139. Diksha Dhar

Abstract 139. Diksha Dhar

Visual dialogues and Virtual Landscapes: Reading Voices of Dissent in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines. Echoing in line with Benedict Anderson’s work Imagined Communities, that defines a nation as an “imagined political community that is imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign,”  an enormous range of discourse surrounding Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines looks at the porous nature of the ‘nation’ in it. Ruminating on this paradigm, this paper tries to argue that within this permeable nature of a nation, Ghosh draws up the identity of a people (here the Bengali) through the imagination of a place but this is drawn up through remembering pehaps shadowy but definite physical spaces of the city. In creating landscapes of a past and making them resonate along the present, the difference is highlighted of what was and what has come to be, but more importantly the atmosphere of memory fogging the present, seems to subtly smudge out the notions of the ‘real’ and the ‘imagined’. For example Thamma does not recognise her ‘old Dhaka’ through sign boards and custom checks at the Bangladesh airport but through a certain stall at the street side corner that has stayed on at the same place. Ghosh looks through ‘the border was a long black line with green on one side and scarlet on the other, like it was on the school atlas,’ (Ghosh, 151) into spaces that give people a tangibility of who they are. By looking at Ghosh’s use of urban iconography, I want to see how tangible spaces like lanes, streets, monuments, and the gaze of their shadow become central to formations of identity. Spaces, to me appear to be a co-text within the discourse of the plot. Pirouetting around various spaces (through words/ instances/ situations) in the text, memories create eddies in the plot question the direction itself. Very often the progression of the plot meanders when the narrator hits upon a place that brings him memories of another time. He himself claims to the act of remembering places and that he has learned the practice of imagining from his alter-ego Tridib, whose death triggers his need to tell the story: Every word I write about those events of 1964 is the product of a struggle with silence. It is a struggle I am destined to lose—have already lost—for even after all these years I do not know where within me, in which corner of my world, this silence lies. All I know of it is what it is not. It is not, for example, the silence of an imperfect memory. Nor is it a silence enforced by a ruthless state—nothing like that: no barbed wire, no check-points to tell me where its boundaries lie. (Ghosh, 213) My paper is an attempt to read these absences that the boy talks about. By reading absence I do not mean to pin upon the details of the incident. I mean to gauge modes of reading the imperfect memory through the perfection of places that he finds significant to tell. Places that he himself talks about as being a witness to events, incidents, histories. What Ghosh creates in the process, is not a slippery cosmopolitan identity as opposed the fixed nature of nation’s imagined one, but rather how rituals of identity lay hidden in the physical presence of places.