“Splashing with Both Hands:” Horror and Resilience in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines

Abstract

Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988) is read as a straightforward critique of postcoloniality in 20^th Century India. I focus on a moment that the narrator of The Shadow Lines slips up on what he calls the “jungle-craft of gentility” (98), a practice of looking away. It is when the child-narrator is on a veranda he is not supposed to be on that we encounter the only image of a slum in the novel. I posit that acknowledging the image of the slum that resides at the very center of the novel serves to de-center middle-class and cosmopolitan concerns with transnational identity. The image of the slum very clearly situates the middle-class narrative within its material context of postcolonial India. The image unsettles notions of stability by exposing the coexistence of vulgar levels of suffering in close proximity of comfort. What makes looking away untenable is the need to know where not to look. The disruptive image of the shantytown demonstrates how the self-defeating preoccupation with the horror of life in the slums forms the very basis of Indian middle-class life. A segregated realism that ignores the squalor of India is and has been an impossibility.