Study Questions

• Ghosh mentions toward the end of "The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi" a new writing challenge that confronted him as he prepared to write a novel that became The Shadow Lines: "How was I to write about what I had seen without reducing it to mere spectacle?" (201). Close read a violent or potentially violent  scene in the novel and examine the causes or potential causes for violence. What triggers or tipping points are presented? If there is violence, what is its nature? How is it manifested? How do the characters involved affect the outcome of the situation? What issues are at stake? How does Ghosh narrate the scene? Analyze the language used. What "form--or a style or a plot" has Ghosh found to "accommodate both violence and the civilized willed response to it" (202)? Does Ghosh dramatize the "too undramatic" nonviolence? If so, how? Some choice for investigation might be the Grand Hotel disrupted dance (86), uncle Alan's house on Brick Lane (100–101), the night with May after Ila's wedding (154–57), the dying dog (168–70), and the multiple versions/retellings of Tridib and the mob in Dhaka.

• What does it mean to be free? The Shadow Lines offers several ideas from various characters, for example, Ila's freedom (87–88), Tridib's "utter freedom of strangers" (141), grandmother's "for your sake; for your freedom" (232), Robi's "I would have given anything to be free of that memory" (241). Ghosh seems to be proposing a difficult and controversial notion: that freedom is a problem, and, perhaps even more outrageously, that freedom shouldn't be desired or that it is wrong or wrongheaded to desire freedom, to want to be free. What ideals of freedom does he take on? How does he unsettle them?

• Consider Ghosh's setting: how he evokes place and time. In "The March of the Novel through History," Ghosh observes that setting was integral to the novel form, and that location-specific settings were a trait of the modern works. Examine how place and time function in this novel, and how it is akin to or varies from their role in his cited predecessors' works. You might explore the dirty slum (131–32), the narrator and Ila's table playhouse, London, Dhaka, the bombed theater (136–41), among others.

• Look at Ghosh's portrayal of women. Why is it significant that we are given the narrator's grandmother both before and after her retirement, and separated by the two sections (Going Away and Coming Home) of the book? Why is the narrator shocked "that this withered, wasted, powerless woman was the same person that [he] had so much loved and feared" (90)? Does Ghosh's mission to write individuals make a difference in his depiction of women? How do his fictional female characters like the grandmother, Mayadebi, the mother, Ila, and May compare to the nonfictional "stout woman in a sari" who told the Sikh to get down ("The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi" 190), the women surrounding the men as a wall in the post-assassination march against violence (199), and the "accomplished professional[s]" who "gave up years of their time" to help families after the 1984 riots?

• maps

• time and narrative

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