A Study of Two Female Characters,�Tha'mma and Ila in Amitav Ghosh’s�The Shadow Lines

BA Sem V English Honors

The Novel

• Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines (1988), is about an Indian family and an English family in the transitional days of 1960's covering three cities- Calcutta, London and Dhaka. Ghosh primarily focuses on the meaning of political freedom in the modern world and the force of nationalism.
• Ghosh even questions the idea of nationalism and national boundaries while at the same time granting its existence an its operation upon human minds.
• The novel focuses on nationalism, the Shadow Lines we draw between people and nations, which is both absurd illusion and a source of terrifying violence. Through the description of various political movements, with the introduction with some nationalists and with the description of the effect of such nationalist movements, the novelist sends the readers the question of the validity of such nationalism.

Relationship between the two women

• Ila is Tha’mma’s sister’s grandchild and she is narrator’s, Tha’mma’s grandson’s age.
• Her father, Jatin, Mayadebi’s elder son, is an economist in UN and travels a lot owing to his job.
• Ila has travelled a lot with her family, and she has been to various schools where she has always felt alienated and friendless.
• Her extensive travels had made her insensitive to the different places and cities. She fails to see anything interesting in them.
• Tha’mma is highly critical of Ila’s way of life.

Tha’mma’s love for freedom

• The fundamental nationalism also emerged from the character of the narrator's grandmother. She is a fundamental nationalist and wants freedom. She is very passionate for freedom. As we see that when she was young during the Swadeshi movement, she wanted to john it and could do anything for the country. She says, "I would have killed his. It was for our freedom." But the author shows that the so called nationalism has no value at all. Here Thamma fails to see that nationalism has destroyed her home and spilled her kin's blood. As she says, "we have to kill them, before they kill us." Till the end she fails to realize that national liberty in no war guarantees individual liberty.

Freedom for Ila

• For Ila, freedom means something radically different. When at the Grand Hotel she wants to dance and Roby protests saying

"you can do what you like in England. But here there are certain things you cannot do" (SL 88). Ila bursts out in rage and shouts: ‘‘Do you see now why I've chosen to live in London? Do you see? It's only because I want to be free” (SL 88).

• When the narrator asks, 'Free of what?' She replies: “Free of you! Free of your bloody culture and free of all of you” (SL 89). Then the narrator shouts back:

“You can never be free of me, I shouted through the open window. If I were to die tomorrow you would not be free of me. You cannot be free of me because I am within you. . .Just as you are within me” (SL 89).

Freedom for Ila

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The globe- trotting Ila’s diasporic dislocation frees her from any essential idea of home. She says while playing with the narrator, ‘We can choose to build a house wherever we like’ (SL 70). She does not possess the migrant sensibility struggling to find accommodation and alliterations, but a rootless, careless one. She neither repents the absence of the idea of home in her life, nor bothers to find any alternative. Time and again, the narrator says:

“I could not persuade her that place does not merely exist, that it has

• to be invented in one's imagination’’ (SL 21).

• Ila is a liberated modern woman who loves to talk about having promiscuous sex and wears clothing the narrator finds exotic (mostly jeans and t-shirts). Though the narrator loves her romantically throughout his childhood and into adulthood, Ila either doesn't realize or doesn't care.
• Ila dabbles in Trotskyism in London, and tells the narrator that nothing that happens in India is important on a global scale. She marries Nick Price and soon discovers that this was a mistake: he has several other girlfriends and refuses to give them up. Though she confides in the narrator and seeks comfort from him, she later insists that she made it up and Nick would never hurt her.

• The concept of freedom is completely different for Tha'mma and Ila. The two polar characters are obsessed with the idea of freedom. For Tha'mma, the dangerously nationalist, freedom means liberation of her nation from the colonizer British as well as defeat of their enemy i.e. Pakistan. She told Tridib about the terrorist movement amongst nationalists in Bengal in the first few decades of this century

‘‘about secret terrorist societies like Anushilan and Jugantor and all their offshoots, their clandestine networks, and the home-made bombs with which they tried to assassinate British official and policemen’’ (SL 37).

• She treasures the memory of her shy bearded class-mate who was a member of the terrorist movement amongst the nationalists in Bengal, how she worships Khudiram Bose and Bagha Jatin, the martyrs. To the narrator she expresses her secret will to do anything to be independent of the colony. She says,

"It was for our freedom: I would have done anything to be free” (SL 39).

