The_theme_of_violence_in_shadow_lines.docx

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The Theme of Violence in ‘The Shadow Lines’

Written in the voice of a faceless and nameless narrator, The Shadow Lines is a novel which carries a moving discourse on the concept of nation, of borders and of the idea of freedom by using violence as an omnipresent, yet often neglected theme. The novel revolves around numerous unnumbered lives of real people, unmarked and uncared for in the larger scheme of things in a war ravaged England and blood soaked Dhaka and Calcutta. The theme of violence The Shadow Lines is often overshadowed by the emphasis given on the concept of nation and subjective histories. However this seemingly unassuming theme is certainly of immense value: firstly by the virtue of being an important theme in itself and secondly in the function it plays in sustaining the entire structure of the book. It therefore acts as a matrix which being important in itself also serves as a medium in which various ideas in the novel float about .This paper is divided into two parts, the first of which aims at addressing the various aspect of the theme of violence and the second, its functionality in the novel .

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PART A

The primordial form of violence which pervades the pages of the book and breeds numerous other forms is the violence of human intervention inflicted on the natural order of things. The name of the book itself can be seen as the byproducts of violence – The ‘Shadow’ being the violence in obstructing the path of light and ‘Lines’ being the violence involved in the act of drawing borders where there aren’t any. The ‘Shadow Lines’ which we have drawn along our countries is therefore in itself an act of violence. Once this form of violence is practiced and sanctioned by the logic of the majority, all other forms of violence such as wars, riots, narrow nationalism and racial discrimination are but inevitable ramifications.

Wars between nations embody violence at its largest scale and worst form. After reading the first few pages of the book we stumble upon the mention of The Second World War - one of the most gruesome events to taint the pages of the history of mankind. An offshoot of the first form of violence, war isn’t just frighteningly massive in its scale but also in how it gets embossed in the collective memory. The most terrible aspect of war is that people tend to think that it can, and consequently, must, be won. Therefore, when the state has used an organized and apparently ‘justified’ form of violence to attain its goal against another state, people of at least the lesser damaged nations come to believe that they have actually won the war. Therefore Malik’s

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offhanded remark made in Teen Murti House Library in New Delhi in 1979 regarding the IndoPak War of 1965 carries an uneasy weight: "At least we won that one" ( Ghosh, 222) This also explains the anxiety of the narrator’s grandmother against not only the war against China, but her tendency to view the Chinese as absolute enemies. By alluding to the death of four people in the book viz. Mike, Dan, Francesca and Tresawsen after having elaborately written about the nitty-gritty’s of their personal lives, Amitav Ghosh seems to drive home the point of the futility in the idea of winning a war. Ironically, it is interesting to note that they were the citizens of the winning nation. It is more explicitly stated when the grandmother sacrifices the long held chain of her husband which she had clung to even during her widowhood in order to contribute to the war fund during the 1965 Indo-Pak war. “I gave it away she screamed. I gave it for the fund of war, I had to do it don’t you see? For your sake; for your freedom. We have to kill them before they kill us; we have to wipe them out." (237)

The very sincerity of her nationalism becomes alarming when violence of one nation over the other is justified as an attempt to safeguard ones 'freedom'.

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Communal violence and riots have been greatly dealt about in the book. Communal violence has a certain degree of uncontrollability which cannot be tamed even by the state. The aftermath following the loss and later, the recovery of Muin-i-Mubarak in Kashmir sent its ripples in Khulna, East Pakistan which despite using the armed forces, simply defied control “Once the riots started in Khulna the government of East Pakistan lost no time in sending the army to put down the 'disturbances. But it was already too late"( 214)

This massacre of the Hindus was followed by a bloodthirsty and irrational retaliation in Calcutta on 10 January, 1962. “Mobs went rampaging throughout the city, killing Muslims, and looting their shops and their houses.” ( 233)

Communal violence, more often than not, feeds itself on rumors. Furthermore in this case, it certainly carries it connotations with the Partition violence of 1947. “In Calcutta rumors were in the air especially that familiar old rumour, the harbinger of every serious riot that the trains from Pakistan were arriving packed with corpses."( 228)

The ancestral house in Dhaka divided by a partition and the other side of which is rechristened by the narrator’s grandmother and Mayadebi as the ‘Upside down house” also reflects how the ‘other’ is viewed by the ‘self’ in a mockingly suspicious manner once the division is affected. Later, they realize that their uncle’s part of the house is exactly same as theirs and that the silly partition wasn’t posing as a boundary between different entities but was a baseless tool which brought in differences within a wholesome world. This realization also reduces the violence of Partition to an illogical act of madness.

