I want to break free":  Constriction, Construction and Categorisation of Nation and

Identity in The Shadow Lines

The whole system of nation-states is coming under increasing strain. The rich countries are essentially more
and more a single unit: borders don’t really apply. At the bottom of the scale, in countries like Pakistan and
Burma, again borders have melted away and there is a general collapse of the state. I think we are at a point where
the ideal of the nation as a way of organizing society is no longer holding.1
Amitav Ghosh

Issues concerning the formation of the nation state and the maintenance of it as a
singular monolithic entity have been embedded in history and public consciousness
only to finally being problematised when the neat binary constructions of ‘Other’ and
the ‘Self’ melt away, to reveal the ‘Self’ in the ‘Other’ and vice versa. Various
alternative realities are side-stepped and brushed away as a dominant hegemonic
discourse is created in order to concretize a nation state and give it an identity of its
own. In the process however, public/political and private narratives come at
loggerheads resulting in the domination of the latter by the former. Such micro-
narratives, when recovered from the cobwebs of history question the grand-narrative
of a nation state. As Milan Kundera succinctly puts it,

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.2

The importance of the nation state has been variously stated, none more strongly than
Hegel himself. It is the course of ‘history’ that initiates the rational process through
which a single individual, alienated and incoherent, achieves a cohesive status and
identity in the broader scheme of things, i.e. a structured and ordered national
identity. This leads to Hegel positing that,

The overlapping narratives of ‘Reason’, ‘Modernity’, and ‘History’ reveal their proper ‘end’-the
final truth of their significance-in the consolidated form of the nation state. 3

Creating a definite and concrete identity for oneself becomes of paramount

importance especially in a colonized society where years of cultural and historical
imperialism have robbed the natives of a sense and knowledge of their own past and
historical lineage. This is where nationalism and freedom movements played the role
of fashioning a historical discourse that would set them apart from the clutches of the
colonial categorization that they have been subjected to. But this is steeped in
ambivalence since,

If the rhetoric of national development secures a forward looking vision, the corresponding- and
equally powerful –rhetoric of national attachment invokes the latent energies of custom and tradition.4

The structural vulnerability is all the more apparent after the attainment of freedom. The
endeavor is now to concretize the concept of a nation, which works by the employment of
the notion of exclusivity, almost a kind of an ordering principle. It may be looked upon as
the effacing of one discourse by another.
The question that begs an answer is then, who or what constitutes a ‘nation’? Is it
people of the same religion, speaking the same language, bound by common ideological
goals living together within a definite geographical space? Joyce in Ulysses makes
Leopold Bloom search for an all encompassing definition wherein he says,

A nation is the same people living in the same place…or also living in different places. 5

But such a neat categorization becomes a bit problematic when we try and apply this
definition to the context of the Indian subcontinent. It is a mass of land with various
cultures and subcultures, religious beliefs- a land as much divided by linguistic barriers as
by state borders- several countries within one. The ironical thing is that such differences
were packaged under the umbrella of the notion of ‘India’ during the British rule, a
strategy of homogenization that served the British well. But it all erupted on the night
when India acquired its freedom and suddenly the task fell upon its administrators to
govern a country marked by tremendous heterogeneity. Salman Rushdie sums it up when
he says,

After all, in all the thousands of years of Indian history, there never was such a creature as a united
India. Nobody ever managed to rule the whole place, not the Mughals, not the British. And then, that
midnight, the thing that never existed was suddenly ‘free’. But what on earth was it? On what common
ground (if any) does it, stand.6

The crux of the argument is to carve out a notion of commonality or sameness in the
formation of a national identity. Something needs to bind people from disparate socio-
cultural and economic background, to give them a shared sense of belonging. It also
means that a nation should also distinguish itself from other nations, to give them that
feeling of exclusivity. Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines raises these issues and more
and captures a nation at moments of its carving an identity on the premises of alienation
of communities and creating an ‘other’ within the ‘self’ not realizing that both of them
are in reality inverted mirror images of one another.7
Benedict Anderson talks of nations being ‘imagined communities’ but the veracity of
the act of imagining a nation into existence is not the most important issue but rather the
‘style’ in which they are shaped into existence.8 This strand of thought is carried forward
by Robert Foster when he remarks,

