Page 59 - DENG503_INDIAN_WRITINGS_IN_LITERATURE

Unit 6: Amitav Ghosh: Shadow Lines:Characterisation

placed somewhere through her connections but she later said, “Don’t get taken in by these stories. Notes
Once these people start making demands it never ends. Did anyone do anything to help me when
I was living like that?”
Tha’mma is a steadfast nationalist. She is in love with her place of birth in Dhaka and cannot
forget it in any way. The partioned India and the line drawn between Calcutta; her present place
of stay and Dhaka does not make any sense to her. She comes to realize that borders have a weak
existence and not even the history of bloodshed can make them truly impregnable. She is
undiplomatic and straight. For her, it is either this way or that but no in between. She had believed
that she would be able to see the borders between India and East Pakistan from the plane. She also
believes that there must be something— trenches perhaps or soldiers or guns pointing at each
other or just barren strips of land which would be called no man’s land but when she is told that
she might see some green fields she is baffled and what she says raises a very important question.
‘But if there aren’t any trenches or anything, how are people to know? I mean, where’s the
difference then? And if there’s no difference, both sides will be the same; it will be just like it used
to be before, when we used to catch a train in Dhaka and get off in Calcutta the next day without
anybody stopping us. What was it all for then—partition and all the killing and everything— if
there isn’t something in between?’ Born in Dhaka, separated from her birthplace by a history of
bloodshed and lines on the map she loses her linguistic precision in terms of her home. She fails
to understand how her place of birth had come to be so messily at odds with her nationality. In her
bafflement she says she would come home to Dhaka rather than saying ‘she would go home to
Dhaka’ and this becomes a family joke.
She had long believed that nostalgia is a weakness. ‘It is everyone’s duty to forget the past and
look ahead and get on with building the future‘, she used to say. But one in Dhaka, she understands
the harsh reality of the border and realizes that dislocated people like her have no home but in
memory. Stunned by her nephew Tridib’s death by a riotous mob in Dhaka she develops a great
hatred for Pakistanis. In 1965, one and a half years after her arrival from Dhaka, the Indo-Pak was
starts and she gifts away her only necklace which was the last remembrance of her husband which
she had never parted with even when she underwent gall-bladder stone surgery; to the war fund
so that they may fight them properly at last with tanks and guns and bombs. She says to her grand
son ‘For your sake, for your freedom.’
Her concepts of nationalism, nationhood and the formation of Indian state are quite clear and
forceful. It is observed in her perception of her early days when she saw, felt and experienced the
tremors of British imperialism. Her sense of freedom and nationhood was sharpened. She finds
Ila to be at odds with England and feels she has grafted herself on it. She tells her grandson—It
took those people a long time to build that country; hundred of years, years and years of wars
and bloodshed. Everyone who lives there has earned his right to be there with blood: with their
brother’s blood and their fathers ’blood and their sons’ blood. They know they are a nation
because they have drawn their borders with blood. Regimental flags hang on all their cathedrals
and their churches are lined with memorials of men who died in wars, all around the word. War
is their religion. That is what it takes to make a country. Once that happens people forget they
were born this way or that, Muslim of Hindu, Bengali or Punjabi. They become a family born of
the same pool of the blood. That is what your have to achieve for India, don’t you see? Hence
when she suffers the greatest burden of historical dislocation, she finds herself aghast and at loss
for words. She says: then what was the need for all this bloodshed and violence. However, her
action in Dhaka in the face of the grim tragedy of the mob attack when she asks the driver to take
away the car leaving her old uncle behind whom she had gone to retrieve puts her in the tight spot.
Her earlier avowal of killing instinct when she narrated the incident of her classmate now sounds
hollow.

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