SEMESTER VI

Paper: DSE-A3

TOPIC - THE SHADOW LINES BY AMITAVA GHOSH QUESTIONS THE ARTIFICIAL

BARRIERS BETWEEN NATIONS AND CULTURES.
(Tutorial Exam, 2025)

CU Roll No: 222224-21-0016

CU Reg. No: 224-1111-0255-22

Name: Rohan Mojumder

College Roll: 2330
Date of Submission: 13.05.25
The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh is one of the most well-known postmodern texts in Indian
Literature that challenges its own genre – it clarifies and broadens the definition of ‘partition’
as the novel is discussed to belong to Partition literature. Amitav Ghosh presents the hollowness
of partition which plays a very crucial role in knitting the frame of The Shadow Lines. The
novel seems to have many layers which somehow point towards a singular message or idea but
the connection is strange and abrupt rather than understood. Through his unique choice of
narrative and a refined use of symbolisms, Ghosh writes the novel with an aim to question the
artificial barriers between nations and cultures.

Amitav Ghosh challenges the idea of partition through his novel The Shadow Lines. Many
historical events like the freedom movement in Bengal, The Second World war, the partition
of India in 1947 and the communal riots in Bangladesh and India are alluded to in this novel to
emphasis the theme of partition. The futility of the border lines is presented through these
events. Borders or boundaries are always the cause of partition. As for example, the Radcliffe
Line, which divided India and Pakistan. Sir Cyril Radcliffe architected The Radcliffe Line. The
western side of The Radcliffe Line serves as the Indo-Pakistani border and the eastern side of
this line as the India-Bangladesh border. This partition has affected the villages of Bengal and
Punjab. The novel exhibits the story of two families inhabited in Dhaka, Calcutta, London-
three different places of three different countries of the world namely Bangladesh, India and
England respectively. The narrator provides a sketch of the differences of the experience of
culture, religion and nationality of the generation of the two families. The narrator examines
the effect of the communal riots. Ghosh tries to sketch out that riot is a very crucial cause for
the creation of border which is created by men against men.

Through the portrayal of wider family connections in the novel, Ghosh reduces the physical
distance that apparently separates them. By creating Tridib’s friendship with May which
ultimately ends up in love, the author is able to show the power of love which can exist beyond
borders and the confines of culture, language and geography. The Datta Chaudhuri family and
the Price family are connected through a friendship between their respective patriarchs – Justice
Chandrasekhar Datta Chaudhuri and Lionel Tresawsen.
The living generation in the families only have the historical connection of their ancestors to
hold on to, but the power of friendship and love binds the two families together with no signs
of discord or contempt for each other even though socially and culturally they are different.

The map episode refers to a specific scene or section of the novel where the narrator, along
with his uncle Tridib, uses a map, specifically Bartholomew's Atlas, to explore and navigate a
world beyond their physical location and the boundaries of national borders. This becomes a
recurring motif in the novel as Ghosh is able to prove the meaninglessness of geographical
distance as on the map, two places from countries far apart could appear so near, and when
visualizing the distance from the mind, it is even nearer. “But when I took my compass through
the pages of that atlas, on which I could still see the smudges left by Tridib’s fingers, I
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. Then I tried to draw a circle with
Khulna at the centre and Srinagar on the circumference. I discovered immediately that the map
of South Asia would not be big enough. I had to turn back to a map of Asia before I found one
large enough for my circle.”

