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2000 35: 35The Journal of Commonwealth LiteratureAnjali Roy

Microstoria: Indian Nationalism's ''Little Stories'' in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines

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‘‘Little Stories’’ in The Shadow Lines

Microstoria: Indian Nationalism’s‘‘Little Stories’’ in AmitavGhosh’s The Shadow Lines

Anjali RoyIndian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India

If imperialism is an ‘‘act of geographical violence through which virtuallyevery space in the world is explored, charted, and finally brought undercontrol’’, the primacy of the cartographic impulse in the anti-imperialistimagination is quite understandable. Cultures of resistance are seen to‘‘reclaim, rename and remap the land’’1 in their move towards nationalistself-assertion. Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines examines the relevanceof nationalism’s concern with geographical restoration in the context of anew borderless, global landscape.2 While acknowledging the contributionof nationalism in affirming the Indian people’s identity during the Indepen-dence struggle, Ghosh attempts to fill up the gaps in nationalist historiesby telling alternate revisionist stories, suppressed or elided by nationalism’sdominant discourse, even as he interrogates the validity of the nation,nationalism and nationalist identity in an era of global capitalism.

Following Benedict Anderson’s idea of ‘‘nations’’ as ‘‘imagined com-munities’’, post-colonial commentators have rigorously investigated thenation, along with other ‘‘narratives’’, during the last two decades.3 Thiscontestation is most directly addressed in the works of the Subaltern Studiesgroup and the historiographic fiction of Rushdie, Ghosh and others. InImaginary Homelands, Rushdie raises the fundamental question, ‘‘DoesIndia exist,’’4 which he unravels through the central metaphor of a nation’sbirth in Midnight’s Children.5

Rushdie emphasizes the ‘‘mythical’’ nature of the land calling it ‘‘acountry which would never exist except by the efforts of phenomenalcollective will’’. Like all myths, the reality of this one, too, is predicated onbelief, ‘‘a dream we all agreed to dream’’, ‘‘a mass fantasy shared in varyingdegrees by Bengali and Punjabi, Madrasi and Jat’’.5 Ghosh’s reiteration ofthe ‘‘invented’’ nature of places – ‘‘a place does not merely exist, [ . . .] it



36 Journal of Commonwealth Literature

has to be invented in one’s imagination’’ (p. 21) – echoes Ernest Gellner’sreading of nations almost verbatim.6

Anderson distinguishes modern states by their tendency to mark theirsovereignty over every square centimeter of a legally demarcated territoryand outlines the significance of the map in achieving this purpose. Linkingmaps and power, he shows how the European colonizer exploited the mapto legitimize the spread of his power by establishing the antiquity of tightlybound territorial units in the new cartographic discourse.7 Ghosh introducesthe novel’s cartographic theme through the growing boy’s natural fasci-nation for an old Bartholomew’s Atlas on which he learns to locate distantlands with his peripatetic uncle Tridib’s help. The boy’s obsessive interestin mapping histories compensates, in some inexplicable way, for his insu-lation in his hometown, Calcutta. His cousin Ila, as a senior diplomat’sdaughter, has the privilege of travelling across the world. Ghosh contraststhe centrifugal and centripetal movements at work in the native and themigrant psyche through the difference in the two characters’ approaches.As a teenager, the boy is astounded to learn that magic names on the mapwere to Ila: ‘‘a worldwide string of departure lounges, but not for thatreason, at all similar, but on the contrary, each of them strikingly different,distinctively individual, each with its Ladies hidden away in some yet moreunexpected corner of the hall, each with its own peculiarity’’ (p. 20). Withhis strong roots in middle-class Calcutta, from which he struggles to breakfree, he finds it difficult to understand the importance of the Ladies in Ila’slife as ‘‘the only fixed points in the shifting landscapes of her childhood’’(p. 20). At the same time, Ghosh stresses the mind’s capacity to transcendlocalities in order to inquire into the meaning of ghettoization and cosmo-politanism. Ila is, really, no less cloistered than her Calcutta-raised cousinliving the imaginary landscapes painted by Tridib’s vivid stories because‘‘the inventions she lived in moved with her, so that although she had livedin many places, she had never travelled at all’’ (p. 21). Ila, mocking at theconstructions of Tridib’s imagination as ‘‘fairylands’’, little realizes that ‘‘herpractical, bustling London was no less invented than mine [her cousin’s],neither more nor less true, only very far apart’’ (p. 21). Throughout thenovel, Ghosh juxtaposes Tridib’s ‘‘fairyland’’ picture of places with Ila’squotidian view to accentuate that ‘‘invented’’ places need not be ‘‘fabri-cated’’.8 His play on the real and the ‘‘invented’’, through people like Tridib,‘‘who could experience the world as concretely in their imaginations as she[Ila] did through her senses’’ (p. 30), cumulatively exposes the ‘‘invented’’nature of nations.

