The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh. The novel is set against the backdrop of historical events like the Swadeshi movement, Second World War, Partition of India and Communal riots of 1963-64 in Dhaka and Calcutta. The novel earned Ghosh the 1989 Sahitya Akademi Award for English, by the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters. The novel was translated by Shalini Topiwala into Gujarati In 1998.

1. The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh

2. About The
Author :-
Ø Amitav Ghosh is the writer of “The Shadow
Lines”.
Ø Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta on
11th July 1956 and was educated at the all-
boys boarding school The Doon School in
Dehradun. He grew up in India, Bangladesh
and Sri Lanka. His contemporaries at Doon
included author Vikram Seth and historian
Ram Guha. While at school, he regularly
contributed fiction and poetry to The Doon
School Weekly (then edited by Seth) and
founded the magazine History Times along
with Guha. After Doon, he received
degrees from St. Stephen's College, Delhi
University, and Delhi School of Economics.

3. Why The Shadow Lines
◦ Won Sahitya Academy award in 1988 (first Indian English writer to be honoured)
◦ Aftermath of Sikh riots in Delhi, 1984-1985
◦ Laid the foundation of Indian writing in English in mainstream literature
◦ Historical fiction (WW II-1939-45, Indo-Pak partition-1947, Calcutta-Dhaka riots-1964,
swadeshi movement-1905-1917)
◦ Amitav Ghosh won Padma Shri in 2007

4. Major Historical Incidents
◦ Dhaka riots 1964 (The 1964 East Pakistan Riots refer to the massacre and ethnic
cleansing of Bengali Hindus from East Pakistan in the wake of an alleged theft of what
was believed to be the Prophet's hair from the Hazratbal shrine in Jammu and Kashmir
in India)
◦ The 1984 anti-Sikh riots, also known as the 1984 Sikh Massacre, was a series of organised
pogroms against Sikhs following the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh
bodyguards.

5. About The Shadow Lines
◦ Published in 1988
◦ Post colonial/partition novel
◦ Point of View first person and unnamed narrator
◦ Setting: India, England and East Pakistan
◦ Story of three generation of Indian-Bengali family
◦ Divided into two parts:
◦ Coming home
◦ Going away

6. About the narrator
◦ Unnamed
◦ Best friend to uncle; Tridib
◦ Fond of Tridib’s stories/childhood in London
◦ Born in Calcutta, stays with her grandmother, Tha’mma
◦ Never stepped beyond Calcutta

7. Justify the title, The Shadow Lines
◦ The narrative in the novel persistently transgresses the special and the temporal
boundaries.
◦ The nations divided territorially are united emotionally.
◦ The shift from tangible/concrete to untangible/abstract.
◦ Bluring the real vs. the unreal
◦ Artificial vs. the natural
◦ The man made/limited/geographical division vs. natural/limitless emotional unity.
◦ Thus, ‘shadow’ refers to the borders/ artificial/manmade lines which are meaningless
because the emotions, imaginations etc., contradicts the former.

8. Themes :-
1. Youth vs. Maturity
2. Memory, Storytelling, and Reality
3. Freedom and Identity
4. Social Standing and Pride
5. Borders, Violence, and Political Unrest

9. The Shadow Lines follows the unnamed narrator, the youngest member of the Indian Datta-
Chaudhuri family, as he pieces together his family history. This history spans several decades and
follows many different family members—including his grandmother's youth in Dhaka in the 1910s
and 1920s, his uncle Tridib's experiences of World War II in England as a child, the Partition of India
in 1947, and finally, the riots in Calcutta and Dhaka in 1964, which unfold when the narrator is
eleven. As the narrator recounts these events in a nonlinear fashion, he seeks to make sense of his
family and his history by reevaluating initially youthful and simplistic understandings of people and
events. The novel suggests that in doing so, the narrator is finally able to reach maturity and a
greater sense of his place in his family and in the world.
Youth vs. Maturity :-
Memory, Storytelling, and Reality:-
The narrator of The Shadow Lines is endlessly fascinated by the relationship between memories as
they exist in people's minds and memories that are transformed into stories and passed on through
the spoken word. As a child, he lives for the stories his uncle Tridib tells him of living in England, as
well as other stories about the Price family, which is the family that Tridib and his parents stayed with.
As the narrator grows up and experiences others challenging these stories that Tridib told him, he
becomes even more convinced of what Tridib always insisted: while stark reality has its place, one
can live an even richer life when a person allows stories and memories, both one’s own and those
of others, to inform and influence their reality.

