Chiranjeet Das

Roll no- 0022

3rd semester
English Department

Discussion on the absurdity of drawing arbitrary lines while memory inevitably connect
communities in “The Shadow Lines”

The shadow line is Amitav Ghosh’s second fictional work. As can be said bout all

postmodern novels, The Shadow Lines also defies regular categorization. It is a memory

novel, a political novel and also an autobiographical novel. In the novel deals with a subject

the crossing borders and closing the gaps. The whole novel is about the created or constructed

Shadow lines of Human nature. The novel attempts to show us that we can neither neglect the

lines nor can do away with them completely. In this novel we can see that the narrator

through his memory created an arbitrary line that communities.

Ghosh questions the very basis of modern nation states. It does not matter how many states

exist in a continent or sub-continent. When nature draws lines in form of mountains, oceans,

rivers, it is real. But man-made borders are shallow and unjustifiable. In the novel we can see

that the novelist tries to bring about the arbitrary lines of India, and Bangladesh that are

illogical and arbitrary. These arbitrary lines cannot determine the different culture of these

communities living across the border. One way or the other India/ Kolkata will remain

connected to East Pakistan/ Dhaka.

On this context we can see that Jethamosai, Tham’ma’s uncle, quoted- “I don’t believe in this

India-Shindia. It’s all very well. you are going away now, but suppose when you set there,

they decide to draw another line somewhere. What will you do then? Where will you move
to? No one will ever have you anywhere. As for me, I was born here, and I’ll die here”

(Amitav Ghosh P.237)

Here the author has shown that riots and distances at the social and national level do not

really beget any solution through partition of bigger nation- state. Dhaka and Kolkata- the

two different cities in two independent states- do not drift and become the other reality as

they flare up at the slightest pretext. The patterns of violence in these cities relates them to

each other. The border line becomes just “a looking glass border”. (Amitav Ghosh P.247)

Amitav Ghosh reveals the theme of borders’ absurdity through Tridib, narrator’s uncle, who

believes that the borders drawn by politicians do not really perform as nothing more than

shadow lines. These borders will never be able to separate people who share the same history

and culture. One might imagine that these border lines would divide people, but ironically,

they bring them closer together because their memories remain undivided.

The title, The Shadow Lines, has many connotations: does not only refer to borders between

countries. Building upon this, Ghosh stresses the arbitrariness of such cartographic

demarcations. He illustrates this point through Thamma, the narrator’s grandmother. When

she travels to Calcutta with her family in a plane, she naively asks “whether she would be

able to see the border between India and East Pakistan from the plane” (P 167). Thamma

does not imagine any line between the borders: she is actually locking for visible indication

of demarcation. She says “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 Dhaka and get

off in Calcutta, the next day without anybody stopping us’’(p-167).

This theme of geographical borders is also apparent in Kanafani’s novel “Men in the Sun”.

while Shadow Lines describes the border that divide people who share the same cultural
background, “Men in the Sun” comes to convey two kinds of border; the colonial borders that

separates Palestinians and Israelis who have different history, culture and language. These

border lines divide people who share the same culture and history.

Political division is arbitrary as it is arbitrarily taken and national border lines are imbalanced

in all time. Such situation is successfully brought out by Sadat Hassan Manto in his famous

short story “Toba Tek Singh” where we can see that Manto presents the meaninglessness

arbitrary line between India and Pakistan, where the lunatics did not know that where is India

or Pakistan. They only know that where they have been born is their motherland, there is no

division as India or Pakistan.

So, through these references we can say that most of the writer during Post-Modern period

wanted to create an image of the global umbrella which includes and encompasses various

cultures and create a single unified global picture. And Ghosh also acknowledges no separate

national or cultural realities because for him all such demarcations are shadow lines, arbitrary

and invented divisions.

Work Cited:

1. Ghosh, Amitav The Shadow Lines,Penguin 1988

2. Manto ,Saddat Hassan,Toba Tek Singh, “Columbia University”1955

3. Kumar, Amit, “concept of Nationalism” JHSS , vol 20,7 july2015