The Shadow Lines

by Amitav Ghosh

A major novel on recent Indian political history, covers partition and violence in Bengal. Reflects post-colonial concerns with historical memory, symbolism, and cultural transition. Excellent reviews in the West and South Asia.

Genres: Fiction, India, Historical Fiction, Indian Literature, Literary Fiction, Literature, Historical

252 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Amitav Ghosh is an Indian writer. He won the 54th Jnanpith award in 2018, India's highest literary honour. Ghosh's ambitious novels use complex narrative strategies to probe the nature of national and personal identity, particularly of the people of India and South Asia. He has written historical fiction and non-fiction works discussing topics such as colonialism and climate change.
Ghosh studied at The Doon School, Dehradun, and earned a doctorate in social anthropology at the University of Oxford. He worked at the Indian Express newspaper in New Delhi and several academic institutions. His first novel, The Circle of Reason, was published in 1986, which he followed with later fictional works, including The Shadow Lines and The Glass Palace. Between 2004 and 2015, he worked on the Ibis trilogy, which revolves around the build-up and implications of the First Opium War. His non-fiction work includes In an Antique Land (1992) and The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016).
Ghosh holds two Lifetime Achievement awards and four honorary doctorates. In 2007, he was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India's highest honours, by the President of India. In 2010, he was a joint winner, along with Margaret Atwood, of a Dan David prize, and in 2011, he was awarded the Grand Prix of the Blue Metropolis festival in Montreal. He was the first English-language writer to receive the award. In 2019, Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the most important global thinkers of the preceding decade.

Reviews

[Mutasim Billah · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I could not persuade her that a place does not merely exist, that it has to be invented in one's imagination.”



“Nobody knows, nobody can ever know, not even in memory, because there are moments in time that are not knowable.”
Image: Muslim refugees clamber aboard an overcrowded train near New Delhi in an attempt to flee India.


In The Shadow Lines, Amitav Ghosh writes about memory, or rather the imperfections of memory. The book is a novel where the narrator recalls stories and events from his childhood and compares them with perspectives of other people to paint a full picture of the narrative. The "shadow lines" are essentially the lines which are present in one person's perspective but non-existent in another, meaning that the lines that are present in one person's perspective are passed on as shadows through the telling of tales and altered by the power of imagination.



“I thought of how much they all wanted to be free; how they went mad wanting their freedom; I began to wonder whether it was I that was mad because I was happy to be bound; whether I was alone in knowing that I could not live without the clamour of the voices within me.”
Image: People demonstrating against the sacrilege at the City Center in Srinagar on 28 December 1963


The narrative is entirely built upon many such lines crossing each other, each providing a new perspective. History forms a central theme of the novel, where the backdrop of the story is set against events such as the Partition of India, World War II and the communal riots of 1963-64 in Dhaka and Calcutta after the theft of the Holy Relic from the Hazratbal Shrine.


Hazratbal Shrine, 1963

[Riku Sayuj · Rating 4 out of 5]

The return of this asymmetrical Saturday was one of those little events, internal, local, almost civic, which, in peaceful lives and closed societies, create a sort of national bond and become the favorite theme of conversations, jokes, stories wantonly exaggerated: it would have been the ready-made nucleus for a cycle of legends, if one of us had had an epic turn of mind.

~ Marcel Proust

The Shadow Lines of History (& Geography)

It is said that childhood is the font of all stories. No story can be told without getting the child in you involved. Well, that is not quite true. You can tell one without involving the child, except that it wont be a story anymore. It will be an anecdote - a story without the soul.

Here, the child, and the adult, and the teenager flit across the shadow lines of time that separates them, blending into each other, becoming one and separate without the slightest effort.

One minute the wonder of the child, next the indifference of the adult, next the deliberate inadequateness of the teenager - all assault the reader at the same time. Taking the reader on a parallel journey. The transitions between times is stunning - seamless! Between past and present selves… all shadow lines are sketched in loving detail.

This technique is employed partly due to narrative expediency, but also to show the true nature of stories we tell ourselves - they are as fleeting as our memories. Our personal histories are figments of our imagination.

Sometimes this shadowy nature of memory revels itself:

You might think you know a story, you have grown up with it. Then someone comes along and says, but that could not have happened. You look them in the eyes and say, ‘look, that is what happened.’ They will understand.

Not so much. Your stories are built on ‘facts’ that they are alien to. They belong to another time, one parallel to theirs. To another universe. Did you meet the multi-verse today?

Looking-Glass Borders

But these lines, these stories, are not just personal, they are spun out and eventually lays siege to whole nations. They become political hallucinations:

What had they felt, I wondered, when they discovered that they had created not a separation, but a yet-undiscovered irony: the simple fact that there had never been a moment in the 4000-year-old history of that map when the places we know as Dhaka and Calcutta were more closely bound to each other than after they had drawn their lines – so closely that I, in Calcutta, had only to look into the mirror to be in Dhaka; a moment when each city was the inverted image of the other, locked into an irreversible symmetry by the line that was to set us free – our looking-glass border.

Combine this with the opening quote from Proust, where anyone who is unaware of the 'Saturday' becomes 'barbarians' and we can see how history (& geography) are nothing but silly private jokes that we play on each other. (in fact it was stumbling across the passage in Proust that made me turn to this half-formed review among my notes.)

The Grand Illusionists

But Tha’mma, how can you teach me grammar - you don’t even know the difference between coming and going!

The illusions that we conjure out of these shadows, made of boundaries which evidently are, but where there could be none. Lines circumscribing a ‘present, a ‘past and ‘future’, a ‘home’, a ‘abroad’, a country, a family, a property, even an identity - none solid - all melting when not paid attention to. Lacking a centre, we float on our emotions —

— The Shadow lines present only when a light is shone somewhere near by - but disappearing in darkness and in light - if paid attention to or if ignored - appearing only at the sideways glance. Such strange places do we inhabit in our personal stories, the ones told to ourselves.