In contrast to Tridib, who sensitizes his young ward to the ‘‘invented’’nature of boundaries even as he initiates him into the mysteries of readingdots and markings on the atlas, his grandmother’s naive belief in the exist-ence of borders is shown to be consonant with the definition of the nation



‘‘Little Stories’’ in The Shadow Lines 37

as ‘‘limited’’.9 ‘‘[D]id she really think’’, her son teases her, ‘‘the border wasa long black line with green on one side and scarlet on the other, like itwas in a school atlas’’ (p. 151). Her consternation at being told that notrenches or strips of land mark the border articulates the central dilemmaof Indian nationalism and independence:

But if there aren’t any trenches or anything, how are people to know? Imean, where’s the difference then? And if there’s no difference both sideswill be the same, it’ll be just like it used to be before, when we used to catcha train in Dhaka and get off in Calcutta the next day without anybodystopping us. What was it all for then – partition and all the killing andeverything – if there isn’t something in between?’’ (p. 151)

The modern border, as her son explains, is political but real. Anderson hascalled attention to this aspect of international boundaries by delineatingtheir importance in ‘‘determining the limits of sovereign authority’’,10 eventhough they might be mere vertical interfaces with no horizontal extent. In‘‘The Riddle of Midnight: India August 1987’’, Rushdie recalls prenationalimaginings of community which conflict with the construction of the Indiannation:

After all, in all the thousands of years of Indian history, there never wassuch a creature as a united India. Nobody ever managed to rule the wholeplace, not the Mughals, not the British. And then, that midnight, the thingthat had never existed was suddenly ‘‘free’’. But what on earth was it? Onwhat common ground (if any) did it, does it, stand?11

Ghosh too unveils the process through which a collective consensus wasobtained to ‘‘invent’’ a new nation by following the personal history of animmigrant family uprooted by the partition of Bengal in 1947. CastingTha’mma, the narrator’s grandmother, in the role of historical witnessrecounting the microstoria of Indian independence, he traces, albeit affec-tionately, the limits of essentialist nationalism.12 Tha’mma, as part of thegeneration which agreed to ‘‘dream’’ a new nation, must perforce believein ‘‘the reality of nations and borders’’, beyond which ‘‘existed anotherreality’’, permitting only relationships of war and friendship ‘‘between thoseseparate realities’’(p. 219).13 Ghosh intermingles personal and public, thepeople and the state, by inserting this frail woman into the ‘‘extraordinaryhistory’’ of terrorist movement among the nationalists in Bengal. Tha’mma’sfirm conviction in the necessity for war and violence ‘‘to make a country’’(p. 78) becomes the cue for Ghosh’s investigation into the fascist strains inchauvinist nationalism whose disastrous results contain hard lessons forIndian nationalism.14 Though he concedes nationalism’s value in mobili-zing Indian resistance against British domination through its restoration of




community, Ghosh expresses his scepticism about romantic celebrationsof identity in the present context.

Ghosh configures the nation in the metaphor of the house. He finds ananalogue for drawing of national boundaries in a game of Houses eight-year-old Ila and her cousin play during one of her visits back to Calcutta.Ila spells out the rules of the game required to suspend disbelief. ‘‘ ‘Don’tyou understand ?’ ’’, she explains to the boy, ‘‘ ‘I’ve just rearranged thing alittle. If we pretend it’s a house, it’ll be a house’ ’’ (p. 70). Ghosh uncoversthe same strategy of ‘‘rearrangement’’ and ‘‘pretence’’ in the birth ofnations, which he extends to the very process of the construction of reality.As Tridib tells the young narrator, ‘‘ ‘everyone lives in a story [ . . .] becausestories are all there are to live in’ ’’ (p. 182). While Tha’mma reveals anawareness of this aspect of making up stories, ‘‘one begins to believe inone’s own story’’, she seems oddly oblivious to the ‘‘narrative’’ of nations.

