Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Sukanta Das
In the essay entitled “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question”, Partha
Chatterjee focuses on the complex and troubling relationship between women’s question
and the politics of Indian nationalism. He draws attention to the fact that the rise of
Indian nationalism led to the disappearance, if not demise of women’s question, from the
public agenda. Chatterjee’s thesis regarding the critical relation between the politics of
nationalism and women’s question expresses a general truth about the possible
conflicting relation between various politics. Chatterjee contends that the ideology of
nationalist politics in its very specificity acts as the normative mode of the political as
such, and the “imagined community” is envisaged as the most authentic form of
McClintock ruefully puts: “Nowhere has feminism in its own right been allowed to be
more than the maidservant to nationalism” (386). The politics of nationalism pushed
women’s question to the back by prioritizing the primary task of nation-building. The
exclusive emphasis upon the construction of nation made heavy toll upon women whose
politics is sacrificed for the sake of nation, and is made subservient to the politics of
nationalism. I shall situate Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1984) in the context of
the dichotomous relation between the politics of nationalism and the question of women.
I would further explore how Ghosh problematizes the construction of female identity in
the backdrop of predominantly patriarchal ideology and politics. Amitav Ghosh’s second
novel, The Shadow Lines, alerts us against the possible entrapment by various discourses
which compete with each other for the engagement of the attention of individuals. This is
clearly manifested in the advice given to the unnamed narrator by his somewhat queer
uncle Tridib (“we would never be free of other people’s inventions”). The novel
investigates into the issue of freedom and the larger question of identity of individuals.
The novel traces the gradual development of the unnamed narrator who scrutinizes the
various discourses right from the ‘grand narrative’ of the nationalist discourse to the
truths of personal memory which may not always match with the official version.
of nationalism etc. are essential for the dismantling of various versions of freedom. The
present paper seeks to explore how Amitav Ghosh problematizes the construction of
The native people, confronted by the new situation thanks to colonialism, adopted two-
fold approaches to the changed circumstance. The male nationalists started appropriating
women from the possible infringement by the foreign culture. The patriarchy considered
women as the site where true Indian identity is played out and therefore they need to be
preserved pure and unaffected by the western materiality. Chatterjee holds that the
nationalists could not ignore the West but they rigorously defended the native or “inner”
space from any possible fundamental damage from the West. In other words, the true
Indian identity is to be located only in home, spirituality, and the figure of women as the
representative true self. Women incidentally become the bulwark of tradition, custodian
Chatterjee thus highlights the ideological perspective of the nationalism through which it
seeks to answer women’s question. This necessitates certain stereotyping of the roles of
The Shadow Lines relates the story of a Calcutta-based Indian family and their
relationship with the English Prices, which started in the colonial period, and survived
through the World War II, and the Partition upto the 1980s.In the novel Thamma, the
grandmother of the unnamed narrator who witnesses the anti-colonial struggle in her
youth, becomes a staunch supporter of the official nationalism and wants to do anything
that would ensure ‘freedom’ for the country. Being forced to leave her home place after
the formation of East Pakistan, Thamma comes to settle in Calcutta. After her
challenges the patriarchal prescription regarding female activity. In fact her active life
style and the defiant attitude certainly make her an independent woman and therefore
call in question the patriarchal authority. But she does not turn out to be as assertive and
prescribes certain roles for them. In the anti-colonial struggle women are not expected
to actively participate and this creates secret desire in Thamma to “run errands for them
(nationalists), to cook their food, wash their clothes, anything” (39). She nourishes the
desire for total involvement in the armed nationalist movement for independence. She
herself harbours the desire of even killing the English magistrate. When asked by her
grandson whether she would have really taken such a step, she argues:
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 (emphasis added, 39).
Thamma here equates the liberation of the state from the colonial masters with personal
freedom, and believes in the impermeability of the borders. It is precisely for this reason
that Thamma never prevents the narrator from playing cricket since “You can’t build a
strong country […] without building a strong body”. Thamma, who has been a witness to
anti-colonial struggle and subsequent victim of the partition of the subcontinent, imbibes
the spirit of nationalism and therefore would pursue the ideology of nationalism which is
nationalist ideology of cultural and national conformity. Thamma’s own vision of the
nation therefore is constructed on war and bloodshed. This excludes those Indian
diasporic people like her granddaughter Ila, who is a colonial, for it is only through
participating in the tradition of warfare one can attain the status of nationality and owns
which nation is baptized, are the basic constituents of a country, whose border will only
accommodate those who have contributed with their blood in its construction:
Ila has no right to live there, she said hoarsely. 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 has earned his right to be there with blood: with
their brother’s blood and their father’s blood and their son’s blood. They know they’re a
nation because they’ve drawn their borders with blood […] war is their religion. That’s
what it takes to make a country (77-78).
