NOTE / AJANTA SIRCAR* Individualising History: The ‘Real’ Self in The Shadow Lines The so-called ‘new’ writing in English, comprising Salman Rushdie and the Stephnains, has met with a shower of accolades from various quarters within the country. Running through the valorisation of these novelists by the dominant Indo-Anglican critical tradition is the insistence that they manifest new and liberating forms of engagement with contemporary India. It is in this context that I wish to re-read Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines! to analyse the extent to which his novel, working within the realist mode, engages with questions of domination/subordination, resistance/hegemony, in a context in which asymmetrical power relations continue between metropolis and former colony. To do so, I will examine Ghosh’s representation of ‘India’ in the novel to evaluate the extent to which it accounts for the disruptive and contradictory socio-political pressures that mark the contemporary Indian metropolis. The most important reading of The Shadow Lines from such a perspective has been by P.K. Dutta, ‘Studies in Heterogeneity: A Reading of Two Recent Indo-Anglian Novels’? According to Dutta, by identifying cultural heterogeneity as an epistemological location, a novel such as The Shadow Lines ‘realises the possibility that the experience of overlapping heterogeneities itself can be counterposed to the violent sub-continental insistence on cultural purity and communal division’.3 This paper takes as its starting point the larger theoretical implications of Dutta's argument—that to effectively negotiate the mechanisms of power and control within which post-colonial identities are constituted, the post-colonial needs a history which can account for the diffusion and heterogeneity of origins rather than the idea of monolothic, ‘authentic’ cultural past. Such a liberating concept of the post-colonial ‘self’, moreover, is not something which exists outside discourse and therefore needs to be recovered. Rather, this ‘self has to be fashioned out of an understanding of the multiple socio- historical processes which shape contemporary Indian culture. * Department of English, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad. Social Scientist, Vol. 19, No. 12, December 199134 SOCIAL SCIENTIST ‘Culture’ as an autonomous realm of discourse emerged in Wester Europe in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. In an age of unprecedented socio-economic change, when England was transformed from a predominantly agrarian society to a predominantly industrial one within a short span of forty years or so, the Romantics proposed ‘culture’ as the realm which preserved the values of a mythical, organic, pre-industrial past.4 ‘Culture’ was now privileged as the seat of transcendental values such as Truth and Beauty to which imaginative literature provided direct access. This rarefied realm was, moreover, proposed as being, immediately available only to an elect minority endowed with the power of ‘creative intuition’ which enabled it to be spiritually integrated with the ‘Idea’ lying behind appearances. But, as Malini Bhattacharya argues, this was a new image of the literary artist and it evolved out of specific historical conditions: What seems to be ‘transcendence’ or an absence of any logical connection with the dominant trend in society, may still be explained by reference to the various contradictions that we find existing within the social fabric at a particular phase in history. . . [Literature] can be upheld as a symptom, at the cultural level, of the contradictions within the bourgeois social order.> It was at this historical moment that the idea of the ‘creative genius’ emerged. The reconciliation of the disruptive tendencies within society was then accomplished through the spiritual vision of the literary artist, in Art or Literature. Consequently, the ideological conflicts within society were to be resolved not in the material world but at the level of contemplation. The new idealist conceptions of ‘art'/‘literature’/‘culture’ significantly took shape in the face of nascent proletarian militancy. Simultaneously, the making of history was taken completely out of human hands and attributed to a mystic Providence. It was also at this historical moment that realism emerged as the dominant mode of writing in Western Europe. The connection between the class-character of the new concept of literature and the emergence of realism as the dominant mode of writing can be best established through an analysis of the realist conception of the ‘self. The ‘self presented by realism is that of a coherent, autonomous individual whose cogito is the locus of all meaning. The narrative logic of the realist novel is then structured towards the self-realisation of the autonomous individual. However, as J.M. Bernstein observes The ‘self which comes to self-recognition in the cogito is not the ‘self whose narrative we have been following; indeed it is not the kind of ‘self for whom self-knowledge and the question of identity could even be at issue. .. The universality of the cogito isNOTE 35 guaranteed by its ubiquity and anonymity—a