There seems to be an interesting resonance between the

phrases “How can anyone divide a memory” in Shadow

lines and “a migratory fowl that in its flight never heeds
when it crosses a frontier” in Billy Budd- the resonance
which seeks to capture the inherent complexities of the
simultaneous palpability and intangibility of frontiers and
borders that separate countries, realities, ages, cultures,
etc. In other words, the idea of non existent divisions or
shadow lines is repeatedly invoked and applied to a wide
domain of inner and physical lived human experiences.
The cultural and national frontiers are invoked as the
story is woven around two families, the Datta- Chauduris
of Bengal and the Prices of London, the relationship
between whom spans three generations and involves
several lucid passages to and from India on both sides.
Towards the end, the story also deals with the crossing of
the frontier between India and East Pakistan,
acknowledging along the way the proximate presence of
other countries and continents through the UN and
Indian diplomatic postings of two of the Datta
Chaudhuris. This mobility seems to be rather
symptomatic of Ghosh's proposition that all international
demarcations are nothing but arbitrary, invented and cut
across interpersonal relations and interreligious
identities more than countries.
In fact the international partition where the trio
Jethamoshai, Thamma and Mayadebi live in separate
countries is microcosmically represented as a domestic
partition between Thamma's parents’ house and that of
her Jethamoshai. The memory, class, economic, religious
and culutural divide that are both aggravated and
thwarted in the novel through the medium of an
international divide obfuscate the determinate or
absolute nature of any of these divides.
The Shadow lines seems to be fundamentally a project
on search for meaning, explanations, reasons, and formal
logic tinted with nostalgia that seeks the interweaving of
the author's autobiography and the nation's biography.
The looping, digressions, partial answers, non linear and
wide ranging narrative techniques interestingly enable
the removal of cobwebs of modern Indian memory and a
repeated return to those effacing, deletion and fissures
that mark the sites of personal and national trauma.
Shadow lines also takes a very paradoxical position
regarding the conception and portrayal of Nationalism.
Although it captures the aftermath of nationalism with a
sort of fidelity to causative events with the narrative
beginning in the year 1939 and the outbreak of the
Second World War and ending in 1964 with Hindu-
Muslim riots, it neither narrates events sequentially or
chronologically but from memories and memoirs, and
nor are the experiences of the characters limited to the
real events in their lives: for beneath the surface of
everyday happenings they live a life in memory and
imagination. AN Kaul calls the Shadow Lines a metaphor
for evading rather than exploring political realities as he
seems to perceive space, time, location, nationalism and
difficult political realities as illusory and shadows. In the
same way, although for the privileged Datta Chaudhuris
nationalism seems to have ceased to have any
significance and national frontiers nothing more than a
smooth transition through customs and immigration at
identical airports, the narrator's grandmother is
portrayed as a surviving representative of fossilized and
almost chauvinistic nationalism. This is corroborated by
her apprehensions about crossing over to Bangladesh to
retrieve Jethamoshai from Dhaka and also when she
conceived the international border as “ trenches perhaps
or soldiers or guns pointing at each other or even barren
strips of land.”
 Shadow lines seems to preach that in order to
achieve maturity the lines within need to be erased even
more than those without…. Especially the lines that
separates reality from imagination, past from present,
and what happens to oneself from what has happened to
the others. The contravention would be an entity fitting
Tridib 's rather opinionated description of Ila, the
inventions she lived in moved with her, so that although
she has lived in many places, she had never travelled at
all… thus a mere untravelled, unchanged woman taking
the world kust as it is.