The title allowed to the blurring of the lines between nations and families, as well as the blurred
lines within one’s own self-identify. Ghosh depicts the characters of the novel as caught
between two words and the struggle to come to terms with both their present lives as well as
their past forms the core of the narrative. Ghosh sees history as the trajectory of events that
cause dislocations, disjunctions, movement and migrations and eventually replacing solid
markers with shadow lines, destabilizing our notions of the past in the reverberations of the
present. Hence, his narratives offer a sensitive and multifaced view on the contemporary
problems of the world. There is no such thing as objective or factual truth. All truth in our world
is created by the context within which it is experienced or observed. The novel endeavours to
reconstruct history on its own logic of individual memory and interpretation. The Shadow Lines
depicts the suffering, the death and devastation caused by a shadow line of division that could
not undo the shadow line of connection.
In the novel, the past merges fluidly with the present as it reflects the restlessness and turmoil
of the times and its meaning in the present context. explores the historical variables, the
meaning of contemporary India, the cross-culture friendship and feelings. Ghosh as a traveller,
travelling, therefore is not just between two geographical locations or two points in history, but
is the ability to shift from experience to experience, both in terms of time and space
imaginatively replacing the shadow line between two people’s cultural and traditional
experiences in disparate geographical contexts and at discrete historical junctures, and time
surpassing into the formidable or forbidden domain of people who are shattered higher or lower
in the hierarchy of class and race.The novel refers to the blurred lines between nations, land
and families as well as within one’s own self-identity. Ghosh depicts the characters of the novel
as caught between the two worlds. Hence they struggle to the core to come to terms with both
their present as well as their past. Ghosh’s tale dramatizes the dissimilar yet related cultures as
well as the outward conflicts between friends and families that have been inflicted by
geopolitical discord.

The first section of the novel provides the concept that love has the ability to go beyond any
kind of barriers or boundaries. Borders are meaningless and don’t have the power to restrict
human emotions. A border may separate the people of two countries geographically but it does
not have any power at all to separate the people of two countries psychologically. Borders
create struggle for people. The second section of the novel upholds the concept of national
identity. When Tha’mma wants to visit Dhaka to bring back her uncle, Shri Ghostobihari Bose,
she practically realizes the impact of partition. Though Tha’mma thinks that she can easily go
to her ancestral home which is situated in Dhaka, but after partition it is not so easy to go Dhaka
from Calcutta for Tha’mma because she has to follow the rules for going outside the country.
Tha’mma understands this really when it is needed to mention the name of her birth place on
the passport from which is required to be filled up properly in order to go to Dhaka and it is at
this very moment that Tha’mma realizes the socio-political situation. Here borders challenge
the individual identity of Tha’mma.
The Shadow Lines puts to the forefront the inevitable question of partition. This idea of partition
is however not just limited to its political meaning. The narrator’s grandmother’s ancestral
house in Dhaka had the rooms of the two families divided by a wall. There is partition even
within their own family. The partition is also evident in the house of the narrator where the
family members are divided by their mentality and ideas. The concept of borders is so
magnified that the disagreement between Salim’s Indo-China war and the author’s Kolkata
Riots as to which of the two was the greater event is the discourse in that episode. The creation
of borders has given a sensational rise to communalism which obviously incites violence and
hatred. The partition is also psychological – the author is confused by the nuances of the
faculties of his mind and he is clueless at times over the things he hears and witnesses. In the
novel, Amitav Ghosh explores how the artificial partition of India, a political act, creates a deep
and lasting divide in the minds of individuals and their relationships, blurring the lines between
historical memory, imagination, and national identity. Ultimately, the novel reveals how the
physical borders imposed by the partition become internalized, shaping people's experiences
and perceptions of the world.
BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Ghosh, Amitav. The Shadow Lines. Bloomsbury, London, 1988.

• Kaul, A.N. “A Reading of The Shadow Lines:” The Shadow Lines. Oxford University
Press, Oxford, 1995.

• Cusack, Tricia. "Janus and Gender: Women and the Nation's Backward Look."
Nations and Nationalism, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 541–561. Blackwell, Oxford, 2000.

• Chanda, Debarati. “Nation and Borders in Question in The Shadow Lines.”

International Journal of English Language, Literature in Humanities (IJELLH), vol. 3,
no. 7, pp. 72–79. Bhopal, 2015.

ONLINE RESOURCES

• https://www.bankurauniv.ac.in/uploads/tempimagepdflink/1654696506.pdf

• https://www.cvs.edu.in/upload/05082020182453_Creation%20of%20National%20Bo
undaries.pdf