Missing Pages………..

Afghanistan’s international policies and internal politics has overshadowed its cultural past and transactions with the rest of the world; its only available picture until very recently was its war-torn, ravaged condition. For most of us our first encounter with an Afghan persona was with the character of Abdur Rahman created by Rabindranath Tagore in Kabuliwala. A pathan fruitseller, comes to India to sell dry-fruits and delicacies to support his family back home, a beautiful relationship ensues between him and little Mini, but as the plot unfurls Rahman gets framed for a theft-charge that he does not commit. In Munshi Premchand’s Godaan, Mehta guises as an Afghan terrorist at Rai Sahab’s function to demand money or threaten to carry off Malti. Sigrun Srivastava’s short-story, Advia enumerates the encounter in Afghanistan between an ambassador and his wife with a local, begging in Pashto for medicine, the horror-struck wife takes him for a terrorist by his sheer “appearance” and uncomprehending speech. Notwithstanding the authorial intention, such portrayals problematize our sense-perceptions creating stereotypes. For instance, as a result many landlords in Delhi refuse to rent out place to Afghanis once their ethnicity-nationality is revealed. In the absence of any first-hand experience -literature, cinema and media mould the way we perceive.

The absence of Afghanis and their culture from common knowledgeable memory has been criticized by many as a strategy of “collective amnesia” or “selective memory” on the part of writers, historians, and governments. The world hears about Afghanistan when news-channels compete to sensationalize the occurring of some major event in the territory. We all are familiar with the face of the “Afghan-girl” Sharbat Gula on the 1985 edition of National Geographic magazine photographed by Steve McCurry – the face with the pair of haunting sea-green eyes became the face of the Afghan Civil Wars between Soviet Union and Mujahideens; the hijack of the Indian Airlines flight at Qandahar; the demolition of the Bamiyan Buddha by Taliban in 2003; the “9/11” attack on the World Trade Centre.

Surprisingly our curriculums never had any stories about or by an Afghani. Neither had we any access to the ones written. So, for most of us our profound encounter with the Afghan world has been through Khaled Hosseini’s first novel, The Kite Runner and later the film popularized the Afghan story greatly. The novel follows the bildungsroman narrative of Amir’s life from childhood through maturity. But the politics of the story result in the many criticisms towards its reception. Hosseini presents a slice of Afghanistan’s life that was not available to us earlier. However, that representation is problematic. This novel/ film and another Indian film, Kabul Express were banned in Afghanistan, specifically in Hazarajat for its mal-representation of the Hazara community and offensively hurting their sentiments; the latter derogatorily abuses the community, while the former salts-their-wounds by reiterating the atrocities inflicted on them through the depiction of certain scenes like the rape of the Shia Hazara boy, Hassan by the Sunni Pashtun boy, Assef. Reading the novel in the New-Orientalist trope, critics like Mathew Thomas Miller state the underlying current as “Islamization of Evil” and “Westernization of Goodness”. A captivating story of Amir’s redemption from his childhood guilt; the successful western expatriate writer leaves his safe, idyllic existence in the U.S. and returns to heroically rescue Hassan’s son, Sohrab. The inherent goodness of Baba and evil of Assef is repeatedly reified in some of the most graphic-dramatic scenes of the novel. Amir’s descent into this “Other” world, a veritable “heart of darkness” works as an allegorized neo-colonial imperative of the “White man’s [now western] burden” narrative. As Hosseini’s character Rahim Khan says “the way to be good again”.