Tha’mma’s idealistic subscription to the glorious task of nation-buildingshows how the rhetoric of unification and reconstruction in the Indianresistance concealed from her the grand narrative of Indian nationalism,which is clearly visible both to the pre-and post-independence generations.Tha’mma’s nonagenarian uncle registers his protest against the creation ofthe myth of a nation by stubbornly refusing to migrate:

I don’t believe in this India-Shindia. [ . . .] suppose they decide to drawanother line somewhere? What will you do then? Where will you move to[ . . .] As for me, I was born here and I’ll die here. (p. 215)

Rushdie reports a conversation with a ’47-born Bengali intellectual,Robi Ghosh, in 1987 about the idea of the nation and its location. Hissimple dismissal postulates a very basic definition:

‘‘To the devil with all that nationalism. I am an Indian because I am bornhere and I live here. So is everyone else of whom that is true. What’s theneed for any more definitions?’’15

Though this simple logic of equating nationality with one’s birthplace,violently refuted by the massive migrations during and after partition, isno longer available to the post-independence generation, Ghosh’s novelposits imaginings other than such nationalist self-definition.

Abena Busia’s 1993 Presidential Address to the African LiteratureAssociation, accentuating the imagined nature of present communities,created by the politics of passports and visas, engaged with several issuessuch as the contradiction of national territorial borders with previouslyimagined communities and the notions of identity and belonging.

We live in a world of imagined communities. We are also policed through aworld of fixed state borders. Accustomed as we are to the fluidity of our




own imaginations, we are also, increasingly, being accustomed to negotiatingborders, and using the one to serve the other.16

Busia concluded by establishing the inappropriateness of fixed andstable identities given the collusion of disparate worlds in the lives of thepost-colonial individual and underlined the need for developing ‘‘manifoldsenses of self and community’’ and to ‘‘transform the boundaries policingus, and go beyond them, to imagine new movements to create ourselvesanew’’.17 Ghosh’s novel explores the possibility of constituting identity asmultiply interpellated and non-stable in the post-national Indian context.

Tha’mma’s education in the fictiveness of the nationalist construct beginswith her preparations for her journey back to her birthplace, Dhaka. Herneat ordering of the world is disturbed when she realizes that, by filling inDhaka as her place of birth on her passport, ‘‘her place of birth had cometo be [ . . .] at odds with her nationality’’ (p. 152). Ghosh unravels thisparadox through a play on a peculiar use of the verb for coming in theBengali language which connotes both coming and going. Tha’mma makesan inadvertent slip by using it in describing her train journey to Dhaka inthe pre-partition days. Travelling to Dhaka was different in those days, shetells her family, because she could ‘‘come home to Dhaka whenever[she] wanted’’ (p. 152). The technicalities of passports and visas apprise herof the politics of borders, which, in the modern world, begin at the airport.Tha’mma’s present visit to Dhaka is portrayed as a homecoming as well.But she realizes that, post-partition, for immigrants like her to come homeis to arrive in a foreign country. Throughout the visit, Tha’mma’s searchfor the pre-partition Dhaka of her childhood and youth is projected as anostalgic return home. Despite her naturalization as an Indian citizen, herstrong loyalties and affiliations to the city of her birth, which surface duringthis return, permit Ghosh to investigate the conflicting claims of roots andbelonging, nations and boundaries in the Indian mind. Tha’mma’s attemptto identify herself as a native Dhakaian from the older parts of the city,who is contemptuous of the alien inhabitants of new residential localities,demonstrates her amnesia to her new Indian identity when confronted withthe more compelling claims of an older solidarity. The irony of her alien-ation in her own homeland comes home to her only through Tridib’s teasingreminder, ‘‘‘But you are a foreigner now, you’re as foreign here as May[ . . .]’’’ (p. 195). Her visit to her parental home, ironically figured as amarried daughter’s ‘‘going home as a widow’’ (p. 205) – where she emotion-ally declares to her estranged uncle, ‘‘‘We’ve come home at last’’’ (p. 212)– is used to explore this contradiction of local and national identities further.The paradox between home and abroad, going and coming, is interrogatedthrough Tha’mma’s repeated confusion of this distinction during her strangemission to her old home to bring her uncle ‘‘back where he belonged, to




her invented country’’ (p. 137). ‘‘Going Away’’ and ‘‘Coming Home’’, theheadings of the novel’s two sections, aptly sum up the post-colonial con-dition where, especially for the immigrant, ‘‘going away’’ and ‘‘cominghome’’ challenge essentialist notions of belonging and identity.

