Reviewed by Nyla Ali Khan Published in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines: A Critical Companion, Edited by Murari Prasad

1. Amitav Ghosh ' s
The Shadow Lines
A Critical Companion
Edited by
Murari Prasad
Pencraft International
New Delhi-110052

2. Published by A nurag Jain for
Pencraft International Acknowledgements
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website: www.pencraftintemational.com Literature and the authors for "Cosmopolitanism at Home: Amitav
Ghosh's The Shadow Lines", 41.3 (2006), 45-65, by Shameem Black,
and "Microstoria: Indian Nationalism's `Little Stories' in The Shadow
Lines", 35.2 (2000), 35-49, by Anjali Gera Roy.
The Johns Hopkins University Press, Purdue Research Foundation,
Copyright © Reserved with the Editor, Murari Prasad and the author for "The Process of Validation in Relation to Materiality
and Historical Reconstruction in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines",
in Modern Fiction studies, 39:1 (1993), 187-202, by Nivedita Bagchi.
Copyright © All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be Blackwell Publishing, Oxford and the author for "Postcolonial
reproduced in any form without the written permission of the Editor. Melancholy: An Examination of Sadness in Amitav Ghosh's The
Shadow Lines", in Orbis Litterarum, 59.2 (2004), 90-99, by Ian
Almond.
Taylor & Francis Ltd., Abingdon, and the author for "The
Literary Criticism
Heteroglossia of Home: Re-"routing" the Boundaries of National
Identity in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines", in the Journal of
Postcolonial W riting, 41.1 (2005),40-53, by Sharmani Patricia
Gabriel.
First Edition: 2008
ISBN 81-85753-89-X Writersink, Dhaka, and the author for "Enmeshed in Differences:
Amitav Ghosh's Fictional Location and The Shadow Lines" by Fakrul
Alam in Imperial Entanglements and Literature in English, 2007.
Laser typesetting by The Editor and the author for "Citizenship in a Transnational Age:
Mukesh Aggarwal Culture and Politics in Ghosh's The Shadow Lines", in The Journal of
WZ-526, Nangal Raya, New Delhi- 110046 Indian W riting in English 33.2 (2005): 42-52, by Nyla Ali Khan.
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3. 98
igaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian C. Gill.7laca:
Cornell UP, 1985.
. "The Looking Glass from the Other Side." This Sex W Y Fh Is Not
ne. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 9
JanM%amed , Abdul R. and David Lloyd, eds. The Nature ild Context of
6
ority Discourse. New York: Oxford UP, 1990.
Kristeva, ulia. "Motherhood According to Giovanni Bjnini." Desire in
Lang ge. Ed. Leon S. Roudiez. Trans. Thomas Go lf, Alice Jardine and
Citizenship in a Transnational Age:
Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 198 y237-270.
. Th risteva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. Ne ork: Columbia UP,
Culture and Politics in Ghosh's
1986. The Shadow Lines
MacLeod, A.G. lloquial Bengali Grammar. C utta: Baptist Mission P.,
1967.
Martin, Phyllis M. d Patrick O'Meara. A fri . Bloomington : Indiana UP, Nyla Ali K han
1986.
McCan, James. "Re nstructing the A can Past." Lecture. Boston
University: Boston all 1992. I think the difference between the history historians write and the
Munson, Patrick J. "Afri 's prehistoric ast." A frica. In Martin. 43-63. history fiction writers write is that fiction writers write about the
Ngugi wa Thiongo. Deco ising th ind. Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya, human history. It's about finding the human predicament
, it's about
1986. finding what happens to individuals , characters . I mean that's what
. Devil on the Cross. ns gugi wa Thiongo. London : Heinemann, fiction is ... Exploring both dimensions , whereas history,
the kind of
1987. history exploring the causes , causality, is of no interest to me . (Ghosh,
Nyrom, Richard F. India: A Cou Study. Washington: American University, "The Shadow Script" 30)
1986. Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines is an attempt to give voice to
Phillips, C. and Mary Dor n nwright, eds. The Partition of India.
