Shadow Lines

The Shadow Lines, Ghosh's second novel was published in 1988, four years after the sectarian violence that shook India after Indira Gandhi's death. Seen in this context, we find it probing the various faces of violence and the extent to which this reaches under the guise of fighting for freedom and religion. The answers to the questions regarding freedom, about the real and yet non-existent line, which divides nations, people and family's still evades us.

The book is a landscape of symbolism and realism that spans both time and space. The concept of distance and time are uniquely portrayed in both the physical borders that divide countries and the imaginary ones that divide human beings and their cultures. We are taken on a fascinating journey of exploration, dissecting the characters of the story while simultaneously dissecting the human race.

The Shadow Lines is a story of two families -the Dutta Chowdharys' of Bengal and the Prices in London spanning three generations and viewed from the eyes of our unnamed and formless narrator, a young bourgeois Bengali lad. It is about his perceptive and eccentric uncle Tridib, who gives the boy worlds to travel and eyes to see long before he actually leaves Calcutta.

It is about his cousin Ila whom he secretly loves and their friends Nick and May. It is about her genteel and idealistic grandma and her trysts with history. It is about the meaning of political freedom in modern world and the force of nationalism.

It is about the tragedy of the love across the seas. It is about private upheavals mirrored by public turmoil. It is very much about the world we live in.

The title in itself is intriguing. What is a shadow? What are shadow lines? Throughout history shadows have been used as metaphors for secrets. So they are not merely lines that determine human form but also our inner conflict to choose between darkness and light, between mystery and truth.

Shadows are generally a distorted representation of ourselves except when viewed in proper light. Through this, perhaps the writer wants to tell us that we are not what others make of us and also make us realize that we need darkness not only in dealing with others but also with ourselves as well.

A shadow appears as an interface between darkness and light, seems to symbolize the slow unveiling of truth and its knowledge, and of the non-existent divisions