Meenakshi Mukherjee in the essay “Maps and Mirrors: Co-ordinates of Meaning in The Shadow Lines” makes this observation:
The grandmother’s expectation of the border between India and East Pakistan grew indirectly out of her experience of the territorial division she had witnessed in childhood. When the ancestral home was divided, the brothers insisted on their rights with a lawyer-like precision so that the dividing line went through doorways and the brothers even partitioned their father’s old nameplate. That the borders should be explicit, that the lines should be clearly marked on the land by ‘trenches or something’ was the least she could expect after so much violence and bloodshed during the partition of India in 1947. (Mukherjee, 265) …show more content…
Tha’mma’s long held belief that “…nostalgia is a weakness…” (SL 230) is destroyed since she realizes that she has “no home but in memory” (SL 214) after her visit to Dhaka. Suvir Kaul in the essay “Separation Anxiety: Growing up Inter/National in The Shadow Lines” comments:
Perhaps, the crowning irony of The Shadow Lines is that almost as soon as Tha’mma realizes that the legacy of her birthplace is not separable from her sense of herself as a citizen of India, her nephew Tridib’s death at the hands of a Dhaka mob confirms in her a pathological hatred of ‘them’… Hysterical from the memory of the rioters who killed Tridib, she takes comfort in the organized propriety of war: “We are fighting them properly at last…”(Kaul,
The grandmother’s expectation of the border between India and East Pakistan grew indirectly out of her experience of the territorial division she had witnessed in childhood. When the ancestral home was divided, the brothers insisted on their rights with a lawyer-like precision so that the dividing line went through doorways and the brothers even partitioned their father’s old nameplate. That the borders should be explicit, that the lines should be clearly marked on the land by ‘trenches or something’ was the least she could expect after so much violence and bloodshed during the partition of India in 1947. (Mukherjee, 265) …show more content…
Tha’mma’s long held belief that “…nostalgia is a weakness…” (SL 230) is destroyed since she realizes that she has “no home but in memory” (SL 214) after her visit to Dhaka. Suvir Kaul in the essay “Separation Anxiety: Growing up Inter/National in The Shadow Lines” comments:
Perhaps, the crowning irony of The Shadow Lines is that almost as soon as Tha’mma realizes that the legacy of her birthplace is not separable from her sense of herself as a citizen of India, her nephew Tridib’s death at the hands of a Dhaka mob confirms in her a pathological hatred of ‘them’… Hysterical from the memory of the rioters who killed Tridib, she takes comfort in the organized propriety of war: “We are fighting them properly at last…”(Kaul,