Crossing boundaries, making home: Issues of belonging and migration in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines

Abstract

Amitav Ghosh's 1988 novel The Shadow Lines is concerned with issues of exile and migration, and a related critique of a particular construction of belonging.This notion of belonging pre‐supposes the conjoining of a specific space and a single culture in a unified nation state.The individual is inserted into this unity through birth and descent- he/she belongs if she/he is born on a culture's territory and descendant of its adherents. The text stages the negative consequences of this conception in the trajectories of two of its main characters.The narrator's grandmother is trapped between her birth in Dhaka, now capital of the Muslim Bangladesh, and her descent from Hindu ancestors. Forced to flee from her imaginary home, she becomes an eternal refugee, longing always to return to a home that never really existed. Ila, on the other hand, rejects a Hindu culture that limits her independence, and thus also rejects any form of belonging, becoming a dislocated nomad. Against these two forms of dislocation the narrator struggles to assert a different form of belonging and motion that constructs belonging out of the painful and powerless desire to come to know the other that produces a dialogic relation to difference.

Keywords:

• belonging
• cosmopolitanism
• culture‐space
• difference
• migration
• nation‐state

Notes

1 Mondal locates his analysis of the nation state within an, admittedly rather simplistic, understanding of ‘modernity’ as marked by cultural homogenization, European imperialism and totalizing modes of historical narrative, opposed to an equally simplistically conceived ‘post‐modernity ‘ that, he argues, seeks to deconstruct these totalizing tendencies. He then goes on to argue that ‘the means by which metropolitan postmodernism attempts to overcome the “metaphysic” of modernity is, in the “postcolonial” context, simply not viable because “identity politics” - the politics of difference - in a postcolonial society has far reaching implications that do not relate to metropolitan societies, which have experienced modernity on their own terms and possess secure democratic institutions, a strong civil society, and have undergone greater secularization’ (2003, 33). Survir Kaul equally argues that the novel ‘shows us, powerfully and movingly, an (Indian) nationalism discovering its limits, limits that are often the residue of those ineffable shadow‐lines, the boundaries of the subcontinent’ (1988, 284), again suggesting that the problematic of the nation‐state is specific to the subcontinent.

2 Sharmani Patricia Gabriel points to this conjoining of space and culture while pointing out this conception's usefulness to colonial conquest, when she argues that, ‘[t]he fixing of cultures through anthropological assertions of the impermeability of boundaries reinforces the idea that cultures are bounded, continuous and unchanging rather than the products of history. More significantly, it emphasizes the existence of fixed boundaries between ‘complex’ and ‘native’ races or cultures, which in the colonial era permitted (Western) anthropologists to write about ‘other’ cultures without the others reading, writing or talking back’ (2005, 41).

3 I am persuaded by Partha Chatterjee's attempt to understand the specific trajectory of nationalism in the subcontinent. Chatterjee argues that many Indians under British occupation understood their lives as divided between an ‘outer’ sphere of public administration, law, the economy etc where British superiority had to be accepted and imitated, and an ‘inner’ realm of the family, spirituality and tradition, where Indian ideas where superior. Nationalist ideas began to circulate first in this “inner” domain and nationalism's first struggle was to remove it from the influence of the coloniser. This provenance of nationalism might go some way towards explaining the mutual imbrication of nationalism and religion in the history of the independence struggle on the subcontinent (Chatterjee 1993). For an exploration of the gradual transformation of an Indian nationalism that saw India as culturally and ethnically plural into one that insisted more and more on India being Hindu, in the specific context of Bengal, see (Chatterji 1994).

4 A large number of studies have been published on the events of and preceding the Partition of the subcontinent. For some good summaries, see (Butalia 1998); (Kaul 2001); (Khilnani 1997); (Pandey 2001).

5 Joya Chatterji points to the impossibility of being a Partition refugee in her exploration of the different treatment meted out to Partition refugees in West Bengal from those in the Punjab. See (Chatterji 2007).

6 Spyra, in an interesting feminist critique of the novel, argues that Ila's move to London presents an attempt to ‘avoid containment within the symbolic meanings of the body by the mastering gaze of the masculine, [her] family, or community’ (2006, 7). She goes on to claim that Ila faces this containment in the narrative constructed by her cousin, the nameless narrator, ‘who can easily be exposed in his patriarchal bias’ (7). Her assertion hinges crucially on a (mis-)reading of the role played by imagination in the narrative, since she seems to equate imagination to fantasy, a self‐serving projection of the narrator's skewed vision on the people around him (15).

7 In a similar vein, Shaheem Black has argued, in attempting to resurrect an alternative understanding of cosmopolitanism through a reading of Ghosh's novel, that ‘[t]he wonderful paradox of imagining precisely defines the ideal version of cosmopolitanism that haunts Ghosh's pages. Conceptualizing others requires the leap beyond positivism that imagination connotes, but to offer more than a self‐serving fantasy of cultural difference, this practice of imagination demands a respect for the specificity and uniqueness of other lives’ (2006, 54). While I agree with the description of what imagining with precision might mean, I find the term ‘cosmopolitanism’ too loaded to prove useful in analysing Ghosh's narrative. At the same time, to use one's imagination with precision is not to assume, as A. N. Kaul claims, that ‘humanity, after all, is the same everywhere’, and thus to elide the ‘real’ differences between nations and cultures (2001, 301-302). Instead, this imagining begins with the acceptance that no amount of knowledge of overarching cultural differences will suffice in seeking to understand the particular difference of the particular individual one encounters.

8 The inverse mirroring between Britain and Germany in the lead‐up to and during the war is contrasted in the narrative with the legend of Tristan and Isolde, a legend narrated in a number of different spaces and times which speaks of a Europe before it was divided into nations (186).