It is only apt that one of the sideways glanced characters in the book is called MayaDevi (Goddess of Illusion), and she is in fact the main actor - the dancing shadow line - disappearing if forgotten or if paid attention to - possible (/living) only on the sidelines but impossible to live without.

[Sam Law · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an amazing book that left me blown away by the beautiful vivid storytelling, the insightful analytical commentary and the thought provoking message of the book.

The book collapses time and space, placing events from different times and places next to each other. The narrator goes from his experience as a little boy in India to London both through the stories of his uncle and his own experience there as a student. From this narrative structure emerges a powerful message.

For Ghosh, the world is intimately connected and our memories both shape and are shaped by the interactions with that world. Identities are constructed by complex overlapping memories and stories. Cultures, nations and identities are not bounded entities but are formed through global processes of interaction between differently situated individuals. Traditions, memories and history are in a dynamic interplay with each other and by exploring the way in which this happens for one individual, Ghosh eloquently paints a picture of heterogenous global world.

This message is strongly political, smashing reified notions of culture or nations that inform nationalisms. Events do not fit neatly within borders and the global web of history and events that inform the narrators view of the world make any such claims impossible.

This book could be seen as a fictive ethnography of a global world, exploring how the narrator constructs meaning and understands his place in a global field of conflicting narratives. The stories and events described are deeply human: the innocence of childhood, the process of growing up, unrequited love, youthful idealism, painful violence, internal struggles over identity, the voyeurism of everyday life and forgiveness. I highly recommend this book.

[Arupratan · Rating 4 out of 5]

মার্সেল প্রুস্ত বলেছিলেন, আমাদের অতীতকে আমরা যেভাবে মনে রাখি, অতীত আসলে তার চেয়ে অনেকটাই অন্যরকম ছিল। প্রুস্তের এই কথার সঙ্গে "বিস্মৃতি"র কোনো সম্পর্ক নেই। বিস্মৃতি মানে ভুলে যাওয়া। এখানে উনি স্মৃতির প্রতারণার কথা বলতে চেয়েছেন। অথবা স্মৃতির বিশ্বাসঘাতকতার কথা। আমরা কতটা ভরসা করতে পারি আমাদের স্মৃতির উপরে?

এই কাহিনিতে নির্দিষ্ট কোনো প্লট নেই। নির্দিষ্ট কোনো শুরু নেই। শেষ নেই। ঠিক যেমন আমাদের অবচেতন এবং অস্তিত্বের মধ্যে সারাক্ষণ নিচুস্বরে কথোপকথন চলতে থাকে, অনেকটা তেমনভাবে বলা হয়েছে এই গল্পটা। সিরিল র‍্যাডক্লিফ নামের একজন ব্রিটিশ আইনজীবী, যিনি আগে কোনোদিন ভারতবর্ষে পা রাখেননি, তাকে ভারতবর্ষ দেশটাকে ভেঙে দু-টুকরো করার দায়িত্ব দেওয়া হয়েছিলো। সময় দেওয়া হয়েছিল ৫ সপ্তাহ।

এই নামমাত্র সময়ের মধ্যে একটা কাল্পনিক সীমারেখা টেনে, পাশাপাশি বসবাস করা অসংখ্য মানুষকে তিনি পরস্পরের থেকে বিচ্ছিন্ন করে দিতে সক্ষম হয়েছিলেন। খণ্ডিত দুই ভূখণ্ড, একে অপরের কাছে পরিণত হয়েছিল স্রেফ স্মৃতিতে। নিমেষের মধ্যে বর্তমান রূপান্তরিত হয়েছিল অতীতে। অতীত মানেই স্মৃতি। কিংবা স্মৃতি এবং বিস্মৃতির মাঝামাঝি কয়েকটা ধূসর সীমারেখা। দ্য শ্যাডো লাইনস।

উপন্যাসটি এমনভাবে লেখা হয়েছে যেন অনেকগুলো টুকরো টুকরো গল্পের মাধ্যমে একটা সম্পূর্ণ গল্পের অবয়ব ফুটে উঠেছে। এই টুকরো গল্পগুলোতে অতীত এবং বর্তমানের সীমারেখা মিলেমিশে একাকার হয়ে গেছে। বর্তমানের পরের লাইনেই অতীত এবং অতীতের পরের পরিচ্ছেদেই বর্তমানের এই মিশেল পাঠকের মনে একটা ঘোরের সৃষ্টি করে। তার সঙ্গে যুক্ত হয়েছে অমিতাভ ঘোষের চমৎকার মসৃণ গদ্য।

উপন্যাসটি যার জবানিতে লেখা হয়েছে সেই কথকের নামটা একবারও উল্লেখ করা হয়নি। এই নামহীন কথকের মুখে আমরা জানতে পারি তার প্রতিভাবান কাকা ত্রিদিবের কথা। যার ব্যাপারে কথকের ঠাকুমা বলেছিলেন, ত্রিদিব ইচ্ছে করলে অনেক কিছুই হতে পারতো, কিন্তু ত্রিদিবের নিজের ইচ্ছে ছিলো "কিছুই-না-হওয়া"। জানতে পারি এই কথাটা যিনি বলেছিলেন সেই ঠাকুমার কথা, দেশভাগের অনেক পরে ঢাকায় ঘুরতে যাওয়ার সময় যাঁর মনে হয়েছিল, তিনি সেখানে যাচ্ছেন না, তিনি ঢাকায় "ফিরে আসছেন"। জানতে পারি ইলার কথা। কথক যাকে মনে মনে ভালোবাসতো। ইলা সেই ভালোবাসার কথা জানতো না।

জানতে পারি, আমাদের স্মৃতি প্রায় সবসময়ই অসম্পূর্ণ। Fragmented. Unreliable. কোন্ ঘটনাটা আমরা মনে রেখে দেবো, কোনটা ভুলে যাবো, একটা ঘটনাকে অনেক অনেক বছর পরে কীভাবে পুনর্নির্মাণ করবো, তার কোনও ঠিকঠিকানা নেই। ফুটবল লেগে আমার নাক ভেঙে গেছিলো। সেই দিনটার ব্যাপারে আর কিছুই মনে নেই। শুধু মনে আছে নাক চেপে ধরে মাঠে শুয়ে হঠাৎ আমার চোখে পড়েছিল বিকেলবেলা ঘরে ফিরতে থাকা কয়েকশো পাখির একটা অপূর্ব ঝাঁককে (কয়েক হাজারও হতে পারে)। কুড়ি বছর আগেকার এক শীতের গোধূলিমুহূর্তের এই ঘটনাটা আমার স্পষ্ট মনে আছে।