London: George Alle and Un in, 1970.
the stony silences and exhume the unclaimed corpses in the catacombs
of "unhistorical historiography " ( Guha 1 ). Many aspects of the eras of
Ray, Sudhansu Kumar. a Ritual of the Bratas of Bengal. Calcutta:
Firma K.L. Mukh adhyay, 1911 the Partition of 1947 and the further partition of 1971 are repressed
Sackey, Edward. "Or Tradition and t African Novel." Modern Fiction into the political unconscious of the people of the Indian
Studies 37.3 ( 1): 387-407. subcontinent.In this novel , Ghosh not only presents the reader with a
ole. My , Literature and the A 'can W orld. New York: Cambridge political vision that questions the ethnolinguistic and cultural divides
976. created by the fiery resurgence of nationalist ideologies but also
yatr' hakravorty. In Other W o :Essays in Cultural Politics. interweaves that vision with the human story he delineates in the
Y : Methuen, 1987. novel . In other words, the author seeks to elaborate on the larger
/ Banglar Brata. Santiniketan: V wa Bharati UP, 1947.
A. politics of postcolonialism in affirming the identities of ordinary
ane. "`Indians': Textualism, Morali and the Problem of History." people and their cultural anchors.
e." W riting and Difference. Ed. Henry ouis Gates, Jr. Chicago: U
Ghosh has published novels that continue to gain critical acclaim
icago P, 1986, 59-77.
in their attempt to establish the processes of citizenship and diasporic
na. A System of Mythology and Tradi n. Trans. H.H. Wilson.
identity formation as one of perpetual struggle. His first novel, The
tta: Punthi Pustak, 1961. Circle of Reason ( 1986), won the Prix Medicis Etranger, one of
.J. Hindu Mythology: V edic and Puranic. ndon: Curzon, 1973.
France ' s most prestigious awards . Ghosh's second novel,
The Shadow
Lines, won the Sahitya Akademi award ,
India's most renowned literary
prize . According to Edward Hower of the
New Y ork Times Book
Review, Ghosh ' s second novel is " a stunning book -
amusing , sad, and

4. 100 Nyla A li Khan Culture and Politics in Ghosh 's `The Shadow Lines' 101
truly international in scope" (10). And Maria Couto endorses that persons, not persons composed in a single life's trajectory or around
verdict by declaring that, " in The Shadow Lines, Ghosh has found his an idea or a theme; but there in the way neighbours are, friends are, the
own distinctive voice - polished and profound" (1212). Since then, he people we work with are" (143). By confronting burning social and
has published In A n A ntique Land (1993), The Calcutta Chromosome political issues of their times created by transnational cultural,
(1995), and The Glass Palace (2001).The ability of Ghosh's texts to political, and economic flows, these transnational writers deploy their
draw on various cultural traditions, along with his own diasporic sensibilities, one Western and one homegrown, to engage in a dialogic
subjectivity as an Indian of Burmese origin who spent time as a child relationship with society and to overcome restraints that deradicalize
in Bangladesh, Iran and Sri Lanka, has done his writing in Egypt, and the literary works of the "Third World." Ghosh remains engaged with
now does it in the US, corresponds well with the subjects of emigration, his cultural and historical past throughout the novel by rejecting the
exile, and cultural displacement addressed in his work. His diasporic process ofhistoricizing the imperial past in favour of personal memory
subjectivity and the subject matter of his fiction have led many critics and imagination.
to see him as a blossoming postcolonial writer. Ghosh's work is a I argue that although Ghosh's novel does take a rather limited and
crucial component of what Western literary studies has today classified restrictive view of nationalism by portraying the concept of the nation
as "Postcolonial Literature." as an invention that breeds heinous crimes and relentless violence,
In The Shadow Lines, I argue that Ghosh interrogates the Ghosh does not portray his characters as existential individuals
authenticity of colonial and nationalist historiography by, on the one pursuing spiritual journeys in order to find their personal epiphanies.
hand, emphasizing the fictions that people create in their lives, and, on On the contrary, he treats his characters as individuals moulded and
the other, recording the vivid and verifiable details of individual confronted by their cultural and socio-political environment. Ghosh's
memories that do not necessarily correspond with the documented characters encounter a new world, a new cultural paradigm while
version of history. As the narrator says, "stories are all there are to live trying to preserve their own recognizable forms of identity. His agenda
in, it was just a question of which one you chose" (15). This finding is to threaten the safely-guarded domain of privilege and power by
enables the narrator to come to grips with the "deterritorialization of demanding equality for human beings of all races, religions, cultures,
culture" (Appadorai 10), the way in which the affinity between the and ethnicities . Ghosh' s stance raises some interesting issues
: What is
members of a community is sustained despite geographical divides his position vis-a-vis the volatile political situation in the Indian
that might separate them as citizens of different countries . It is only subcontinent? Does the novel suggest a viable alternative to the terrors
as an adult historian that the narrator is able to integrate fragments of of nationalism? Does it deal with the complexities of universalism?
