ENGLISH DEPT,
MEKLIGANJ COLLEGE
6TH SEM , ENGLISH HONS, DSEEH 4.
The Shadow Lines as a
Post Colonial Reading
Ghosh's novel The Shadow Lines could be
read as a postcolonial work. Postcolonial
studies is the academic study of the cultural legacy of colonialism and
imperialism, focusing on the human consequences of control and exploitation of
colonized people and their lands. A Postcolonial novel tends to embrace
subsequent cultural and political interactions between the colonial
power-culture and traditions-and the colonized.
In the novel The Shadow Lines, the unnamed
narrator traverses borders with ease and reinvents himself with all the
liberating energy implied by the postcolonial
condition that allows for and acknowledges dissonance rather than coherence.
There are different episodes in The Shadow Lines which shows Ghosh’s post
colonial consciousness while writing the novel. The inclusion of characters
from both the world- western and eastern creates a dichotomy among them. A
sense of being the ‘other’ in the class structure is resonated among the main
characters like unnamed narrator, Ila and Tribid. The narrator throughout the
novel conceives himself to be the mirror image of another. He decides at the
age of eight he looked exactly like Tridib. When they were children, Ila and
the narrator were look-alikes but the character with whom he desires
synchronicity is Nick Price. We can observe the narrator’s a post colonial envy
towards Nick. To him Nick Price “became a spectral presence beside me in my
looking glass; growing with me, but always bigger and better and in some way
more desirable”. Like Ila , he is also mesmerized by the exotic appeal of the
white skin. Consider the scene under the
large oak dining table where Ila and the narrator play houses and where Nick is
first introduced as the narrator's shadowy double, his blonde alter ego, always
a head taller, always closer to Ila.
The
significance of the childhood game of houses is being used to introduce the
major issue of racism in Britain. Ila
represents the unacceptable and contempted orient living in the occidental
space. She is often mocked and abused by her schoolmates for the colour of her
skin. Again Nick has been cast as the narrator's double who desires for travel
and adventure as opposed to the narrator for whom cultural differences can be
collectively contained to create not a fragmented self but a self that belongs
to many places, which can be lived freely in its moment accommodating itself to
the various pressures placed upon it. The narrator seems to be the mouthpiece
of the novelist who too wants to erase the shadow lines of division. For Ila,
cultural differences create only a small, quivering self, one incapable of
action, and more importantly, even of self-respect. Tha'mma's notion of freedom
is completely defined by the idea of the nation and therefore limited. For her,
freedom has meant not just wresting India away from the British but also the
conviction that war and blood define nations, that the nations of the
subcontinent still need to outline their boundaries in blood in order to erase
the distinctions between various regional groups.
The narrator says that was all Thamma
wanted was a modern middle-class life. Thamma's desire for nationhood is
historically determined, as the only woman in this novel whose convictions
translate into meaningful action, her actions and beliefs being represented as
dated are problematic. Her natural inheritor, Ila, is allowed only the meanest
notion of freedom, for to Ila freedom means the freedom to choose to dance in a
disco in Calcutta as she would in London which she believes history had denied
her in its fullness and for which she could never forgive it. Ghosh's ways of "writing back" to
earlier colonial fictions are also immediately accessible. The relationship between
Tridib and May ends in the gruesome incident where Tridib gets killed. This
reminds us of the saying “East is east, west is west and never the twain shall
meet”. The postcolonial thus becomes a
tangible approach that can be seen in
operation in this text.