এক বন্ধুকে কথাপ্রসঙ্গে এই ঘটনাটা বলার পরে সে হাসতে হাসতে বললো, পাখির ঝাঁক তো সেদিন দেখিসনি তুই। তোর নাক ভেঙেছিল স্কুলের মাঠে দুপুরবেলা। দুপুরবেলায় পাখি কই? পাখির ঝাঁক দেখেছিলি গঙ্গার পাশের মাঠে, যেদিন তোর পা ভেঙেছিলো। মাঠে শুয়ে কাতরাতে কাতরাতে আমাকেও সেই পাখির ঝাঁক দেখিয়েছিলি তুই। এইরকম আধমাতাল স্মৃতির উপর নির্ভর করেই আমরা সারাজীবন কাটিয়ে দিই! উপন্যাসে এরকম ভঙ্গুর স্মৃতিচারণায় আমরা দেখতে পাই দেশভাগের কথা, দাঙ্গার কথা, দেখতে পাই রাজনীতি কিভাবে প্রভাবিত করে একজন মানুষের জীবনকে, কয়েকজন মানুষের জীবনকে, একটা পরিবারকে, একটা শহরকে, কয়েকটা শহরকে, প্রেমকে, মৃত্যুকে।

"And then I think to myself why don't they draw thousands of little lines through the whole sub-continent and give every little place a new name? What would it change? It's a mirage. The whole thing is a mirage. How can anyone divide a memory?"

.

[Marc Lamot · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading this book is rather disconcerting: the author continuously jumps back and forward, in time and in space, and after 50 pages you're really confused. The Indian city of Calcutta in the 1960's and afterwards is the main stage, but also London in 1940 and in the sixties, and in the second part also Dhaka in Bangladesh are places of interest in this novel. The story-telling "I" seems to be an Indian boy, growing up in Calcutta; his family has fled from Eastern Pakistan, after the partition (1948); there are grandmothers, grandaunts, uncles and nephews and nieces that drift between London, Calcutta and Dhaka.

After a while I understood that this book is about boundaries, in space and in time, and the main message is that boundaries only are shadow lines, no real fences that delimit other worlds: events in Calcutta, London and Dhaka are interrelated; and events in the past, or the memories about them, have a transformative influence on the present; even the boundaries between coloniser and colonised aren't very sharp.

Ghosh has written an intruiging and very interesting book, but it is more a kind of experiment, not a really accomplished story. Sorry for the harsh rating, it didn't really resonate.

Addendum: perhaps I ought to give this a second chance. In the meanwhile I've digested some books on systems thinking and chaos theory, with their accent on interconnectedness, feedback loops etc. And the way Ghosh writes is in line with that!

[Vartika · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

The lawyer Cyril Radcliffe had no knowledge of India and had never set foot in the subcontinent before July 1947, that fateful year of the colony's painful independence. The man was given a few weeks by the British colonial authorities to draw what would become the borders dividing India and Pakistan—mere lines on paper which created a division so painful its memory persists like an open wound, salted every day by a communal suspicion that erupted overnight and continues to shape social relations in the subcontinent to this date.

Map depicting Radcliffe's bifurcation of Bengal between India and Pakistan. The territory of Punjab was similarly divided between the two countries-to-be on communal lines.

It is these shadow lines that moved WH Auden to write his poem on the Partition two decades later, and it is these that the lives of the characters in Ghosh's novel are pitted against. The Shadow Lines is a poignant reminder of the trauma the separation of 1947 continues to inflict on people several decades and generations later.

Told in a seamless stream of consciousness, this is a story that unfolds through the intersection of the unreliability of memory and the arbitrariness of borders; through the inability of one to prevent the other from solidifying. Time, space, and the links of memory collapse into each other as the unnamed narrator weaves his own memories with those he's come to remember and regard, walking the reader through a tale comprising four generations' shadowy experiences of freedom, nation, family, home, and history, all of them shaped in some ways by the partition and brought together time and again by those dividing lines.

The first half of the narrative is spent exploring and examining memory and relationships formed during the second world war, the period immediately following the Partition, and all the way through to the present day in the 1980s, scattered between London, Calcutta, and Dhaka. In many ways, The Shadow Lines maps a transition from a borderless world to one defined by its dividing lines. Yet, as the narrator asks: "How can anyone divide a memory?" Yet, there remains how "a place does not merely exist, it has to be invented in one's imagination", and imagination is what both connects and divides two dots on a map. As we get closer to the end we see that for all the nationalisms that divide us, the lives we live are mirrors of each other; that despite the seemingly, impenetrably antagonistic distance of borders, the events in cities like Calcutta and Dhaka remain as closely bound as two sides of a looking-glass. More importantly, we see how the freedoms we seek—freedom from parental authority and hand-me-down cultures, from guilt, from the 'other' so integral to our own identities—are futile illusions that only beget more loss.


One of the impressive aspects of the storytelling in The Shadow Lines is how every character's memory is central to the narrative; a protagonist in their own right; and while each of their stories has its own weight and part to play, none is more or less important than the other. Thus, even though the beginning of the story reads slower, it is no less engaging for it. Like pieces of a puzzle, everything comes together in the breathtaking crescendo of the last 70 pages where our characters attempt to cross over these shadow lines.

It is hard not to see the relationships between some characters as allegorical. For instance, I found the relationship shared by Ila and Nick, as well as that between May and Tridib, to be representative, in many ways, of the manner in which British attitudes and responsibility towards its erstwhile colonies and its people took shape in the decades following the Partition.