1980’s Afghan society was far from what it is today. The degradation has been brought about by the shifting regimes causing ravages in the country. Cinema until recently was considered un-Islamic. The sole Cinema theatre that was built under the Soviet regime after 16 years in Herat, the historical city of art and culture, was demolished by Mujahideens and Taliban. People like Mohammad Amin Wahidi; director-producer-founder of Deedenow Cinema Productions are trying to revive the long-lost culture of his nation, creating opportunities, providing platforms to his countrymen to come out and fearlessly narrate their stories. Likewise, music and dance were banned by Taliban for being sacrilegious and criminal, sentencing to death its practitioners. A new phenomenon called “Afghan Star”, an equivalent of American or Indian Idol, is taking the nation by storm; being more than just a TV show, for singing is risking life. But during Afghan golden age, the cultural exchange between Afghanistan and the world, especially India was immense. One such example is our very own instrument used in Hindustani classical music, the Sarod, a refined version of the Afghan Rubab, a folk instrument which still dominates Afghan music. It was the sarod maestro, Ustad Amjad Ali Khan’s great great great grandfather, Mohammad Hashmi Khan Bangash, who brought the rubab to India about 200 years ago. Today, the celebrated Afghan musician, Farhad Darya, the UNDP National Goodwill Ambassador, whose famous ‘Give me a piece of Peace’ and ‘Beloved Kabul’ were the first songs to be played on national radio at the dawn-break of a new Afghanistan after the fall of Taliban regime in 2001. He says, “For a long time now, the world has a dark and wrong image from Afghanistan. I am trying hard to give the world a deserved image of Afghanistan. The media mostly deals with war news, bloody faces, scandals, ashes, fires. The Afghanistan that I am voicing is unfortunately not a good selling point for the media”.

Afghanistan need undergo the “phoenix-experience”, resurrect and revive its dead culture from its ashes and soar high.

Traversing the "shadow lines".

The Shadow Lines:"The recovery of history through personal memory..coexistence of invented stories and lived realities."

Amitav Ghosh's radiant second novel opens in Calcutta in the 1960's following two families-one English, one Bengali as their lives intertwine in tragic and comic ways. The narrator, Indian born, English educated, traces events back and forth in time, from the outbreak of world war second to the late twentieth century, through years of Bengal's partition and violence, observing the ways in which political events invade private lives.

The novel begins with Tridib, the boy's eccentric and perceptive uncle who gives him worlds to travel in and eyes to see them with long before he ever leaves Calcutta. While the young narrator can visualize 'the first pointed arch in Cairo touching the stones of the great pyramids of cheops'; ironically his cousin Ila, who has been all around the world and lived in many places but has not traveled at all. All she remembers of Cairo is 'the inconvenient location of the 'ladies' at the airport'.

The personal lives of the characters and the public events are juxtaposed in the novel presenting a unique position from which to watch the boy grow as he finds himself sucked into history: public/national and personal-partition of Bengal and Thamma being stuck up in a family feud. The narrator seeks to unify the divergent strands of the stories, the different voices and characters that constitute his memory and his limited knowledge of events. Hence, at one level the novel is a bildungsroman in which the motif of the journey facilitates the exploration and understanding of the self. His narrative weaves together the historical and the imaginary.

The novel can be relegated to the genre of 'stream of consciousness' where there is no linear progression…rather there is a constant to-and-fro movement between different times and realities. The narrator's first visit to London is almost a literal replication of Tridib's own visit to that place. Each experience relating to this journey comes alive to the narrator as Tridib had already narrated to him: a collapsing of distinctions between narrator's and Tridib's (interior monologues that he has when in solitude) consciousness.

The narrator through his narrative is embarking on a journey of discovery and self-definition. The decentralized individual is reconstituted by history, society, culture that constructs his identity. The anonymity of the boy at once makes him universal, liberated from the trappings of time, age and place. He fits into the frame of what the philosopher Descartes had said "I think therefore I am.", the boy's existence and identity is rooted in his vivid imagination and ability to transcend the "shadow lines".

In continuation of the idea of transcendence, in the pre-partition novel of Tagore, Ghare-Baire, the movement into the political foray disrupts the personal universe. While Ghosh's post-partition novel The Shadow Lines reiterates that personal freedom is curiously connected with political realities that are often divisive and disruptive and so no freedom is unequivocal. Bimala in Ghare-Baire fanned by Sandip's jingoism decides to mark journey from 'Ghare'(Home) to 'Baire'(the World) to seek personal freedom through political activism. In Ghosh's text, pre-partition Thamma's entire personality is shaped by listening to the heroic deeds of women in the political movement, but thirty years later the same spirit of nationalism holds no importance for the post-partition Ila who is unable to conform or adapt to the society that has developed in independent India and escapes to another society with a different set of values and social system.

Temporally, the novel is set in the transitional period from 1939 to 1979; and spatially the narrative straddles between Dhaka, Calcutta, and England. The narrator comes of age after his painstaking 'a la recherché du temps perdu'(remembrance of the things past) [Marcel Proust] through memory and imagination. The traditional concepts of time and space get questioned in the course of this journey into the past.