transcendental self. This 'trancendental self’ is then placed in relation to History, God or Art which function as the ‘objective’ categories for its self-realisation. The most important ideological function of realist fiction, as Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey have argued, is the endless display of autonomous subjects who are the origins of their actions.” The focus of the realist novel, they suggest, then shifts to the opposition between the universal 'self and various essentialist ‘objective’ categories. Such a subject object opposition, they argue, performs the function of bourgeois ideology by displacing class-conflicts within society onto a socially autonomous realm in which they are then imaginatively resolved. Within the specific context of post-colonial India, the endorsement of the nineteenth-century West European definition of the ‘self’ further implies the reiteration of a discourse generated by the pressures of the West European metropolis. It cannot therefore produce a historically analytical and yet culturally specific definition of the contemporary Indian metropolis. In fact, as Partha Chatterjee has suggested, the endorsement of the West European bourgeois epistemology in the Indian context signifies the continuing relationship of dominance between metropolis and former colony & Having outlined the larger political implications of the production of essentialist identities in the contemporary Indian situation, I will now analyse the self-representations of some of the major characters in The Shadow Lines (the hero/narrator, his mentor Tridib, his cousin Ila and his grandmother Tha'mma) in order to see if they challenge these continuing unequal relations of power. I will use Stephen Greenblatt's concept of 'self-fashioning' to analyse the subjectivity produced through The Shadow Lines. Greenblatt's concept of self-fashioning enables us to consider literature ‘as a manifestation of the concrete behaviour of its particular author, as itself the expression of the codes by which behaviour is shaped, and as a reflection upon those codes’? The entire narrative of The Shadow Lines is constructed from the perspective of the hero/narrator. I wish to suggest that by ultimately shifting the focus of his narrative, through the narrator, from a materialist interpretation of the Indian nation to the relation of the transcendental ‘self' with the essentialist category of ‘sacrifice’ (extinction of self), Ghosh’s novel is perhaps unable to offer any radical redescription of the post-colonial situation. Tha'mma is undoubtedly the most important mother-figure in Ghosh's novel. The nationalist ideology, suggests Partha Chatterjee, was based on a selective appropriation of western modernity by a separation of culture into a series of distinct, mutually reinforcing dichotomous spheres—the material and the spiritual; the world and the home; the masculine and the feminine. On the question of the36 SOCIAL SCIENTIST social position of women, the nationalist ideology legitimised conservative social attitudes and patriarchal forms of authority.10 Writing about the nationalist ideology of ‘motherhood’ in particular, Jasodhara Bagchi has observed that it took away from women all real powers (such as economic independence or decision-making authority within the family) by creating a myth about their spiritual strength and power. As a married woman, Tha'mma internalizes the nationalist construction of the domesticated ‘Indian wife’. Once widowed, however, the narrator shows that Tha'mma challenges in significant ways the extremely passive role constructed for 'widowhood’ by the nationalist ideology. Tha'mma, who is educated, now decides to be economically independent. By doing so, she challenges the dominant stereotype of the ideal ‘Indian woman’ in two major ways. The first is on account of her having a Western education. Discussing the issue of Western education for women, Tanika Sarkar points out: Drain was not simply a matter of financial worry. It was repeatedly linked up with a more serious moral concern: that of corrupting the sources of indigenous life. .. . The woman and the peasant as ‘ideal’ patriotic figures, had to be particularly careful by insulating themselves against the pretensions of this false knowledge! The material consequence of this idealisation, Sarkar suggests, was that by proscribing access to higher education to lower-class men and to women as a group, the new avenues of employment opened by the colonial restructuring of the indigenous administrative system could be monopolised by the upper-class males. The second aspect of the dominant stereotype that Tha'mma challenges is by choosing to take up employment rather than accepting the financially dependent, domesticated role of the ideal ‘Indian woman’. The consequences of her economic independence, the narrator shows, is that Tha'mma holds a position of considerable real power within her family. For instance, in a context which justifies child-bearing and nurturing as the only legitimate social roles for women, Tha'mma is able to exert her choice regarding the number of children she will have (TSL, p. 129). Similarly, the