his memory into a composite whole. He articulates his journey down The author creates a realm that melds pre-Independence India,
memory lane for the reader: it is "sitting in the air-conditioned calm of Britain in the Second World War, and post-Independence India.
an exclusive library" that he begins his strangest journey: "a voyage Deploying this realm as one of intermingling cultural and political
into a land outside space, an expanse without distances; a kind of paradigms and ideologies as well as of overlapping geographical
looking glass event" (224). divides, Ghosh undertakes the task of establishing the futility of all
As works like Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines, Salman sorts of barriers, or "Shadow Lines." As one of the Subaltern Studies
Rushdie's The Satanic V erses, and Anita Desai's In Custody show, the scholars, Shail Mayaram, reminds us, during the Partition of India
Indian novel in English is an exploration of the historical various state authorities rigidified borders and boundaries that were
transformations of community life: "Instead of drawing Jamesian once flexible, and people were coerced to opt for one nation or the
`portraits' of sensitive individuals, this type of novel attempts to other, India or Pakistan, or one religious identity or the other, Hindu
project a vision of the individual under the community, the individual or Muslim. And in many cases the choice was imposed on them (128).
under the sway of larger movements of history" (Mukherjee 24). There are other novels in Indo-English fiction that belong to the
Interestingly enough, the conventions that Raymond Williams would Partition genre : Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan
(1956), Manohar
like to see the English novel subscribe to are manifested in the novels Malgonkar's A Bend in the Ganges
(1965), Raj Gill's The Rape
of writers like Rushdie, Naipaul, Desai, and Ghosh: "Not selected (1974), Balchandra Rajan 's The Dark Dancer
(1970), and Bapsi

5. Culture and Politics in Ghosh 's `The Shadow Lines' 103
102 Nyla A li Khan
the mirror". The image in the mirror is a poignant reference to that
Sidhwa 's Ice-Candy- Man (1988). The Shadow Lines , however, is
especially notable because it delineates the agonies and ruptures of segment of the population that has either fled or been made to flee to
the newly created nation-state of Pakistan. The novel begins with a
that period in such poignant detail . It also underlines the challenges of
passage about the happenings in colonial India: "In 1939, thirteen
cultural dislocations and ambiguous citizenship , and highlights the
years before I was born, my father's aunt, Mayadebi, went to England
illusions of militant nationalisms.
with her husband and her son, Tridib" (3). The plot begins in the year
The unnamed narrator ' s nationalist grandmother , Tha'mma,
articulates an unambiguous understanding of the central role of 1939 during the chaos of the Second World War and ends in 1964 with
the political upheaval caused by the outbreak of communal riots in
violence in the making of nations in The Shadow Lines when she talks
about the creation of Britain: India and Pakistan.
The story revolves around Tridib, who is taken to England by his
It took those people a long time to build that country; hundreds of parents in 1939, at the age of eight, and then in 1964 dies a victim of
years, years and years of war and bloodshed. They know they're a communal frenzy in Dhaka. As the opening sentence indicates, the
nation because they've drawn their borders with blood. Hasn't Maya beginning of the narrative takes place thirteen years before the
told you how regimental flags hang in all their cathedrals and how all narrator's birth, and thus his knowledge of the ravages of the Second
their churches are lined with memorials to men who died in wars, all World War comes to him through Tridib 's recapitulations . The details
around the world? War is their religion. That's what it takes to make a of Tridib's death are given to him years later by Tridib's brother, Roby,
country. Once that happens people forget they were this or that, Muslim and his girlfriend, May Price. Price was a witness to the inexplicable
or Hindu, Bengali or Punjabi: they become a family born of the same frenzy and violence that resulted in his death. This horrific occurrence
pool of blood. That is what you have to achieve for India, don't you is linked with the catastrophic political events in England and on the
see? (77-78) Indian subcontinent that the narrator attempts to understand cohesively.