10. The Shadow Lines centers on the relationship between freedom and how people try to achieve
that freedom. In this way, the novel seeks to parse out the meanings of different kinds of freedom
and how one's perception of freedom influences their identity. Further, the novel also suggests that
the idea of freedom is enough to drive someone mad, even if freedom is ultimately unreachable.
The novel explores the idea of freedom primarily through the opposing definitions held by Tha'mma,
the narrator's grandmother, and Ila, his cousin. Tha'mma, who was born in 1902, grew up during the
British occupation of India. As a young woman, Tha'mma believed that there was nothing more
important than securing freedom from British rule, even telling her wide-eyed grandson that she
wanted to join the terrorists and assassinate British government officials to meet those ends. Despite
being so intent on this freedom as a young woman, when Partition (the process that granted the
colony of British India freedom from colonial rule by creating the separate countries of India, West
Pakistan, and East Pakistan, which later became Bangladesh) finally took place in 1947, Tha'mma
was far too busy working and raising a family as a widow to even celebrate, let alone consider the
gravity of what happened.
Freedom and Identity :-
Social Standing and Pride :-
For all of the characters in The Shadow Lines, social standing is a major motivating factor in their
lives. By exploring how people's desire for wealth and social standing gets out of control as a result
of excessive pride, the novel suggests that these things should be treated with caution and not be
taken too seriously. The narrator notes that though his education and his family's standing have had
innumerable positive effects on his life, he also shows how the same things tear apart different
factions of his family and prove to be, in some cases, lethal.

11. Borders, Violence, and Political Unrest :-
The events of The Shadow Lines center primarily around riots that took place in Calcutta, India, and
Dhaka, East Pakistan, in late 1963 and early 1964. Though the narrator doesn't discover the truth until
the very end of the novel, it's this riot in Dhaka that kills Tridib, a realization that suddenly forces the
narrator to reevaluate his experience of the conflict from his hometown in Calcutta and consider
the ways in which the riots were an even bigger defining moment in his life than he realized at the
time. As the narrator, in his late twenties or thirties, finally pieces together what happened, he
begins to consider the role that British colonialism and the border between India and East Pakistan
played in the conflict, and how the political unrest of the period truly impacted his understanding of
his family and the world. When the British finally granted their colony of British India independence in
1947, they divided the colony along religious lines, creating the Hindu-majority country of India and
the Muslim-majority countries of East Pakistan and West Pakistan. As the narrator, who grew up in
the Indian city of Calcutta, describes, these borders meant that he was relatively unaware of
anything happening outside his home in India—cities that were a thousand miles away but still in
India were in the forefront of his consciousness and understanding, while cities that were a day's
drive away, but in another country, simply didn't exist in his mind.

12. Characters :-
1. The Narrator
2. Tridib
3. Ila
4. Tha'mma
5. May Price
6. Mayadebi
7. Nick Price
8. Jethamoshai
9. Robi
10. The Shaheb
11. Queen Victoria
12. Mother
13. Mrs. Price

13. The narrator was born in Calcutta, India in 1953, where he lives with his parents and his
grandmother, Tha’mma. He spends his entire childhood in Calcutta and spends a lot of it with his
favorite uncle, Tridib. Tridib tells him stories, pointing out faraway cities in his atlas and telling him
often about living in London as a child. The narrator idolizes Tridib's way of living and looking at the
world, which is a problem when the narrator is around his cousin Ila.
The Narrator :-
Tridib :-
Tridib is the narrator's uncle. He's about twenty years older and is a very skilled storyteller. He often
tells the narrator stories about the year he lived in London with the Prices. Tridib's sense of place in
his stories is so exact, the narrator can find his way around London as an adult years later going off
of what Tridib told him.
Ila :-
Ila is the narrator's cousin. They're the same age, and their families joke that they could be twins,
but they're very different. Ila's family is very wealthy and she lives in a number of foreign cities
throughout her childhood, which makes her much less interested in their uncle Tridib's stories.
Tha’mma :-
Tha'mma is the narrator's grandmother. As a young woman in British India, she desperately wanted
to be a part of the terrorist groups that fought for India's independence from Britain. When Partition
happened in 1947, however, Tha'mma was too busy raising the narrator's father as a single parent
to think much of it. When her husband died, Tha'mma became fiercely independent and refused
help from everyone, including her younger sister, Mayadebi. Eventually, Tha'mma told herself that
her relatives actually refused to help her, so she actively distanced herself from much of her family.

14. May is Mrs. Price's daughter. She's an infant when Tridib and his family are in London in 1939, and
she's at least ten years older than her younger brother, Nick. May is an oboist and plays in an
orchestra professionally throughout her adult life, though later in life, she also works for "worthy
causes" that provide housing and disaster relief in third-world countries.
May Price :-
Mayadebi :-
Mayadebi is Tha'mma's younger sister. The narrator describes the two women as being like
reflections in a looking glass. Mayadebi is lucky enough to marry the Shaheb, a wealthy diplomat.
As such, she travels often throughout her life, including to London in 1939 with the nine-year-old
Tridib, her middle son.
Nick Price :-
As children, Ila introduces the narrator to Nick Price through stories she tells about playing with him
in London when her family lives with his. He's several years older, blonde, and has long hair.
Jethamoshai :-
Jethamoshai is the uncle of Mayadebi and Tha'mma. When the girls were little, he was an eccentric
man and was difficult to take seriously—though he was sometimes frightening because of his
skeletally thin frame and piercing eyes.
Robi :-
Robi is the narrator's uncle, though he's only a few years older than the narrator. When his parents,
Mayadebi and the Shaheb, moved to Dhaka in 1963, Robi went with them. He therefore got to
accompany his mother, aunt, Tridib, and May to fetch Jethamoshai from his mother's childhood
home when he was thirteen.

