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    Shadow Lines Review by Anita Desai - Read

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    This document provides a summary of the book "The Shadow Lines" by Amitav Ghosh. It summarizes: 1) The book abandons "magical realism" in favor of a more realistic narrative style, focusing on families in Calcutta, London, and Dhaka. 2) Ghosh conveys subtle insights into family structures and relationships in Indian society through scenes like a joint family splitting due to petty quarrels. 3) A key scene describes a child staring at a pool of sludge near factories and shanties, representing the landscape that fueled his mother's desire for him to study hard and avoid poverty. 4) The reviewer praises Ghosh

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    Shadow Lines Review by Anita Desai - Read

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    This document provides a summary of the book "The Shadow Lines" by Amitav Ghosh. It summarizes: 1) The book abandons "magical realism" in favor of a more realistic narrative style, focusing on families in Calcutta, London, and Dhaka. 2) Ghosh conveys subtle insights into family structures and relationships in Indian society through scenes like a joint family splitting due to petty quarrels. 3) A key scene describes a child staring at a pool of sludge near factories and shanties, representing the landscape that fueled his mother's desire for him to study hard and avoid poverty. 4) The reviewer praises Ghosh

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    This document provides a summary of the book "The Shadow Lines" by Amitav Ghosh. It summarizes: 1) The book abandons "magical realism" in favor of a more realistic narrative style, focusing on families in Calcutta, London, and Dhaka. 2) Ghosh conveys subtle insights into family structures and relationships in Indian society through scenes like a joint family splitting due to petty quarrels. 3) A key scene describes a child staring at a pool of sludge near factories and shanties, representing the landscape that fueled his mother's desire for him to study hard and avoid poverty. 4) The reviewer praises Ghosh

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    115 views4 pages

    Shadow Lines Review by Anita Desai - Read

    Uploaded by

    trisha
    This document provides a summary of the book "The Shadow Lines" by Amitav Ghosh. It summarizes: 1) The book abandons "magical realism" in favor of a more realistic narrative style, focusing on families in Calcutta, London, and Dhaka. 2) Ghosh conveys subtle insights into family structures and relationships in Indian society through scenes like a joint family splitting due to petty quarrels. 3) A key scene describes a child staring at a pool of sludge near factories and shanties, representing the landscape that fueled his mother's desire for him to study hard and avoid poverty. 4) The reviewer praises Ghosh

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    of 4

    Third World Quarterly

    Choosing to Inhabit the Real World


    The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh
    Review by: Anita Desai
    Third World Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Apr., 1989), pp. 167-169
    Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
    Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3992748 .
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    LITERA R Y FEA TURE RE VIE WS

    Choosing to inhabitthe real world

    Anita Desai*

    The Shadow Lines


    Amitav Ghosh
    London: Bloomsbury. 1988. 246pp. ?12.95hb

    Amitav Ghosh won much acclaim for his first novel, The Circle of Reason
    (1986). Although unabashedly derivative and almost plagiaristically shadowing
    Salman Rushdie's celebrated novels, Midnight's Children (1981) and Shame
    (1983), it had about it an exuberance of fantasy, a gusto of the imagination
    and many memorable and vivid passages that made one feel that here was a
    writer who had unfortunately allowed himself to go astray. Next, there
    appeared in Granta a piece that was obviously based on his own experiences as
    a student of anthropology researching in Egypt; he chose to be plainly realistic
    but showed a wit, humour and sophistication of style that were like the flash
    of an original and distinctive gift emerging from the troubled ocean of inter-
    nationalism, magical realism and literary borrowings.
    In his second novel, The Shadow Lines, Ghosh has abandoned that inter-
    nationally popular 'magical realism' and made the more modest, less ambitious
    choice of old-fashioned realistic narrative, with only a touch or two, at the
    end, of Rushdie's method of addressing the reader directly and weaving his
    own experiences into the fictional ones. It is by comparison with his first book
    a curiously flat, muted and quiet work but it has qualities that are not imitative
    and are entirely his own.
    The settings are Calcutta, London and Dhaka, the characters both Indian
    and English: much scope for international dazzle, but Ghosh eschews scene-
    painting and if he does mention the cotton-man of the Calcutta streets, the
    sweet seller of Dhaka or the coffee bars in London, it is because they belong
    to his story, and not for their effect. He does not have any interest in painting
    different worlds for us-on the contrary, he makes them so similar that one
    has scarcely any sense of passing from one culture over the border into another.
    Since the theme of his novel is that there are no borders, that lands and
    peoples would blend if it were not for history, the somewhat dull monochrome
    of his landscape has its reasons.
    The narrator's grandmother, originally from Dhaka when it was the capital

    * Anita Desai's novel, Baumgartner'sBombay (1988) was reviewed in Third World Quarterly 11(1)
    January 1989, pp 167-8.