I was particularly taken by the author's adeptness at describing the way time and history build and wear away at cities, those physical monuments of memory: just as the narrator creates his own understanding of the cities he is in through other people's descriptions of their past, so could I visualise the streets and sights of Delhi and Calcutta through the author's eyes, so different from what I know them to be like today and yet so much the same.

That history is made not only of memory but also of selective forgetting is also tackled brilliantly in this book, notably in its dealing with the memory and the erasure of the 1964 riots in Calcutta, and how they were offshoots of events happening thousands of miles away but in the same country, as well as those taking place a few miles away but across the border. Not only does the correlation here echo the pain and events of the partition, but the manner in which the riot is handled and forgotten rings eerily true to events as recent as those of January 2020—riots that were provoked for much the same reason as they were in 1947, 1964, 2002, and all the years between and since.

As one of his earliest novels, The Shadow Lines may not be representative of all the strength and beauty that Ghosh's writing is now known for, but it is nevertheless an immensely important novel—a glowing fictional reminder of the realities we share despite our fraught histories, and of all that we choose, but cannot afford, to forget.

[Srividya Vijapure · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was recommended to me by a friend who had simply loved it. She claimed the book to be one that was meant to be read several times, with each reading rendering a deeper understanding and probably a different interpretation. I was naturally curious and wanted to see what she meant by that statement. With that in mind, I promised to read it with her and discuss it. Of course, I was really lazy and never got around to reading it, until today.

As I sit to review this book, the first thought that comes to my mind is that Man is either a master or a slave or even worse a victim of his memories. This thought brings to mind a quote by Marcel Proust “Remembrance of things in the past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”

Wondering why I am talking about memories and its impact on our lives? Well, this book is a narration of a boy’s memories, told after he has attained manhood. His is a world of blurred lines, lines that were interpreted differently by him as a boy and which is perhaps seen differently today as a man. It is a story of a boy growing into a man, living in the shadow world of memories, which are so powerful that it has an impact on his present. Set against the backdrop of some of the most important historical moments of the world, including the Second World War, Partition and the communal violence in Dhaka and Calcutta, this is a tale of love, of passion, of death, of the pains of growing up and lastly a tale of memories, which somehow never let you go. It is a story that makes you smile, when you want to cry; that moves you to tears when you are laughing, a story so poignant and multi-faceted that makes you fall in love with it, even when you don’t want to.

The crazy thing about this book is that it doesn’t have a plot; there is no beginning and no end. It reads like one big rambling, which can be quite irritating but somehow isn’t. However, this lack of a solid plot doesn’t mean that there is no central theme governing the book. I believe this is a book, which portrays how we as humans live life in the shadow lines of our memory. Gabriel Garcia Marquez puts it very nicely, when he says “What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”

When you look at the book from this point of view, everything said in these pages suddenly makes sense. It then becomes a tale of a boy who lives in a world of memories, which include both his memories as well as the memories of those around him. Life as we live today is filled with such memories, which not only include our own but also those of others around us. If we were to write a story around those memories, reflections will show the shadow lines that exist between perception and reality. And I believe that the author is trying to emphasise this point in this story.

The nameless narrator in this book takes you through his story, which despite being his own, is influenced by his family and friends, making it a sum of their memories rather than his own. It is a story that begins 13 years before his birth and ends on the night when he is returning to India from London. It is a story that introduces you to the two most important people in his life, Tridib and Ila, and how they influenced him, his decisions and ultimately his life. Their memories are entwined with his to such an extent that he is a man who can easily find his way in London, despite never having visited the city earlier. However, the saddest part is that he remembers a London of yesteryears as opposed to the one that is today!

As I said earlier, the book was one big ramble from the narrator, which made me feel as if I was caught in a blur. Well, I guess it was supposed to read that way but my first impression was “What am I doing reading a book with neither plot nor story, no beginning and therefore no end?” However, despite feeling unsure and even a little irritated with the style in the beginning, I persevered and in a really convoluted way, I am glad I read it till the end. Of course, being happy about finishing a book does not in any way mean that I totally understood it. Honestly, I am as clueless today while reviewing this book as I was when I began reading it. While some things were made clear at the end, I still felt like being left hanging, wondering what happened next. I don’t blame the author for ending the book in that manner, given that he did clarify certain aspects, but then I felt as if I was walking on a cloud, which suddenly decides to disappear leaving me suspended and unsure. Despite the lack of clarity or maybe because of it, I found beauty in this book. I found myself being transported into those memories, experiencing them with the nameless narrator and I found myself being enchanted, even when I didn’t want to be. Today I understand what my friend meant when she said that this is a book that you may have to read many times before you truly understand the depths involved.

With extremely confused feelings and yet strangely happy, I recommend this book to everyone because honestly and perhaps selfishly I want to hear your thoughts about this one!

Finally a big thank you to Eunice who recommended this book to me and made me read it. It was a wonderful, albeit a blurred journey, which I totally enjoyed.

[Mahima · Rating 5 out of 5]

“What had they felt, I wondered, when they discovered that they had created not a separation, but a yet-undiscovered irony . . . the simple fact that there had never been a moment in the four-thousand-year-old history of that map, when the places we know as Dhaka and Calcutta were more closely bound to each other than after they had drawn their lines – so closely that I, in Calcutta, had only to look into the mirror to be in Dhaka; a moment when each city was the inverted image of the other, locked into an irreversible symmetry by the line that was to set us free – our looking-glass border.”

This was my third Ghosh, and the first thing that I can now very easily identify and pinpoint about his writing is that it is turned both inwards and outwards, it is both Indian and cosmopolitan, and as such, most of his fiction concerns itself with the exploration of various connections between the two – between people, cultures, and countries that have a shared past – and while doing this it also looks at the connection between past and present, between memories and events, and of course, like all post-colonial fiction, between the political and the personal, in a non-linear narrative common to Indian fiction. And Ghosh does all this with the most understated intensity, an intensity that is never evident but still felt.

