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

what would be Ghosh’s third book, In An Antique Land (1992). Ghosh returned to India in 1982, Notes
and worked in the Centre For Developmental Studies in Thiruvananthapuram (Kerela) for a year.
He describes the period as the most peaceful in his life. He started work on his first book The Circle
of Reason (1986) while still in Kerela and completed it in Delhi. He talks of his days in Delhi and
his struggle as a fledgling writer. He says in an interview “I was living in the servant’s quarters on
top of someone’s house. With the Delhi sun beating down at the height of the summer, I would sit
in a lungi and furiously punch away at my typewriter.” His writing career began at the Indian
Express newspaper in New Delhi and in 1986 his first novel, The Circle Of Reason, went on to win
one of France’s top literary awards, the Prix Medici Etrangere. His writing career had taken off
well from here on and subsequent years saw him becoming a recipient of many coveted awards,
including the 1999 Pushcart Prize and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for his highbrow thriller, The
Calcutta Chromosome (1996) Witnessing the 1984 Anti-Sikh riots in Delhi in the wake of Indira
Gandhi’s assassination had a profound effect on him. “I think it was essentially after the 1984 riots
that people recognised the dimension of the communal problem in India.” He wrote about it in
The New Yorker and it became a point of departure for his novel The Shadow Lines (1988). Though
the book does not deal with the ’84 riots per se, it has dealt with the pathology of riots and civil
strife in a more encompassing manner.
In the year 2001 he was in news for having withdrawn his book The Glass Palace from the shortlist
of Commonwealth Writer’s Award because he felt that such awards continue to abet the very
institutions (the British Empire) that he tries to fight through his writings. In a letter written to the
Prize Manager of the foundation he contests the very idea behind Commonwealth as a category…
‘As a literary or cultural grouping … it seems to me that “the Commonwealth” can only be a
misnomer so long as it excludes the many languages that sustain the cultural and literary lives of
these countries. …the ways in which we remember the past are not determined solely by the brute
facts of time: they are also open to choice, reflection and judgment. The issue of how the past is to
be remembered lies at the heart of The Glass Palace and I feel that I would be betraying the spirit
of my book if I were to allow it to be incorporated within that particular memorialization of
Empire that passes under the rubric of “the Commonwealth”.’ The literary community hailed this
withdrawal as being exemplary and worthy of emulation. On the subject of recreating historical
events through his novels, he draws up the distinction between ‘state history’ and ‘human history.’
He says in an interview that the difference between the history historians writes and the history
fiction writers write is that the latter write about ‘human history’… ‘it is about finding out the
human predicament. It is about finding out what happens to human individuals, characters…on
the other hand is the kind of history exploring causes…Causality is of no interest to me.’ In these
times driven by media, Ghosh has consciously cultivated a low profile. He believes that the
excessive pressures created by the media circus (as he calls it) on young writers cripple their
creativity and take attention off the most important task: that of writing. Ghosh is presently based
in America, where he first met his wife, Deborah Baker, who is a senior editor with the publishers
Little, Brown and Company. After teaching anthropology and comparative literature in various
universities in America, Ghosh is now distinguished professor of Comparative Literature at Queens
College, City University of New York. He lives in New York with his wife and children, Leela and
Nayan.

1.4 Critical Appreciation of the Novel

The Shadow Lines (1988) can be viewed at one level as a story of a Bengali family through which the
author presents, analyses and problematises many issues that are being debated in contemporary
India. The story cleverly engages in its main body characters spanning three generations of this
family. The story of these characters is not told in a contextual vacuum, it instead corresponds to
the growth of Calcutta as a city and India as a nation over a period of three decades or more.
Significantly, private events in the author’s life and other important characters take place in the
shadow of events of immense political significance. The family too is not there typically as a
spectacle but as a means to ‘discuss’ these issues that are at the heart of this work. So there is
Tha’mma, the grandmother of the unnamed narrator through whom the issue of the Bengal Partition

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