The Shadow Lines – Significance of the title
The novel ‘The Shadow Lines’ by Amitav Ghosh centers
around a young boy, the narrator, whose growth in age and maturity is traced
slowly through his understanding of the memories that connect him and his
family members. Through the book, we watch him move backwards and forwards in
time as bits and pieces of stories, both half-remembered and imagined, come
together in his mind until he arrives at an intricate, interconnected picture
of the world where borders and boundaries mean nothing, mere shadow lines that
we draw dividing people and nations.
The title ‘The Shadow Lines’ is the author’s commentary on the artificial nature of cultural, ideological, geographical and psychological borders, which he asks us to disregard in favour of a broader humanism. The titular ‘shadow lines’ can refer to many different things, but I believe the fundamental allusion he makes is to the borders that separate nations from each other.
Division between Nations - shadow lines
Amitav Ghosh asserts that the borders that separate nations are nothing more than artificial lines created by men. Thus, the ‘shadow lines’ of the title are the borders that divide people, and one of the main emphases of the novel is on the arbitrariness of such cartographic demarcations.
Why are these lines ‘shadowy’ then? Because like shadows, they lack substance, they lack meaning. Ghosh believes that these ‘shadow lines’, these meaningless borders, can and should be crossed – if not physically, then at least mentally through our imagination and through open-minded acceptance of people, irrespective of nationality, religion or race.
In the novel, the lives of the narrator's family have been irrevocably changed as a consequence of Bengal's Partition between India and Pakistan at the time of Independence and the subsequent experience of the East Pakistan Civil War of 1971, which led to the creation of Bangladesh. Towards the end, when members of the family are about to undertake a journey from Calcutta to their former home in Dhaka, the narrator's grandmother asks whether she will be able to see the border between India and East Pakistan from the plane. She is puzzled when told that there will be no such visible demarcation and 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'll 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 . . .”
This ingenuous response on her part highlights the absurdity of the revisionist map-making of the politicians responsible for Partition. Because the truth is that there really is no difference between this side of the border and that. There’s nothing concrete about these borders for they only exist in maps and in our minds.
Things that transcend borders; that determine where the real lines between people actually exist
The title ‘The Shadow Lines’ is the author’s commentary on the artificial nature of cultural, ideological, geographical and psychological borders, which he asks us to disregard in favour of a broader humanism. The titular ‘shadow lines’ can refer to many different things, but I believe the fundamental allusion he makes is to the borders that separate nations from each other.
Division between Nations - shadow lines
Amitav Ghosh asserts that the borders that separate nations are nothing more than artificial lines created by men. Thus, the ‘shadow lines’ of the title are the borders that divide people, and one of the main emphases of the novel is on the arbitrariness of such cartographic demarcations.
Why are these lines ‘shadowy’ then? Because like shadows, they lack substance, they lack meaning. Ghosh believes that these ‘shadow lines’, these meaningless borders, can and should be crossed – if not physically, then at least mentally through our imagination and through open-minded acceptance of people, irrespective of nationality, religion or race.
In the novel, the lives of the narrator's family have been irrevocably changed as a consequence of Bengal's Partition between India and Pakistan at the time of Independence and the subsequent experience of the East Pakistan Civil War of 1971, which led to the creation of Bangladesh. Towards the end, when members of the family are about to undertake a journey from Calcutta to their former home in Dhaka, the narrator's grandmother asks whether she will be able to see the border between India and East Pakistan from the plane. She is puzzled when told that there will be no such visible demarcation and 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'll 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 . . .”
This ingenuous response on her part highlights the absurdity of the revisionist map-making of the politicians responsible for Partition. Because the truth is that there really is no difference between this side of the border and that. There’s nothing concrete about these borders for they only exist in maps and in our minds.
Things that transcend borders; that determine where the real lines between people actually exist
Hatred and Violence
In proof of the meaninglessness of borders, the author
gives us a glimpse of the reactions that shook Dhaka and Bengal on their
separation. There was a striking similarity in the pattern of fear, mutual hatred and
violence that gripped
the two nations – only, the collective crimes were perpetrated on the opposite
country’s people. Thus, the division, the lines of demarcation actually brings
the people of the two countries closer together through the mirroring of the
people’s reactions and through the similar and tragic deaths on both sides. In
their mutual but laterally inverted reactions of violence, the two countries
proved how much the same they were.