narrator recalls that it was Tha'mma who defined the rigorous work ethic of their family rather than his father (TSL, p. 4). The consequence of such real powers is that unlike the ideal woman who is expected to constantly negate her ‘selfhood’ in the service of the controlling patriarchs, Tha'mma develops a tremendous sense of self-pride in her achievements. The narrator says, . .. she [Tha'mma] talked to me more than she did to anyone else. . .and I could guess a little. . . .of the wealth of pride it had earned her [to refuse her rich sister's help]' (TSL, p. 33). However, he inability to acknowledge this self-pride shows Tha'mma as interiorising the dominant stereotype of 'womanhood'. Hence, Tha'mma insists that sheNOTE 37 took up employment only as a ‘sacrifice’ for her son's career. It is also this sacrificial complex constructed around the stereotype of the ‘Indian woman’ which cannot permit Tha'mma to acknowledge the fact that the entire project of ‘rescuing’ her uncle, Jethamoshai, is essentially an act of self-indulgence on her part. The narrator reconstructs Tfha'mma's visit to her childhood home: My Grandmother starts because she has forgotten all about her uncle . . . she reminds herself that she has a serious duty to perform, that she hasn't come all this way merely to indulge her nostalgia—she hates nostalgia, . . . it is a waste of time. (TSL, p. 298) The notion of an autonomous ‘selfhood’ for women was viewed by the nationalist ideology as a degenerate form of self-indulgence, as being directly opposed to the ‘true’ feminine identity characterised by self- sacrifice and suffering.13 The Nehruvian ideals of austerity and nation-building were thus not gender-neutral categories but involved rigidly structured social divisions of labour. For men, making good use of their time involved as Tha'mma suggests, 'The business of fending for oneself in the world' (TSL, p. 14). Consequently, Tha'mma's dislike of both Tridib and her brother-in-law, Shaheb, stems from her conception that they are not able to maximise the prospects of their respective careers. For women, making good use of time involved primarily their being good enforcers of the patriarchal order. The defining norm here was the myth of the ‘sexual purity’ of women which condemned as dangerous and immoral the female sexuality that did not serve the patriarchy. Thus Tha'mma is violently repulsed by what she imagines to be Ila’s sexual promiscuity, seeing it as an immoral form of self-indulgence. The narrator, is, however, unable to see the underlying ideological connection between Tha'mma's rigorous work-ethic and her code of morality. He interprets her attitudes instead in terms of ahistorical values and says that she was ‘too passionate a person to find a real place. . . in [his] late-bourgeois world’. (TSL, p. 92) That Ghosh challenges the cultural essentialism reinforced by the nationalist ideology, as by Tha'mma, is evident through the narrator's reconstruction of the second major female character of the novel, Ila. Through Ila, Ghosh is able to problematise the conception of “Indianness’ in the post-diaspora period. The post-decolonisation era in India has witnessed large-scale emigrations to Western Europe. Consequently for people like Ma, ‘nationality’ and ‘ethnicity’ are problematic categories. Having been brought up in various metropolises, mainly London, Ila inhabits very different social roles from those of Tha'mma. She attempts to actively imitate the high- culture of Western Europe. Consequently, Ila finds the social roles38 SOCIAL SCIENTIST prescribed for the ‘Indian woman’ at Calcutta inadequate. The narrator recalls an episode at the Grand Hotel: Listen Ila, Robi [Ila's uncle] said, . . .girls don't behave like that here. What the fuck do you mean? She spat at him. I'll do what 1 bloody well want. . . Here there are certain things you cannot do. That's our culture; that how we live. (TSL, p. 88) However, the narrator suggests that Ila's mode of self-fashioning does not allow for any effective engagement with the problems of race and culture in the post-decolonisation era. It leads rather to a pathetic dependency on, and subjection to, the metropolitan culture, as represented in Ila's married life where her husband Nick used her primarily as a means of financial support and then as one among many other women with whom to have sexual relationships. Vivek Dhareshwar's analysis of V.S. Naipaul's novel is applicable here to Ila's self-fashioning as it also leads to a ‘double exclusion’.’4 While Ila actively dissociates herself from the community at Calcutta, the metropolis in turn rejects her. As the narrator suggests, even Ila's leftist sympathies become merely another means by which she attempts an illusory identification with the metropolis through the character of Allen Tresawsen (Nick's uncle). The narrator poignantly reconstructs Tla's positions as he learns the ‘truth’ about Ila's fabricated story of Nick rescuing her doll, Magda: I [the narrator] tried to think of Ma walking back from school alone through the lanes of West Hampstead. . . Ila who in Calcutta was surrounded by so many relatives and cars and servants that she would