The Boundaries of National Identity in the Shadow Lines.

Name: Vadher Ankita.

Paper: E-C-202: Indian Writing in English- Post Independence

Topic: The Boundaries of National Identity in the Shadow Lines.

SEM: 2, Part: 1.

Year: 2011/12.

Submitted To,

 Dr. Dilip Barad,

Dept. of English,

                                           Bhav. Uni

v The shadow line:

Ghosh’s reparation of the nation and its boundaries in the novel, which takes as its pivotal moment the partition of the province of Bengal in to west Bengal and east Bengal. In the novel, ghosh writes of the datta-chudhuri of Bengal who crosses and recross not only physically but also imaginatively, the boundaries between Calcutta and London and those between Calcutta and Dhaka. The narrator, who is never, named based in Calcutta that of his tha’mma and her sister, mayadebi, born and raised in Dhaka but living in Calcutta as part of the mass exodus of Bengali. Hindu during partition and two further lines bringing in to the story the narrator’s other relatives his cousin ILA and uncles robi and tridib. The narrator’s closest links are with his tha’mma and her sister’s son, tridib. In pursuing its inquiry in the logic of boundaries in the postcolonial context, the shadow lines takes up the challenge of representing the complexity of national identities. Homi Bhabha writes that the postcolonial text the problem of identity returns as a persistent questioning of the frame, the space of representation, where the image is confronted with its difference its other. For Bhabha the very place of national identification and uncertainly where identity is not pre-given stable or whole but divided by otherness’s within itself, always in a state of ambivalence. The shadow lines are the mirror image, which runs throughout the novel as a sign of those relations that paradoxically connect nation and individuals even as they divide them. Towards the end of the novel the other character learns to recognize each of the other characters Tridib, ILA, Robi, Nick, and Tha’mma as his mirror image. The mirror image in the novel foregrounds the idea of mutual contractedness not only between the narrators the other characters that surround him but also between the cities of London Dhaka and Calcutta. As he discovers new meaning and imagines new connection between his and the other characters perception and experiences of space the adult narrator comes to understand that “Muslim Dhaka” and “Hindu Calcutta” are essentially mirror image of each other separated by a “looking Glass border”., the cause of the riots that killed Tridib in Dhaka also causes the Calcutta riots in which he was trapped as a child. As tha’mma believes “across the border there existed another reality”. Thus in the novel Tha’mma supremely confident in her belief that real borders separate nations is taken aback when told that she would not be able to see any borderline between India and east Pakistan from the plane. ”where’s the difference then? She asks, and if there’s no difference both sides will be the same.

v Partition and Hindu Muslim Relation:

               Hindu Muslim conflicts and division in the subcontinent after 1947. Culture identities, religion and conflict that partition violence is commonly agreed to have been the most momentous event in the shaping of Hindu Muslim relation in independent India the division of the country in to two states of India and Pakistan. The shadow line implicitly endorses the view that identities such as “Muslim” and “Hindu” are not entities with fixed unambiguous meaning. Culture and national identities depend for their meaning on political, social, and historical forces also determine the contexts within which difference is constructed. The shadow lines can be read as destabilizing the fixed, binary logic imposed on nation of otherness, identity, history and memory in the construction of nationalist boundaries. Thus in the shadow lines ghosh represents national identity in a way which forces us to acknowledge the ambivalence of boundaries, even as we accept that partition was necessary this, on a metaphoric level is what Tridib tries to do by jumping out of the sure safety of his car during the riots and running towards the Muslim old man he barely knows. The force and appeal of nationalism cannot be wished away, just as death by a communal mob in the bye-lanes of old Dhaka’. Dhaka has been tha’mma’s place of birth but her nationality is Indian. As a young girl, she had thought of fighting for freedom in east Bengal. But those very same people for whom she had been willing to lay down her life are enemies how in 1964. Feelings of nationalism had after all motivated the fight against the British. The violence it unleashed by the action of a few fanatics the vengeance that the ordinary Hindu, Muslim and Sikhs wreaked on each other worsened our social sense distorted our political judgments and deranged our understanding of moral righteousness.

v Conceptions of home:

The novel’s two sections, “going away” and” coming home” are named after the two, principal journeys Tridib’s journey to England in 1939 and Tha’mma journey to Dhaka in 1964. The journeying fore grounded in the text, however is in epistemological as well as in physical term. The narrator observes: every language assumes a centrality a fixed and settled point to go away from and come back to and what my grandmother was looking for was a word for a journey that was not a coming or a going at all a journey that was a search for precisely that fixed point which permits the proper use of movement. This comment is prompted by his grandmother’s confusion when speaking in Calcutta about she says she will “come home to Dhaka” instead of “go” home to Dhaka. The narrator teases his grandmother about not knowing “the difference between coming and going” the more nature narrator now sees that her idiom has in fact been shaped by her assimilation of the basic dictate of “home”. When tha’mma discovers that her native city of Dhaka which she visit for the first time after partition is now the “other” home, a place of danger threat and instability. The novel’s opening sentence undermines any stable or unitary nation of the nation spatial cultural and temporal contexts: “in 1939 thirteen years before she was born and her father’s aunt mayadebi went to England with her husband and her son tridib.

v Conclusion:

For Amitav ghosh borders are self reflexive frames for constructing meaning “shadow lines”, which acquire an interstitial intimacy that transgresses the monologue fixity of nationalist boundaries. Only when the narrator comes to understand that the boundary is that line “where the shadow of the other falls upon the self and it is here that the novel’s title resonates with meaning can he arrive at a fuller understanding of his complex identity as a subject of the postcolonial Indian nation.