In configuring the partition, almost literally, in the wall constructed topartition the ancestral family house on Jindbehar Lane as a fratricidal war,Ghosh returns to a memory that is earlier than nation-ness. He conteststhe traditional conception of family as the domain of disinterested love andsolidarity in the undocumented chronicle of the family feud between twobrothers over a trivial matter. He critiques the nationalistic idiom ofbrotherhood through challenging the claims of kinship and consanguinityas illustrated in the independent course of a family feud preceding andoutliving the partition of Bengal.17 Jethamoshai, the lone member of thejoint family left behind, is seen defending his house against its rightfulclaimants, his own brother’s daughters, long after the partition even ashe displays complete indifference to its occupation by Muslim squatters.Tha’mma’s sudden surge of filial affection at the horrifying prospect of anold man abandoned by his kin to die among his enemies seems out of placeas she find her uncle in the care of a Muslim rickshawalla to whose childrenhe is a surrogate grandfather. Ghosh introduces a deliberate confusion inthe meaning of family and outsider, friend and foe, to investigate the basisof community formation and warns, as Busia did with a different focus,against creating ‘‘national myths which reduce the complexities of creatingcommunity to a fixed choice of fathers’’.19

The immigrant family’s visit to their ancestral home in their native placebecomes the site for Ghosh’s examination of the meaning of presumednational communities. The narrative reiterates Tha’mma’s estrangementfrom her home and kin to turn filial duty and nationalist sentiments upsidedown before they culminate in the horror of the climactic scene of Tridib’sdeath. The delayed account of Tridib’s death serves the purpose of providinga detailed inquiry into the meaning of essential nationalism and underlinesthe need for ‘‘transcending the ways in which meanings get fixed, lockedin moments of history which time nor social change, nor personal affiliationcan alter.’’20 Ghosh argues that only an awareness of the ‘‘invented’’ natureof communities can release individuals from the manipulations of politicalimaginings. Tha’mma remains imprisoned in the myth of nation until theend. Her response to Tridib’s death, donating her last few pieces of jewelleryto the war fund, shows how steeped she is in nationalist rhetoric.

Tridib, on the other hand, hints at possibilities of community formation,which might be more aptly termed post-nationalist. His cosmopolitanism isevident in the wealth of ‘‘abstruse information’’ he possesses on subjectsranging from Mesopotamian stellae to the plays of Garcia Lorca (p. 9). Weare told he was ‘‘happiest in neutral, impersonal places – coffee houses,




bars, street-corner addas – the sort of place where people come, talk andgo away without expecting to know each other any further’’ (p. 9). Hereveals a marked disdain for ‘‘creatures who sink to the bottom of the seaof heartbreak when they lose sight of the herd’’ (p. 18). In his correspon-dence with May, he expresses a desire ‘‘to meet as the completest ofstrangers – strangers-across-the-seas – all the more strangers because theyknew each other already . . . in a place without a past, without history, free;really free, two people coming together with the utter freedom of strangers’’(p. 144). His favourite story is that of ‘‘a man without a country, who fellin love with a woman across-the-seas’’ (p. 186), which is re-enacted in hisown encounter with May. Tridib is cast as the paradigmatic figure of migr-ancy and hybridity hinting at imaginings of the self other than the traditionalones.

Spinning yarns at neighbourhood addas being the favourite pastime ofthe young and the old in Calcutta, Ghosh conveniently falls on the tra-ditional manner of telling stories – although the story of Tristan and Iseultis not a Bengali one – to uncover the ‘‘narrative’’ of nations. All thecharacters in the novel tell stories simulating the manner and formulaicconstruction of oriental tales.

The novel begins with the story of Tridib’s journey to England whichhe tells his young nephew in instalments and he, in turn, tells the audiencein the neighbourhood ‘‘the truth as [he knows] it’’ (p. 12). While storiesopenly speak about their ‘‘invented’’ nature – they can be made up, havedifferent versions, or be given multiple endings – , the novel labours todisguise the artifice involved in writing fiction. Out of the several stories incirculation about Tridib, his adda friends choose the one that threatens theirself-esteem the least. Even at age eight the protagonist shows awareness ofthe fictive status of narratives. He ridicules Ila for crying ‘‘because of astupid story she’s thought up’’ (p. 182). Many years later, he tells hisgrandmother ‘‘the story Ila had told [him] and about the odd little endingthat May had added’’ (p. 77). This shows that stories can be created, alteredand ended at will. The novel’s attempt to encapsulate every event as aseparate story, often within another story, illustrates Tridib’s insight aboutstories ‘‘being there to live in, it was just a question of which one youchose’’ (p. 182). Ila’s story about Nick and Magda shows that it is not ‘‘justa story’’ but a most traumatic reality blurring the distinction between lifeand storytelling. Tridib alone realizes the narrative element in perception;‘‘we could not see without inventing what we saw’’ (p. 31).