never have had to walk the length of the street. . . Ila walking alone because Nick Price was ashamed to be seen by his friends, walking home with an Indian. (TSL, p. 76) In contrast to Hla and Tha'mma, Tridib's mode of self-fashioning is presented by the narrator as the privileged position which can enable an effective engagement with the material situation within which post-colonial identities are constituted. Like Ila, Tridib's most dominant desire is also shown to be the effort to negate the entire network of his social relationships: He [Tridib] did not want to make friends with the people he was talking to, and that was perhaps why he was happiest in neutral impersonal places. . . (TSL, p. 9) Unlike Ila, however, the narrator says that Tridib's desire to negate his sociality arises not from the stereotypical colonial fantasy of being appropriated into the metropolis, but has to be read as an effort to challenge imposed modes of knowledge and rearticulate the post- colonial self:NOTE 39 I [the narrator] tried to tell Ila and Robi about the archaeological Tridib . . . The Tridib who said that we could not see without inventing what we saw, so at least we could try to do it properly. . .. He had said that we had to try because the alternative wasn't blankness—it only meant . .. we would never be free of other people's inventions. (TSL, p. 31) Tridib's perspective, the narrator suggests, can critique the dominant cultural stereotypes as it presents to the post-colonial subject a choice to re-narrate his/her ‘selfhood’ according to his/her desires: Everyone lives in a story, he [Tridib] says, my grandmother, Lenin, Einstein. . . they all lived in stories because stories are all there are to live in, it was just a question of which one you chose. (TSL, p. 182) The narrator here is unable to account for the critical limitation in Tridib's perspective—that the process of elaborating a new post- colonial identity involves social action rather than being merely a product of an individual choice made autonomously of society. The narrator further suggests that Tridib's perspective can challenge the dominant stereotypes as it permits one to imaginatively reconstruct times and places and thus enables one to historicise his/her context. Such a historicity generates avenues for the post-colonial subject, for instance the narrator, to resist the kind of dependency generated by a perspective such as Ila’s that only engages with the immediately physical present. The narrator's implication here is that Tridib's idea of identity formation can successfully challenge the uneven power-relations. He elaborates Tridib’s concept of ‘freedom’; {Tridib] did know. . . how he wanted to meet her [May] as a stranger ina ruin . .. He wanted them to meet ina place without a past without history, free, really free. (TSL, p. 114, emphasis added) Thus, ‘freedom' for Tridib involves a total negation of the social past. What is significant here is that ‘history' for Tridib is considered mogeneous and monolithic entity. Consequently for him, a re- ition of post-colonial identity involves not a re-evaluation of the biases of neo-nationalist historiography, but a negation of the situation in which the post-colonial finds himself/herself. For Tridib, therefore, the re-narration of the post-colonial context has finally to be done at the level of individual imagination. Tridib’s mode of self-fashioning is crucial in the text as the hero/narrator himself constantly attempts to ‘see’ through Tridib's eyes:40 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Tridib had given me [the narrator] worlds to travel in and he had given me eyes to see them with. She [Ila] who had been travelling around the world ever since she was a child could never understand what those hours in Tridib's room had meant to me, a boy who had never been more than a few hundred miles from Calcutta. (TSL, p. 20) Through the narrator's endorsement of Tridib’s perspective Ghosh seems to contest at one level the dominant ideology of the post-colonial metropolis which proposes the conscious ‘self to be the locus of all meaning. The narrator is presented instead, on numerous occasions, as actively trying to reconstruct the multiple determinants of his subjectivity: I sat on the. . . camp bed and looked around the cellar. Those empty corners filled with remembered forms, with the ghosts who had been handed down to me by time: the ghost of the nine- year-old Tridib, . . . the ghost of the eight-year-old Ila. They were all around me, we were together at last, . . the ghostliness was merely the absence of time and distance. . (TSL, p. 181, emphasis added) Such a perspective allows Ghosh to account for the social determinations of the 'self. The author can now address the question of subjective attitudes as they are overdetermined by a specific cultural context. Thus Ghosh explains the differences in Tha’mma’s and Tridib's attitudes to time, for example, as resulting from their differential class-positions. Tha'mma's obsessive work ethic which can only sanction a notion of time to be used in order to further one's career interests typifies an Indian petit bourgeois concern. In contrast, Tridib's