The Shadow Lines is a probing into the chronicles of nations and private lives linked together despite the boundaries separating them, making one wonder at the fictionality of what is considered real. These boundaries, these ‘shadow lines’, ever changing, ever evolving, but having always existed, although having always been illusory, born out of nationalism and ideology, having the potential to create violence and disruption, are not just political but also very deeply personal, separating not just nations from nations, people from people, but also people from themselves. And with the shattering of the idea that they are real comes the quest for identity and an attempt to understand the past and the present, for both an individual and a community.

Apart from the metaphor of the shadow lines, Ghosh also undercuts the notion of nationhood by questioning the reality of history, and by juxtaposing it with memory, he exposes it as an invention, not a given, not a reality. It is memory too that forges links between boundaries, that brings people together in a way that history wouldn’t register. And he also demonstrates that the legacy of history, fictive or not, or of memory, is always in a flux, never settled, never fixed, especially when the said history or memory is that of the division of people. Ghosh asserts that boundaries are never the solution – boundaries don’t ensure a collective and individual stability, they don’t ensure the end of violence, of hostility, of subsequent psychological problems, but nor do they erase the love, the commonness, the unity that once was.

All of this Ghosh does without really seeming to do it. He is a story-teller first and foremost, and that’s what I love about him. His writing is moving and heartbreaking and the pathos is unbearable at times, but that is most Indian fiction for you, and I love it like nothing else.

[Dagio_maya · Rating 2 out of 5]

La prima cosa che notiamo, a proposito di questo libro di Amitav Ghosh, è l’evidente richiamo nel titolo al romanzo di Joseph Conrad, La linea d’ombra.
Il motivo della resa al plurale lo scopriamo inoltrandoci proprio nella molteplicità di temi e discorsi contenuti in questa storia e nel suo intreccio con la Storia dell’India.
Se Conrad, infatti, tracciava una linea retta raccontando la crescita interiore di un giovane marinaio, qui, invece, la voce narrante ci racconta esperienze che lo forgeranno su molti più piani e in diversi contesti.
La linea, dunque, si moltiplica e perde la proprietà di retta per intrecciarsi e prendere più direzioni. Perde, inoltre, al chiarezza ed è quindi qualificata con delle zone d’ombra.

Il libro è suddiviso in due parti che definiscono chiaramente l’intento dell’autore:
la prima s’intitola Andare; la seconda Tornare.
Titoli che definiscono la cifra di una storia in continuo movimento.
Nello spazio ci si muove tra Dacca, Calcutta e Londra.
Nel tempo di storie personali che intrecciano le generazioni della famiglia e dei loro conoscenti.
Affascinanti i concetti e le metafore che intrecciano gli spostamenti nel passato e che attraversano le frontiere, ossia proprio quelle linee tracciate concretamente sulle mappe. Salvo poi scoprire come le divisioni di confine non siano altro che spazi tra due immagini speculari…

Lettura a cui non sono riuscita ad appassionarmi proprio.
L’idea di base mi è piaciuta soprattutto per la visione postcoloniale.
Ma i passaggi sono repentini: da un paragrafo all’altro ci si trova catapultai all’improvviso in altri continenti, in altre epoche e con altri compagni di viaggio.
Credi di passeggiare a Calcutta mentre osservi un meraviglioso tempio e, invece, scopri che sei a Trafalgar Square…
Il risultato è stato per me soporifero perché in mancanza di appigli coinvolgenti cala imperturbabile la palpebra.

[Aswathi Raviendran · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some books that are difficult to review. Their pages open up to spill a mixed bag of emotions and self-contained little worlds onto your lap. As the pages whirl by, boundaries blur. And the worlds, with their bags of emotions, seep into your veins, absorbed into the sponge of your sub-conscious.
That's when you realize the book is now a part of you - that there was something so compatible between your mind, your feelings and the book that there are no separate entities now.
And you become bemused. You scratch your head as to how to describe things this fundamental and universal. Like the yearning for freedom. Or the texture of violence that often accompanies it. Or how in the end, the very violence that brings in freedom, chokes it.

In Shadow Lines, Amitav Ghosh brings these subconscious murmurs to light, and paints them, with stunning heart-breaking beauty, on national canvases.

The images bloom and fade rapidly, with startling juxtaposing: of genteel middle class living against riot ridden cities, of people who lived in many places without traveling at all, of upside down houses and nations which are mirror images of one another, of the normalcy birthed by war torn streets, of the shattering violence within a school headmistress grandmother, of memories that bring life to places and people.


"They had drawn their borders, believing in that pattern, in the enchantment of lines......but a yet undiscovered irony: the simple fact that there had never been a moment in the four-thousand-year-old history of that map, when the places we know as Dhaka and Calcutta were more closely bound to each other than after they had drawn their lines - so closely that I, in Calcutta, had only to look into the mirror to be in Dhaka; a moment when each city was the inverted image of the other, locked into an irreversible symmetry by the line that was to set us free - our looking glass border"

Indeed. How can you begin to describe the immeasurable beauty of a sentence like that?



If there ever was a humane writer, it is Ghosh. In Shadow Lines, with the characters, we undertake a lyrical pilgrimage to within ourselves. Through the narrator, we are made to feel the fluid walls of our bubble world- and gaze into the distorted bubble worlds of people around us where their right is our left and vice versa.

You are made aware of the violence outside the bubble walls, just a prick away - the violence that marks the shadow lines between you and the image in you see in the mirror.

[N · Rating 4 out of 5]

A gorgeously rendered and romantic tale of unrequited love set against the Partition of 1947 as well as setting that weaves back and forth from Britain and India from the 1940s to the mid 20th century. The love story between Tridaub and May will captivate the reader.

[Shubhanshu Dubey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this is the perfect book. It isn't a novel. It is something beyond what words can comprehend. Our lives are made up of memories. Maybe proper, maybe improper. This is a live example of that. The strange yet a unique and beautiful way of narration makes the story much more intriguing. It literally goes beyond time and space to build an exquisite stockpile of emotions. A person doesn't read this book, he feels it. There have been very few books in which I didn't skim through some parts which I felt boring. This was one of them. You read each and every word carefully yet without getting bored. As Khushwant singh said for this book, "This is how language should be used. This is how a how a novel should be written." This is so true. A perfect book in all aspects. Now, I'm going to read all of Ghosh's work now. And I recommend it to everyone.
Goodreads allows only 5 stars although this is way beyond rating.

