Haunting Narratives and The Legacy of Trauma in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines

Abstract

This article examines the trauma of communal violence as depicted in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988). The narrative centres on two traumatic episodes of catastrophic events that upend the lives of the anonymous narrator and his family: the Dhaka and Calcutta riots in late 1963 and early 1964 that erupted after the theft of the holy relic of Prophet Mohammed (a strand of his beard) from the Hazratbal mosque in Srinagar, in present-day Jammu and Kashmir. By situating these events within the historical spiral of violence that has scarred the Indian subcontinent since colonial imperialism, this article aims to offer a detailed analysis of the ways in which the testimony of these traumatic occurrences is articulated in the novel, and how the belated (Caruth, 1995; 1996; 1997) recognition of the invisible thread connecting the two episodes of violence can be traced to the historical, psychological and collective negotiation of overwhelming (Felman, Laub, 1992) trauma triggered by ethno-religious upheavals. Furthermore, it explores the daunting challenge of articulating such trauma without rupturing the delicate patterns of individual and communal consciousness, given the paucity of an adequate lexicon to capture its magnitude.