issues regarding nationalism and the postcolonial situation. Her own personal experience
nationalism. She can only think about the relationship of war and friendship that a nation
can have with the other nation. She continually thinks of hostile relation with the
neighbouring nations, for the identity of a nation depends upon its distinction from other
nations. She is therefore elated at the prospect of watching borders between India and
East Pakistan from the plane. When her son laughs away such a possibility, she reasons:
“But if there aren’t any trenches or anything, how are people to know? I mean where’s
the difference then? And if there’s no difference then both sides will be the same…”
out in the minuteness and lawyer-like precision with which the division of Thamma’s
emphasizes on the fixity of borders which are supposed to give solidarity to those within
the border and maintain distinctness/difference from those outside the frontier. Frontiers
with their fixity and definiteness therefore become extremely important in the
determination of the identity of a nation. It is this impulse that drives Thamma to think of
a unified India where different communities will melt so as to confront a common enemy
on the frontier: “people forget they were born this or that, Muslim or Hindu or Bengali or
Punjabi: they become a family born of the same pool of blood. That is what you have to
achieve for India, don’t you see?”(78). The territorial nationalism to which Thamma
subscribes makes her think of the nations as independent and isolated from each other.
But the borders on the map cannot segregate the nations, as the supposed theft of the hair
of the Prophet Mohammed from Srinagar triggers off the riot in Dhaka and Calcutta
making the national frontiers really ‘shadow lines’. But interestingly this fact of the riot,
contemplate on the fragility of borders. On the other hand the same event inaugurates a
process of critical revision of the whole issue of borders and the meaning of distance in
men like the narrator and Robi. Tridib’s death in the riot in Dhaka sparks off the
investigative search in Robi over the whole issue of border and freedom: “…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?”(247). Similarly the unraveling of the mystery of
Tridib’s death by Robi makes the narrator inquisitive toward the truths of various
traditional ‘givens’ like the meaning of distance and the separating power of lines on the
map. Tridib’s death launches a process of revision of the discourse of nationalism and
nation-state, which emphasizes the territorial sovereignty ensured by lines on the map, in
the narrator. He makes archival excavation in order to find the link between his
nightmarish school bus ride and the riot in Dhaka which eventually killed Tridib. The
unholy alliance between the event in Srinagar in which the theft of Prophet Mohammad’s
hair caused much communal conflict and the riot in Dhaka and also in Calcutta explodes
the myth that distance separates and the national frontiers/boundaries guarantee complete
separateness: “I believed in the reality of space; I believed that distance separates, that it
is a corporeal substance; I believed in the reality of nations and borders; and I believed
that across the border there existed another reality”(219).What is remarkable here to note
is the difference in response that elicits from Thamma who witnesses the traumatic event
of Tridib’s death. While the pathetic death of Tridib makes the narrator and Robi critique
the discourse of the dominant nationalism and the politics of nation-state, Thamma
however does not criticize the nation-state. On the other hand she becomes all the more
nation-state. Tridib’s death seems to work as the imperative why the enemy on the other
side of the border is to be opposed, fought, killed: “We have to kill them before they kill
us; we have to wipe them out” (emphasis added, 237). Thamma therefore is caught in the
dominant patriarchal rhetoric which does not allow her to revise/scrutinize the prevalent
ideas. Thamma becomes a victim of the patriarchal discourse of nationalism and hers is
the case of getting trapped in other people’s inventions against which the narrator is
cautioned by his mentor Tridib. While women are debarred from participating in the anti-
colonial struggle for independence, they are projected as bearers of tradition and the
powerful that she just can’t endeavour to (con) test the validity of the national frontiers.