    TWQ 11(2) April 1989/ISSN 0143-6597/89. $1.25 167

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    THIRD WORLD QUARTERLY

    of East Bengal, has been persuaded to revisit it now that it is the capital of
    East Pakistan.
    . .. She wantedto know whethershe would be able to see the bordersbetweenIndia
    from the plane. Whenmy fatherlaughedand said, why, did she reallythinkthe border
    was a long blackline with greenon one side and scarleton the other, like it was in a
    school atlas, she was not so much offended as puzzled ... 'But if there aren't any
    trenchesor anything,how are people to know?I mean, what's the difference,then?
    And if there'sno difference,both sides will be the same:it'll be just like it used to be
    before . .. Whatwas it all for then-Partition and the killingand everything-if there
    isn't somethingin between?'

    Her more sophisticated granddaughter, Ila, who flies regularly from one
    country to another, her father being a diplomat, and goes to international
    schools in various glamorous capitals of the world, sees differences in the
    lands but hardly those that matter; what she notices is that, in Cairo, 'the
    ladies is way on the other side of the departure lounge'. The narrator cannot
    comprehend such a blase attitude: for him the mere words 'Underground',
    'Holborn', 'Brick Lane' contain a sensual delight that he rolls upon his tongue
    like toffees or cigarette smoke. He has been schooled in the romance of other-
    ness by his older cousin, Tridib, a somewhat enigmatic figure who has travel-
    led everywhere and can talk learnedly of 'Mesopotamian stelae, East European
    jazz, the habits of arboreal apes, the plays of Garcia Lorca. . .' Unfortunately,
    the narrator fails to convey to the reader his compelling aura; we have simply
    to take his word for it since Tridib never quite comes to life. When he dies-a
    pointless, violent death that can be interpreted as a martyrdom or hushed up
    as an unfortunate mistake-he fades out of our minds rather like an old photo-
    graph in an album. The Price family in London, who hold such a fascination
    for the little Bengali boy in Calcutta, likewise suffer from a dampness that
    prevents them from catching fire in our imagination. Their fortunes are rather
    improbably linked to those of the Bengali family and Tridib's affair with the
    English girl, May, is so vaguely sketched that it hardly stands out as an event
    from the surrounding monochrome.
    Where Ghosh excels is in detecting and conveying those unspoken, unmen-
    tioned concepts on which societies are built and in which they show their
    uniqueness. His account of the joint family in Dhaka that is riven in two by
    the petty quarrelling and jealousies of the women who 'began to suspect each
    other of favouring their own children above the rest, of purloining the best
    little tid-bits of food from the common larder, and so on. . .' will be instantly
    recognisable to any Indian reader. One sees how accurate, how exact his un-
    derstanding of Indian society is in lines such as: 'Among the women I knew,
    like my mother and my relatives, there were none, no matter how secluded,
    who were free from that peculiar, manipulative worldliness which came from
    dealing with large families-a trait which seemed to grow in those women in
    direct proportion to the degree to which they were secluded from the world.'
    168

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    INDO-ANGLIAN JOURNEYS

    This extraordinary piece of 'inner knowledge' shows that it is not only to


    women writers one must turn for subtle insights into the family structure, the
    web of relationships, sticky and sweet, clinging and trapping.
    His intuitive understanding of this society goes deeper than such insights,
    however, and touches upon the roots of its being. The narrator (who seems
    more canny and worldly as a child than he does when he grows into an ingenu-
    ous youth) stands staring at a stagnant pool beside which factories and shanties
    cluster and watches women 'squatting at the edge of the pool, splashing with
    both hands to drive back the layer of sludge, scooping up the clear water
    underneath to scrub their babies and wash their clothes and cooking utensils'.
    Beyond that are some hillocks of 'some black and gravelly substance' on which
    small figures move, picking up rubble and dropping it into their sacks. 'They
    are perfectly camouflaged, like chameleons, because everything on them, their
    clothes, their faces, their skin, was the uniform matt black of the sludge'. When
    discovered, the child is snatched away with the cry 'Don't look there, it's dirty!'
    'I went willingly,' he says. 'I was already well-schooled in looking away, the
    jungle-craft of gentility,' but he knows that pool of sludge, that hill of rubble:
    was palpableeverywherein our house: I had grown up with it. It was the landscape
    that lent a note of hysteriato my mother'svoice when she drilledme for examinations;
    it was to these slopes she pointedwhen she told me that if I didn'tstudy hardI would
    end up there,that the only weaponpeople like us had was our brainsand if we didn't
    use them like claws to cling to what we'd got, that's wherewe'd end up, maroonedin
    that landscape... it was that landscapethat seethedbeneaththe polishedfloorsof our
    house;it was that sludgethat gave our genteeldecorumits fineedge of frenzy.
    Such insights, described in a prose that is intelligent and controlled-and
    embellished by many elegant accuracies like 'that comfortable lassitude which
    we call a sense of homecoming'-make one grateful that Ghosh has chosen to
    inhabit the real world rather than the artificial land of fantasy, and makes one
    watch his development as a novelist with high expectations.

    Passive disorientation: Indo-Anglian journeys

    ShahrukhHusain

    Sare Mare
    S K Walker
    London: Pandora Press. 1987. 173pp. ?3.95pb
    169

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