"Splashing with Both Hands": Horror and Resilience in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines

Abstract: Readings of Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines (1988) often interpret it as simply about an Anglophilic Indian middle class. This essay focuses on how poverty and communal violence provide the context for most bourgeois narratives from South Asia. The only image of a slum in the novel appears when the child-narrator is on a veranda he is not supposed to be on. The slum is built in one of the effluent-filled marshes on the outskirts of Calcutta. Seeing a woman use her hands to push back toxic sludge to use the water underneath is unusual but not shocking for the narrator. I argue that the disruptive image of the precarious shantytown demonstrates how a self-defeating preoccupation with looking away from the quotidian horrors of life in India forms the very basis of Indian middle-class life.