Ghosh’s revisionist historiographic project incorporates elements fromthe premodern oral discourse of storytelling in opposition to the writtendocumentation favoured by western historiography and the novel to callattention to the ‘‘narrative’’ of history.21 He retells the stories of the minorpersonages and the unknown players of Indian nationalism to retrieve




those counter-narratives occluded or appropriated by official bourgeoisnationalisms through the circumscribed but close-up perspective of micro-history, which tends to focus on the local rather than the national. LouisGonzalez’s gendering microhistory in 1968 as either ‘‘matria history, suitablefor evoking that small, weak, feminine, sentimental world of the motherwhich revolves around the family and the village’’ or as ‘‘yin history, thetaoist term that recalls all that is ‘feminine, conservative, terrestrial, sweet,obscure and painful’’’22 might reflect a masculine bias but provides a clueto its method. Microhistory allows Ghosh to restore the oppositional narra-tive of subaltern militancy conveniently forgotten and appropriated by thegrand narrative of the ahimsa brand of middle-class nationalism.23 It alsohelps him answer Kumkum Sangari and Suresh Vaid’s call in RecastingWomen for a gendering of nationalism through another silenced voice, thatof the nation’s women represented by the grandmother. Ghosh createsmatria history through his reconstruction of the history of undivided Bengalby tracing the dynastic line of a middle-class Bengali immigrant family fromDhaka to Calcutta and, later, to London. By articulating the suppressedhistories of Indian nationalism in the nostalgic voice of displacement, ofthe grandmother telling her grandson ‘‘the story of growing up in Dhaka’’,Ghosh foregrounds the most violent phase of Indian nationalism againstgenteel domesticity and engages with the silences and amnesia of thedominant patriarchal nationalism. Ghosh’s matria history, revolving aroundthe family and the home, challenges the patriarchal thrust of dynastichistories of rural Bengal by constructing a matrilineal genealogy, beginningwith Tha’mma’s, not her husband’s, parental cognates, her sister and herimmediate family and her own children and grandchildren. Similarly, theconnections of the Price family with Calcutta are matrilineal, through MrsPrice’s father, Lionel Tresawsen. The novel’s entire machinery – its gentle,nostalgic tone, the use of the oral medium, the reliance on memory, thenon-linear time scheme – belongs to the spoken discourse of word-of-mouth genealogy rather than elite, written historiography. In this alternativewomanist account of the Indian national movement with its origin in Euro-pean nationalisms, males and national events are included only to the extentthat the public space impinges on the private space to call attention to theirdivision in the traditional construction of genders.

Ghosh finds in the spoken word, which relies on the dynamics ofmemory, a way of recapturing the foreclosures and absences of writtenrecords. These alternative accounts can be recovered only through indi-vidual and communal memory, in reminiscence and in rumour. The noveltranscribes speech meticulously retaining, as far as possible, the dynamicsof a typical speech situation. The characters reconstruct the past throughtelling, listening and remembering. The dialogue between the sixteen-year-old Ila and her cousin illustrates this well:




I tried to tell her [ . . .]I began to tell her [ . . .]I had been talking for a while when I noticed that she wasn’t listening tome [ . . .] (p. 20, emphasis added)

Stories, obviously, can only be told:

Ila [ . . .], who could tell us stories about smart girls and rich boys [ . . .].(p. 76, emphasis added)Many years later, . . . I found myself telling her the story Ila had told me.(p. 77, emphasis added)I rose guiltily [ . . .] angry with myself for having told her the story. (p. 77,emphasis added)What about the story you were telling me [ . . .]. (p. 82, emphasis added)

And, since they are never written down, stories rely on the dynamicsof memory. As a novel of memory, The Shadow Lines prefers memory’struth to recorded history to explore alternative means of documentingevents. The words ‘‘remembering’’ and ‘‘memory’’ punctuate the narrationof almost every story, establishing the loose time scheme of rememberedhistories:

I cannot remember when it happened any more than I can rememberwhen I first learnt to tell the time or tie my shoelaces [ . . .]. I remember tryingvery hard to imagine him back to my age [ . . .] and I could not rememberhim looking anything other than old. [ . . .] (p. 3, emphases added)

The novel re-creates the Calcutta of the ’fifties and ’sixties through thememory of a growing boy but also the Dhaka of the ’twenties through hisgrandmother’s memory. Other characters supplement knowledge of eventsin other parts of the world in a similar fashion: Tridib, Mayadebi, Robi,May. Unlike the protagonist, who resurrects his boyhood Calcutta entirelythrough fragments of memory, his and those of others, Ila displays anamnesia towards the past:

I could tell she didn’t remember.I asked her if she had any memory of the

stratagems [ . . .]. she did have a faint recollection, but she could not exactlysay she remembered.