The narrative is a search "for the elusive formal and causal logic that
And yet, as Ghosh shows, the nation is rendered all the more will allow the narrator's autobiography (and equally the national
threatening when the war that leads to its construction is internecine biography that is interwoven with it in the novel) to cohere, to make
and does not bind Muslim to Hindu or Bengali to Kashmiri but rather sense " (Kaul, "Separation Anxiety" 42). Thus two instances of the
sunders Bengali from Bengali, Kashmiri from Kashmiri. Such an devastating force of the fervour of nationalism in 1939 and 1964 mark
irregular war polarizes these ethnic groups into Hindus and Muslims the narrator's growth from childhood to adulthood.
who are required to disaffirm their cultural, linguistic, and social Through Tridib and his niece, Ila, and their relationship with the
unities. As one of the characters in Ghosh's novel wonders, "And then Price family, the narrative captures the past by describing a London
I think to myself why don't they draw thousand of little lines through rent apart by WW II and then bounds back to the present by telling of
the whole subcontinent and give every little place a new name? What a time when the narrator is himself a student in London. Additionally,
would it change? It's a mirage ; the whole thing is a mirage. How can through the narrator's grandmother, Tha'mma, with her East Bengali
anyone divide a memory? (247). background and memories of her childhood days in `Dhaka, the
Ghosh's novel narrates the story of three generations of the narrative takes the reader back in time to the era prior to the Partition,
unnamed narrator's family, spread over Dhaka, Calcutta, and London. and through her fateful return to her original home in search of her
The narrative begins in colonial India and concludes just after the uncle, Jethamoshai, it makes the reader aware of the calamitous
creation of East Pakistan in the '60s. The story highlights private and consequences of the Partition. The political and social upheaval that
public events and their significance as they bring the characters into followed upon the creation of the nation-states of India and Pakistan
relief. The Shadow Lines describes a period that goes back to colonial in 1947 has left legacies that continue to haunt the two countries.' The
India, prior to the birth of the narrator. A cousin of the narrator's Partition enabled the thunderous forces of violence and displacement
father, Tridib, has witnessed the gruesome Partition of India and the to tear the preexisting cultural and social fabric so systematically that
corollary creation of Pakistan in 1947.1 He, therefore, hankers after a the process of repair hasn't even begun.
place "where there was no border between oneself and one's image in

6. 104 Nyla A ll Khan Culture and Politics in Ghosh 's `The Shadow Lines' 105
I would argue that although the "Third World" intelligentsia Muslims in East Pakistan giving shelter to Hindus, often at the cost of
unceasingly complains about the manipulations and shortsightedness their own lives, and equally in India of Hindus sheltering Muslims"
of the British imperial cartographers and administrators, the onus of (229-30). Such people demonstrate the "indivisible sanity that binds
the calamity engendered on 14 and 15 August 1947 does not lie people to each other independently . . . for it is in the logic of states
entirely on the colonial power . The failed negotiations between that to exist at all they must claim the monopoly of all relationships
"Indian" and "Pakistani" nationalists who belonged to the Congress between peoples" (230). Since these two nations were founded on the
and the Muslim League, the blustering of those nationalists and the ineradicable idea of religious difference, the religious agendas of
national jingoism it stimulated, and the unquenchable hatreds on both fundamentalist groups now loom large in the Indian subcontinent.
sides contributed to the brutal events of 1947. In the words of historian In addition, "official" accounts of the Partition discount narratives
Uma Kaura, "the mistake made by the Congress leadership, the that do not contribute to the deepening of the breach caused by the
frustration and bitterness of the League leadership, and the defensive fracture lines of nationalist collective subjectivity and religious
diplomacy of a British Viceroy cumulatively resulted in the demand identity.3 This exclusionary tactic deployed by nationalist
for partition" (170). As Kaura points out, ever since the inception of historiography, according to which the populace of the Indian
pro-independence political activity in pre-Partition India in 1885, the subcontinent was a passive recipient of the repercussions of the
Muslim leadership insisted on the necessity for a distinct Muslim nationalist struggle valiantly fought by the Western-educated elite, is
identity (164). Kaura also underlines the inability of the nationalist articulately contextualised by Ranaj it Guha in the inaugural statement
leadership to accommodate Muslim aspirations because its primary in the volume Subaltern Studies 1: " What is clearly left out of the un-
concern was to ingratiate itself with the militant Hindu faction, which historical historiography is the politics of the people" ( Guha 1).
