The Shadow Lines

The Shadow Lines is a novel by Amitav Ghosh, published in 1988.

It is a book that well captures the perspectival view of time and events, of lines that bring people together and hold them apart, lines that are clearly visible on one perspective and nonexistent on another. Lines that exist in the memory of one, and therefore in another's imagination. A narrative built out of an intricate, constantly criss-crossing web of memories of many people, it never pretends to tell a story. Rather it invites the reader to invent one, out of the memories of those involved, memories that hold mirrors of differing shades to the same experience.

Plot summary

The book chronicles one series of events lived differently by different people. The narrator has an unusual fascination for his second-uncle, Tridib, the eldest son of the Indian diplomat Himangshu Shekhar Dutta-Chaudhuri, abroad. Tridib never "lives" the story, except through memories of others -- the narrator's, his brother Robi's, and lover May's. He is a link that connects them, a shadow line that never materialises. Beginning with the narrator's memories of his early interactions with Tridib, who had "given me eyes" to see the world with, the narrative keeps travelling back and forth in time as well as space, moving along with the train of thoughts that shift wildly from Calcutta's Gole Park to Ballygunge, and farther into London's Brick Lane of the War, or Lymington Road of today and Jindabahar lane in Bangladesh (formerly East-Pakistan).

The outlines of these places are as vivid to the reader as to those who lived in them, or those who did not actually live in them, but could nevertheless invent them through memories of those who did. The lines that divide places and even times are mere shadows, and hence forever trespassed.

The narrator remains unnamed until the end of the novel and can be, in a way, envisioned as Tridib's alter ego who vicariously lives time past and all those places that he had never actually visited through Tridib's eyes. In his intimate and somewhat complicated relatioship with his uncle Tridib which the narrator/author explores at length in the novel, he decides that his uncle who was so intricately bound to his life 'had looked like me'.

The non-linear narrative of the book moves back and forth through time and place and explores the complex relationship between the narrator and his cousin Ila who aroused in him unfulfilled sexual desire. There is also the May-Tridib romance, 'a man without a country who fell in love with a woman across the seas...' which never matures given Tridib's unfortunate death at the hands of a riotous mob in East Pakistan.

"The Shadow Lines" is the narrator's bildungsroman that interrogates the viability and relevance of man-made divisions necessitaing the various acts of transgressions of these state-codified boundaries through the precise use of imagination as taught by Tridib.