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Unlike war violence which derives its strength in affecting histories through the biased nature in which it is registered in the collective memory, the strength of riots lie in the fact they are relatively easier to be forgotten and find little mention in documented history: "There are no reliable estimates of how many people were killed in the riots of 1964.The number could stretch from several hundred to several thousand; at any rate not very many less than were killed in the war of 1962."(229)

This may be due to the fact that riots, like wars, despite having a cause and effect has, unlike wars, no definite goal to be achieved. Another chilling feature of riots is that the victims of riots and communal violence aren’t even marked. The following lines aptly summarize the oblivion to which the victims of riots are irrevocably consigned to: "But they were ordinary people-, soon forgotten-not for them any Martyrs Memorial or

Eternal Flame"

(230) This is where the darkness of riots is even more appalling than the violence of wars. "The theatre of war, where generals meet is the stage on which states disport themselves: they have no use of memories of riots." (230)

Similarly, Gosh seems to point out that terrorist organizations which use violence to further their cause are also the result of the imposition of boundaries between a nation and another, and between the self and other as in the case of clandestine outfits like Anushilan and Jugantar. The anguish over the violence of injustice which many groups have felt in the past and continue to feel in the present reverberates in the voice of the narrator's grandmother who when asked

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whether she would have killed the English magistrate at Khulna like the wispy bearded shy boy of her class , has the following reply to offer: "I would have been frightened. But I would have prayed for strength, and God willing, yes, I would have killed him. It was for our freedom: I would have done anything to be free" (39)

PART B

The purpose of this section is not to delve on the nature of the theme of violence but to discuss on how it aids to support the structure of the book and elaborate on other aspects of the novel. The theme of violence helps to carry through the notion of “The Shadow lines": the futility in thinking the borders which we have created between one nation and another and between the self and the other as actually existent and hence, absolute. One way among many in which Ghosh enters into this discourse is by using the characters in the book like Ila, Tridib and the narrator's grandmother. These again, are few among various characters used by Ghosh to present his case of the violence in drawing the lines where none exist. Ila who seeks to attain social freedom by freeing herself from the patriarchal rules of the Indian society ends up learning to live by putting up with a different side of the same social captivity in the form of racial discrimination in England. It is very suggestive that no matter which country she goes to she will be faced with certain social discomforts in one form or the other thereby blurring the borders which we have used to define one nation as opposed to the other.

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The narrator's grandmother on the other hand is obsessed with patriotism and views the idea of freedom solely in nationalistic terms. This explains her antipathy to Ila's idea of freedom and an entrenched belief in the idea of a nation being built with the aid of violence:

"Ila has no right to live there. She doesn’t belong there. It took those people a long time to build that country; hundreds of years, years and years of war and bloodshed. Everyone who lives there have a right to be there with blood; with their brother’s blood and with their father’s blood and with their son’s blood. That’s what it takes to make a country. That’s what it takes to make a country."(78)

However this idea of a nation and political freedom comes to haunt her when she frets over filling the form at the airport prior to travelling to Dhaka. Even after an immense partition violence being used to create East Pakistan, she still has qualms on stating her birthplace: “It was not until many years later that I realized it had suddenly occurred to her that she would have to fill in Dhaka as her place of birth on that form, and that the prospect of this had worried her in the same way that dirty school books worried her-because she liked things to be neat and in place- and at that moment she had not been able to understand quite how her place of birth had come to be so messily at odds with her nationality."(152)

Ghosh uses the character of Tridib to present yet another idea of nation and freedom as independent of having no socio-politico-cultural restrictions- The idea of living in a place where there are no demarcation between places, people and a necessarily linear history. However, its practicality in real life is rudely questioned by the violent manner in which Tridib dies. The resistance to the violence used in trying to create arbitrary demarcations is also reflected in the form in which the book is written -without clearly defined chapters and without any use of punctuation marks to distinguish between the spoken voices of one character from the other.

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The theme of violence is also applied in highlighting the fact that subjective reality often gets subsumed in the larger objective reality which is present in the collective memory of the people. In case of the wars, the story of Mike and his friends is evoked: "Whatever it was , at that moment, walking down that Lymington Road, with away from the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet pact, after which nothing in their would ever be the same again. Which was more real, their dirty bath tubs and shared bedrooms or that or that reality, waiting one week way? The realities of bombs and torpedoes and the dying was easy enough to imagine- mere events, after all, recorded in thousands of films and photographs and comic books"(p-68)