But how could you forget? [ . . .] how do you remember. (pp. 19–20,emphases added)

Ghosh exploits personal reminiscence to replicate the workings ofmemory in ‘‘remembered’’ histories. Memory of public events in privatememory, which colours and distorts them in accordance with personal biasesand priorities, is used by Ghosh to call attention to the selective amnesiaof the recorded history of Indian nationalism to all that ran counter to itsnarrative. The narrator’s grandmother’s story about her classmate, who was




a member of one of the terrorist groups operating in Bengal, centres twosuch narratives which were either totally erased or elided to mere footnotesin the heroic epic of Indian nationalist history. Her womanist gaze tints thesemi-forgotten archives of subaltern militancy with the rosy vision of herown youthful idealism. The novel uses Tridib to contextualize these toacknowledge the contributions of militant nationalism in mobilizing resis-tance against British domination even though its idealism proves to bemisguided in hindsight. Against the official story of Indian nationalism runthe little stories of personal lives supplementing as well as giving the lie toofficial facts. Tha’mma’s ‘‘dreamy’’ recollection of the boy, whose closeshave with martyrdom is denied to her, captures the wistfulness of thenation’s women, left out of the heroic narrative of the nation.

Dipesh Chakroborty in ‘‘The Difference–Deferral of a Colonial Mod-ernity’’ links the two questions currently being debated – those of thenation and the women – by showing that the nationalist project of creating acitizen subject cannot be separated from the domestic. Nationalism imbibedimperialism’s civilizational critique and the idea of the divided spaces ofthe personal/domestic and the public/communal, which required it torecast the nation’s women in a domestic role that could service thenationalist cause.24 Tha’mma’s dream of standing by the side of her terroristclassmate, pistol in hand, is subversive of patristic cultures that makewomen’s participation in nationalistic struggles contingent on their subsu-ming of sexual difference. As a woman, the most she can hope for is anurturing role:

She would have been content to run errands for them, to cook their food,wash their clothes, anything. But, of course, they worked secretly: she didn’tknow how to get in touch with them, and even if she had it would havebeen twice as hard for her to get in, because she was a girl, a woman (p. 39)

Though later, her nurturing role is greatly superseded by the necessityof being the family breadwinner, Tha’mma must still participate in thecivilizing mission of nationalism in the domestic sphere through inculcatingthe highly revered ‘‘discipline’’ of the European home maintained througha regimented routine, regulating children’s eating habits, games, work andmanners. Deprived of direct heroic participation, Tha’mma attempts toembody the ‘‘new woman’’, constructed to aid nationalist goals. Sheexemplifies almost all the virtues detected by Chakroborty in the instructionmanuals, such as the question of building the body, valuing time and hardwork, the importance of games. Ghosh interrogates the gendering of theprivate and the public domains by Tha’mma’s frequent violations of theseboundaries. Her widowhood, liberating her from the private, domestic spacemarked by patriarchy, aids her natural, resistant femininity. Tha’mma’s isan untypical femininity: she does not particularly enjoy cooking; she seeks




to fulfill the role of the son of the family by volunteering to fetch Jethamo-shai; and her retirement does not bring her any feminine consolations.

Finally, Ghosh’s microscopic account of two events – the arrest ofTha’mma’s terrorist classmate and Tridib’s death – not only outlines thelocal thrust of his microhistoric project, but also engages with the occlusionsof nationalist historiography. The secrecy and silence shrouding these twoevents re-enacts the silence of the recorded history surrounding accountsinconsistent with dominant reconstructions:

Every word I write about those events of 1964 is the product of a strugglewith silence. It is a struggle I am destined to lose – have already lost – foreven after all these years, I do not know where within me, in which cornerof my world, this silence lies. All I know of it is what it is not. It is not, forexample, the silence of an imperfect memory. Nor is it a silence enforced bya ruthless state – nothing like that, no barbed wire, no check-points to tellme where its boundaries lie. I know nothing of this silence except that it liesoutside the reach of my intelligence, beyond words – that is why this silencemust win, must inevitably defeat me, because it is not a presence at all; it issimply a gap, a hole, an emptiness in which there are no words. (p. 218)

Both these events, erased or added as a postscript to the central narra-tive of nationalism and war, are preserved only in personal memory. Ghoshchallenges the dominant discourse of both imperialism and nationalism inbanishing local history to oblivion. Ila articulates true metropolitan disdainfor the periphery when she informs her shocked cousin that ‘‘nothing reallyimportant ever happens’’ where he is:

Well of course there are famines and riots and disaster, she said. But thoseare local things after all – not like revolutions or anti-fascist wars, nothingthat sets a political example to the world, nothing that’s reallyremembered.(p. 104)

But when a restaurant owner of Bangladeshi origin, Malik, dismissesthe 1964 riots as insignificant compared to the war, the centre/marginpattern is replicated in nationalist discourse. Ghosh focuses on this incidentto unmask the distortions and suppressions in nationalist histories, to tellthe untold stories. The perfunctory coverage of the event by English-language newspapers – a short report on the bottom of the back pagemixed with cricket news and speech coverage – calls attention to thecomplicity of the written discourse in the erasures of state versions. Aligningwars with nations and with documented history, he locates riots in thepeople preserved in personal memory, saying:

[ . . .] they were subject to a logic larger than themselves [governments], forthe madness of a riot is a pathological inversion, but also therefore areminder, of that indivisible sanity that binds people to each other indepen-dently of their governments. And that prior independent relationship is the




natural enemy of government, for it is in the logic of states that to exist atall they must claim the monopoly of all relationships between peoples. (p.230)

Riots recall those imaginings of community that precede the nation.Tridib’s death and the events that lead to it demonstrate that the memoryof these imaginings is far stronger than the newly-forged nations. WhileTha’mma’s identification with Dhaka as home figures the memory of alinguistically constructed unity, the repercussions of an event in Hazratbalin Dhaka assert the claims of a religious community. Ghosh’s close-up ofone single incident, the riots of 1964, erased in the national memory inmicrohistoric fashion, foregrounding similar erasures in nationalist dis-course and official histories, demonstrates the power of pre-nationalmemory. The silence of national history is reproduced in the secrecy, thegaps and the disjunctures punctuating the reconstruction of the event inthe narrator’s mind. Its marginalization in the written document, the news-paper, can only be countered through imperfect memory, by naturefragmentary. The resolution comes also through the map – as the grown-up protagonist returns to a long-forgotten atlas to understand the meaningof distance.

They had drawn their borders, believing in that pattern, in the enchantmentof lines, hoping perhaps that once they had etched their borders upon themap, the two bits of land would sail away from each other like the shiftingtectonic plates of prehistoric Gondwanaland.(p. 233)

He has an intimation of the workings of those imaginings of communitywhich recognizes no national borders. Even as the remoteness of Khulnafrom Hazratbal in no way weakens the claims of religious fraternity, theparallel riots in the twin cities of Dhaka and Calcutta expose the futility ofnational boundaries:

His atlas showed me, for example, that within the tidy ordering of Euclideanspace, Chiang Mai in Thailand was much nearer Calcutta than Delhi: thatChengdu in China is nearer than Srinagar is. Yet, I had never heard of thoseplaces until I drew my circle, and I cannot remember a time when I was soyoung that I had not heard of Delhi or Srinagar. It showed me that Hanoiand Chungking are nearer Khulna than Srinagar, and yet, did the people ofKhulna care at all about the fate of the mosques in Vietnam and SouthChina (a mere stone ’s throw away)? I doubted it. But in this other direction,it took no more than a week . . . (p. 232)

In the face of micronationalist factions threatening to tear the nationasunder, the ideological aspect of the rhetoric of unity and freedom to gaina tenuous consensus underlines the narrative status of the nation. Robi,




administering separatist movements in Punjab and Assam, pronounces thefinal word:

And then I think to myself, why don’t they draw thousand of little linesthrough the whole subcontinent and give every little place a new name? Whatwould it change? It’s a mirage. [ . . .] How can anyone divide a memory? (p.247)

By calling attention to the imagining of nation as a bounded territorialspace underlying the creation of the Indian nation, Ghosh opens out possi-bilities of other imaginings preceding or following the nationalist one.Partha Chatterjee’s investigation of modern historiography in ‘‘Claims onthe Past: The Genealogy of Modern Historiography in Bengal’’ also suggestsother imaginings of nation-ness that challenge the unitary history of theIndian nation. Tracing a disjuncture between the history of India andthe history of Bengal in the historical writings of the Bengali novelistBankim Chandra Chatterjee and others, Chatterjee speculates that therecould have been many such alternative histories for the different regionsof India that call for a confederal rather than national unity. Chatterjeeconcludes that ‘‘we do not yet have the wherewithal to write these otherhistories’’.25 The methods of microhistory used by Ghosh to retrieve thesuppressed stories of the partition of Bengal could provide the wherewithalfor writing these local histories.

