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Unit 1: Amitav Ghosh; Shadow Lines: Introduction to the Text

then linked their own forms of narration. Narratives, according to Kaviraj ‘are always told Notes
from someone’s point of view…they try to paint a picture of some kind of an ordered, intelligible,
humane and habitable world…literally produce a world in which the self finds home.’ The
gemeinschaften, therefore has its own community specific narratives and gesselschaften acquires
it in due course. Whereas the former lives in age old stories, shared in various forms by the
community, the latter finds a home in Histories. Community also comes to us as a concept
through the reading of the experience of Partition. Community, as it appears through the
government documents gets reduced to numbers that bear the brunt of state policy. These
communities are visualised by the state as characterised by one single characteristic-language
or religion. These are the communities on paper and convenient as subjects for policy
formulation. But ‘real’ communities lie outside the ambit of these documents and as Melville
talks of places such as ‘kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South’ which is not
‘down in any map because true places never are’, these communities too are only lived, seldom
represented. The Partition of India was based on the justification of communal tension between
Hindus and Muslims but our literatures have presented to us far more complex designs of
communities with composite structures that have for considerable time shared a common
culture inspite of religious differences. In this regard Bhalla argues that there are hardly any
chronicles, songs, kissas and tamashas in Punjab, which record a long history of irreconcilable
hatred between Hindus and Muslims. What the Governments never addressed was that culture
instead of religion could be an equally valid characteristic defining communities, that culture
far predated religion as a constituent of a community, that it was absurd to lump together
culturally alien Muslims of Bangladesh and Pakistan as one nation and force the East and West
sides of Punjab and Bengal respectively to be declared a part of India. Subsequently the
Nationalists construct the other side as a country politically, ethically and inherently opposed to
itself.
The Partition of India in this sense was an important event because it cartographically relocated
what were once closely existing natural communities and instead formulated an imagined
community of the nation. The history of India being the narrative of the modern nation rather
than the primordial (and now secondary) community told the tale of the nation and obliterated
that of the society. Riots between communities as a characteristic 20th Century phenomenon
figure in the book prominently. The author also focuses on how they are portrayed variedly by
the newspapers and the author’s imagination. Whereas in the author’s imagination they have
stood out as a single most important event of his childhood, in the newspapers and other
sources they do not even merit a mention. The author looks for reasons that lead to this silence
in portrayal of riots by the state. The reason, of course is not far to find: the difficulty in
representing an enemy that arises from within rather than without. The new age stories (literature)
therefore become the narrative of the communities and make up for the silence in history when
it comes to the portrayal of events like partition and riots. It records what happened he partition
victims and subsequently victims of the numerous civil strifes whose point of view always
remains under represented because these incidents undermine the very notion of a nation that
history purports to create. It is also ironic that post partition, people across the border share all
their old stories but from a point completely separate histories. And as Ghosh points out the
nature of this relationship is governed by … that indivisible sanity that binds people to each
other Independently of their governments. And that prior, independent relationship is the
natural enemy of government, for it is in the logic of the states that to exist at all they must
claim the monopoly of all relationships between people. (230) It is shown how when the
communities give way to nation their narration is taken over by a totalizing history. In The
Shadow Lines, Tha’mma receives her ideas about the new nation that she comes to inhabit after
Bangladesh becomes another country.
Some voices in the contemporary Indian Writing in English have studied the writing and
historical justification of partition in this light. Historians have tried to read a communal angle
into the event and tried to trace a genealogy of such events with a ‘retrospective intelligibility’
that leads to a known and expected end. It is interesting to note, therefore, in this light that

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