tendency to ‘waste’ his time signifies a life of leisure and a class-position which is free of immediate economic pressures, that is, the traditional elite classes of India. The narrator recounts: For her [Tha'mma] time was like a toothbrush: it went mouldy if it wasn't used. . . .That was why I [the narrator] loved to listen to ‘Tridib: he never seemed to use his time, but his time didn't stink. (TSL, p.4) Similarly, the narrator is presented as being aware of the fact that the unreciprocated adoration that he has for Ila is largely a factor of the relation of dominance by which the cosmopolitan life-style available to an elite Indian minority operates on the life-styles available to the lower-middle and. other lower-classes (TSL, p. 112). The narrator is also conscious that his fascination for Tridib has largely to do with the fact that as a child, Tridib provided for him the only (imaginary) access to Ma's kind of lifestyle about which he could only fantasise in his little flat.NOTE 41 Such a perspective also enables Ghosh to address through the narrator the crucial question of attitudes and lifestyles as they are specifically related to the access to English education in present-day India. The narrator clearly suggests that English education, in the present situation, is actively implicated in sustaining the uneven socio- economic privileges between the ruling elite and the masses of the Indian population: It was that landscape [at Garia] that lent the note of hysteria to my mother's voice when she drilled me for my examinations. . . I [the narrator] knew perfectly well that all it would take was a couple of failed examination to put me. . . in permanent proximity to that blackness: that landscape was the quicksand that seethed beneath the polished floors of our house. (TSL, p. 134) The narrator is also able to account for the fact that English education in contemporary India is not only an index of class-position but is also related to the hankering after a particular metropolitan/cosmopolitan culture which results ultimately in stimulating the West European economy. The narrator recalls Tha'mma describing the patterns of consumption of this class: It's not just money. . . It's things: it’s all the things money can buy—fridges like the one Mr. Sen's son-in-law brought back from ‘America, . . . colour T.V. s and cars, caluculators and cameras. . . (TSL, p. 79) From such a position, Ila's efforts to mime the high-culture of Western Europe or the narrator's own fascination for Ila, may be read as resulting from the cultural imperialism perpetuated by English education in India. While on the one hand Ghosh seems to be contesting the Descartian notion of the autonomous ‘self’ as the origin of meaning, yet on the other, the narrator's emulation of Tridib's mode of self-fashioning leads the author to finally reinforce the ideology of bourgeois individualism. The narrator is presented as reflecting the preoccupation with a transcendent, private interpretation of significance. His ultimate goal is shown as being the attempt to achieve self-realisation in isolation, by discovering the transcendental meaning of Tridib's death: [Where there is no meaning, there is banality, and that is what this silence [of the Indian media regarding the 1964 riots of East Pakistan] consists in. (TSL, p. 218)..... So that is why I can only describe at second hand the manner of Tridib's death. I do not have the words to give it meaning. (TSL, p. 228)42 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Subsequently, the narrator realises the impossibility of achieving self- realisation: He gave himself up; it was a sacrifice. I [May] know I can't understand it. . . for any real sacrifice is a mystery. I [the narrator] was grateful for the glimpse she had given me of a final redemptive mystery. (TSL, p. 252) That the narrator's search is a direct result of his endorsement of Tridib's idea of ‘selfhood’ is evident: his unsuccessful search for a metaphysical significance echoes Tridib's own inability to understand the real meaning of the lives of Allen Tresawsen and his friends: Most of all he [Tridib] would despair because he could not imagine what it would be like to confront the most real of their realities {of imminent death] . . . The fact that they knew. What is the colour of that knowledge? Nobody knows . . . Because there are moments in time that are not knowable. (TSL, p. 68, first emphasis mine) Like Tridib, the final stability of the hero's ‘self’ also arises from his inability to comprehend Tridib's ‘sacrifice’. The narrator's search for a metaphysical ideal therefore finally results in the narrative shifting to the subject-object opposition by which realist fiction performs its ideological function. The focus of the narrative is, in the end, on the relation of the transcendental 'self' with the transhistorical category of ‘sacrifice’. The narrator's endorsement of Tridib's perspective also implies that his concept of re-articulating the post-colonial situation contributes to the reinforcing of the de-historicising, idealist bourgeois philosophy: [T]he sights that Tridib saw in his imagination were infinitely more