The phrases 'Going Away' and 'Coming Home' are used to separate the two parts of the novel. These two phrases are analysed by Nivedita Sen by paralleling them with the travel motif in children's fiction wherein "the child rebel/adventurer/traveler/dreamer makes a journey away from home, regales the reader with incredible experiences in unfamiliar situations and remote places but ultimately returns to the protective fold and the status quo of his home." Howsoever, "in The Shadow Lines the paradigms of 'Going Away' and 'Coming Home' deconstructs the very assumptions of the travel motif in children's fiction and divides the story neatly into 'escaping from home' and 'coming back to reality'. The polarization of these two phrases is a major shadow line that is demolished in the process of unfolding of the narrator's experiences."

The Shadow Lines is a kind of Bakhtinian 'novel of emergence' wherein "man's individual emergence is inseparably linked to historical emergence... on the border between two epochs" and it also traces a typically repeating path of man's emergence from youthful idealism and fantasies to mature sobriety and practicality". The narrator's journey is not only from innocence to experience but also back to a sentient, sensible and sensitive 'innocence' of a romantic idealization of a world without 'shadow lines' in the process.

"The Shadow Lines" as Silvia Albertazzi observes," sums up and fictionalizes all the major issues of post-colonial literature-the search for identity, the need for independence and the difficult relationship with colonial culture, the rewriting of colonial past, an attempt at creating a new language and a new narrative form and the use of personal memory to understand communal past." She finds a parallel between Conrad's novella

The Shadow Line and Ghosh's novel The Shadow Lines . The former refers to the moment of interior darkness and confusion which precedes maturity, while the latter deals with the moment of epiphany in a young man's life when certain events in his life acquires deeper meaning. Both the texts mark the coming of age of their respective young narrators. Ghosh's pluralization of the title of Conrad's novella marks the passage from the personal to the national, and dealing with other people's memories of times and places the narrator has never known.

The "shadowy", "illusory" border lines which divide peoples from others, colonizer and colonized ("us" and "them") past and present ("then" and "now") signifies a borderline between reality and imagination. This is why Ghosh's unnamed narrator can travel in time and space and even live other people's lives in his mind: the past he is always thinking of (his own, Tridib's, Thamma's, his relatives) fills his world overcoming or rather traversing all sorts of borders-geographical, historical, and psychological. Hence, all travels in the book are first of all travels of the mind…all characters leave to find something and all departures imply a return, all separations a reunion. The title of the two sections of the novel "Going Away" and "Coming Home" suggests that each departure must be followed by a return and at the same time implies the upsetting of geography, even at a linguistic level. This is reflected when the narrator says:

"….what my grandmother was looking for was a word for a journey which was not a coming or a going at all; a journey that was a search for precisely that fixed point which permits the proper use of the verbs of movement."

The Shadow Lines like Meera Alexander's Illiterate Heart, is an evocation of memory of a felt sense of place (landscape of Kerala for Alexander and Calcutta for Ghosh), for both a very specific place and history shape the milieu of childhood. From this originating place, both the works represent many passages or journeys and returns real or imaginary to this place of memory. Along with the primary journey of the authorial persona away from this place of childhood and a return to it (the whole question of Diaspora), both the works represent a multitude of other journeys that are interwoven with the autobiographical one, and which are often violent and traumatic. The angst and the dilemmas of the diasporic writer have been aptly and pragmatically portrayed in his poem 'Enterprise' by Nissim Ezeikel:

"It started as a pilgrimage

Exalting minds and making all

The burdens light……………

……………………………….

We hardly knew why we were there

……………………………………

Our deeds were neither great nor rare

Home is where we have to earn our grace."

Amitav Ghosh, responsibly carries out the task of a post-colonial writer through his work by embarking on a journey, dispelling and traversing all sorts of "shadow lines" envisaging, though a Utopian yet probable world without borders, boundaries, and other "shadow lines" both real and imaginary. Envisioning a seamless world where people like the author-narrator would not have to travel beyond borders and all other sorts of "shadow lines".

Like in "Journey to Ithaca" similarly in "The Shadow Lines" its not the destination but the journey in itself which is of most consequence.