The question of the “Great Expectationesque” romance between Ila and the narrator In Amitav Ghosh’s Shadow Lines has plagued me and I have not been able to let it go. So central to the narrator’s story and so smacking of the famous British novel that I have to believe the connotations of this unrequited love affair were central to the writer’s intent and purpose. Ghosh must be deliberately subverting this idol of the English canon to his own purposes.
First off, there are strong similarities between the main characters. Pip and the narrator both see the world for what it is, good and bad. They absorb multiple perspectives and are able to see the truth in people and life and thus come to rest in equilibrium, in a borderland. Pip recognized the arbitrariness of class, which thus cannot predict the quality of a man and the narrator certainly perceived the illusory nature of nations. Furthermore, Ila, who rejects India, ends up in a troubled marriage and Estella, who embraced the culture of the British elite, also suffers severe marital discord. Perhaps the message is the same in both texts: the more we run from our pasts the more it comes back to haunt us.
In order to heal from such oppression as the class system and partition people must face the horror and then create from the ashes an improved breed of humanity that transcends such illusory categories as race, class, religion, and creed. We are not low or upper class, not Indian or Pakistani, not Hindu, Muslim or Sikh, we are “other” and that is all the classification we need.
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