The Shadow Lines: A Novel

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. 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. 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 traveled 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 specialty 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 is 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 school, and of a glimpse of a mob in Park Circus." I have never experienced such a sound, but God, how these sentences get under the skin, how easy it is to hear that sound, how the heart beats faster on reading these sentences!

Ghosh is also a humorous writer. It is serious humor. Single words hide a wealth of meaning, for example, the way Tridib's father is always referred to as Shaheb, Ila's mother as Queen Victoria, or the way the grandmother's sister always remains Mayadebi without any suffix denoting the relationship. Also look at this passage that describes how the grandmother reacts on discovering that her old Jethamoshai is living with a Muslim family in Dhaka is outstanding and must be read to enjoy

The main characters are very real, almost perfectly rounded. I specially love the grandmother. She is the grandmother many of us recognize. In her fierce moral standards, Spartan outlook of life, and intolerance of any nonsense - real and imagined, she is as real as any patriarch or matriarch worth the name. And there is this very loveable character of the narrator. It is that of a boy who warms your heart, it is that of a man who knows and has lost love - more than once in his life - and thus makes you feel like hugging him close to your heart.

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 modern world. On all scores, Ghosh's novel is excellent reading and would make a very impressive film. Excellent Must Read!


A major critique of contemporary man   February 3, 2000
Prof. G.R. Taneja (India)
18 out of 19 found this review helpful

The new Indian English fiction of the eighties is free from the self-consciousness, shallow idealism, and sentimentalism that characterised the work of the older generation of novelists such as Raja Rao, R. K. Narayan or Mulk Raj Anand who started writing in the thirties. The fiction of the eighties takes a maturer view of Indian reality. There is freshness and vitality and the writ-ers betray remarkable confidence in tackling new themes, and experiment with new techniques and approaches to handle those themes. Amitav Ghosh, whose first novel, The Circle of Reason appeared in 1986, has strengthened the new English novel in more than one way. The Shadow Lines takes us into the mnemonic fund of a young narrator who as a wide-eyed adolescent hero-worshipped Tridib, an uncle, who fed him on his memories of his one visit to London during the war; and his grandmother who shared with him her nostalgic memories of East Bengal where she was born and spent her childhood. And then there is Ila (his cousin, for whom he nurtures a secret passion), who travels all over the world with her diplomat glob-trotting parents and occasionally comes home to tell a wonderstruck boy accounts of her peregrinations abroad. Their memories "form a part of my secret map of the world, a map of which only I know the keys and coordinates, but which was not for that reason any more imaginary that the code of a safe to a banker." From the three whose memories form his own consciousness, he learns to see in different ways. Ila sees much but experiences little. With her superficial response to life, she only remem-bers how one airport differed from the other by its less or more conveniently located ladies'. Tridib teaches him to see with precision because he teaches the boy to see with imagination ("we could not see without inventing what we saw"). He evoked for the young boy "the worlds to travel in and . . . eyes to see them with." The grandmother establishes to him the oneness of memory for according to her neither space nor time can divide it. The Shadow Lines spans three generations of the narrator's family spread over East Bengal and Calcutta; the English family-friends, the Prices, whose histories include the two Wars and the contemporary London. And the web of life in The Shadow Lines, which encompasses many countries, many religions, is a collage of memories, the narrator's own, and others', dusty photo-graphs, yellowing newspaper clippings, but nurtured above all by imagination. While nations, religions, war, violence and parti-tion divide people, memory does not. Imagination creates a world that cannot be divided, any more than nations break and float away when geographical boundaries are arbitrarily recreated. Life in The Shadow Lines loses its chronological logic. Past invades the present and enriches and transforms it, and in the process, strengthens the narrator's ability to encounter and even reshape his own future when it invades his present later. (In that sense one of the major concerns of the novel focuses on growth and experience and maturity.) The very structure of the novel--coil within coil opening up vistas of new worlds, new experiences--reflects this giddying whirl of life, memory and imagination. Ghosh's remarkably brilliant handling of his lin-guistic medium is one of his major achievements. He writes fluently, and his narratives moves with grace, ease and under-statement. Ghosh's evocation of the city of his birth and adolescent years, Calcutta, depicted in remarkably vivid details, is com-parable only with Anita Desai's re-creation of Bombay in Baumgartner's Bombay (1988). His experience as a social anthro-pologist at the Universities of Delhi and Oxford shows in his handling of the characters and the context in which they exist. He reveals a sense of history and a firm grasp of socio-cultural and historical material that underlies his narrative. He con-fesses to one of his earliest memories of Calcutta as that of a mob surrounding his house, a memory that he decided to "exhume" and confront after he witnessed the 1984 riots (the most trau-matic event in contemporary Indian history) which spread through the country after Indira Gandhi's assassination. The Shadow Lines takes in the war-devastated London, civil-strife in post-partition East Bengal, and the riot-hit Calcutta and projects a major critique of the psychological make-up of the contemporary man that thrives on violence.


Amazing!   July 23, 2000
Dana Lightstone (Madison, WI, USA)
13 out of 15 found this review helpful

This is one of the best novels I have read, maybe the best. Not only is the main character portraited flawlessly, but the story is so engaging that I could not put it down. The deeper meaning of the book is portrayed well. I love the idea of "Shadow Lines," or the idea that borders are simply imagined. The language is also beautiful.


Don't miss it.   August 22, 2000
Manojendu Choudhury (Mumbai, Maharashtra, India)
13 out of 13 found this review helpful

Rarely one comes across a book that moves one's emotion and intellect with it's powerful yet beautiful and extremely poignant language. The story effortlessly moves back and forth in time, portraying the contrast of the times and places of the two stages of the protagonist's life, beautifully bringning the evolution of a character in particular and humanity in general. The characters of this story are too real to be fictitious, who are all very complex and yet simple enough to be idnetifiable with our own experiences. The climax is amazing, unpredictable, and very touching, living fully upto the expectations raised in the building up of it, and more. It leaves the reader with a twich of nostalgia that one feels after coming across a beautiful creation. DON'T MISS IT.


Absolutely Amazing   November 26, 2003
12 out of 14 found this review helpful

I am currently taking a course about the Partition of South Asia into the two countries of India and Pakistan. This book is written about that Partition. However, throughout the entire book, the term Partition is never mentioned. This is because Ghosh has produced something incredible. It follows the life and growth of a young Indian boy/man, and throughout his journey, he discovers invaluable insights about life, love, and countries. Of the 8+ books read in the course about Partition, this book is by far the best. Of the books that I have read for fun, this book is my favorite. It provokes thought, feeling, and yearning from the reader. Just give it the chance.