Name – Sukalpa Mukhopadhyay

UID - 0304180099

CU Roll Number - 182017110139

CU Registration Number -0171211326118

Semester - VI

Honours Subject – English Honours

What’s App Number -8584854541

Paper – DSEA3

Supervisor – Professor Souraja Tagore

Title of the Term Paper - The Shadow Lines as an eloquent critique of colonial

hangover
 The Shadow Lines as an eloquent critique of colonial hangover.

Once you start moving, you never stop.

Amitav Gosh is one of the most contemporary Indian English writers whose extraordinary
artwork of fiction has been a source of magical fascination and exerts a bewitching influence
on the mind and the lovers of literature. Ghosh, being a postcolonial writer focuses on the
exposition of the cultures of the land which has so far been relegated to the periphery of The
Shadow Lines which is set in postcolonial India, is one of the finest novels of Amitav Ghosh.
He has tried to suffuse his sense of belonging, national identity, landscapes, rituals, national
culture and tradition which form the core of the postcolonial fiction in the texture of The
Shadow Lines. In this context, it would be appropriate to quote, Silvia Albertazzi’s words
that:

“Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Shadow Lines is probably the most important fictional work to
have appeared in South Asian literature in the last decade. It sums up and fictionalizes all the
major issues of the postcolonial literature- the search for identity, the need for independence
and the difficult relationship with colonial culture, of the colonial past and attempt at creating
communal past.”

Amitav Ghosh in The Shadow Lines seems to move effortlessly across national boundaries. It
has plenty of postcolonial features such as elements of incredible, bewilderment of time and
space, dislodgement, freedom, sense of loss and reminiscence and disintegration of
individuality. In The Shadow Lines: A Note G.R. Taneza addresses the novel as:

“an eloquent critique of colonial hangover and cultural dislocation in postcolonial situation
as also the psychological make-up of the contemporary man who thrives on violence”.

It is evident throughout the novel as the characters are unable to recover from the memories
of the past, the partition of Bengal, the communal riots and its devastating consequences
which claimed lives of their close ones. Seema Bhadury says in Of Shadows, Lines and
Freedom: A Historical reading of The Shadow Lines, “Ghosh’s characters had to deal with
two types of servility- the one is to ideas spawned by history, viz. the ideas of nationalism.
These ideas hold sway even after times to which they were relevant have passed. The other
servility to one’s personal fantasies that distort one’s vision, ‘thamma’ the writer’s
grandmother personifies the first type while ‘Ila’ the writer’s cousin personifies the second”.
paper aims to focus on these two characters: “Thamma” and “Ila” and highlight how they are
transformed consciously and unconsciously and are being victimized by their colonial
hangover.

The novel is woven around two families: the family of Dutta Chaudhari of Bengal and the
family of Price of London and the anonymous narrator’s associations with them. The story
teller from his early days comes in close contact with them and thus is able to knit jointly the
different strands of their associations. The narrator shows the alter ego of Tridib as “Tridib
had given me worlds to travel in and had given me eyes to see them with”. Hence, though the
novel has first person narration, it is not narrator’s life that is narrated but to a large extent,
closed ones lives and experience. He has the requires wisdom to observe and make
comments on every character and incident. It will not be an exaggeration to say that he is the
mouthpiece of novelist himself.

The narrator was born in 1952, and grew up in close contact with his grandmother whom he
called ‘Thamma’. The grandmother, born in Dhaka in 1902, part of the pre-partitioned Indian
sub-continent, had lost her home forever when she first left the place with her husband for
Mayanmar, his working place. The grandmother being brought up in a joint family with old
beliefs and practices, could not let go off it even in the postcolonial world. She has outdated
ideas and attitude towards modern world. For her, time was precious thing as the narrator
said: “For her time was like a toothbrush: it went moldy if it wasn’t used”. According to her ,
Tridib the narrator’s uncle was wasting time mixing with loafers of the street corner, ‘addas’,
missing opportunities and is a good for nothing fellow. Therefore, she asked the narrator not
to mix with him. On the other hand, for the narrator, Tridib is a recluse, a scholar doing Ph.D.
in Archeology, with immense knowledge and intense power of imagination. According to the
grandmother a good man is one who worked hard for his livelihood, as she has done, gets
married and leads a settled and comfortable life at home concerning himself with social or
political problems. Therefore, she also condemns a person like Ila who is living frugally in
England, though she can have all comforts at home. She fails, to appreciate Ila’s aspirations
because she chooses to hold on to her old notions of perfect lifestyle.

