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6. Shadows and Mysteries: Illusions of Imagined Communities in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines
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79 6 Shadows and Mysteries Illusions of Imagined Communities in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines CRYSTAL TAYLOR . . . fiction seeps quietly and continuously into reality, creating that remarkable confidence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations. —Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities IN IMAGINED COMMUNITIES, cultural historian Benedict Anderson explores “the affective bonds of nationalism” (64), illustrating the ways in which the eighteenth-century erosion of religious communities and collapse of political dynasties left people craving a sense of belonging that found expression in nationalistic affiliations, affiliations that also grew out of and in response to the rise of print-capitalism. Asserting that print culture performs political work, Anderson claims that novels and newspapers allow readers to envision themselves as part of a larger social and political group and thereby to experience the “deep, horizontal comradeship” (7) that such national fellowship offers. Implicit in Anderson’s conception of the nation and in his book as a whole is his sense that human societies function as cultural economies in which human beings hunger for purpose and long for fellowship; indeed, his definition of the nation as “an imagined political community” (6) illuminates this perception of emotional debt. Yet, if Anderson’s nations trade in the affective currency of “confidence of community” (36) on the ideological level, they trade in the affective currency of divisiveness on the level of lived experience, fostering a tenuous sense of fellowship inside a nation’s borders by intensifying animosity toward those people who live on the outside. Such tensions are articulated stirringly in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines. 80 CRYSTAL TAYLOR Published in 1988, approximately a year after heightened political and military tensions between India and Pakistan made a nuclear war between them seem imminent, Ghosh’s novel spans decades of the subcontinent’s history, exploring most searchingly the 1947 Partition of Bengal into Pakistan and India, and the riots that preceded the Indo-Pakistan War of 1965. As Ghosh’s unnamed, adult, Indian narrator probes the minutiae of his childhood memories in order to come to terms with his cousin’s slaughter by a crazed Pakistani mob, he marvels at what now, some fifteen years later, appears to him to be his own misguided faith “in the reality of nations and borders” (219). His recollections, tainted by decades of civil and political tumult between India and Pakistan and between both nations’ Hindu and Muslim populations, arouse his wariness of militant nationalism. When read in the light of Anderson’s formulations, Ghosh’s novel suggests that Anderson ’s version of nationalism cannot deliver on its affective promises, for it too often provokes the pursuit of warped standards of freedom and justice that are inimical to a satisfying sense of community. Furthermore, newspapers , Ghosh suggests, breed nothing but fear, ignorance, and hatred toward one’s neighbors, fostering an exclusionary rather than an inclusive nationalism that offers the merest illusion—the merest shadow—of the “deep, horizontal comradeship” (7) Anderson admires. Although The Shadow Lines offers no explicit definition of the nation, it, too, performs a measure of political work, for in allowing its characters to wrestle with their competing interpretations of nationalism, Ghosh’s novel reveals the inextricable ties that bind the inhabitants of the subcontinent and suggests that there can be no “community in anonymity” (Anderson 36) after all. In defining the nation as an “imagined political community” (Anderson 6) that is “both inherently limited and sovereign” (6), Anderson exposes both the violence and the exclusionary narrative inherent in the cultivation of the nation’s independence. “No nation images itself coterminous with mankind,” he explains, implying that those “finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations” (7) require policing. What is more, Anderson ’s emphasizing the nation’s sovereignty implies that citizens must die in order to achieve the freedom for which they long. Freedom is a vague term, and one that Anderson himself never defines explicitly, but his insistence that “nations dream of being free” and that the “gage and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state” (7) suggests that he refers here to one nation’s political and economic independence from its neighbors, to wit its ability to govern its citizens and to conduct itself without having to seek permission or approval from the officials of neighboring nations. Still more provocative is his elaboration of the fellowship citizens gain when they feel as though they belong to a nation. A nation “is imagined as a community,” he writes, “because...