The narrator realizes the futility of this incessant
line-drawing by the politicians, for it never actually manages to separate
anything or anyone but only provokes mindless acts of violence that in fact
highlight the sameness of human emotions and perceptions, no matter which side
of the border people are: “They
had drawn their borders, believing in that pattern, in the enchantment of
lines, hoping perhaps that once they had etched their borders upon the map, the
two bits of land would sail away from each other . . . What had they felt, I
wondered, when they discovered that they had created not a separation, but a
yet-undiscovered irony - the irony that killed Tridib: the simple fact that
there had never been a moment in the four-thousand-year-old history of that
map, when places like Dhaka and Calcutta were more closely bound to each other
than after they had drawn their lines . . .”
Concern about the same issues and expression of concern in
the same way (riots in Bengal)
The narrator of the story was taught by Tridib that the
borders drawn by politicians don’t really function as anything but shadows.
Then what doesbind or
divide people? The answer, of course, lies in the riots and the factor that
gave rise to them. The narrator (and the author) found that the similarity in
the reactions between people of Dhaka and Calcutta, and of Dhaka and Kashmir
was proof that their tendency to care
about and be concerned about the same issues in India is what
binds them with each other.
He tells us: “From the evidence of the newspapers, it is clear that once the riots had started both governments did everything they could to put a stop to them . . . for the madness of a riot is a pathological inversion, but also therefore a reminder, of that indivisible sanity that binds people to each other independently of their governments. And that prior, independent relationship is the natural enemy of government, for it is in the logic of states to exist at all they must claim the monopoly of all relationships between peoples.”
Thus the narrator, through his dialectic of line, in a paradoxical way denies artificial demarcation, exposing the idea of the nation state as an illusion, an arbitrary dissection of people.
He tells us: “From the evidence of the newspapers, it is clear that once the riots had started both governments did everything they could to put a stop to them . . . for the madness of a riot is a pathological inversion, but also therefore a reminder, of that indivisible sanity that binds people to each other independently of their governments. And that prior, independent relationship is the natural enemy of government, for it is in the logic of states to exist at all they must claim the monopoly of all relationships between peoples.”
Thus the narrator, through his dialectic of line, in a paradoxical way denies artificial demarcation, exposing the idea of the nation state as an illusion, an arbitrary dissection of people.
Culture and history
The narrator learns to discount the value of artificial
lines or distance in the development of human relations when he “discovered that Khulna is about as far from
Srinagar as Tokyo is from Beijing, or Moscow from Venice, or Washington from
Havana, or Cairo from Naples.”
He goes on to explain that the real ties that bind people
are culture and a shared
history and not distance
or artificial lines of separation. If it was lines or distance that determined
how close we were to other people, then we would care as much about China as
about Bangladesh, but we don’t. “Chiang
Mai in Thailand was much nearer to Calcutta than Delhi is; that Chengdu in
China is nearer than Srinagar is. . . Yet did the people of Khulna care at all
about the fate of mosques in Vietnam and South China (a mere stone's throw
away)? I doubted it. But in this other direction, it took no more than a week
Shadow
lines as basis for identity
While Tridib and the narrator do not believe in the concreteness of borders because they easily cross them with their imagination, bringing together different nations, cultures and ideals in their mind, the grandmother does firmly believe in these borders. In fact, she believes in them so fervently, perhaps defensively, that she disapproves of Ila, because Ila spent her entire life heedless of these borders, crossing them again and again in her travels to different countries.
‘ “Ila has no right to live there”, she said hoarsely. “She doesn't belong there. It took those people a long time to build that country; hundreds of years, years and years of war and bloodshed. Everyone who has lived there has earned his right to be there with blood: with their brother's blood and their father's blood and their son's blood. They know they're a nation because they've drawn their borders with blood.” ’
Sadly, most people have similar ideas about borders. These shadow lines are what they try to base their identity on. For them, shadow lines are more than just lines of demarcation, the frontiers constructed by politicians. They are to them the signifying acts that construct notions of discrete identity.
The grandmother, too, bases her identity as an Indian, as distinct from a Bangladeshi, on the lines that separate India and Bangladesh. So firmly does she believe in them that she is disappointed with the lack of tangible lines that divide the two countries. Because she derives strength in her patriotism from her belief in these lines and the supposition that her identity is bound with them, her sense of identity is also shaken.