Shakwat Hussain points in his essay Postcolonial Angst in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow
Lines “Perhaps the greatest irony of independence of India for characters like , Thamma is
that while it gave them freedom and new nation-state, the partition took away their ‘homes
and the dialects that gave them their special identity”. The grandmother shares the anxiety
and angst of migrancy suffered by thousands of other Hindus who left the East Bengal
populates by Muslim-majority. Her longing for her Dhakaeit dialect, finds way when Maya,
her younger sister comes to Calcutta as soon as they meet, grandmother hurries towards
Maya, embraces her “laughing, talking quickly in that language that more none of us could
understand properly, their old Dhaka dialect”. To understand grandmother’s character which
Tridib calls ‘a modern middle-class woman’, the following comment by him is worth
mentioning:

“All she wanted was a middle-class life in which, like the middle classes the world over, she
would thrive believing in the unity of nationhood and territory, of self respect and national
power: that was all she wanted- a modern middle-class life, a small thing that history had
denied her in its fullness and for which she could never forgive it.”

On the other hand, the globe-trotting Ila’s diasporic dislocation frees her from any essential
idea of home. Ila is a typical drawing of a westernized, beautiful, attractive and sensitive girl
of modern era. She wears the western dresses and looks like a foreigner to her nature and
character. She lives life in full measure without caring about the Indian traditions she does
not like the Indian culture. She lives a life in full measure, without caring about the Indian
traditions and culture. It makes her to delink from her people both in thought and culture
because she had lived in many countries in her early life. She finds life in Kolkata dull and
boring because of the stereotypical ideas and practice.

The concept of freedom is completely different for grandmother and Ila. The two polar
characters are obsessed with the idea of freedom. For grandmother, the dangerously
nationalist, freedom means liberation of her nation from the colonizer British as well as
defeat of their enemy that is Pakistan. She told Tridib about the terrorist movement amongst
nationalist in Bengal in the first few decades of this century, “ About secret terrorist societies
like Anushilan and Jugantor and all their offshoots, their clandestine networks, and the home-
made bombs with which they tried to assassinate British official and policemen”. We know
how she treasures the memory of he shy-bearded classmate who was a member of the
terrorist movement amongst the nationalists in Bengal, how she worships Khudiram Bose and
Bagha jatin, the martyrs. To the narrator she expresses her secret will to do anything to be
independent of the colony. Even after the partitioned, there begins a war between India and
Pakistan in 1965 and she donates her gold chain, the last relic of her for her husband to the
war fund. She says narrator that she parts with her cherished relic. ‘For your sake, for your
freedom’. Grandmother the fiercely bourgeois old lady with her imagination enslaved to the
ravaging idea of stark nationalism, sinks into continual dementia and lives more in her
imaginary world than the real one, to which the unnamed narrator his mentor Tridib and his
beloved May Price belong.

But for Ila freedom means something radically different. When at the Grand Hotel she wants
to dance and Robi protests saying “you can do what you like in England. But here there are
certain things you cannot do.” Ila bursts out in rage and shouts: “ Do you see now why I’ve
chosen to live in London?.........Its only because I want to be free”. When the narrator asks
‘Free of what?’, she replies, ‘Free of you! Free of your bloody culture and free of all of you’.