Nations and national cultures are artifacts-continually imagined, invented, contested and transformed
by the agencies of individual persons, the state, and the global flow of commodities. As an ideology,
nationalism (as well as a set of correlated practices, the nation) is perhaps the most compelling and
consequential artifact of modern times. But it is nonetheless an artifact, formulated variously, with various
effects, in various social and historical contexts.9

This imagination works in dual ways. Not only does it mean an eradication of differences
within the neat edifice of the nation, a kind of homogenization, to give a semblance of
sameness/oneness. It also leads to the imposition of fixed and motivated ideologies of
what lies beyond the geographical borders, the geographical place being transformed into
culturally and ideologically mediated spaces. Meenakhsi Mukherjee sums it up brilliantly
when she remarks,
 The construction of a nation is a two way process, entailing on the one hand a broad
homogenization despite seeming differences, of what lies within the boundaries and a projection
of alienness upon what is situated outside.10

Before we get into the issue of the creation of a solitarist social identity, it is
imperative that we look into the futility of the very thing that is used to create this
false sense of social security, the drawing of the borders to differentiate one nation
from the other. The arbitrariness and the porous nature of ‘borders’ are explored in
The Shadow Lines and one must keep in mind what Amitav Ghosh himself has to
say about this,

What interested me first about borders was their arbitrariness, their constructedness- the
ways in which they are ‘naturalised’ by modern political myth making. I think this interest arose
because of some kind of inborn distrust of anything that appears to be ‘given’ or taken for
granted.11

If nation is an ‘imagined community’, then Anderson goes on to conclude that this

concept of fashioning a ‘nation’ had a modular character of its own. He goes on to
argue,

The ‘nation’ proved an invention on which it was impossible to secure a patent. It became
available for pirating by widely different and sometimes unexpected hands.12

It is through the eyes of Tridib and the narrator that this distrust is highlighted in the
novel. It is Tridib’s overriding concern not to be sucked into someone else’s
construction of reality or history. The public/political narratives need to be
questioned, to find one’s real place in the scheme of things. The attempt to create a
watertight solitarist national identity is the handiwork of political parties with
vested interests and it is up to us not to be sucked into that rhetoric of singularity.
The idea of belonging needs a unifying principle, where citizens of a particular
nation state can be interpellated within the discourse by being provided with causal
reasoning to establish a dominant pattern mediating national events. It is Tridib’s
warning to the narrator that rings in our ears when he remarks,

If you believe anything people tell you, you deserve to be told anything at all.13

The warning comes home to the narrator when many years later he travels back
in time to uncover the events of the riots that had devastated the cities of Calcutta,
Dhaka and Srinagar. If national identity is monolithic, then it should not have
mattered to the people of Dhaka, which was politically and geographically a
different nation state, if the Prophet’s hair had been stolen from a mosque in
Srinagar. And yet, there is something that connected the population of these three
cities, something uncanny that resulted in the outbreak of riots in almost grotesque
mutuality. In one of the most arresting passages of the novel, the narrator employs a
‘circle of Reason’, by drawing an imaginary circle on the old Bartholomew Atlas
and remarks,

Within the tiny ordering of the Euclidean space, Chang Mai in Thailand was much nearer
Calcutta than Delhi is; that Chengdu in China is nearer than Srinagar is. Yet I never heard of those
places until I drew my circle, and I cannot remember a time when I was so young that I had not
heard of Delhi or Srinagar. It showed me that Hanoi and Chungking are nearer Khulna than Srinagar
and yet, did the people of Khulna care all about the fate of the mosques in Vietnam and Scouth
China (a mere stone’s throw away)? I doubted it.14

Differentiating between nations by the drawing of borders is a way of forging an

identity for oneself. This logic is naturalised and what is stressed upon is absolute
inevitability of the difference and the distinction. But what the narrator learns is that

The separatist political logic of the nation state cannot enforce cultural difference, that some other
thing will always ‘connect’ Calcutta to Dhaka, Bengali to Bengali, Indian to Pakistani as images in a
vast mirror.15

Amartya Sen talks about these issues and more in his penetrative analysis of
violence and the implementation of it in the desire to ‘belong’ somewhere16. This
sense of belonging carries with it the sense of an alienation and divergence from
other social groups. He goes on to state,

Violence is fomented by the imposition of singular and belligerent identities on gullible people,
championed by proficient artisans of terror.17

