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.

Divisions 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 does bind 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.

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 . . .”

Memory

Memory is a human faculty that does not heed the boundaries drawn by man.

This is why Robi, commenting on the illusionary aspect of lines that are never heeded by memories, says: “And then I think to myself why don't they draw thousands of little lines through the whole subcontinent and give every little place a new name? What would it change? It is a mirage; the whole thing is a mirage. How can anyone divide memory?”

He goes on to say: “If freedom were possible then Tridib's death would have set me free. And yet all it takes to set my hand shaking like a leaf, fifteen years later, thousands of miles away, is a chance remark by a waiter in a restaurant.”
Robi is haunted by the memory of a seemingly random act of violence that affected his entire family – Tridib’s death at the hands of a Dhaka mob. And yet this memory binds him with that mob in Dhaka and with the other people in Bangladesh that were affected by these riots. An unpleasant bond, but a bond all the same. He struggles to be free of this bond, but in this memory lies the proof that despite borders and lines in between, people will still be linked to the people on the other side through their interlinked past.

On the other hand, the narrator’s grandmother comes back to her old home, Dhaka and despite her nationalistic fervour, her firm belief in ‘them’ as different from ‘us’, she still searches for her past, seeking nostalgia in the country she considers her enemy. “Perhaps, on the other hand, they consisted of some unusual alchemical mixture of the sound of the dialect and the smell of the vast, mile-wide rivers, which alone had the power to bring upon her that comfortable lassitude which we call a sense of homecoming.”

Imagination

Another reason that the narrator believes the borders between countries to be shadowy is that he finds, through Tridib, that precise imagination can transcend them.

Tridib taught him that though imagination is in principle a vehicle for polarization, for division, (the borders between countries, after all, were created and only live in peoples’ imaginations, and it is people’s imagination that romanticizes each other’s home as ‘there’), it can also be the means of crossing these borders. Tridib believed in a different kind of imagination, a precise imagination. ‘Imagination with precision’ is in essence a vehicle for depolarization; it enables natives to transcend borders that they have distinguished between ‘here’ and ‘there’. To put it in different terms, Tridib, and hence, the author, attached great importance to imagination as a counterforce against distinction. Thanks to Tridib, the narrator was able to disqualify those arbitrary boundaries that divided nations and identities.

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.

Minor Shadow Lines recurrent in novel

Gender lines

Besides lines between countries, there are other shadow lines that exist within our own nation. Our own culture promotes divisiveness by constructing lines around women that bind them in. These lines, however shadowy and indeterminate, still exist. They are real enough for Ila, who is trying to get free from them, to prompt her to flee the suffocating environs of her home and escape to London. The narrator realizes this one night when he sees Ila forced to be confined into gender roles by her own uncle, unable to act the way she wants to: “I saw Ila's face again as I had seen it that night in the taxi, wet with tears, twisted with anger and hatred, and I thought of how much they wanted to be free; how they went mad wanting their freedom…”

Lines within ourselves

Another interpretation of the novel’s title is as a philosophical statement that the author makes, asserting that the ‘shadow lines', or the lines that not only define our human shape but our inner struggles to choose between darkness and light, are an intricate part of all human existence.

The struggles with these shadow lines are most in evidence in May, who has been shown to be a naive idealist, a humanist, through her actions to save the injured dog. Yet, her move to save the old man in Dhaka, motivated by similar promptings, actually results in revealing the shadow lines within Tridib, who chooses the light against the darkness within his soul and sacrifices himself for May.

Robi, on the other hand, arouses admiration in the narrator for his apparent conviction in a clear-cut right and wrong. To the narrator, Robi does not seem to struggle at all with the shadow lines within himself. He seems to know just what he should do, with an assurance that was as impressive as it was puzzling to the narrator. When at his college, Robi refuses to join the strike, he justifies his decision by saying: “Because a rule's a rule; if you break one you have to be willing to pay the price.” “But is it a good rule?”, the narrator asks him. But he gets no answer to this question. In Robi’s convictions, there is no place for subjective interpretation of what is right.

Lines between dimensions and times

The lines between memory and reality in the novel are as shadowy as all other lines. The past, present and future combine and melt together erasing any kind of line of demarcation. The narration jumps from event to memory to current happenings, discarding time as any kind of link between one piece of the narration and the next. Similarly, the personal and the public receive no difference in consideration – the narrator’s perceptions of London are coloured as much by the bombings and war that was public knowledge as by Tridib’s imagination and later by his own experiences. His perceptions of Calcutta and Dhaka are a blend of information from old newspapers, Robi’s recollections of his visit to Dhaka, data collected from maps and globes, and his own experiences in a school bus pursued by a mob in Calcutta. There is no distinction made between any of these means of information, no greater or lesser importance attaxhed to any of them.

In fact, others’ memories, whether they be personal or common knowledge add another dimension to the narrator’s experiences. His experience of the cellar at the Prices’ house includes all these dimensions. The actual three-dimensional material world loses a dimension ("one of their dimensions seemed to dissolve") and its place is taken by the dimension of the imaginary past ("those empty corners filled up with remembered forms").

Tridib as shadow line

Tridib never actually ‘lives’ the story, except through memories of others - the narrator’s, his brother Robi’s, and lover May’s. He is a link that connects them, a shadow line that never materialises. It is with Tridib that the story begins, and it is his death that finally unites the narrator and Robi in their memories of him, and the narrator and May in understanding and love.