15. The Shaheb :-
The Shaheb is Mayadebi's wealthy husband. He's elegant, dignified, and the most important
relative in the narrator's family, which earns him the admiration of everyone in the family but
Tha’mma resents him because she believes he's an alcoholic (though it's never made entirely clear
if the Shaheb ever actually stinks of alcohol) and weak—she instinctively knows that Mayadebi
does most of the heavy lifting.
Queen Victoria :-
Queen Victoria is Ila's mother and the wife of Jatin, an economist. She acquired her nickname
because she often sits proudly like Queen Victoria. She keeps a number of servants and has a habit
of creating silly languages to speak to them to make them feel inferior and confused, and the
narrator notes that she had a "special affinity" for any being, human or animal, who responded to
one of her special languages.
Mother :-
The narrator's mother is a skilled and competent housewife who is exceptionally proud of her
competence. She's briefly shaken when her mother-in-law, Tha'mma, retires and is in the house full-
time, but Mother soon regains her hold over the household.
Mrs. Price :-
Mrs. Price is May and Nick's mother. She and her husband, Snipe, live in West Hampstead, London.
She and Snipe take in Tridib and his parents when Tridib is a child, on the eve of World War II.
Decades later, when the narrator meets her, Mrs. Price is elderly and tires quickly, but still loves
having Indian guests.

16. Rising Action
Narrator's grandmother goes to bring her uncle back to India from his home in the city of Dhaka
with Tridib and May. It is then it is revealed that lla has entered into an unhappy marriage with Nick
Price. As lla flirts with bohemian idealism, Tridib falls deeper into melancholy as he pursues his own
studies.

17. Falling Action
lla confides in the narrator that Nick is cheating on her, though she refuses to leave him. The night
before the narrator leaves, he has dinner with May. At dinner, May tells the narrator about the riots
and asks if he thinks that she killed Tridib. May tells him that she used to think she did, but she knows
now that Tridib sacrificed himself and knew he was going to die.He is in bed with May, who has
begun to act as a mother figure and possibly a lover-to him.

18. Conflict
Amitav Ghosh is a postmodernist writer. He has received numerous awards for his works in the year
2007,he was awarded the PadmaShri by the Government of India. His writings are unique
and contributed a lot to Indian writing in English . The Shadow Lines is one of such writing , a
highly innovative novel . It received the prestigious Sahitya Academy Award in 1989. He is
immensely influenced by the political and cultural milieu of post-independent India. Being a social
anthropologist and having the opportunity of visiting alien lands, he comments on the present
scenario, the world is passing through in his novels. Almost all the works of Amitav Ghosh reflected
the theme of borders and boundaries among nations. The Shadow Lines is a highly innovative,
complex and celebrated novel of Amitav Ghosh, published in 1988. The Shadow Lines is the novel
deal exclusively with the consequences of the Partition and mainly concerned with the Partition on
the Bengal border. It is important to note that Ghosh happens to be the only major Indian-English
novelist who is preoccupied with the Bengal Partition. There was a collective expression of grief, a
demonstration of all religions in which Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus alike to took part. In January 1964
Mu-I-Mubarak was recovered and the city of Srinagar erupted with joy. But soon after the recovery,
riots broke out in Khulna and a few people were killed.

19. Climax
The Narrator learns that Tridib's death mentioned but never explained-was not an accident. He
was killed in a riot that overtook the town of Dhaka on the trip when Tha'mma went to retrieve her
uncle..

20. Era
Ø The novel deals with the concerns of our period.
Ø The search for identity.
Ø The need for independence.
Ø The difficult relationship with colonial culture.
Ø It magnificently interweaves facts , friction & reminiscence.
Ø It is a continuous narrative which replicates the pattern of violence not only for 1964 but also for
21st Century.

21. Summary
Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines deals with political freedom in the modern world, nationalism
and the shadow lines we people draw between us and nations. In its simplest form, the story is
about a young boy in India (who is the narrator). The story begins in India and later transfers to
London. The story moves through the young boy's memories and especially concentrates on the
memory of his cousin, Ila, who he is attracted to. However, because of the social constrictions of his
society, the narrator stays with a platonic relationship. Another interaction Ghosh focuses on is that
of the narrator's relationship with another male cousin Tridib. This part of the story focuses on the
love between the Indian and the English. As the narrator goes on in his personal narrative many
historic events in India's history are revealed (even the second world war and incidents in
Calcutta).But in analyzing the title of the work, the real truth comes in the delineation of borders
and boundaries between nations, hence the term "shadow lines." The author shows how these lines
are created, kept, broken, and even invisible . The concept of Post Colonial Criticism talks about
the negativity of borders made by man. Why? They pit one society against another. As is
evidenced by the story, this was especially true in India when it was divided into three sections:
India (proper), Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Only conflict resulted in that division.

22. Own Views
This is a book about people and places and the connections between them. For me, the most
poignant parts of the book are the times when the narrator contemplates the meaning of maps
and borders, or the difficulty of rendering meaning to violence with language.

23. Thank You