[Andrea · Rating 3 out of 5]

Amitav Ghosh is one of my favourite authors, so it was really interesting for me to see how different this early novel is, to the later ones of his I have read. The writing is as sublime as I've come to expect, but where The Shadow Lines is quite unique is in the way the story is told. This is in fact a story about telling stories, written in the style of a series of stories from the point of view of the story-teller. Confusing? Yes, but kind of brilliant. It was almost accordian-like at times (accordianesque??) with the story expanding and then suddenly collapsing in on top of itself, although there was definitely a wide narrative arc going on in the background. It took me a while to get into it (the style, not the story/ies), and I don't think it would be to everyone's taste, but in the end it was a 3.5★ read for me.

It would be too difficult to try to give a sensible synopsis, so here are a few of my favourite passages, showing how equally entertaining Ghosh can be, at both his most lyrical and base.

As a young child, the narrator's mother reveals how eagerly he has waited for Ila's visit:
At that moment I hated my mother. For the first time in my life she had betrayed me. She had given me away, she had made public, then and for ever, the inequality of our needs; she had given Ila the knowledge of her power and she had left me defenceless, naked in the face of that unthinkable, adult truth: that need is not transitive, that one may need without oneself being needed.

The narrator helps to nurse his grandmother through her final illness:
And yet, when I look at her, lying crumpled in front of me, her white thinning hair matted with her invalid’s sweat, my heart fills with love for her – love and that other thing, which is not pity but something else, something the English language knows only in its absence – ruth – a tenderness which is not merely pity and not only love.

Family dramas:
Soon the two brothers were quarrelling too. And since they were both lawyers their quarrels took a peculiarly vicious, legalistic form, in which very little was actually said. Instead, they would send each other notes on legal stationery.

The narrator's love for his second-cousin is not completely blind:
I was sure she was telling me no more than the bare truth, for it was true that in those rare moments when the clouds of her self-absorption parted, she was granted glimpses of such startling clarity into the practical exigencies of other people’s lives that for a while they assumed an urgency in her mind that was no less pressing than it would have been had they been her own.

And finally, the English memsahib accompanies the family to their ancestral home in Dhaka:
Khalil! he whispered in a whistle that shrilled through the room. Khalil, run, run, go quickly and buy some toilet paper.
What’s that? said Khalil. Why?
What if she wants to shit? the old man said. My father always said: the first thing to remember if a foreigner comes to your house is to buy toilet paper. He knew: he read books.

[Regina Lindsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh
4 Stars

On its surface, Shady Lines is about two families – one English and one Bengali – whose lives have been intertwined for three generations. The unnamed narrator, Indian born and English educated, has grown up with the stories of his uncle, Tridib. It is through these seemingly unrelated stories that the larger picture slowly unfold until, eventually, you realize that they are all culminating in a single, tragic event that impacts both families.

Ultimately, the story is about stories. The stories of family history, the stories in history, and the stories needed to deal with traumatic events. The way the stories are presented may cause issue for some readers because the shifts are subtle with no time marker to establish past, present, or future. The narrator observes, “…for having seen it first through Tridib’ eyes, its past seemed concurrent with its present.” (pg. 31) It is in this manner that Ghosh writes. It is similar to the style of The Unknown World by EP Jones.

In my opinion, Amitav Ghosh is one of the most brilliant minds of our time. When I read his work I always feel much of what he is revealing I’m not quite grasping. However, I do glean certain aspects of his work and, rather than becoming frustrated, I leave a bit in awe of the new insight I’ve gained. With Shadow Lines Ghosh delves into the concept of what borders really mean {“I grew up believing in the truth of the precepts that were available to me: I believed in the reality of space; I believed that distance separates, this is a corporeal substance: I believed in the reality of nations and borders; I believed that across the border there existed another reality.” (pg. 214)} and how it has impacted our relationships with people across these borders { “With my limited knowledge, I tried to imagine an event, any event, that might occur in a city near the periphery of that circle (or, indeed, much nearer) – Stockholm, Dublin, Casablanca, Alexandria, Istanbul, Kiev, any city in any direction at all – I tried to imagine an event that might happen in any of those places which would bring the people of Milan pouring out into the street. I tried hard but I could think of none. None, that is, other that war.” (pg.228)} . While I don’t necessarily draw the same conclusions, I certainly appreciate his position and his arguments. One of the most fascinating tools Ghosh employs is the use of mirror images in dealing with personal issues and those of larger national and international scale.

If you haven’t read Ghosh before, I still recommend The Glass Palace as my favorite. However, I don’t think anyone could go wrong with The Shadow Lines, especially if you are wanting a glimpse into the events surrounding Partition.

[Celeste · Rating 5 out of 5]

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. There are love stories in the book, and sex, and politics. A moving read, if not a happy one.

This is a book that you will want to read in one sitting. I didn't, but I wish that I had. The book follows the memories of the narrator, and like memories, does not follow a linear narrative. This pulls you into the story, but also means that if you put the book down and come back to it you may not remember whether the events being described are happening in the present or in the past.

[Rose · Rating 2 out of 5]

UGH. I'm so annoyed at this book.

It's really got some illustrative descriptions of the Subcontinent. The dialogue syntax is weird, but kind of neat - there are no quotation marks. And the story isn't really anything close to linear. But even though it's got this weird layout, I've found myself going through it at a pretty reasonable clip.

*SPOILER (yet not terribly tied to the story, wtf?)*

Still, I'm pissed off that I've spent 158 pages on it just to find out that the main character is an attempted rapist. And his close family friend that he attacked just brushed it off the next morning. I might be willing to brush this off as an effect of the non-PC times in which this book took place. But its copyright is for 1988, so I'm going to continue to be annoyed.