If the grandmother is rigid about nationalism, which can be called extreme nationalism, Ila
holds her ideas and thoughts associated with pervert internationalism. Ila has travelled all
over the world with her parents as Urvashi Barat observes in Imagination and Reality in The
Shadow Lines too great an exposure to reality has erased the magic from her eyes, so that all
those places on the maps which are to the narrator ‘a set of magical talismans’ are for her
merely familiar commonplace, dull, significant only by virtue of position of ladies toilets in
the airport lounges, which become for her the science of stability, “The only fixed points in
the shifting landscapes of her childhood”. Whatever city happened to be living, caught in her
ever-changing Yearbooks of the international schools which are full of photographs only. As
if she never lived a place but : “The places themselves went past her in an illusory whirl of
movements, like those studio screens in old films which flash past the windows of speeding
cars.”

Ila once herself claims that ‘I am free’ to invent stories. While playing houses she makes
stories, creates roles and urges the narrator to pretend. The Magda story is the subconscious
reconstruct her own experience of racial antagonism at London where Nick didn’t want to be
seen with her once again, when she scolds the narrator as ‘third-world tapioca farmer’,
unconsciously Ila locates herself out of the third worlds. Ironically enough, she does not
belong to the first world as well. Her real location is always at flux. Therefore, we see how
sharply she also carries the self-contradictory traits in her personality. Though she dislikes
Bengali/ Indian culture she treats the narrator and Robi in her favorite Indian restaurant in a
small Bangladeshi place Clap ham. Ila once who brags, ‘I Ila Datta Chaudhary, free woman,
free of spirits” is nothing but a person for whom maps and memory are irrelevant.
Meenakshi Mukherjee in her essay Maps and Mirrors has something very noteworthy in little
Ila’s playing house. Her house has no veranda. When the narrator points “It can’t be a real
house….because it does not have a veranda, she opposes ‘what shall we do with a veranda?”
Mukherjee thinks terraces and verandas, like courtyards, are essential female spaces in
our( Indian) culture and inability to comprehend their importance can be attributed to her
cosmopolitan and diasporic disposition. Ila’s English house and English family with an
imaginary English child with an English name are easily explainable under the light of
Gramsci’s idea of hegemon. We see how Ila’s grandfather is called ‘Shahab’ by the family
members, here it has become a family joke that ‘his hat wouldn’t come off his head’. We are
also told how Ila’s mother’s eccentric Euro-centricity has earned her the title Queen Victoria.
Ila is nothing but the product of the hegemonized Shahab’s and Queen Victoria’s erroneous
upbringing.

According to the above discussion, it becomes evident that Amitav Ghosh’s genius has
beautifully carved out the fact of colonial hangover through the character ‘Thamma’ and
‘Ila’. On one hand the grandmother perceives about freedom and nationalism, which
intrinsically are the concepts arrived from the Western culture of the colonizers and on the
other hand Ila holds on to the Western culture despite belonging to India that is how she is
deluded that , she is a white woman in brown skin. Apart from colonial hangover, The
Shadow Lines ,very artistically expresses through plot, characters and narrative technique his
perspective of futility of borders and how they fail to affect basic human values of love and
brotherhood which are imbibed in sensibility of writers as well as common man due to our
ancient culture of unity in diversity. Though the novel deals with multiple themes, the
thoughts of partition dominate the memories of ‘Thamma’ in the section of this great novel of
Amitav Ghosh.
Bibliography:-

 Firoz A., Shaikh. "The Partition and its versions in Indian English Novels: A Critical Study."
2006, p. 242, etheses.saurashtrauniversity.edu/id/829. Accessed 17 June 2021.
 Kulsum, Umme, and Nahid Kaiser. "Lost in Contrasted Strands of Dislocated Identity: A study
of Two Diasporic Characters, Thamma and Ila in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines."
Stamford Journals of English, p. 15, www.banglajol.info. Accessed 2 June 2021.
 Narayan, Satya. "Representation of Women Characters in Amitav Ghosh's Selected Novels."
International Journal of Research and Analytical Reviews , vol. 5, no. 3, 2018, p. 6,
www.ijrar.org. Accessed 19 June 2021.
 Rani, Seema. "A Postcolonial Study of Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines." International
Journal of All Research Education and Scientific Methods, vol. 6, no. 11, 2018, p. 3,
www.ijaresm.com. Accessed 2 June 2021.