The Shadow Lines: Title

The title of the novel, The Shadow Lines, refers to the boundary lines that separate people who otherwise are united. The separating lines, the result of political action, have created an artificial division among the people. Amitav Ghosh demonstrates with his drawing of two circles on an atlas how these boundaries are the geographical expressions of nationalism.Particularly in respect of Bengal, Calcutta and Dhaka are the exact reflection of each other and the people are very closely bound to each other. Separating them is like separating the image in a mirror from the original. Or it is like dividing a memory. It is this forced, unnatural division that has resulted in the irony of senseless violence that claims innocent lives.

Partition Lines: Shadow Lines

The story in a way is a microcosmic representation of the story of partition in the subcontinent. In 1905 when Lord Curzon divided the state of Bengal people on both sides of the provisional border protested so strongly that the British Government was compelled to revoke its decision. They spoke the same language, sang the same songs, and had four thousand years of shared history. But only after forty-two years a line was drawn on the map, an invisible and incorporeal wall was erected and the neighbours became foreigners at the stroke of midnight.

The grandmother came to Calcutta in 1935. She had not visited Dhaka for a long time, still it was her home, her own country. But after 1947 when it became an alien land she experienced partition for the second time in her life. It is not only an imaginary line on the map. It is capable of evoking some strongest human emotions- love, pity, fear, courage, compassion, hatred and complete realignment of cherished ideals. Seventeen years after the partition of the country she goes to Dhaka. Her old Jethamoshai is still living alone in Jindabahar Lane. Before going to Dhaka she asks her son whether she will be able to see the ‘border’ from the aeroplane. She is told that the question of her seeing the border doesn’t arise as there is no wall or line or anything like that. She never took off what was given to her by her late husband. She does not hesitate to part with it for a noble cause that is the sovereignty of her country, her motherland is fighting enemies who just twenty years back were compatriots. A line drawn on a piece of paper changes her loyalty, her sense of belonging and inspired in her a sense of patriotism which she never experienced since her college days. The irony involved in drawing and redrawing of lines is brought out by the story of a woman who keeps on changing her nationality as these lines both uphold and subvert the very purpose of their existence.

In this novel Ghosh relates a particular incidence of communal violence to the politics of violence played in the name of nationalism or patriotism all over the world. When Tridib dies in Dhaka the grandmother’s passion for revenge and retaliation seeks legitimate release in supporting the cause of the Indian army that fights the Pakistanis responsible for her nephew’s death. The grandmother is almost like an everyman on the soil of the subcontinent. She symbolises an ordinary man’s agony at loss in senseless violence, his thirst for revenge, thereby becoming a loop in an endless chain of actions and reactions which have  no beginning or end. All these happen simply because some people have drawn a line somewhere which was supposed to stop all violence and settle disputes. But the mockery of the whole exercise is that the shadow line does not fulfil its purpose of division but reinforces the idea that the twin cities of Dhaka and Calcutta remain mirror images of each other as they always have been during the four thousand years of their shared history. 

The metaphor in the title of the novel epitomises the author’s distrust of all kinds of borders- domestic or international. The metaphor of shadow lines further points out two other themes in the novel. There are shadow lines between facts and meaning of history, between geographical places and places invented in one’s imagination, between personal memory and received version of history, between imagination and reality. The shadow lines shift, blur the division, create and recreate. One’s perception of history, geography, even of reality is sometimes different from that of other people. The shadow lines criss-crossing this vast non-material space remain a persistent preoccupation of the novelist.