The Shadow Lines and Idea of Freedom

Partition Literature 1
Roushan Kumar Singh
Debashish Parashar
17/72846
22nd March 2020
The Idea of Freedom in The Shadow Lines
“I thought of how much they all wanted to be free; how they went mad wanting their
freedom; I began to wonder whether it was I that was mad because I was happy to be bound;
whether I was alone in knowing that I could not live without the clamor of the voices within
me.”
The Narrator, The Shadow Lines
Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines. Ghosh in his novel about partition and immigration explores
man’s eternal quest for freedom. He contrives the concept of freedom in The Shadow Lines
using historical memories and implies its various connotations in the modern world. The idea of
freedom and the quest to achieve that freedom is prevalent in the novel as it scrutinizes the
meaning of freedom for people in the contemporary world. The Shadow Lines entwines the idea
of freedom juxtaposing the past and the present, the private and the public, the social and the
political. Ghosh ingeniously weaves these ideas across the three generations and moving
between contrasting cultures, he provides a narrative which critically analyses freedom as an
essential and pervading force.

Ghosh primarily traverses the idea of freedom primarily through the contrasting ideologies held
by Tha'mma, the narrator's grandmother, and Ila, his cousin. For instance, When the narrator in
the novel asks his grandmother if she would have been willing to kill like that, she replies, “But I
would have prayed for strength, and God willing, yes, I would have killed him. It was for our
freedom, I would have done anything to be free” As a young woman, Tha'mma believed that
there was nothing more important than securing freedom from British rule, even telling her wide-
eyed grandson that she wanted to join the terrorists and assassinate British government officials
to meet those ends. Thus, the longing for freedom is universal and primitive among humans.
During the age of grandmother; geopolitical sovereignty was a major quest. However, in the
modern age, intellectual independence is under threat with colonizers casting their technological
nets for the third world mind.
Also, Tha'mma is considers Ila's desire for and idea of freedom as a direct attack on her own
beliefs about freedom. Ila, narrator’s cousin, has travelled widely and seen a lot of the world, and
she lives very decidedly in the present. She is more sophisticated than the narrator, even a bit
jaded, but is more than a little insecure in her personal relationship. She is in search of an
exclusive personal, social and moral freedom. “Do you see why I’ve chosen to live in London? It
is only because I want to be free. Free of your bloody culture and free of all of you”. Ila longed
for Liberalism, Liberty from shackles of culture and customs which delineate an individual
interest. Ila was free from Indian culture and apparently led an existing life abroad. This is
primarily because Ila seeks her freedom by escaping to England, where she can live as a modern
western woman: she can sleep with or flirt with men if she feels like it, she can travel around the
world, and most importantly, she's no longer under the control of her male relatives in India.
However, the novel questions if the "freedom" Ila finds by living in England is even real when it
describes the man she marries, Nick Price. Though Ila's marriage to Nick is supposed to free her
from obligations to her family and give her a platform of support, Nick admits mere months into
their marriage that he has several other girlfriends and no interest in giving them up. When Ila
refuses to leave her marriage because she loves Nick too much, she chooses to exist in a place
where her freedom is compromised. The narrator interprets this as an indication that in some
ways, Tha'mma was right: Ila can't be free. This is reinforced in a point that comes later in the
novel but earlier chronologically, when the narrator tells his dying grandmother that Ila lives in
England so that she can be free. Tha'mma calls Ila a whore and insists that Ila is in no way free—
as per Tha'mma's understanding, freedom can't be purchased in the form of a plane ticket,
especially since her own first and only plane ride to Dhaka resulted not only in an identity crisis,
but the loss of family. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan comments on these incidents in ‘The Division of
Experience in The Shadow Lines’, “Ila live in London because ‘she wanted to be free’, a
freedom that is really rootlessness. Both Ila and her great-aunt are unimaginative, un-free,
rootless: blind subjects of the subcontinent’s history.”
The political freedom makes this novel relevant in contemporary times. The meaning of political
freedom in the today’s world is claimed to be complex and which has no solution. In the novel
Ghosh tries to establish the fact that whenever different cultures and communities become
antagonistic to each other, it led to mass destruction. “It is this that sets apart the thousand
million people who inhabit the subcontinent from the rest of the world – not language not food,
not music – it is the special quality of loneliness that grows out of the fear of the war between
onself and one’s image in the mirror.” Using examples from history the author implies that such
antagonism is the haunting fear in contemporary India also. Ghosh realizes that with the
dominant tradition, complex cultural communal antagonism grows instead of providing a safer
ground for the survival of man.
As the narrator speaks to others about the meaning of freedom, from his uncle Robi to
May, he comes to understand though everyone desperately loves the idea freedom and wants it
for themselves, actually achieving true freedom is nearly impossible. Robi believes he'll never be
free of the traumatic memories of Tridib's death, which he witnessed firsthand; Ila chooses to
never free herself from her unhappy marriage that was supposed to free her; and the narrator
asserts that the Indian subcontinent will never truly be free from the spite and animosity caused
by British rule, long after Partition. With this, the novel suggests that freedom is an impossible
idea, and no one can ever be truly free, no matter how hard one might fight for it or attempt to
escape oppression.
In this way, the novel seeks to parse out the meanings of different kinds of freedom and
how one's perception of freedom influences their identity. Further, the novel also suggests that
the idea of freedom is enough to drive someone mad, even if freedom is ultimately unreachable.
The Shadow Lines is a representative work of Amitav Ghosh imbued with the postcolonial
ambience and atmosphere, tracing and dissecting the meaning of freedom, faith and nationalism.
The quest for freedom is never ending as Meenakshi Mukherjee points out in ‘Maps and Mirrors:
Co-ordinates of Meaning in The Shadow Lines’, “In The Shadow Lines there is a repeated
insistence on the freedom for each individual to be able to create his own stories in order to
prevent getting trapped into someone else’s construction of reality.”

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Partition Literature 1

Roushan Kumar Singh

22nd March 2020

The Idea of Freedom in The Shadow Lines

The Narrator, The Shadow Lines

between contrasting cultures, he provides a narrative which critically analyses freedom as an

essential and pervading force.

nets for the third world mind.

rootless: blind subjects of the subcontinent’s history.”

ground for the survival of man.

prevent getting trapped into someone else’s construction of reality.”

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