Published in 1988, The Shadow Lines is a novel by award-winning Indian writer Amitav Ghosh. It recounts the story of the narrator's coming of age in Calcutta and the sweeping impact of political violence on his life.
The novel is told from a single point of view, but does not follow a straightforward chronology. Instead, the narrator captures the looseness of memories, leaping back and forth through time, following his recollections as they come to him. In doing so, he paints a vivid picture of his family and the events of his times, including the Swadeshi movement, the bombing of London in WWII, the Partition of India, and the communal riots of 1963-64 in Dhaka and Calcutta. He pays particular attention to his uncle Tridib, grandmother Th'amma, and cousin Ila. In addition, he shows their relationship with the Price family, in particular the romance between May Price and Tridib as well as Ila's marriage to Nick Price. He also portrays events in the life of Lionel Tresawsen, the Price family patriarch with whom Tridib lived as a child. He describes how Tridib's worldliness left a big impression on him at a young age and shaped his ideas about the parts of the world he hadn't seen. He writes about his painful, unrequited feelings for Ila. He depicts his grandmother as stubborn and set in her opinions about the world around them. Her decision to return to Dhaka in search of her uncle, and attempt to bring him home with them, brings about their violent encounter with a mob and causes Tridib's death. In the first section, the narrator provides individual portraits of the members of his family and their social circle, ending with Ila's realization that the narrator has been in love with her. In the second section, he shows the events leading up to the riots and Tridib's murder. The narrator encircles this main event, continually forestalling the climax of the story, while making it very clear that Tridib died. The novel ends with May recounting Tridib's death at the hands of a mob, as he attempted to save her.
In recognition of the novel, Ghosh received the 1989 Sahitya Akademi Award for English from India's National Academy of Letters. The novel explores many of the themes in Ghosh's other work including the reliability of memory, the scope of history, and the lingering impact of violence. Like many of his other novels, it examines these ideas in the context of actual historical events.
