By Pratiti Ketoki

I distinctly remember when my childhood friend Meghna slid The Shadow Lines to me in 10th grade. It was a gift for my 16th birthday, and since we were in different sections, Meghna had to give me the book under the table in Bangla class. She whispered to me, কভারের লেখাটা পড়লাম, কিছু বুঝলাম না, তাই ভাবলাম তোর ভালো লাগবে, which translates to, “I read the blurb, it wasn’t something I understood much so I thought it would be perfect for you.” I jeered at her, complaining about how my reputation is of a person who reads such novels, and I was cut off by our teacher starting her daily test of Bengali grammar.

I started reading The Shadow Lines, then and there, paying very little attention to whatever our teacher was asking us to do (I was rather weak in Bangla, it is an ill twist of faith that as a graduate student, I work primarily in Bengali and Hindi literature). The book isn’t very long, at least for a teenager in small-town India who neither had a lot of friends nor a lot of other sources of entertainment. I understood some things and didn’t understand most other things yet it remained with me for the longest time. I read and reread it until I got to college, with almost no one to discuss the book with. My friends did read novels like that, but my dad somehow didn’t want to read them, and we never got around to getting a Bengali translation for mom and paternal grandmother . I believed it was a niche book that very few read until I entered the gates of my liberal arts university and realised it was one of the most popular pieces of Indian English Fiction. I have had many, many animated discussions about the novel with friends, colleagues and professors, yet it never lost its charm. I thought long and hard about why that is the case, and maybe it is because it captures my beloved Calcutta, between 1947 and 1971, through the eyes of a Partition family, who had casualties in both of these partitions and independence experiences.

The Shadow Lines has a non-linear story structure; one that is grappling with many pasts. The protagonist is unnamed throughout the story, and I often think about how that was what had a very strong impact on the readers of this story. I, who was born and brought up in a Bhadrolok family in Calcutta,  became the protagonist. Our unnamed protagonist follows a non-linear story arc that drifts in and out of Calcutta. The Calcutta that he describes is largely of the past, of his childhood in the 50s and 60s leading up to the riots in 1964 in Dhaka. This is the Calcutta that my paternal grandparents first came to from their village in West Bengal and one that I have heard flashes of from my thammi ( my paternal grandmother in Bangla). My thammi, Juthika Ganguly, came into adulthood in the 60s often speaking about the city and its turmoil and growth. In Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, I first came to embody the city of that period. It is probably because the story interweaves memory with the narrative of the author’s own experiences.

The memories in this story pivot around Partition and the impact that Partition has on this family’s history. The story follows our protagonist’s grandmother, who after being widowed at a young age, comes to Calcutta after the premature death of her husband to work as a teacher and raise her only son, the protagonist’s father. There are glimpses of her past struggles, which linger on in the family’s history as they move up the social and economic ladder. There is also the much older past of Mayadebi’s marital family. Mayadebi, the sister of the protagonist’s grandmother, is married to a high-ranking diplomat from an old and elite family in Calcutta. Their middle son Tridib still lives in their old, now slightly dilapidated family home, much to the disapproval of his parents. There is a strange and constant discomfort with the past, especially with Partition. The story is interwoven with layers of memory and history. The novel, for me as a 16-year-old history geek, opened up the stories of the past, beyond the verbose descriptions in my history textbooks.

The novel also goes further back in time into the late 1930s and early 1940s Dhaka. It establishes a milieu of a different past, one that is in many ways lost forever. We see the paternal home of Mayadebi and her older cousin (our protagonist’s grandmother).  It involves Mayadebi’s marriage to an eligible bachelor, Justice Datta-Chaudhuri, and the way it impacted their lives in post-partition Calcutta. Even the marriage itself is reminiscent of their past in Dhaka, the feud between their father and their uncle, and how their mother and aunt set aside their differences to make for this match to happen. The past flashes back to our protagonist when he and his grandmother go to visit a relative who has recently moved to Calcutta from the other side of the border. Their dilapidated surroundings and their desire for help is one that disgusts his grandmother, but our protagonist guesses it is also a relief of getting away from such circumstances. Our protagonist goes away and comes back, and the city serves almost as a requiem for his memories, one that he hasn’t moved past, and hasn’t adapted to the life of his adulthood. In turn, he serves as a requiem to his family’s memories. The idea of loss, but also moving away from this loss into a space where one is silent about trauma is central to the Bengal partition experience and it was with Ghosh’s text that I first came to see and understand it.

Probably the most impactful aspect of the narrative is how the story transitions from Calcutta to Dhaka. I have never been to Dhaka, or anywhere in Bangladesh even. My mom’s village, Bagula, in Nadia District of West Bengal is less than half an hour from the India-Bangladesh border at Gende. My maternal family is from Jessore, a district in the state of Khulna right across the border from India. Therefore the view of ওপার বাংলা (‘Opar Bangla’ or ‘That Side Bengal,’ historically referring to the other side of the Padma river but today used to refer to the other side of the border) has always been of the village, the local trains, the land borders and the village on the other side. My memories include food that sometimes our relatives brought from across the border when we visited our village, the one time I actually got to eat পদ্মার ইলিশ (the Hilsa fish from Padma, often considered superior to Ganga’s Hilsa, and I agree with it). Dhaka was a passing mention in the history textbooks, the occasional Bangla novels and from a sole trip my paternal grandparents took in the 1980s. It was in this novel, that I in a way, experienced Dhaka, the bustling metropolis. Ghosh who was the child of a diplomat and had spent some of his early years in Dhaka in the Pakistan era masterfully portrays the tensions of a family who come back to their own city, the city of their birth and of their ancestors as diplomats, and representatives of a foreign government. Mayadebi writes to her sister that she hasn’t been able to visit their old home because firstly they live very far from where their home was and their movement is restricted. The trauma of partition is therefore not just in the loss, but also in the ironies. Similar ironies exist in almost all partition families in Bengal, where there is no clean break in history, where loss and identity-making doesn’t happen in 1947 but is a continuous process until the 1980s. My irony also is that I have never set foot in my maternal grandmother’s village, less than 100 Kms from my mom’s village, and even when I go to Bangladesh, it will likely be to Dhaka, a city much further from Jessore district than the towns and villages that I that my mother grew up, right by the border. The protagonist’s grandmother comments at one point how she can’t see her familiar Dhaka, and that she had become a foreigner in her own city.

The Shadow Lines is often considered a central text in Indian post-colonial literature and one that captures the milieu of post-colonial India. But I have always thought that is far more specific and is a novel about Bengali post-coloniality, and of Bengali trauma of the partition. The climax of the novel also justaxopeses the violence of Calcutta and the violence of Dhaka together, pointing to the fragmented community and social uprising that is happening almost simultaneously in both cities. It doesn’t romanticize the political violence behind those movements, but rather points at what individuals and families lost in the Bengal’s post-coloniality.