About a week ago I finished reading The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh, one of the best writers I know about. This is an early novel of his, first published in 1988, and set in Calcutta, Dhaka (Pakistan), and London. Several passages in the book stood out for me because of the insight they offer about living in India.
Most of the characters in the book are middle class or wealthy, educated and privileged. A bit before the middle of the book, the narrator describes a visit he made with his mother and grandmother to a poor relative whom they had discovered. The narrator, still a boy, looks out from a balcony at "a patchwork of stagnant pools, dotted with islands of low, raised ground. Clinging to these islands were little clumps of shanties, their beaten tin roofs glistening rustily in the midday sun."
Ghosh is brilliant at descriptive writing. These two sentences convey all the poverty of Calcutta. Ghosh goes on:
Our relative spotted me leaning on the railing and ran out.
Don't look there! she cried. It's dirty! Then she led be back inside.
I went willingly: I was already well schooled in looking away, the jungle-craft of gentility.
That "jungle-craft" is probably highly developed in India, where the extremes of wealth and poverty are greater than in the West, but it's something we all have, if we're privileged.
Ghosh goes on:
But still, I could not help thinking it was a waste of effort to lead me away. It was true, of course, that I could not see that landscape or anything like it from my own window, but its presence was palpable everywhere in our house; I had grown up with it. It was that landscape that lent the note of hysteria to my mother's voice when she drilled me for my examinations; it was to these slopes she pointed when she told me that if I didn't study hard I would end up over there, that the only weapon people like us had was our brains and if we didn't use them like claws to cling to what we'd got, that was where we'd end up, marooned in that landscape: I knew perfectly well that all it would take was a couple of failed examinations to put me where our relative was, in permanent proximity to that blackness: that landscape was the quicksand that seethed beneath the polished floors of our house; it was that sludge which gave our genteel decorum its fine edge of frenzy.
One of the themes of The Shadow Lines is the contrast between the more securely genteel life of an English family (lacking "the fine edge of frenzy") and the hysterical gentility of his own family - though part of the book takes place in London during the Blitz, when the facade of normal life in England was literally stripped away by bombs, and the myth of high European civilization was shown to mask unthinkable barbarity.
Later on in the book, in describing an outbreak of ethnic violence in Calcutta when the narrator was a schoolboy, Ghosh speaks of a kind of fear, which, he asserts, underlies all of life in India:
It is a fear that comes of the knowledge that normalcy is utterly contingent, that the spaces that surround one, the streets that one inhabits, can become, suddenly and without warning, as hostile as a desert in a flash flood. It is this that sets apart the thousand million people who inhabit the subcontinent from the rest of the world - not language, not food, not music - it is the special quality of loneliness that grows out of the fear of the war between oneself and one's image in the mirror.
I believe that "the knowledge that normalcy is utterly contingent" is not uniquely Indian. All over the world today either there is no normalcy at all, in the complacent sense that we privileged people feel it, or that normalcy is threatened by the potential for violence, by economic insecurity, and by the looming environmental crisis (to offer a short list).
Most of the characters in the book are middle class or wealthy, educated and privileged. A bit before the middle of the book, the narrator describes a visit he made with his mother and grandmother to a poor relative whom they had discovered. The narrator, still a boy, looks out from a balcony at "a patchwork of stagnant pools, dotted with islands of low, raised ground. Clinging to these islands were little clumps of shanties, their beaten tin roofs glistening rustily in the midday sun."
Ghosh is brilliant at descriptive writing. These two sentences convey all the poverty of Calcutta. Ghosh goes on:
Our relative spotted me leaning on the railing and ran out.
Don't look there! she cried. It's dirty! Then she led be back inside.
I went willingly: I was already well schooled in looking away, the jungle-craft of gentility.
That "jungle-craft" is probably highly developed in India, where the extremes of wealth and poverty are greater than in the West, but it's something we all have, if we're privileged.
Ghosh goes on:
But still, I could not help thinking it was a waste of effort to lead me away. It was true, of course, that I could not see that landscape or anything like it from my own window, but its presence was palpable everywhere in our house; I had grown up with it. It was that landscape that lent the note of hysteria to my mother's voice when she drilled me for my examinations; it was to these slopes she pointed when she told me that if I didn't study hard I would end up over there, that the only weapon people like us had was our brains and if we didn't use them like claws to cling to what we'd got, that was where we'd end up, marooned in that landscape: I knew perfectly well that all it would take was a couple of failed examinations to put me where our relative was, in permanent proximity to that blackness: that landscape was the quicksand that seethed beneath the polished floors of our house; it was that sludge which gave our genteel decorum its fine edge of frenzy.
One of the themes of The Shadow Lines is the contrast between the more securely genteel life of an English family (lacking "the fine edge of frenzy") and the hysterical gentility of his own family - though part of the book takes place in London during the Blitz, when the facade of normal life in England was literally stripped away by bombs, and the myth of high European civilization was shown to mask unthinkable barbarity.
Later on in the book, in describing an outbreak of ethnic violence in Calcutta when the narrator was a schoolboy, Ghosh speaks of a kind of fear, which, he asserts, underlies all of life in India:
It is a fear that comes of the knowledge that normalcy is utterly contingent, that the spaces that surround one, the streets that one inhabits, can become, suddenly and without warning, as hostile as a desert in a flash flood. It is this that sets apart the thousand million people who inhabit the subcontinent from the rest of the world - not language, not food, not music - it is the special quality of loneliness that grows out of the fear of the war between oneself and one's image in the mirror.
I believe that "the knowledge that normalcy is utterly contingent" is not uniquely Indian. All over the world today either there is no normalcy at all, in the complacent sense that we privileged people feel it, or that normalcy is threatened by the potential for violence, by economic insecurity, and by the looming environmental crisis (to offer a short list).