I'm going to finish it, just because I'm less than 100 pages til the end and would like to say I've completed it. Maybe I'll be a little less annoyed when I let the author conclude the story.

EDIT: I stopped at page 170 out of 246. I skimmed to the end and got the gist of it. Meh! As stated earlier, I was way into it for a while, and that misogynistic bullshit annoyed me too much. I will say that I loved the prose in the portion where he was able to navigate a house without ever having been in it before. This passage and others bring up the themes of going to a place versus really knowing a place. That's about all I can take from this book, aside from the fact that I want to read a book that ***really*** explores the Partition, wars, and refugees of Eastern Pakistan/Bangladesh. This one just didn't have enough.

Incidentally, Rushdie's Midnight's Children, which was set primarily in India and Pakistan explored the issue more than this book did, and this book was set in Bengal and Dhaka.

[Cititoare Calatoare · Rating 3 out of 5]

Povestea in sine este despre un baiat bengalez si urmareste evolutia acestuia pornind de la copilaria din Calcutta, urmata de educatia universitara din Anglia si intoarcerea lui acasa in India. Dar ce ar trebui sa fie oarecum simplu se devedeste foarte complicat de urmarit.
Este scrisa intr-un mod care mie una imi displace, sare de la o perioada la alta si de la un loc la altul. Pare o poveste fara inceput si sfarsit dar foarte derutanta datorita acestor "plimbari temporale".
Totusi au existat cateva paragrafe ce mi-au placut tare mult.

[Lovesfrost · Rating 4 out of 5]

..... all I would like to say about this one is that......you know the book is actually good when it completely devastates you...you know it has served its purpose when it makes you question everything that you think you think you had known.

"And then I think to myself why don't they draw thousands of little lines through the whole sub continent and give every little place a new name? What would it change? It's a mirage;the whole thing is a mirage.How can anyone divide a memory ?"

[Girish · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Everyone lives in a story, he says, my grandmother, my father his fatehr, Lenin, Einstein, and lots of other names I hadn't heard of; They all lived in stories, because storeis are all there are to live in, it was just a question of which one you choose.."

Intense book that talks, among other thing, of the porous nature of memories, places and people. Ghosh is a master of prose and he deftly settles us down with words and words that don't seem to move the story but on the contrary starts new ones. Some of these ends in a hurry, some land smoothly, some crash and others are left open ended. For example the end of the story of the narrator meeting Ila and Robi in a London pub in the early chapters ends in the last chapter.

There are many characters but from the sheer focus and adoration of the narrator we focus on his pick of characters. Tridib, the all knowing all popular cousin who defined his world through stories. His grandmother - the fiesty matriarch who built her family from scratch after the partition and who was dominant influence in his life all through. Ila - the self absorbed cousin who breaks his heart and Mrs.Price and her offsprings who form a central role to this Indian family. The author visits many vignettes of memories that lead on to another from another country and time and so on till you get understand the context or why.

The characters are extremely real and in the hands of Mr.Ghosh come off as likeable despite their base nature. There is unpredictability and since the narrative is not in sequence, you do not know the cause and effect. In one of the brilliant passages - a scene of two characters sitting under a table spans across timelines, across cities with different characters and different contexts till we realise there is only a shadow line which keeps things in "boxes".

There are some obvious stretch stories whose outcomes are not obvious. Like a drunken character tries to get his way with his host in her house and gets buffed and wakes up the next day with guilt and he is forgiven. Or a pen pal writing an erotic letter across the countries to profess his love. While it puzzled me, I realised the author had fallen upon how else would 2 people with so much history and common characters behave. And that is why Mr.Ghosh is one of the most accomplished writers of human nature as he explores reactions to situations in stories to test his characters.The Dhaka leg was a bit weak I felt, but then again we are talking of people's reactions.

This is an evocative and understated book. Loved it.

[Julie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Last night I was watching an episode of Lost, and as usual with this TV series, I was confused about what was going on. Is this the past? the future? reality or a flashback? And all of a sudden I realized that I have the same muddled confusion over this book. The story is about a Bengali boy and follows his life from a child in Calcutta, through a college education in England and returning home to India. It is definitely set in a turbulent time period, from post World War II, through the India/Pakistan partition, to the late 20th century. I enjoyed many of the issues covered in this book - people getting displaced by Partition, living as a foreigner in another country and racial and religious bigotry. But the style of writing made reading this book feel like work instead of pleasure. The story is told as a young man's reminisence of his past, so some of the jumping around makes sense. But I found Ghosh's sentence structure incredibly difficult to read. Here is a single sentence:

That wasn't surprising, for my grandmother's contempt for the Sheheb had nothing to do with drink at all, as my father thought: it was founded on the same iron fairness which prompted her, when she became headmistress, to dismiss one of her closest friends - a good-natured but chronically lazy woman - from her job in the school: at bottom she thought the Shaheb was not fit for his job, that he was weak, essentially weak, backbone-less; it was impossible to think of him being firm under threat, of reacting to a difficult or dangerous situation with that controlled, accurate violence which was the quality she prized above all others in men who had to deal with matters of state. pg. 144 OK - that's 9 commas, 2 colons, 1 semi-colon, and 2 dashes. I'm glad I never had to diagram that sentence!

[Ahtims · Rating 4 out of 5]

stark... dark... depressing... heavy to digest
need time to ruminate before I write anything further .

[Elizabeth (Alaska) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm having a hard time figuring out what to say about this. The description and some of the reviews say this is, on the surface, a story of two families - one Indian, one English. I found it only the story of the Indian family who happened to know the white English family and who occasionally spent time with one or other of them. By that I mean that the Indian family sometimes interacted just with themselves, but the white family members interacted only with the Indian family members, rather than sometimes just with each other.

The story is not linear. The narrator is variously a pre-teen or an adult in his twenties. While told in the first person, nearly all of the action takes place in the past. He tells either of his own experiences or of those told to him. These latter may have taken place before the birth of the narrator, and are often told combined with his memory of the story having been told to him. As a reader it was more easily followed, than trying to explain it.

