Amitav Ghosh's the Shadow Lines

Journal of Advances and JournalScholarly of Advances and Researches in Scholarly Researches in AlliedAllied Education Education Vol.Vol. VI 3,II, IssueIssue No. 6, XV, July-2014,April ISSN-2012, 2230 -7540 ISSN 2230- 7540 REVIEW ARTICLE AN AMITAV GHOSH’S THE SHADOW LINES INTERNATIONALLY INDEXED PEER REVIEWED & Study of Political Representations: REFEREED JOURNAL Diplomatic Missions of Early Indian to Britain www.ignited.in Journal of Advances and Scholarly Researches in Allied Education Vol. VIII, Issue No. XV, July-2014, ISSN 2230-7540 Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines Bal Rishi1 Dr. Sandeep Kumar2 1Dept. Of English, Research Scholar of OPJS University, Churu, Rajasthan -India 2Assistant Professor, G.N.C. Sirsa (Haryana) Abstract – In this essay I examine Amitav Ghosh’s craft and concerns in one of his finest novels, The Shadow Lines (1988). I further explore Ghosh’s organization of the diegetic elements, such as the novel’s world and situation, events and characters, as well as the mode of telling and recounting the story, and argue how it is designed in conjunction with his central thematic preoccupation. As memory provides the narrative trigger in this novel, I analyses Ghosh’s mnemonic enterprise as part of his narrative management. By using different narrative terms derived from Russian Formalism and Structuralism mediations, the novel’s construction is taken apart to demonstrate Ghosh’s innovative art. Besides dealing with the novel’s narratological technique, this essay looks at Ghosh’s interrogation of cartographic determinations against the background of Bengal’s vivisection into East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and West Bengal and evaluates his espousal of secular tolerance and alternative cartography in a multi-cultural scenario. Keywords – Partition, Cartography, Nationalism, Communalism, Cross-Border, Narratological - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - X - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - INTRODUCTION 3) or “the disjointed magic realism” (Mukherjee) evident in his apprentice novel. What he now offers is Amitav Ghosh stands out among his peers for the a supple and sophisticated mnemonic narrative. He admirable directness and lucidity of his prose as well wraps together slices of history by mnemonic triggers as for his brilliant perception of the complexities of or “wistful evocations of memory” (Mukherjee, human relations in the multicultural world. As an “Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma”) to reflect ingenious crafter of fiction he has made his mark and on communal carnage and sectarian tension in the earned substantial critical acclaim. His originality was Indian subcontinent. Evidently, his deft craft of story- readily apparent even in his first novel, The Circle of telling plays an important part in soldering the Reason (1986), which received considerable narrative components to the tale‟s emotional center. appreciation for its bold experimentation with content Discrete and non-sequential units of time and place and form. Ghosh‟s abiding concern about the relation are conflated to carry the main narrative burden. The between culture and imperialism is evident in this multiple switches in the narrative from one time- picaresque tale. But the novel goes far beyond sequence to another or the apparent a chronicity presenting the simple binary divide between tradition constitutes a counterpoint to hegemonic history or the and modernity set on an East/West axis. Ghosh grand narratives of the nation – a key device in the proposes the theme of “complex cultural imbrication" novel to unpack specific predicaments and traumas (Khair 36) as a result of ongoing migrations, border of individuals. This paper aims at examining the crossings and inter-cultural flows. This preoccupation signifying transactions in The Shadow Lines as well with transnational cultural processes, including the as the process by which Ghosh transforms his author‟s nuanced critique of the exclusive notion of material into the finished product. The novel derives discrete cultures, gains a new focus and dimension in its material from Ghosh‟s experience of the fracture The Shadow Lines. following the Partition and the resultant rupture in the affiliate bonds of the communities across the border. While The Shadow Lines explores the author‟s major What makes his experience worthy of investigation is concern about wider, cross-border humanity with the technique by which his experience is distilled into striking insights into the issues of ethnic nationalism a fascinating narrative. and communalism, it also reveals new levels of his technical prowess. Ghosh has departed from The difference between “content” and Rushdie‟s mode of “imaginative serio-comic “achieved content” or between experience and art storytelling” (Hawley is technique. Mark Schorer defines technique as any “selection, elimination or distortion, any form of www.ignited.in 1 Bal Rishi1 Dr. Sandeep Kumar2 Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines rhythm imposed upon the