It is therefore imperative that we look at the role played by orchestrated violence in

the shaping of a nation’s destiny and identity.
The role of violence is significant, what is more significant is where this
violence features in the historiography of the nation. Very crudely, it can be divided
into ‘good’ and ‘bad’. The former, when the nation as a collective goes to war
against an identifiable enemy on the other side of the border. The latter however is
problematic, and consists of internal riots and massacres, where the ‘friend’ and the
‘enemy’ cannot be divided into clearly identifiable categories. The former,
solidifies the attempts of the nation to carve an essentialist identity of itself and the
latter, merely exposes the fissures and the cracks in the apparently neat edifice of
the nation, which undermine such attempts. More often than not, accounts of such
communal and sectarian violence are glossed over, where the historiographer
undertakes the erasure of public memory culminating in a collective amnesia. The
heroes of the wars are decorated and the martyrs of local/communal violence
forgotten. The confrontation between public history and private memory is nowhere
better evinced.
It is Ghosh’s own admission that it is the Hindu-Sikh riots of 1984 after the
assassination of Indira Gandhi, which brought to his mind the memory of the riots
of 1964. But the irony is that as an Indian, Ghosh has to sift through volumes of
newspapers and articles to bring the memories of the riots back to his mind, but on
the other hand, there were a dozen published books recording India’s war with
China. The latter has found a space in the recorded history of the nation while the
 former, no less traumatic, has been erased from public consciousness and a nation’s
history. Ghosh remarks,

I had not thought of this event in decades, but after 1984 it began to haunt me: I was astonished
by how vivid my memories were and how fully I could access them once I had given myself
permission to do so. But my memories had no context: I had no way of knowing what had happened,
whether it was an isolated incident, particularly to the neighbourhood we were living in, or whether
it had implications beyond. I had decided to find out what happened….a small glance at a library’s
bookshelves was enough to establish that in historical memory a small war counts for much more
than a major outbreak of civil violence.18

Ghosh’s treatment of the riot of 1964 raises such issues and more. Thamma’s
passionate plea to the narrator may provide the premise which is ultimately
undermined.

War is their religion. That’s what it takes to make a country. Once that happens people forget
they were born this or that, Muslim or Hindu, Bengali or Punjabi: they become a family born of the
same pool of blood.19

But we do realize in the course of the narrative that people don’t forget who they
are, and that the all enmeshing discursive narrative of the nation state fails to create a
homogenized singular identity. It is no surprise that with the outbreak of the riot, the
identity of the narrator’s school friend who happens to be a Muslim acquires importance.
The world seems to be turned inside out, concretized by the untidy angles at which the
rickshaws on the streets were arranged and the feeling was that the narrator’s own city
and its population had turned against them. The same people, streets, customs appear
different causing a strange sort of unease. This unease is the result of a fear not of an
identifiable external enemy, but a part of us which has suddenly come apart. It is
ourselves that we start fearing now and the narrator remarks,

It is the special quality of loneliness that grows out of the fear of the war between
oneself and one’s image in the mirror.20

Similarly, Amartya Sen, recounting his memories of the partition riots remarks,

A great many person’s identities as Indians, as sub-continentals, as Asians or as members of the

human race, seemed to give way- quite suddenly- to sectarian identification with Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh
communities. The carnage that followed had much to do with elementary herd behavior by which people
were made to “discover” their newly detected belligerent identities, without subjecting the process to
critical examination. The same people were suddenly different. 21

What is also remarkable to note is that not only do these incidents of violence not
find a place in the official history, but individuals who dare to restrain from conforming
to such straightjacket notions of identity, are somehow subsumed within the silenced
corridors of history. Stories of Hindus helping the Muslims and vice versa, often at the
cost of their lives are never chronicled. They are suppressed because they act as a
disruptive force in the protocols of the nation state. A case in point is Khalil who
sacrifices his life in an effort to save the elderly Jethamoshai from the hands of the
Muslim rioters, in a sense his ‘own’ people. Meenakshi Mukherjee sums up,

The ‘looking-glass border’ attempts to create mirage of otherness but only sees itself reflected. 22

Memory is a process that works on the dual modes of selection and elimination, and
anything that doesn’t conform to the ideology of the nation state is effaced. Once this
methodology gives way, the whole concept of a nation seems to lose its sacrosanct
identity. National cultures’ grand-narratives are suddenly shown to lose significance as
repressed narratives gain voice. We remember Ernest Renan positing,

Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor, in the creation of a
nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for the [principles of]
nationality.23

Drawing lines as borders may seem to divide countries and even at times to create them.
With Tridib and the narrator, memory and imagination are the space shuttles that help
them transcend the socio-cultural milieu they find themselves in. Tridib’s early advice to
the narrator is to use his ‘imagination with precision.’24 This enabling act of memory will,
according to Tridib, help the narrator in escaping being cloistered in someone else’s
construction of reality and history. Even in his almost platonic relationship with May, he
sees himself to be the central character in the Tristan-Isolde story, the man without a
country who ultimately falls in love with the woman across the seas.25 Memory allows
time and space to dissolve and forms a stylistic device shaping the content of the novel.
The style is simultaneously fashioned by the content and it is not surprising that the
narrative moves back and forth, fluid as memory itself, ‘memory endowing remembered
places with solidity and imagination the recounted ones.’26 It is as much about how the
imagination works in managing one’s memories as it is about the arbitrary nature of
nations and borders, but in The Shadow Lines, Ghosh has found a wonderful vehicle to
merge the two ideas.
But if this be the enabling power of memory, then the disabling power is too is
significant. It allows us to gain control, to uncover truths, which most times are
disturbing and jolt us out of our secured sense of belonging. As Suvir Kaul claims,

Memory is above all, a restless, energetic, troubling power, the price, and the limitation, of freedom; the
abettor, and the interrogator, of the form and existence of the modern nation-state. 27

What memory does is to give voice to silence. The narrator has to take recourse to his
memory of the India England test match being played on the day of the riots’ breaking
out to chart the senseless loss of so many innocent lives. The memories of the riots had
been silenced, wiped off. Recovering the events is not always a pleasurable experience
but it is necessary, or else the private truth would be erased by public lies. It makes us
question who we are and where do we belong. Borders divide people; memories seem to
bring them together. As Robi remarks in the novel,

And then I think to myself why don’t they draw thousands of little lines through the whole subcontinent
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 memory?28
 The novel’s central characters react in different ways to the conundrums of the issues
discussed. It is Tridib who realizes the apparent futility and hypocrisy of everything
around him, and he desires, in a certain way, to transcend the arbitrary borders and
distinctions and rivalries imagined into existence between countries and cultures and
return to a truer sense of commonality, a sense of belonging where he is free from both
constricted notions of identity and solitarist endeavors of belonging. His final act of
defiance is ambiguous. May thinks that it was to save her that Tridib had jumped amidst
the rioting crowd but she realizes her mistake when she remarks to the narrator,

For years I was arrogant enough to think I owed him his life. But I know now I didn’t kill him; I
couldn’t have, if I’d wanted. He gave himself up; it was a sacrifice. I know I can’t understand it, I know I
mustn’t try, for any real sacrifice is a mystery. 29

Our mind goes back to the incident of May’s trying to save a fatally injured dog, and
ultimately using her knife to set it free of its misery. We remember Tridib asking May to
do the same for him if it was ever needed. Her Eurocentric work ethic compels her to step
in to save the elderly gentleman and that provides Tridib with the opportunity to set
himself free. He knew full well that the mob would not be hurting a foreigner and yet he
saw that as the escape route, to step outside history, identity and nationality. He steps in
to step out.
The problem for the narrator’s grandmother is more complex. Her self assurance and
domineering personality seem to vanish away under the changing notions of ‘home’ and
‘abroad’. Dhaka is the city where she was born, and yet, it was the handiwork of
administrators, who by the drawing of borders, makes the same place a city where she is
a tourist and needs a passport to visit. She loses her grammatical co-ordinates of coming
and going and she is utterly disappointed to see that there are no physically identifiable
borders as such. Her stupefied wonder and naïve questions are ironically comic as she
remarks,

But if there aren’t any trenches or anything, how are people to know? I mean, what’s the difference
then? And if there is no difference then both sides will be the same…What was it all for then- partition and
all the killing and everything-if there isn’t anything in between? 30