precise that anything I [the narrator] would ever see. He said to me once that one could never know anything except through desire, real desire, . .. that carried one beyond the limits of one's mind to other times and places. . . to a place where there was no border between oneself and one's image in the mirror. (TSL, p. 29, emphasis added) Hence, the terms by which the author proposes to articulate a liberating, alternative model of history, ultimately show a complicity with the essentialisms of bourgeois philosophy. The narrator proposes to rewrite history through the ahistorical quality of ‘real desire’ which by enabling a kind of Keatsian negative capability will allow him to become imaginatively integrated with the object of introspection. The consequence of the narrator's endorsement of an empiricist- idealist philosophy is that contrary to his own assertions, there is anNOTE 43 underlying continuity between the positions endorsed by Ila and Tha'mma and his own perspective. The narrator recounts that Tha'mma has not been able to realize her ideal of ‘freedom; the middle-class dream of ‘the unity of nationhood and territory, of self- respect and national power. . . ' (TSL, p. 79). He also shows Ila's active efforts to be appropriated into the West European culture which continues to impinge on the post-colonial along an axis of power. As with them, his own desire to be free is also ultimately ineffectual. The narrator's recollection of Robi’s ideas of freedom may be read as describing his own position: Free. . . You know, if you look at the pictures on the front pages of the newspapers at home now—in Assam, .. . Punjab, Sri Lanka, Tripura—people shot by terrorists .. . and the army . . . you will find somewhere behind it all that single word, everyone's doing it to be free . .. why don't they draw thousands of little lines, through the whole subcontinent... ? What would it change? Its a mirage; the whole thing is a mirage. How can anyone divide a memory? (TSL, pp. 246-47, emphasis added) Freedom is itself rejected as being an illusory socio-political condition. What is significant is that like Tridib's concept of ‘history’, ‘memory’ for the narrator signifies a homogeneous, monolithic essence outside discourse. Consequently, any attempt at re-reading the selectivity of the dominant neo-nationalist historiography, as manifested in the Indian media-reports of the riots in East Pakistan, is categorically proscribed as 'madness’. The narrator considers the violence of various anti-establishment struggles as also finally being futile because of an original collective memory which is beyond re- interpretation. Thus, while he suggests that Tha'mma's conception of the ‘nation’ as a profound horizontal comradeship, ‘a pool of blood’ (TSL, p. 78); is inadequate, he himself also describes the complex and fragile material pressures which mark the subcontinent in terms of certain ahistorical values: It [the fear generated by the communal riots] is a fear that comes of the knowledge that normalcy is utterly contingent. . It is this that sets apart the thousand million people who inhabit the sub- continent from the rest of the world—not language, not food, not music—it is this special quality of loneliness that grows out of the fear of war between oneself and one’s image in the mirror. (TSL, p. 204, emphasis added) What therefore defines the contemporary Indian nation according to the narrator is a ‘special quality of joneliness'. Hence all the characters can be seen as articulating a similar underlying concept of ‘freedom’ as a Platonic Ideal which has to be individually and imaginatively realised. Using ‘freedom’ as one of the defining motifs44 SOCIAL SCIENTIST of the text, Ghosh's definition of ‘India’ seems to foreclose a materialist interpretation of the pressures which shape present-day India. The motif of ‘travelling’ in the text perhaps elucidates most clearly the author's implicit endorsement of the logocentric philosophy that prevents him from critical engaging with the material conditions of his culture. The two sections of the novel derive their titles from the two most crucial journey to England around which all other episodes are structured—Tridib’s journey to England in 1939 and Tha'mma, Tridib and Robi's journey to Dhaka in 1964. The narrator signifies, however, that Tha'mma’s journey is not to be understood merely in terms of physical movement: Every language assumes a centrality, a fixed and settled point to go to and away from and come back to, and my grandmother's fjourney] was not a coming or going at all [but] a journey that was a search for precisely that fixed point which permits the proper use of verbs of movement. (TSL, p. 153) The narrator indicates at one level here that the Absolute on which language is grounded is essentially one that has been ‘assumed’, that is, discursively constructed. Therefore, Tha'mma's logocentric search for a ‘pure’, homogencous national identity in the irrevocably fragmented post-partition context has to end disastrously with the death of Jethamoshai. The narrator implies that Tha'mma's illusory search results from her inadequate perception of the nature of politics