On the other hand, the author definitely had a deeper message and I thought he did not carry it out well. There was much more of the family stuff, and little of the fact that Muslims and Hindus lived side by side. His point, as I understood it, is that we are all people, more or less the same, and that boundaries between countries are arbitrary. Frankly, I found this odd. What little I know of Partition is that it happened because people of different religions were treated differently, both by their government and by society. Perhaps I am wrong.

Most of the story takes place just after partition of India and Pakistan. I wish I knew this part of history better, but I do not. Also, I am not particularly familiar with some of the Indian terms. I was able to just move on, but at the same time I knew I was missing some things.

Even with these criticisms, I wanted to keep reading. Ghosh writes in a style that pleases me and I won't hesitate to pick him up again. 4 stars on this, but with less enthusiasm than that might appear.

[Tnahsin Garg · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. It was okayish, I guess?

I went over this book in the last few days when I was busy writing my PhD thesis and probably that is why I couldn't focus on it. Several times, my attention drifted to matters more pressing than that of the confused narrator and his babble. There's something about Bangladesh, partition, etc - matters of great political importance for the educated I presume. But to my ignorant self, all the historical background of 1960's against which this novel is set was not arousing enough.

There's hardly any flow in the book, the prose is boring to death. Narration jumps between events set apart in time haphazardly, and this does not help the poor reader you see.

I know Mr. Ghosh is a big shot in the Indian literary scene, so I'll definitely try some of his other books at some point in the future. But right now, this was his first book I read and it was not a good book to start with. No sir.

Final Verdict: Go for it if you are, let's say, Bengali? Maybe you get more out of it? Don't expect any thrill.

[M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yet another book which I think ought to be made mandatory reading at the school level, especially now when so many seem to think that nationalism and nationality are black and white ideas, too rigid to accommodate blurred lines or gray areas. As an added bonus, we might finally teach students from a fairly early stage to see how history is always an act of selective forgetting and that how importance is given to events in history is largely determined by who is retelling history and to whom. Perhaps the most eye-opening aspect of this book is that it neatly shows how some events which are incredibly important parts of our story as communities- can be unwittingly sidelined in our collective memories.

Regarding nationality and national identities, Ghosh has something quite simple and elegant to say: that the borders that separate us often become mirrors because, despite the collective efforts of society to alienate us from those on the other side of the 'wall', we are more similar than we may have ever imagined possible.

[Moushumi Ghosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh is about homes and homelessness, places which are homes and people who become our homes. And when the violence of the world overrides logic and emotion, memory too becomes a kind of home. Filled with memorable characters and geographical locus points across three countries -- Bangladesh, India, and England -- this novel is a tour de force of remembering events and people that leave an indelible mark on the lives of the unnamed narrator and then later the reader too. A luminous novel and a must-read.

[Samiur Rashid Abir · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible! Incredible!! Incredible!!!

[Neha Gupta · Rating 3 out of 5]

What should I say, The Shadow lines is a healthy sort of a book, like it has a healthy theme, good English, good sentences, good flow of story, mixing & merging of events, perfectly decent characters happily meeting & parting with each other and their intricate relationships smoothly knit. It gives you a first party narration but with a third party perspective of a neutral observer who lets the events unfold being part of them but not influencing them. The author goes deep enough in the psyche of the characters without getting emotional, smoothly guides the reader through the story touching sensitive issue of race & religion at various points. Its like you are watching episode by episode play of a Doordarshan TV Soap of the 80s, where the story revolves around two families , their interactions & the historical events and how it changes their lives.

Finally a note on Amitav Ghosh who is a varied author dabbling in fiction, essays & medical thriller (which I happen to have read & liked). Throughout his writing which looks more like documentation you can assume he believes that ‘God lies in details’... clearly describing each & every second, character, scene, relationships, historical events, walking through pictures out of memories and even the snippets of jokes & funny moments. If you like reading well structured, well written, proper books then Amitav’s works are for you.. don’t expect any spice, magic or mysticism, it is simplest & purest form of fiction meant for the good readers. But acaution, his works lie on the thin border between serious and boring and short length of the book helps avoiding that.

[Suzanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book. There are some great observations from a child's point of view. There are also some real sentiments from the elderly grandmother teacher. But...
I easily put this book down to watch tv, talk to my cat, tweeze my eye brows or anything else. The narrator /main character tells his story in a haphazard fashion, not stream of consciousness. Either I couldn't follow him or I didn't care enough to try.
I thought it would be nice to read about a middle class Indian for a change. The narrator's family was intimately connected with an English middle class family . I didn't find them or their relationship engrossing either.
The political upheaval , partition of Pakistan, should have been a lightening rod. It was significant , but buried.
I found the prose to be memorable , but the characters' stories, and plot to be shadows, not fully developed or at least not satisfying for me.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was expecting something else entirely out of this story when I read the blurb and what I got out of it was very different but exciting.

I loved the way the story pulled between the past and the present with a fair amount of foreshadowing thrown in. It took a bit of time to get used to it, But then Ghosh’s skillful writing immediately pulled you in and the story moved on smoothly.

The story is basically about an unnamed narrator, who is portrayed almost as an omniscient being and is related to the various characters in the book in different ways, chronicling their past as they move in and out of each other’s lives between three central places: Calcutta, London, and Dhaka. This story takes place at the beginning of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation war, but there isn't much there about that except for one major incident, while the rest of the book just focuses on the family drama

[Calzean · Rating 3 out of 5]

The 1960s in the east of India and East Pakistan. Another day, another riot. A man is killed and another family lives with the loss. It's an early Ghosh novel and while it's good I found it to be a little disjointed.
A story mainly told through various characters telling stories about their experiences. The narrator's grandmother left Dhaka prior to the Partition and started a new life in Calcutta. Later, relatives in the foreign service spend time in England including the Blitz and a English family comes into their lives.
The story jumps around time periods, events in four countries, experiences and memories. The focus is on what happened to an older cousin but it was very much a timepiece of the broader events in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh their relationship with the English, their neighbours and themselves.