When it comes to the narrator, we see the objective reality of the Indo-China war of 1962 is nowhere comparable to the subjective reality of 1964 Calcutta riots which the narrator had to go through. Fifteen years later in Delhi when one of the narrator’s friend Malik, in a casual conversation says that the 1962 war with China was the most important event of their childhood, he can’t help but disagree. The Calcutta riots in which the narrator's childhood has been helplessly entangled was far greater for him than the Indo-China war which didn't take place at his 'doorstep.' The importance of the objective reality of 1962 is therefore seriously challenged by the mere headline: “Curfew in Calcutta, Police Open Fire, 10 dead, and 15 wounded"

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The theme of violence also functions in dismantling the idea of linearity, thereby lending a force to the non linear narrative. One of the first instances of the presence of nonlinearity in the book is linked to the Second World War. The year of 1939 is brought up when the crowd at Gole Park begins to doubt Tridib's excuse for his long absence, after the narrator spills the beans. However, Tridib seems to have had told the truth by extracting the strands from the past and stitching them up with the present, thus continuing his narration from 1939. Ghosh also uses violence to heighten the effect of nonlinear narrative by keeping the climax, the death of the novel's ‘Ur Hero’(A.N.Kaul ) towards the end of the book. Tridib's death and hence the death of the subjecta common feature in post modern writings along with nonlinearity, is kept right at the end of the book from which the story reverts back to the present state of May and the narrator. Also, many events of violence are strategically placed at the end of a particular segment before jumping to a different setting with a different timeframe. The use of this may be to decrease the impact of shunting one train of thought to another, thus making the transience smooth for the readers to follow. This use can be felt in the story of clandestine terrorist organization before moving to the visit paid by the Shaheb to the narrator's grandmother. It is also see when the narrator is at Mrs Price's house in London. On entering the photograph studded room, the narrator switches to a non linear mode and the lives of the people in the photograph is described at length, using the instance of their violent death in war to return to the present. Again, after the episode of Mayadebi's visit to Dhanmundi in Dhaka, the narrator hovers around the Calcutta riots before coming back to the happenings at Dhaka.

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This technique of using violent episodes to help the readers stay attuned to the story during transposing from setting to setting and time frame to timeframe becomes enormously useful especially in a book which has no chapters to distinguish one event from the other. On a lighter note, Ghosh seems to be toying with the idea that the violence done in creating the borders has lent such an illusionary dilution to the immense intensity of the linear distance between two places of the same country that the only way to understand its true significance is by drawing nonlinear circular arc as the narrator does with the Bartholomew atlas.

Violence has also been used in shaping various characters and in the book some of which will be dealt with in the following few pages. In case of the grandmother, violence is a major means of defining a nation and the idea of freedom. Towards the end of the novel, we see that the erstwhile strict grandmother has been greatly affected by the death of her nephew Tridib in the riots to that extent that any mention of it upsets her acutely. The butchering of Jethamosai, Tridib and Khalil leaves her all the more entrenched in her nationalistic leanings. This also explains her giving away the chain for the war fund. The narrator’s mother explains the situation to him: “It is the war with Pakistan. She’s been listening to the news on radio all the time and it hasn’t been good for her. She’s never been the same you know, after they killed Tridib” (238)

Robi, a calm, firm man reputed for retaining his cool even under pressure gets shaken by the violence of his brother’s death. The macabre incident affects him so deeply that he turns into a mute sufferer whose memory fails him to retrieve the happenings of the past and can only have

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an access to fragmented memories through nightmares. He confesses of this at the Maharaja, Clapham where he expresses sheer disbelief in the idea of freedom : “If freedom were possible, surely Tridib’s death would have set me free. And, yet all it takes to set my hand shaking like a leaf, fifteen years later, thousands of miles away,at the other end of another continent, is a chance remark by a waiter in a restaurant.” (247)

The violent death of Tridib has a lasting effect on May’s psyche and reinforces her belief in charity and serving the needy. She can’t help but come to believe that Tridib’s death was a sacrifice, which in itself is highly questionable: “I know now I didn’t kill him; I couldn’t have, if I wanted. He gave himself up; it was a sacrifice” (252)

The narrator himself seems to believe the same, though one can’t really discern his reason in doing so. Both May and the narrator seem to want to believe that Tridib’s death was a sacrifice just because they need something of an explanation for the event which unexplainably changed their lives forever.

The ‘Ur Hero’ of the novel Tridib, a dreamer of a borderless world with no distinction between one country and another or between other and the self gets mercilessly killed in a violent display of brutality thus concluding in a concrete manner the intangible rigidity of the shadow lines.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY The Shadow Lines - Amitav Ghosh, Oxford University Press Separation Anxiety : Growing up inter/ national boundaries in the shadow lines.