in the post-colonial context. This perception is further shown as being reinforced by the Indian media as also by the conventional historiography, that is, a perception perpetuated by the dominant ideology which causes people to believe that distance is a corporeal substance: I [the narrator] had to remind myself that they [the people of India and Pakistan] were not to be blamed for believing that there was something admirable in moving violence to the borders. .. They had drawn their borders, believing. . . in the enchantment of lines, hoping. . .the two bits of land would sail away from each other like the shifting tectonic plates of the prehistoric Gondwanaland. What had they felt. .. when they discovered that they had created not a separation but... . . the irony that killed Tridib! The simple fact that there had never been a moment in the four-thousand-year-old history of that map, when the places we know as Dhaka and Calcutta were more closely bound to each other than after they had drawn their lines. . .When each city was the inverted image of the other, locked into irreversible symmetry by the line that was to set us free—our looking-glass border. (TSL, p. 233, emphasis added)NOTE 45 The narrator says that he too had earlier believed in these deceptive precepts. The implication is that by using Tridib’s concept of travelling, of ‘using [one's] imagination with precision’ (TSL, p. 124), ‘The narrator has been able to effectively represent the contemporary Indian situation. Hence he says that unlike Tha'mma or his father, he has realised that maps are mirages and that Dhaka and Calcutta are essentially mirror-images of each other. But as he himself acknowledges elsewhere, such a symmetry only exists in the event of a war (TSL, p. 233). Thus, he is unable to account for the very different socio-political conditions of the two nations and formulates instead a definition of India characterised by a ‘special quality of loneliness’. So, the narrator's own concept of 'travelling' also does not contribute to an accurate reconstruction of the material pressures which mark present-day India. By offering a contemplative interpretation of India, the narrator remains a subject to the ideology that fosters the illusion that individuals are world-makers. While I have a more detailed analysis elsewhere,!> what I hope to have established in my discussion is that Ghosh's self-representations are unable to register the many-layeredness of the cultural-historical formation of post-colonial India. The specific, complex and contradictory socio-economic conditions which shape class and gender identities in contemporary India are transformed in Ghosh's interpretation into certain universal values. This transformation performed by The Shadow Lines prevents it from offering a liberating and radical re-description of the post colonial context. I wish to thank Dr. Tejaswini Niranjana for her comments on earlier versions of this article. NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines, Ravi Dayal Publishers, Delhi, 1989. All subsequent references to this work, abbreviated as TSL, are indicated in the essay itself. PK. Dutta, ‘Studies in Heterogeneity: A Reading of Two Recent Indo-Anglian Novels’, Social Scientist,18 (3), March 1990, pp. 61-70. Ibid, p.70. For an extended discussion see Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, Oxford University Press, New York, 1973. Malini Bhattacharya, ‘Utilitarianism and the Concept of Authorial Autonomy in Early Nineteenth-Century England’, Economic and Political Weekly, 17(31), 31 July 1982, pp. 49-57. 6 JM. Bernstein, The Philosophy of the Novel: Luckacs, Marxism and the Dialectics of Form, Thompson Press, New Delhi, 1984, p. 180. 7. Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey, ‘On Literature as an Ideological Form’, in Untying The Text, edited by Robert Young, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1989, pp. 81-99. eon10, 11. 12, B. 14, 15, SOCIAL SCIENTIST Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1986, p. 11. Cited by Vivek Dhareshwar, 'Self-fa: ing, Colonial Habitus, and Double Exclusion: V.S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men’, in Criticism, Winter 1989, p. 77. Partha Chatterjee, 'The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question’, in Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, edited by Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, Kali for Women, New Delhi, 1989, pp. 232-52, Jasodhara Bagchi, ‘Representing Nationalism: Ideology of Motherhood in Colonial Bengal’, Economic and Political Weekly, 25 (42-43), 20 October 1990, pp. WS65-71. Tanika Sarkar, ‘Nationalist Iconography: Images of Women in Nineteenth- Century Bengali Literature’, Economic and Political Weekly, 22 (48), 21 November 1987, pp. 2011-14. Prabha Krishnan, ‘In the Idiom of Loss: Ideology of Motherhood in Television Serials’, Economic and Political Weekly, 25 (42-43),,20 October 1990, pp. WS103-15. Dhareshwar, op. cit,, p. 80. Ajanta Sircar, ‘Imaging Metropolitan Subjectivity: Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines,’ unpublished M.Phil. dissertation, English Department, University of Hyderabad, 1991.