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Digvijay Pandya, LPU Unit 4: Amitav Ghosh: Shadow Lines: Detailed Study of Part -III (Critical Appreciation)

Unit 4: Amitav Ghosh: Shadow Lines: Notes
Detailed Study of Part —III (Critical Appreciation)

CONTENTS
Objectives
Introduction
4.1 The Shadow Lines — A Critical Appreciation
4.2 Summary
4.3 Key-Words
4.4 Review Questions
4.5 Further Readings

Objectives

After reading this Unit students will be able to:
• Assess the novel Shadow Lines.
• Critically examine the Shadow Lines.

Introduction
One of the chief features of The shadow Lines is that it is not written sequentially. The novel
moves back and forth with little regard to the chronology of time and distance.
Therefore distance in The Shadow Lines is a challenge to be overcome by the use of imagination
and desire until space melts. Time and space coalesce in a seamless continuity. Both Tridib and the
narrator are engaged in the creation of the world as it comes alive to them or to their powerful
imagination. Tridib’s idea of romantic love in a place without history, without a past is magnificent.
It is in this continuation that his ideal becomes the story of a man who fell in love with a woman
across the seas. He also does the same and their love between them is powerful and passionate
despite a great distance separating them. He has built a whole world with May Price to the extent
that he imagines love making with her in wartime London’s ruined cinema ball.
His stories and anecdotes about India, England and far away places serve food for thought for the
young narrator and he follows in Tridib’s foot prints to create worlds for him as it existed and will
exist for him. ‘Stories are all there to live in’, Tridib tells him for if you don’t invent stories for
yourselves you will have to live in other’s invention of them. Narrator begins to imagine the
slooping roofs of Ila’s house, as it must have existed when Tridib asked him if he noticed that fact.
The pattern they made if one wheeled in the sky above them, how sharply they rose if one looked
at them from below. Narrator by his dominant imagination is able to create Nick Price in blood
and flush and keeps him in his memory as if he had really met him face to face, after Ila tells him
about Nick under the table in Rai Bazaar and when he actually meets Nick Price in London he tells
him, “ I have grown with you.”

4.1 The Shadow Lines — A Critical Appreciation

The Shadow Lines is undoubtedly a benchmark in Indian writing in English. The book stirs up a
number of themes. Time and distance in The Shadow Lines are illusory. The novel moves back

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