She is so much indoctrinated by the patriarchal discourse that she does not hesitate to
donate her prized golden chains to the war fund since “we’re fighting them properly at
last, with tanks and guns and bombs” (237).When inadvertently her hand bleeds after it
smashes against the glass front of the radio, she states in a calm posture: “I must get to
the hospital…I mustn’t waste all this blood. I can donate it to the war fund” (237). This
same impulse makes Thamma visit her ‘homeland’ in Dhaka, not out of love for her
Jethamoshai, but in order to ‘rescue’ the old man from the clutches of Muslims belonging
to the other side of the border: “We don’t want the house. We’ve come to take you home
with us. It’s not safe for you here. There might be trouble any day now. You must move
while you can” (emphasis added, 215). It is however interesting to see how Thamma’s
‘place of birth had come to be so messily at odds with her nationality’. But the old man
does not subscribe to Thamma’s opinion regarding the national identity. To quote the old
man: “I don’t believe in this India-Shindia. It’s all very well, you’re going away now, but
suppose when you get there they decide to draw another line somewhere? What will you
do then? Where will you move to?”(215). It is interesting to see that male characters in
this novel are capable of questioning/contesting the ‘organizing principle of division’ and
the text seems to privilege such a position, while women are only left with the
The patriarchal discourse of nationalism has its own modus operandi as it makes
women bear the burden of tradition while men become the beneficiaries of the same
system. One understands why Thamma is so critical of Ila, the narrator’s cousin who
settles in London. The discourse of nationalism and the patriarchal family values are
ingrained in Thamma, who is extremely critical of any sort of nonconformity either with
national or cultural ideology. Thamma is fiercely antagonistic toward Ila, for leaving her
ancestral land for London. She cannot change her stand even when the narrator informs
the former about the austerity and trouble with which she (Ila) has to survive in London.
Thamma is so much convinced about her own notion of Ila’s motive that she disapproves
the narrator’s proximity with Ila. She even goes to the extent of reporting to the principal
of the narrator’s college regarding her grandson’s moral promiscuity. Understandably she
prioritizes her own version of territorial nationalism and the value of cultural rootednesss.
Ila’s free lifestyle poses a danger to the dominant patriarchal concern for conformity to
the prevalent culture. This ideology is so embossed in Thamma that she even would
readily dismiss the narrator’s supposed semblance with Tridib, for the latter does not
The formation of the identity of Ila is very complex as she is caught between two
cultures. While enjoying in the nightclub in Calcutta along with the narrator and Robi,
she is prevented from dancing with a stranger (a businessman). When Ila wants to know
from Robi why she has been refrained from dancing with the stranger, the latter argues:
“You can do what you like in England…but here there are certain things you cannot do.
That’s our culture; that’s how we live” (88). Ila in fact revolts against this claustrophobic
sexual atmosphere which makes women follow the code of conduct prescribed by the
patriarchy. Visibly very disgusted with the patriarchal prescription regarding female
activity Ila retorts back: “Do you know why I’ve chosen to live in London? Do you see?
It’s only because I wanted to be free” (88). Understandably Ila’s revolt is directed against
the burden of ‘representation’ women have to bear. As Nira Yuval Davis argues in
has also brought about the construction of women as the bearers of collectivity’s honour”
(45).
Therefore women like Ila are expected to conform with the patriarchal projection of
women. Thamma who internalizes the doctrine of the patriarchy emphasizes on the
enforcement of the patriarchal rules /culture. Ila is criticized by Thamma because the
former does respect neither the national nor cultural frontiers. Ila on the other hand seeks
to escape such tortuous burden of representation and wants to enjoy the ‘freedom’ in
London which is so greatly curtailed in India. But Ila’s development is seriously affected
albeit that of the West. Evidently the ease with which Ila falls in the patriarchal discourse
points to the predicament of people who are captured within the metanarrative and fail to
invent their own stories. She has always been fascinated by the Eurocentric idea of
freedom and thus her life becomes a series of illusions, evasions, lies etc. This is seen as
early in her life when she informs the narrator that she has a dashing boyfriend. She not
only tries to project Nick, her boyfriend and subsequent husband, as extremely desirable,
but also fails miserably in her attempts to identify herself with the English/cosmopolitan
culture. As Suvir Kaul puts: “The unspoken suggestion seems to be that it is her
dislocations, her not being rooted in any one culture and its ways, that haunt
her”(Kaul,274). But the cultural contradiction and the confusion are not peculiar to
diasporic people; they are rather the inevitable aspect of women who are always put
under patriarchal pressure to conform to the set rules. Ila, whose life is a series of
illusions, pretensions, reveals to the narrator how she has always been cultivating the
self-conscious lax moral attitude. When learning about Nick’s sexual relation with other
women from the narrator she exclaims: “You see, you’ve never understood, you’ve
always been taken in by the way I used to talk, when we were in college. I only talked
like that to shock you, and because you seemed to expect it of me somehow. I never did
any of those things: I’m about as chaste, in my own way, as any woman you’ll ever
meet”( 188 ). She is caught in the Eurocentric worldview in which the West is projected
as the Centre and the rest of the world is the periphery. But the interesting point about
Ila’s situation is that she remains always on the periphery though she wrongly thinks she
can be part of the West simply by living there and following certain codes. She is thus
exoticized by her friends as ‘our own upper class Asian Marxist’. Inevitably the
restrictive culture of the middle class Bengali family, she is so eager to escape, imprisons
her in its western version. Therefore the cosmopolitanism which she embraces is not free
from the accompanying moral promiscuity. Thus she has to endure the faithlessness of
her husband whose sexual relation with a number of women is an enactment of his ‘way
of travelling’.
