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Unit 7: Amitav Ghosh: Shadow Lines—Narrative Techniques

“The Shadow Lines,” Ghosh’s second novel, was published in 1988, four years after the sectarian Notes
violence that shook New Delhi in the aftermath of the Prime minister, Indira Gandhi’s assassination.
Written when the homes of the Sikhs were still smouldering, some of the most important questions
the novel probes are the various faces of violence and the extent to which its fiery arms reach
under the guise of fighting for freedom. Ghosh’s treatment of violence in Calcutta and in Dhaka
is valid even today, more than ten years after its publication. What has happened recently in
Kosovo and in East Timor show that answers still evade the questions which Ghosh poses about
freedom, about the very real yet non-existing lines which divide nations, people, and families.
Much has been written about Amitav Ghosh’s novels. “The Novels of Amitav Ghosh”, edited by
R. K. Dhawan was published this year by Prestige Books, New Delhi. If I find it necessary to say
something more about Ghosh’s writing it is because this novel moved me as none other did in the
recent times.
Before that stage arrives the reader is catapulted to different places and times at breath taking
tempo. The past, present and future combine and melt together erasing any kind of line of
demarcation. Such lines are present mainly in the shadows they cast.

The Shadow Lines is the story of the family and friends of the nameless narrator who for
all his anonymity comes across as if he is the person looking at you quietly from across
the table by the time the story telling is over and silence descends.

There is no point of reference to hold on to. Thus the going away - the title of the first section of
the novel - becomes coming home - the title of the second section. These two titles could easily
have been exchanged. The narrator is very much like the chronicler Pimen in Pushkin’s drama
Boris Godonow. But unlike Pushkin’s Pimen this one is not a passive witness to all that happens
in his presence, and absence. The very soul of the happenings, he is the comma which separates
yet connects the various clauses of life lived in Calcutta, London, Dhaka and elsewhere. The story
starts about thirteen years before the birth of the narrator and ends on the night preceding his
departure from London back to Delhi. He spends less than a year in London, researching for his
doctorate work, but it is a London he knew very well even before he puts a step on its pavements.
Two people have made London so very real to him - Tridib, the second son of his father’s aunt, his
real mentor and inspirer, and Ila his beautiful cousin who has travelled all over the world but has
seen little compared to what the narrator has seen through his mental eye. London is also a very
real place because of Tridib’s and Ila’s friends - Mrs. Price, her daughter May, and son Nick. Like
London comes alive due to the stories related by Ila and Tridib, Dhaka comes alive because of all
the stories of her childhood told to him by his incomparable grandmother who was born there.
The tragedy is that though the narrator spends almost a year in London and thus has ample
opportunity to come to terms with its role in his life, it is Dhaka which he never visits that affects
him most by the violent drama that takes place on its roads, taking Tridib away as one of its most
unfortunate victims. Violence has many faces in this novel - it is as much present in the marriage
of Ila to Nick doomed to failure even before the “yes” word was spoken, as it is present on the riot
torn streets of Calcutta or Dhaka. But the speciality of this novel is that this violence is very subtle
till almost the end. When violence is dealt with, the idea is not to describe it explicitly like a
voyeur but to look at it to comprehend its total senselessness.
Thus the way “violence” is brought into the picture extraordinarily sensitive: The narrator says,
talking of the day riots tore Calcutta apart in 1964, “I opened my mouth to answer and found I had
nothing to say. All I could have told them was of the sound of voices running past the walls of my

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