Will the ‘Real Reader’ Please Stand Up? ‘Bookishness’ in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines

Abstract

This essay examines the palpable presence of books and the printed word in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988) and its entwinement with the brief, “bookish” life of the character Tridib, who plays a pivotal role in the narrative. It draws upon a phrase from Amitav Ghosh’s oeuvre–the “real reader”–to explore the idealized figure of the reader and storyteller embodied by Tridib. This idealized figure, as this essay highlights, has a history stretching back to the early days of print in colonial India, and important antecedents in the modern Bengali literary canon. It is also a figure constituted by material dimensions of book-ownership and by dominant ideologies on the cultural value of book-owning and reading. What does the tale of the “bookish” storyteller stand for in the postcolonial context, in a narrative that holds his readerly qualities in the highest esteem?

Keywords:

• Postcolonialism
• Amitav Ghosh
• reading
• the shadow lines
• bookishness
• book history

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Gourab Ghosh, Priyanka Basu, Shinjini Basu, Rukmini Chakraborty, and Farha Noor for their insights and support. The students of the Department of English, Gurudas College, and JDSOLA, NMIMS University, have helped me work through many of the questions addressed here.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This essay, despite its widespread use of the word ‘Bengali’, limits itself to modern-day West Bengal and its capital, Kolkata (Calcutta), as opposed to the broader Banglasphere including present-day Bangladesh.

2 ‘Bookishness’ has been reconsidered in contemporary scholarship in the light of the digital transformation of reading and books (Pressman 2009, 2020; Freedman 2009; Hildebrand-Schat et al. 2021). Norrick-Rühl and Towheed (2022), in an edited volume, consider the state of physical and digital bookshelves in the age of the Covid-19 pandemic, For millennia, personal bookshelves—personal libraries, really—have often been understood to be a bit of cultural shorthand for how a person projects their education, socioeconomic status, and taste. Bookshelves and, of course, the books on them are what twentieth-century philosopher Pierre Bourdieu might call the stuff of habitus. Fast forward to the COVID-19 pandemic and personal bookshelves became profoundly performative backdrops for virtual meetings and streamed interviews and, as Claire Battershill notes in her chapter, helped facilitate a then-emerging pandemic aesthetic. (viii)

3 ‘Bookishness’ is not without pejorative connotations in the modern Bengali literary canon. Sukumar Ray’s Pagla Dashu stories, for instance, lampoon various forms of ‘bookishness’ in characters like the ‘good boy’ Jagabandhu, ‘know-it-all’ Duliram or ‘detective’ Jagabandhu.

4 Mukherjee’s engagement with Tridib’s literary antecedents also mentions Satyajit Ray’s detective, Feluda, pointing to the similarities between the narrator and Topshe (the narrator of the Feluda tales) as boys “held spellbound by a somewhat older person’s encyclopedic knowledge of other lands and other civilizations” (Mukherjee 1995, 247). ‘Bookishness’ forms a significant component of Satyajit Ray’s body of work, evident in characters like the eponymous Feluda and his bibliophile uncle, Sidhu Jyatha, representing different readership models. Ray’s filmography includes bookworms like Apu in Pather Panchali (1955) and Aparajito (1956), and complex registers of ‘bookishness’ in films like Charulata (1964). Like The Shadow Lines, manuscripts and printed materials are a palpable presence in the Feluda stories, featuring rare manuscript collectors like Durgagati Sen in Hatyapuri (1979) or the travel narratives collector, Naresh Pakrashi in Baksho Rahashya (1973), who orchestrates the elaborate theft of the fictional 1917 manuscript of A Bengalee in lamaland by one Shumbhoo Churn Bose. Books and manuscripts, like other “[culturally] valuable antiques and heirlooms encompass a range of significances within the narrative space of the Feluda stories,” as Debalina Pal (2022, 136) notes, serving as “material signifiers of tradition, bearing testimony towards a more glorious, economically affluent and culturally venerated past.” While it is well beyond the scope of this essay to engage in a comparative analysis of ‘bookishness’ in The Shadow Lines and the Feluda stories, it is worth noting that much like Tridib’s removal from the postcolonial present, Feluda’s Calcutta stories scrupulously remove themselves from the churning in Calcutta’s streets to serve as “an intellectual and cultural correspondence between two genteel neighborhoods—one of [Feluda’s] own and the other of his clients—while deliberately managing to bypass the festering city in between” (Chowdhury 2015, 122).

5 Supriya Chaudhuri (2021, 88) describes growing up reading cheap Soviet editions abundant in the pavements of Ballygunge, and the books on her aunt’s bookshelf which included Tagore, the Bengali modernists, and translations of “Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Gorky, Pasternak, Akhmatova, Zweig, Hamsun, Mann, Sartre, Camus, Unamuno, Moravia, Montale, Françoise Sagan, Simone de Beauvoir, Vasko Popa, Miroslav Holub, Paul Celan, Borges.” The Soviet editions in Bengali and English continued to be widely available when this author was growing up in the 1990s.

6 In the words of Sumanta Banerjee, who was an employee in the 1960s, I remembered when I was growing up in the 1940s, my elders used to venerate its English editor Ian Stephens. During the devastating famine in Bengal in 1943, he alone dared to defy the then war time censorship imposed by the British colonial government. He published reports and photographs of starving and dying people on the streets of Calcutta. (5 March 2023, n.p.) Growing up in a small town in the 1990s, this author experienced The Statesman being upheld as essential for English-acquisition in their upwardly mobile, dominant caste Bengali household.

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Swati Moitra

Swati Moitra (M.Phil, Ph.D) is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English, at Gurudas College, University of Calcutta.