• Even after partition, there begins a war between India and Pakistan in 1965 and she donates her gold chain, the last relic of her for her husband to the war fund. She says to the narrator that she parts with her cherished relic ‘For Your sake; for your freedom’ (SL 237).

If Tha’mma stands for extreme nationalism Ila represents, undoubtedly, pervert internationalism. Ila has traveled all over the world with her parents, too great an exposure to reality has erased the magic from her eyes, so that all those places on the maps which are to the narrator ‘ a set of magical talismans’ are for her merely familiar, commonplace, dull, significant only by virtue of the position of Ladies toilets in the airport lounges, which become for her the signs of stability, ‘the only fixed points in the shifting landscape of her childhood’(20).

• Whatever city she happened to be living is caught in her ever changing Yearbooks of the international schools which are full of photographs only.
• As if she never lived a place but:

“The places themselves went past her in

an illusory whirl of movement, like those studio screens in old films

which flash past the windows of speeding cars” (SL 23).

Story fabrication

we hear Tridib saying to the narrator:

“Everyone lives in a story, he says, my grandmother, my father, his father, Lenin, Einstein, and lots of other names I hadn’t heard of; they all lived in stories, because stories are all there are to live in, it was just a question of which one you chose. . . .”(SL 182).

• Stories serve for both 'Tha'mma and Ila an escape from the harsher realities of life. Both fabricate stories which appease their imagination.
• We see how 'Tha'mma invented stories about their 'upside down' house to make little Maya sleep. Her idea of name as well as her idea of Dhaka is a construct, preserved in her memory. Dhaka, for her, is a cluster of images: Cham-Chams, fish, Dhakai saree, so on.

Ila’s stories

Ila, of whom we are informed that, ‘for Ila the current was the real’ (SL 30) and once she herself claims that “I am free” (SL 32) too invents stories. While playing Houses, she makes stories, creates roles and urges the narrator to ‘pretend’. The Magda story is the sub-conscious reconstruction of her own experience of racial antagonism at London where Nick didn’t want to be seen with her.

Her sense of alienation and loneliness gets projected in her tales about her friends and boyfriend in the scrap book that she maintains are nothing but her fantasies woven into made up stories

Tha’mma’s stories:

Tha'mma’s personal life shrinks from the abundance of the ‘big house’ into a tiny little flat of South Calcutta, and her sense of self respect hinders herself to be lost in rhizome and that compels her to continue herself searching journey up to the last moment of her life.

Her prolonged story of the past and the continuous changes of the present historical facts made a perpetual clash in identifying herself. She made the major mistakes of her life knowingly or unknowingly out of this psychological trauma. Once she comments about Tridib that he wastes his time and wasted time stinks. Ironically it’s her time that rots and stinks.

Ila’s hatred for hypocrisy

Ila for one trait, she hates kitsch or hypocrisy. Though her nature is full of 'the signs of cosmopolitanism' she is not hypocrite like 'Tha'mma whose sentimental love for Jethamoshai disappears in the moment of survival. When at the Grand Hotel she offers Roby and the narrator to take beer Roby denies on the ground that he can do this in his college but not in the place where he lives and is known. At this she shouts at him ‘‘you are a little hypocrite’’ (SL 52). Of her moral judgment we are also given some information.

“She could understand and admire someone who never ate meat

on principle, but a person who was a vegetarian only at home was,

to her, the worst kind of hypocrite” (SL 82).

On this ground Ila is much more down to earth and admirable than Tha'mma whose sentimental ways fly away in the moment of crisis.

Similarities

A major point where 'Tha'mma and Ila are identifiable; on the point of their loving someone or being loved by. We know of 'Tha'mma's ideal hero ,the shy bearded classmate who has been executed for being a member of secret anti-Britain movement and how she regrets for not knowing him from earlier. We also notice her secret brooding over how handsome he was and so on. It’s romantic, as much as Ila's love for Nick.

Both indulge in story-making. (instances already quoted)

Both are reluctant to live in reality and like to remain in their worlds. Ila chooses her destiny in London away from the narrow mindedness of traditional Indian society. Tha’mma chooses her stiff-backed journey of a self-made woman, reluctant to depend upon her relatives.