could have created unmendable dissensions within the Congress (165). I observe that the Partition is a vivid manifestation of the claim
The borders that were brutally carved out by the authorities at the that postcolonial nations are founded in a bloody severance of the
time of Partition have led to further brutality in the form of those riots, umbilical cord, one that fortifies borders between nation-states with
pogroms, and organized historical distortions and cultural depletions irrational and remorseless violence. The discourse of nationalism,
with which the history of independent India is replete. Hindu as well however, affects to make sense of the absurd loss of lives that occurs.
as Muslim leaders, according to Kaul bear responsibility for those I see Tridib as being painfully aware of the unfathomable depth of
events: the human mind that requires the individual to pursue an infinite and
interminable search for the knowledge that would disrupt all-
There are stories that have been told so often, including by historians, encompassing religious narratives and demystify the production of
that they have become the official memory of Partition itself. Each time conceptions nurtured by sectarianism and nationalism . At the same
we teach the story of Partition in order to demonstrate . . . the time, Tridib cannot elude his cognizance of "the seductive clarity of
culpability of the Muslim League, and ignore the role played by ignorance; an illusion of knowledge created by the deceptive weight of
religious chauvinists within the Congress or other political and social remembered detail" (67). While in London, he contemplates the
organizations, we tell a tale that deepens the divides signified by anticipated repercussions of World War II and the destinies of Mrs
Partition. (Partitions 5) Price's brother Alan and his three friends. Tridib realizes that this
blissful ignorance enables one to evade the starkest of realities, the
It is an unfortunate fact that all the historical and social events that led reality of death that he perceives not only in London but also during
to the catastrophe of 1947 can be best understood within the the 1964 Hindu - Muslim riots in India and Pakistan:
explanatory framework of religious and familial obligation. This
molding of collective subjectivities by the evocation of pan-national The realities of the bombs and torpedoes and the dying was easy
religious affinities results in the stifling of minority voices that express enough to imagine - mere events, after all, recorded in thousands of
divergent cultural and social opinions. The narrator of Ghosh's The films and photographs and comic books. But not that infinitely more
Shadow Lines observes, "As always, there were innumerable cases of important reality: the fact that they knew, that even walking down that

7. 106 Nyla All K han Culture and Politics in Ghosh 's `The Shadow Lines' 107
street, that evening , they knew what was coming -not the details nor subjectivity needs to be a part of the structure as well as of the
the timing perhaps , but they knew, that their world , and in all probability periphery. So the similarity in the emotions evoked by communal and
they themselves, would not survive the war . . . . Nobody knows, religious affiliations on the two sides of the border renders the
nobody can ever know, not even in memory, because there are moments inclusion/ exclusion dichotomy incoherent, making riots and mobs fit
in time that are not knowable : nobody can ever know what it was like emblems of its logic.
to be young and intelligent in the summer of 1939 in London or Berlin. I contend that in rejecting the meta-identity of nationalism,
(67-8) Ghosh seems to privilege a universalism that has been rejected for its
hegemonic and manipulative power by many postcolonial scholars. By
Tridib ' s story is a defiance of metanarratives , because human doing so , he also might appear to belittle nationalist . struggles of
knowledge will always be tentative and arbitrary . He inspires the dispossessed peoples in battling communities that need to assert
narrator to construct his own narratives in order to avoid getting
themselves . Universalism is as shaky and fluid an idea as nationalism
incarcerated in someone else's oppressive stories that reflect ethnic and is too utopian to provide a genuine solution to the actual problems
and religious jealousies and rivalries . He is warned that the alternative bred by nationalism . Universalism has often been identified with
to inventing one's own story "wasn't blankness - it only meant that if imperialist ideologies that purport to support a "civilizing mission"
we didn ' t try ourselves , we should never be free of other people's that creates a totalizing or homogenizing centre.
inventions" (31). Helen Tiffin comments about the universalist criteria that negate
As the critic A.N. Kaul points out, the predominant theme of The the historical and sociocultural specificities of a people by insisting
Shadow Lines is the crossing of frontiers of nationality, culture, and that life in a Third World country is similar to life in a metropolitan
language in three countries : India, East Pakistan ( now Bangladesh), centre because of the essential camaraderie of mankind: " [A]n
and England(303). To that list, I would add the author ' s attempt to orthodoxy has developed which dismisses realist writers as inherently
cross the barrier of citizenship as a self-conscious political philosophy. inferior to those with more overtly metaphysical interests" (28).