discourse even though she wishes to keep herself outside the discourse of the Third
World patriarchy. She is allured by the relatively ‘free’ atmosphere of the West even
though the enjoyment of this freedom presupposes the acceptance of the profligacy of her
husband. In fact Ila is just taken in by the liberal ambience of London without taking into
account the politics of freedom and patriarchy. Though Ila calls Thamma a ‘fascist’
because of the latter’s rigorous enforcement of the cultural and the patriarchal codes
(violated by the ‘transgressive’ Ila), she herself enacts the same feat in her fierce and
aggressive dismissal of the Orient and the aggrandizement of the West as the centre of
the supposedly grand events like anti-fascist movement etc. Ila’s eulogization of Europe
and all the happenings there points to the extent to which she is indoctrinated in the
We may not achieve much in our little house in Stockwell, but we know that in the
future political people everywhere will look to us—in Nigeria, India, Malayasia,
wherever. It must have been the same for Tresawsen and his crowd. At least they
knew they were a part of the most important events of their time—the war, and
fascism, all the things you read about today in history books. That’s why there’s a
kind of heroism even in their pointless deaths; that’s why they’re remembered and
that’s why you’ve led us here. You wouldn’t understand the exhilaration of events
like that—nothing really important ever happens where you are…Well of course
there are famines and riots and disasters…But those are local things after all—not
like revolutions or anti-fascist wars, nothing that sets a political example to the world,
nothing that’s really remembered (104).
Therefore Ila’s journey toward self-knowledge starts with her attempt in escaping the
burden of patriarchal ‘expectation’. But ironically she becomes all the more
The discourse of nationalism wielded such power that the female characters
internalize the patriarchal prescriptions even after showing signs of contesting the
patriarchal ideology. Thamma for example defies the role, set by the patriarchy for
women, by taking up the job of teaching in a school after her widowhood. This is no
doubt seriously questioning the patriarchal prescription but eventually she becomes
caught in the discourse of the patriarchy as she internalizes the patriarchal discourse
of nationalism and that of the nation-state. She becomes the agent of the patriarchy
when she faults with Ila’s desertion of her ancestral land and enforces the patriarchal
cultural norm by reporting against the narrator for the latter’s fondness for Ila. Ila on
the other hand apparently impresses one as a ‘free’ person (free from your bloody
culture), but she too is caught in the ideology of the patriarchy. She develops
discourse. Amitav Ghosh here shows the problematics of constructing female identity
Partha Chatterjee:
The new patriarchy advocated by nationalism conferred upon women the honor of a
new social responsibility, and by associating the task of female emancipation with the
historical goal of sovereign nationhood, bound them to a new, and yet entirely
legitimate, subordination (Chatterjee, 629)
roles they are assigned to by the patriarchy. Interestingly such presentation of women
Yet she (Thamma) does not fall outside the novel’s inclusive ambit of
sympathy; the author allows her historical position to confer certain inevitability
to her ideology. Perhaps the representative of a class and a generation, in this
novel she stands alone, as far away as her only son who is caught up in the
upwardly mobile career graph of success, as from his only son who in his
fascination for maps and stories that would enable him to transcend space and
time through the fluid sharing of other lives is emulating the ‘undesirable’
example of Tridib.(265).
Evidently Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines shows the limitations of the construction
Ghosh however shows the possible way of fighting off the claims of a discourse by
actively engaging one’s imagination. Through the character of Tridib, Ghosh seems to
suggest that one must invent one’s story so as to resist being subsumed in other’s story.
Tridib uses imagination and creativity as the liberating forces of the individual, who is
free to use them at will so as to checkmate the artificiality of cultural and ideological
apparatuses. Ghosh leaves the positive suggestion of transcending the patriarchal shadow
lines by means of creating one’s own story without getting trapped in various discourses.
WORKS CITED
Women: Essays in Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid ( New Delhi:
Ghosh, Amitav. The Shadow Lines. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1995
Lines” (pp. 268-286). The Shadow Lines. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1995
Lines” (pp.255-267), The Shadow Lines. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1995