On the other hand, Ila's belief is that her internationalism can liberate her. She wants to be free of these lines that stifle her. So she lives in London with people she believes will affect the history of the entire world, irrespective of boundaries and borders, and who, she is convinced, will free her too from these oppressive lines of demarcation. What is ironical is that the political activists with whom Ila shares her house in London “regard her as a kind of guest, a decoration almost” and "talk of her as ‘our own upper-class Marxist’ ”.
Furthermore, the striking disharmony between her intellectuality and nativity is reinforced by the following irony: it is never brought to her knowledge that her future husband “Nick Price was ashamed to be seen by his friends, walking home with an Indian”. She is thus stuck, even in London, as a stranger, those same lines that she ran away from pursuing her and marking her as an outsider. In what she centralizes as ‘here’, she is thus forced to act as an Other. For this reason, she is in no way free from the shadow lines, nor does she gain her personal freedom.
Separation in The Shadow Lines is never a clean-cut affair; it paradoxically turns out to be an extension, a continuation, something that is indivisible.
The author brings forward to us the inhuman consequences of the creation of these shadow lines of demarcation. He reveals through the riots the absurd manner in which your home can suddenly become your enemy, when those people who cannot separate their identity from their belief in these borders develop and nurture a hatred towards each other.
Thus, the novel implicitly suggests the need for coexistence and strong humanitarian ties across cultures overlooking personal, regional and political considerations. It questions the meaning of political freedom and the force of nationalism in the modern world. It asks a very important, a universal question – what is a nation? What is this great entity that nationalism serves? Does it even exist? Should it exist? And in the answers to these questions lies the key to understanding the novel.
While Tridib and the narrator do not believe in the concreteness of borders because they easily cross them with their imagination, bringing together different nations, cultures and ideals in their mind, the grandmother does firmly believe in these borders. In fact, she believes in them so fervently, perhaps defensively, that she disapproves of Ila, because Ila spent her entire life heedless of these borders, crossing them again and again in her travels to different countries.
‘ “Ila has no right to live there”, she said hoarsely. “She doesn't belong there. It took those people a long time to build that country; hundreds of years, years and years of war and bloodshed. Everyone who has lived there has earned his right to be there with blood: with their brother's blood and their father's blood and their son's blood. They know they're a nation because they've drawn their borders with blood.” ’
Sadly, most people have similar ideas about borders. These shadow lines are what they try to base their identity on. For them, shadow lines are more than just lines of demarcation, the frontiers constructed by politicians. They are to them the signifying acts that construct notions of discrete identity.
The grandmother, too, bases her identity as an Indian, as distinct from a Bangladeshi, on the lines that separate India and Bangladesh. So firmly does she believe in them that she is disappointed with the lack of tangible lines that divide the two countries. Because she derives strength in her patriotism from her belief in these lines and the supposition that her identity is bound with them, her sense of identity is also shaken.
On the other hand, Ila's belief is that her internationalism can liberate her. She wants to be free of these lines that stifle her. So she lives in London with people she believes will affect the history of the entire world, irrespective of boundaries and borders, and who, she is convinced, will free her too from these oppressive lines of demarcation. What is ironical is that the political activists with whom Ila shares her house in London “regard her as a kind of guest, a decoration almost” and "talk of her as ‘our own upper-class Marxist’ ”.
Furthermore, the striking disharmony between her intellectuality and nativity is reinforced by the following irony: it is never brought to her knowledge that her future husband “Nick Price was ashamed to be seen by his friends, walking home with an Indian”. She is thus stuck, even in London, as a stranger, those same lines that she ran away from pursuing her and marking her as an outsider. In what she centralizes as ‘here’, she is thus forced to act as an Other. For this reason, she is in no way free from the shadow lines, nor does she gain her personal freedom.
Separation in The Shadow Lines is never a clean-cut affair; it paradoxically turns out to be an extension, a continuation, something that is indivisible.
The author brings forward to us the inhuman consequences of the creation of these shadow lines of demarcation. He reveals through the riots the absurd manner in which your home can suddenly become your enemy, when those people who cannot separate their identity from their belief in these borders develop and nurture a hatred towards each other.
Thus, the novel implicitly suggests the need for coexistence and strong humanitarian ties across cultures overlooking personal, regional and political considerations. It questions the meaning of political freedom and the force of nationalism in the modern world. It asks a very important, a universal question – what is a nation? What is this great entity that nationalism serves? Does it even exist? Should it exist? And in the answers to these questions lies the key to understanding the novel.
No comments:
Post a Comment