world of action by means of been in India when the British were here, and… she which our appreciation of the world of action is had a daughter called May, but she was a little baby enriched or renewed” (qtd. in Aldridge 68). The study when Tridib was in London, and as far as I knew he of narrative grammar or narratology is concerned with hadn‟t seen her since… I met May Price for the first prying open the narrative “langue” or deep time… when she came to Calcutta on a visit. The next structure. As the Russian Formalists have theorised time I met her was seventeen years later, when I went narrative aesthetics, technique manipulates fabula into to London myself…. Later, when we were eating our sjuzet. The former is the unshaped, uncrafted story; dinner, I discovered that in 1959, when [Tridib] was the latter the shaped narrative discourse. Seymour twenty-seven and she nineteen, they had begun a long Chatman designates fabula as the “what” of the correspondence…. Smiling at the memory, she told narrative, and sjuzet the “how” of the narrative me how [Tridib‟s] card had reached her just when she (Chatman 19). In other words, the sjuzet, or the was trying to get over an adolescent crush on a conditions of telling the story (fabula), can alter our schoolboy trombonist… and after that they had written perceptions of what the narrative is all about. These to each other regularly – short, chatty letters, usually. two terms are analogous to Gérard Genette‟s histoire Soon, pen-friendlike they had exchanged photographs. (the narrative raw material) and récit (the narrative (3-17) text) (Walsh, “Fibula and Fictionality in Narrative Theory”). In the diegesis (the story constructed by the narrator) the first-person unnamed narrator refers explicitly to Genette has also offered a comprehensive typology of his own opinions or feelings as well as to his narrators. According to him, the extradiegetic narrator relationship with the characters of the narrative and is is the apparently distant third-person narrator while the part of their spoken exchanges. The narrational choice autodiegetic narrator makes continuous use of the predicates his involvement in the story in that he tells first-person account. Unlike the former, the latter is not the story as an element of his own experience. an impersonal, though reliable and seemingly all- Of course extradiegetic narrators, too, are to some knowing, purveyor of the events. However, in either extent intradiegetic (involved in the story), but the use case of narration the principle of focalisation works. of stylistic signals in their narration gives the air of Applying Genette‟s views on narrative technique and objectivity and impartiality. the typology of narrators to our discussion of Ghosh‟s craft in The Shadow Lines, we notice that the In the extract quoted above from The Shadow Lines, unnamed first-person narrator in this novel is both an the first-person pronoun “I” operates as the tie around autodiegetic narrator and the primary agent of external which a variety of episodes and referential and internal focalising. By external focalising we elaborations, including intrusive opinions about the mean reports on the activities of characters mental and emotional states of the characters within whereas internal focalising suggests references to the the matrix of narration, are threaded. The first thoughts and feelings of the characters including the sentence, which discloses the narrator‟s personal narrator‟s own. We shall now see how the process of and family relation with the characters, is focalisation is controlled and orchestrated in The consistent with his close and candid narrational Shadow Lines by the narrator who not only narrates involvement throughout the novel. The extract also the events from a retrospective distance of about two samples the typical manner and level of focalisation – decades but also taps into his mnemonic fund to recall in other words, the way ideational meaning is being momentous incidents germane to the novel‟s plot determined by the status of the narrator and generated dynamics from times long past: by the narrative and linguistic devices. Clearly, the narrator is both the external focaliser and the In 1939, thirteen years before I was born, my father‟s internal focaliser in this novel. As an external aunt, Mayadebi, went to England with her husband focaliser he is telling the narrattee about the events and her son, Tridib…. Mayadebi was twenty-nine and the people witnessed by him as well as those when they left and Tridib was eight. I remember trying recalled from his memory; as an internal focaliser he very hard to imagine him back to my age, to reduce his is constantly digging into the psyche of other height to mine, and to think away the spectacles that characters to reveal their thoughts and feelings were so much a part of him that I really believed he underpinning their physical behaviour. The recurrent had been born with them…. My grandmother didn‟t use of “I” and “me” and other deictically proximate approve of Tridib. He is a loafer and a wastrel….

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