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Unit 3: Amitav Ghosh—Shadow Lines: Detailed Study—II (Plot and Criticisms)

It goes without saying that the great novelists of the world have also been great thinkers and Notes
observers of life. Therefore, their novels are the classic examples of some fine work done on the
understanding and appreciation of the problems plaguing the human beings and life in general.
Therefore, it is impossible for the novel not to reflect his thinking and his criticism of it.

3.3 The Shadow Lines—A Critique

The Shadow Lines began to be written after the assassination of Mrs. Indira Gandhi in the year
1984. The riots and the general massacre that began in Delhi and followed in other cities have an
oblique bearing on the novel. The undertones of political vendetta are pervasive in the novel and
can be felt when the efficacy of nationalism is questioned in today’s context.
The Shadow Lines raises a few very important questions against the backdrop of emergence of
increasing city-states everywhere and its demarcation and delineation on the maps. These shadow
lines that are drawn cannot divide a memory or experience as Tha’mma and her old uncle believe
and so do many others. The narrator’s grandmother has got great affinity for Dhaka and her uncle
who is ninety years old is staying there even after the partition and is reluctant to come to India.
He lived with a Muslim family whom he had given shelter in his house during the partition. He
is being looked after by the same family and he refuses to move away from this place. He says that
if he moves out of his native place and transfers to Calcutta and they decide to draw a line once
again then where would he go, having spent all his life in united India and being so enmeshed in
Bengali culture where in the past Hindus, Muslims and Bengalis spoke the same language, shared
the same culture and sprang from the same racial stock, and on the floor in a certain Bengali
manner and celebrated their own Bengali new year on 15th April. Rabindra Nath Tagore was held
in high esteem by one and all. He was born there, had spent his life there and would die there
only. The same was the reaction of the narrator’s grandmother also who is a staunch nationalist.
She vents the similar feelings. Back in History in 1905, Lord Curzon, one of the able viceroys to
rule India, tried to split Bengal into two halves on the plea of better administration and management.
He tried to take advantage of the religious gulf between the two major communities but his efforts
ended in failure in 1911 when the Bengalis irrespective of their religions got together and a bloody
revolt proved that Bengalis were more prone to nationalist sentiments than to religious passions.
Tha’mma wanted to visit her old house in Dhaka and actually went there with Tridib and May
where she met her ninety-year-old uncle being attended by Khalil—the rickshaw driver and his
family. She was quite surprised to find that her uncle who would even avoid the shadow of a
Muslim while eating was being fed by a Muslim family. It is here that Tridib, he and Khalil
become the victims of the riot.
However, the cold-blooded killing of Tridib in front of her eyes changes her perception. She too
becomes a victim of aversion for those Pakistanis. Indians [undivided] who lived side by side for
generations had suddenly turned on each other in a frenzy of killing. Troubled by the death of
Tridib in Dhaka riots, she gives away her only gold chain to the war fund of 1965, ‘For your sake;
for your freedom’, she tells her grandson, ‘we have to kill them before they kill us; we have to
wipe them out.’ She takes comfort in the organized propriety of war now. We are fighting them
properly at last, she says, with tanks and guns and bombs. Tha’mma is a staunch nationalist and
British imperialism has made her senses sharp and keen and forged the theme of nationhood and
the formation of Indian nation state. She tells him the story of her youthful days of college in 1920s
when Indians were fighting the British tooth and nail for the freedom and there were a few
militant revolutionary societies operating secretly in Bengal. One of her classmates was arrested
by a police party in the middle of the lecture. He was a shy and bearded youth hut with exemplary
courage and spirit of definance. How she had wanted to help him and his societies; to cook food
for them, to wash their clothes even go to the front to kill the British officers with a pistol in her
hand. Though she is unable to get over the trauma of partition and uses her coordinates of

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