October 2004

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Seeking Freedom, Finding Connections: The Work of Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines.
South Asia Publishers, 1988.

Michael True, who lives in Worcester, was a Fulbright lecturer on American literature in India in 1997-98, and on peace, conflict, and nonviolence studies earlier this year.

"In 1939, thirteen years before I was born, my father's aunt, Mayadebi, went to England with her husband and her son, Tridib." Thus is the reader drawn into the story of a family's effort to make its way across a complex, divided landscape over the next forty years, "locked into an irreversible symmetry" of boundary lines meant to set them free.

As the opening sentence suggests, the story is told in the recognizable, intriguing, and authoritative voice that has informed Amitav Ghosh's fiction and nonfiction over two decades. Through his artistry, evident in this early novel and later work, he now claims a central place among Indian novelists writing in English.

Early on, The Shadow Lines immerses the reader in the vivid and haunting lives of once-unified Bengalis, now divided between India and Bangladesh. The focus is a Hindu family originally from Dhaka, who relocated in Calcutta following partition. In a powerful rendering of divisions between peoples sharing the same culture, Ghosh returns to a theme that has intrigued him for some time, as he puzzles over what "borders" mean. Why are people who belong to one another separated and pitted against one another by artificial boundaries, provoking great unhappiness, suffering, communal riots, and murder? It is a question disrupting societies on all continents, leading to continual migrations, civil wars, ethnic cleansing, starvation, and millions of refugees bent on "freedom."

The principal characters of the novel say they seek freedom from the limitations imposed upon them by history, culture, and modern circumstance. By contrast, the narrator, or "chronicler" as he calls himself, seeks and makes connections through his love for his sometimes difficult, commanding grandmother and a beloved, imaginative older cousin.

That cousin, Tridib, commands center stage from the narrator's early childhood and, in memory, even after Tridib's death. He is the narrator's window on the world that enables him to make imaginative and often accurate connections that other family members seldom appreciate or achieve. Others dominating his personal life are another cousin, Ila, with whom he falls in love, and May, whose friendship deepens over the years.

Set in Calcutta, Delhi, Dhaka, and London between 1952 and 1979, with flashbacks to England during World War II, the novel conveys the complex interconnections among several cultures and the inevitable conflicts that divide the family and threaten its survival. Having moved Dhaka (predominantly Muslim East Bengal), to Calcutta (predominantly Hindu West Bengal), members of the family make a return trip to collect their ailing grandfather, only to be caught in a communal Muslim/Hindu riot in which several family members are killed. One cousin, in fact, may have knowingly sacrificed his life to allow the others to escape.

Thus do borders and "shadow lines" divide us, the novel seems to say, depriving us of a full understanding of who we are. In truth, people eventually discover "the simple fact that there had never been a moment in their four-thousand-year-old history…when places such as Dhaka and Calcutta were more closely bound to each other than after they had drawn their lines." Meanwhile, they plunge on in an effort to be "free," unaware that they court alienation and chaos in the process.

The journey is "a voyage into land without space, an expanse without distances; a land of looking-glass event." In concluding scenes, however, as the narrator begins to connect the lines, he brings the story and the family full circle. In a resolution that is appropriate, believable, perhaps even encouraging, the novel implies that what often divides us or what appears to be conflicting and multifaceted is actually one.

In his later powerful, anthropological novel In an Antique Land, Ghosh returns, in one chapter, to this storyline. The theme is echoed, as well, in his 1995 New Yorker essay "The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi," telling about Hindus risking their lives to protect Sikhs in the Delhi riots following the assassination of Indira Gandhi.

In his fiction and nonfiction, Ghosh indicates what language is capable of in conveying fundamental and peculiar challenges of our time. In these immensely well-crafted works of imagination, he enables us to see ourselves in history, with hints about how to find our way out of loneliness and fear and into the future.

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