Both sides are the same. But she just cannot come to terms with the fact that she is a
foreigner in her homeland. The moment she comes to realize that borders are just the
political manifestations of her childhood game of the ‘upside down house’, she reverts
back to her notions of exclusive nationalism when Tridib is killed in the Dhaka riots. She
goes back to the days where she was a student in Dhaka and would have done anything to
help the revolutionaries against the British, the days where the binary of us/them was
instrumental in identifying the enemy. She fulfills her adolescent fantasy in a way, by
donating her gold chain for the was fund31 as she remarks,

We have to kill them before they kill us; we have to wipe them out.32 (My emphasis).
It is however through the narrator’s eyes, and more significantly his reconstructions of
the past that our understanding comes a full circle. He sees himself to be almost a
prototype of the uncle whom he admires, thinking his thoughts, seeing through his eyes
and ending up loving the same woman. His sense of identity and belonging is not as
restrictive as that of Ila’s. Nor is his sense of nationality as vehement as that of his
grandmother. He may seem to be a bit too idealistic for some, but in his painful
recollection, he attains a maturity that Tridib did not live to see. The man without a name
chronicles the ‘undramatic’33 aspects of civil violence that had been erased from the
pages of a nation’s history. The theatre of violence plays itself out in grotesque ways,
claiming innocent lives and highlighting the fissures and the futility in the totalizing
narrative of a nation state. In our efforts to belong somewhere, we end up belonging
everywhere. The wanderer’s perennial adage-there isn’t any place like home- is ironically
proven true. There is indeed no essentialist notion like ‘home’.
1
Quoted by John. C. Hawley, Contemporary Indian Writers in English: Amitav Ghosh (New Delhi: Foundation Books,
2005), 5.
2
Milan Kundera, The Book of laughter and Forgetting (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 4.
3
Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 105.
4
Gandhi, 106.
5
James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Vintage, 1986), 272.
6
Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (New York: Viking, 1991), 27.
7
I am indebted to Meenakhsi Mukherjee’s analysis of the novel for this strain of thought.
8
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983),
112.
9
Quoted by Saurabh Dube, “Terms that Bind, Colony, Nation, Modernity”, Postcolonial Passages ed. Saurabh Dube (New
York: Oxford UP, 2004) 16.
10
Meenakshi Mukherjee, “Maps and Mirrors: Coordinates of Meaning in The Shadow Lines in The Shadow Lines (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 262.
11
Hawley, 9.
12
Anderson, 67.
13
Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1988), 12. All subsequent quotations and references are from
this edition.
14
Ibid. 232.
15
Suvir Kaul, “Separation Anxiety: Growing Up Inter/ National in The Shadow Lines in The Shadow Lines (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1995), 281.
16
He takes up this issues in Identity and Violence: The illusion of Destiny (London: Penguin, 2006) All quotations would be
from this edition.
17
Sen, 2.
18
Amitav Ghosh, “The greatest sorrow: Times of Joy Recalled in Wretchedness”, in his The Imam and the Indian: Prose
Pieces (Delhi: Ravi Dayal and Permanent Black, 2002), 315-316.
19
Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1988), 78.
20
Ibid, 204.
21
Sen, 9-10.
22
Meenakshi Mukherjee, “Maps and Mirrors: Coordinates of Meaning in The Shadow Lines in The Shadow Lines (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 266
23
Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?”, trans. Martin Thom, in Homi Bhabha (ed.) Nation and Narration (London:
Routledge, 1990), 11.
24
Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1988), 24.
25
Even though his ultimate aim is to be free from any kind of prescriptive notions of belonging, the place he chooses to be
divested of history during May’s visit to Calcutta is the Victoria Memorial, a site symbolic of the colonial rule and
domination in a city which once served as the capital of colonized India.
26
Meenakshi Mukherjee, “Maps and Mirrors: Coordinates of Meaning in The Shadow Lines in The Shadow Lines (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 257.
27
Suvir Kaul, “Separation Anxiety: Growing Up Inter/ National in The Shadow Lines in The Shadow Lines (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1995), 269.
28
Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1988), 246-247.
29
Ibid, 251-252.
30
Ibid, 151.
31
She is also willing to donate her blood for the war front. The novel is like a palimpsest, where memories and narratives
seep through layers like blood, both literally and metaphorically.
32
Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1988), 237
33
Ghosh, “The Ghost of Mrs. Gandhi”, in his The Imam and the Indian: Prose Pieces (Delhi: Ravi Dayal and Permanent
Black, 2002), 62.