Ghosh makes the reader aware of the humanist response to the Universalist critics prefer writers who undermine the local and the
ridiculousness of war, a response that transcends national boundaries specific . According to Arun Mukherjee , "The universalist critic, armed
and barriers.4 with his ready-made categories of narrative technique , symbolic
patterns , motifs such as journey or quest, bildungsroman, pastoral,
The unhistorical historiography that is manifested in personal memory
etc, overlooks the formal complexities that arise when a work openly
reveals the fictive nature of official historiography . The nation is
or cryptically utilizes the collectively shared knowledge and
expected as "an imagined political community ," because, as Benedict
experiences of a society : experience of colonialism , legends of heroes
Anderson points out, "memories of even the smallest nation will never
and villains, deeply held belief systems ,, rhetorical pronouncements of
know most of their fellow members , meet them , or even hear of them,
local elite such as politicians , businessmen and movie stars and so on"
yet in the minds of each lives the personal memory of history that
empowers her to shake off the yoke of the official versions of history. (21). In such situations , the "universal" circumvents the need to see
This attempt to recollect the minutiae of her childhood in Dhaka is the alien and refuses to deal with a world that has been radically
lauded by the narrator, who observes that " people like my grandmother, transformed by struggle.
who have no home but in memory, learn to be very skilled in the art of In a world that has been sinking further into the morass of political
recollection" ( 194). unaccountability and cultural repression after the gut -wrenching
events of September 11th, 2001 ; the fizzling out of the fragile Peace
This articulation of the supplementary and unstable structure of nation- Pact in Palestine in 2003 ; the installation of putatively dejure regimes
states is a profound deconstruction of the notion of an "originary" in Afghanistan and Iraq , and the unspeakable degradations the
source of identity. The narrator identifies a contradiction in the populaces of those countries were subjected to; the Hindutva
concept of the fixity of nationalist ideology, because in order to movement in India , with its privileging the idea of an ethnically pure
provide a point of origin , which organizes the stability of the structure, Hindu nation , neither a single theoretical compartment nor a

8. 108 Nyla A li Khan Culture and Politics in Ghoshs `The Shadow Lines' 109
celebratory discourse of hybridity is adequate to frame multiple Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P., 1996.
subjectivities and histories. The communal riots in the Indian state of Couto, Maria. Review of The Shadow Lines. Times Literary Supplement 4465
Gujarat that occurred in 2002 divided the state along religious lines (28 October 1988): 1212.
causing such irreparable damage that its seismic tremors continue to Ghosh, Amitav. 1995. The Calcutta Chromosome. New York: Avon Books,
destabilize other regions of the Indian subcontinent, kindling Muslim/ 1995.
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Unfortunately such recurrences of bigotry are funded by transnational .The Glass Palace. New York: Random House, 2001.
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.The Shadow Lines. New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1988.
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." Shadow Script." Interview. New Delhi: First City, September
postcolonialism is appropriated by such movements. These cultural
2000
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Ranajit Guha. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1982.
Notes Hower, Edward. Review of The Shadow Lines. New Y ork Times Book Review.
2 July 1989, 10.
1. Tridib is the curious eight-year old narrator's mentor and narrates these Kaul, A.N. "A Reading of The Shadow Lines", In The Shadow Lines by
historically significant events to the child. Amitav Ghosh. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1995
2. As Suvir Kaul notes, each time communal violence rears its ugly head, Kaul, Suvir. 2001. "Introduction". The Partitions of Memory: A fterlife of the
the horrific memories of Partition resurface (Partitions 3). Division of India. Ed. Suvir Kaul. Indiana: Indiana UP, 2001, pp. 1-29.
3. For example each time the story of Partition is related in the Indian "Separation Anxiety: Growing Up Inter/National in Amitav
context in order to demonstrate the reprehensibility of the Muslim Ghosh's The Shadow Lines." The Oxford Literary Review 16 (1994):
League and negate the damaging role played by religious zealots within 125-145.
the Indian National Congress, the official account of the partition Kaura, Uma. Muslims and Indian Nationalism: The Emergence of the Demand
worsens religious and social divisions. (Kaul, Partitions, 7) for India's Partition 1928-40. Columbia: South Asia Books, 1977.
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