NOTES1 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, London: Vintage, 1994, p. 271. Cf. Paul

Carter’s ‘‘Spatial History’’ where he suggests that the cultural place wherespatial history begins is ‘‘not in a particular year, nor in a particular place, butin the act of naming. For by the act of place-naming, space is transformedsymbolically into a place, that is, a space with a history’’. The Post-ColonialStudies Reader, eds. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, Londonand New York: Routledge, 1997, p. 377.

2 Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines, New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1988. Subsequentreferences are to this edition and are included in the text.

3 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin andSpread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1992.

4 Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–91, Delhi:Granta, 1991, p. 26.

5 Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, London: Picador, 1982, p. 112.6 ‘‘Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness; it invents

nations where they do not exist’’, Ernest Gellner quoted in Imagined Communi-ties, p. 6.

7 Anderson shows how the status of the map as a representation of somethingthat existed ‘‘there’’ changed to something that anticipated spatial reality, op.cit., p. 173. Consider Paul Carter’s definition of imperial history as one where‘‘the primary object is not to understand or to interpret: it is to legitimate’’,The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, p. 376.




8 While Gellner interprets ‘‘invent’’ as ‘‘to fabricate’’, Anderson looks upon the‘‘imagining’’ of nations as essentially creative. op. cit., p 19.

9 Anderson defines the nation as being imagined as ‘‘limited’’ because it musthave finite boundaries beyond which lie other nations. ibid., p. 19.

10 ibid., p. 172.11 In imposing a homogenous national culture, nationalism ignores preexisting

cultures even though it tries to define itself in the name of some putative folkculture, Imaginary Homelands, p. 27.

12 Ginsberg traces the various interpretations of microhistory as traditional history(Braudel), history of local events (Cobb), of a particular trade (Levi), of onesignificant event (Les Fleurs bleues), close-up history (Stewart), and history aspractised by Furet and Le Goff, which rejects Eurocentric perspectives and isrecommended by Aries for the study of pre-industrial societies. Ginsberg usedit for ‘‘the minute analysis of a circumscribed documentation, tied to a personwho was otherwise unknown’’ in The Cheese and the Worms (1976). CarloGinzberg, ‘‘Microhistory: Two or Three Things that I Know about It’’, CriticalInquiry (Autumn 1993), 10–33.

13 This corroborates Anderson’s thesis about earlier imaginings of community inwhich ‘‘borders were porous and indistinct, and sovereignties faded impercep-tibly into one another’’ (op. cit., p. 19) Also, his assertion that notwithstandingtheir imagined status, ‘‘nations inspire love, and often self-sacrificing love’’, op.cit., p. 141, is borne out by post-colonial nationalisms.

14 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A DerivativeDiscourse, Delhi: OUP, 1986, p. 2.

15 Imaginary Homelands, p 32. Although the idea of nation as a prepolitical entitytied to a homeland is increasingly being reexamined in the light of large scalemigration and displacement, both Jethamoshai and Robi Ghosh create a senseof belonging around a pre-political community integrated on the basis ofdescent, a shared tradition, and a common language. These imaginings conflictwith the one defined as the praxis of citizens exercising their civil rights.

16 Abena Busia, ALA Bulletin, 19, 3, (1993), 7.17 ibid., 12.18 Anderson brings out the contrast between the newness of the nation-state and

the hoariness of the states from which they are born. The prenational imaginingsthat conflict with the new national identity here are both linguistic and religious,which often overlap. Tha’mma’s prenational, linguistically defined identity as aBengali is at odds with her new Indian citizenship as she tries to recover herold sense of belonging in her birthplace. Indian Partition is invariably imagedas a fratricidal war, Imagined Communities, p 200.

19 Busia, op. cit., 12.20 ibid., 1321 Hayden White, ‘‘The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical

Theory’’, Metafiction, ed. Mark Currie, London: Longman, 1995, pp. 104–2122 Louis Gonzalez quoted in Ginzberg, op. cit., 1223 The distinction between ‘‘war of position’’ and ‘‘war of movement’’ is important

to understanding the two counter-tendencies – moderation and radical action –informing Indian nationalism. Chatterjee, op. cit., p 46

24 Dipesh Chakroborty, ‘‘The Difference-Deferral of a Colonial Modernity: PublicDebates on Domesticity in British Bengal’’, Subaltern Studies VIII: Essays inHonour of Ranajit Guha, eds. David Arnold and David Hardiman, Delhi: OUP,1994, p 55




25 Partha Chatterjee, ‘‘Claims on the Past: The Genealogy of Modern Histori-ography in Bengal’’, ibid., p. 48



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