In What Ways Do Women Characters Contribute to the Story of Tridib in Amitav Ghosh’s the Shadow Lines?
The story of Tridib in ‘Shadow Lines’ remain incomplete without the influence, or rather we should say the contribution, of the women characters in the novel.
Main women characters in the novel namely Ila, May and the grandmother of the narrator, have a great influence on the coming-of-age of the narrator. It is important to understand their influence on the narrator first before that on Tridib, because Tridib is narrator’s mentor here, his alter-ego and mirror image.
Tridib’s correspondences had influenced the narrator’s heart and mind in his childhood days itself which did not leave their impressions even decades later. It was as if Tridib was the one who had helped make the narrator’s world for him. He had given him “worlds to travel in and…eyes to see them with”. Narrator who had never went beyond his hometown in Calcutta during his childhood, would travel to distant lands and places, and experience them with the power of his imagination, as Tridib pointed them out on his Batholomew’s Atlas. Tridib was the man who had taught him to use his imagination and knowledge precisely to be able to see world by “inventing what we saw” or “we would never be free of other people’s inventions”.
Here is where the differences arise between the narrator’s values imbibed from Tridib and that of Ila’s. Ila “…lived in present which was like as airlock in a canal, shut away from the tidewaters of the past and the future by steel floodgates.” She had been and lived in many places but has never actually travelled, because she had never been able to live them in her imagination, except her senses. She had a stunted imagination. While the narrator and Tridib could live and relive the experiences of their life in their memory, Ila could not.
Narrator’s grandmother too is unable to use her memory to recount past experiences. According to her memory is “a weakness” and one needs to forget the past and look forward to the future. However, later in the novel this only memory of
Main women characters in the novel namely Ila, May and the grandmother of the narrator, have a great influence on the coming-of-age of the narrator. It is important to understand their influence on the narrator first before that on Tridib, because Tridib is narrator’s mentor here, his alter-ego and mirror image.
Tridib’s correspondences had influenced the narrator’s heart and mind in his childhood days itself which did not leave their impressions even decades later. It was as if Tridib was the one who had helped make the narrator’s world for him. He had given him “worlds to travel in and…eyes to see them with”. Narrator who had never went beyond his hometown in Calcutta during his childhood, would travel to distant lands and places, and experience them with the power of his imagination, as Tridib pointed them out on his Batholomew’s Atlas. Tridib was the man who had taught him to use his imagination and knowledge precisely to be able to see world by “inventing what we saw” or “we would never be free of other people’s inventions”.
Here is where the differences arise between the narrator’s values imbibed from Tridib and that of Ila’s. Ila “…lived in present which was like as airlock in a canal, shut away from the tidewaters of the past and the future by steel floodgates.” She had been and lived in many places but has never actually travelled, because she had never been able to live them in her imagination, except her senses. She had a stunted imagination. While the narrator and Tridib could live and relive the experiences of their life in their memory, Ila could not.
Narrator’s grandmother too is unable to use her memory to recount past experiences. According to her memory is “a weakness” and one needs to forget the past and look forward to the future. However, later in the novel this only memory of