[Music] [Music] good morning and welcome back to the lecture series on a partition of india in print media and cinema so ah today we are talking about home and nostalgia ah mushroom hassan notes the current shift that has happened in the vis-a-vis the focus so mushroom hassan notes the shift that has happened vis-a-vis the focus of partition literature scholarship where we see the intellectual resources are now being ah you know exposed to the inadequacy of numerous narratives on independence and partition and they compel us to look further into personalized narratives into fresh themes and thereby adopt new approaches for investigating the topic of partition so ah partition studies has now undergone some critical sensitivity that literary representations ah and so partition studies consider literary representations more seriously than before ah so a call for new resources for remembering and representing the partition is you know it has been placed and so there is an onus that was there is an onus on literature which was previously not there so ah the local memory the social relations and the complex subjectivity are now all coming under the historian's scrutiny clifford gets actually raises a very pertinent question regarding who describes whom so depiction itself is a form of power who is able to narrate and who is being narrated in what terms is actually some something not neutral and it is deeply related with the question of power so basically in the 1990s we had these debates of history and theory questioning the traditional understanding of the relation between fact representation and reality so we see you know we see that the different scholars and critics take cognizance of the intertextual relationship between ah fictive history and textualized history right so the understanding of a dialectical relationship between literary representation and history carries an enormous possibility or other enormous possibilities because ah then what happens is that literature is seen as a legitimate source for understanding the past and it is actually analogous to any other sources found in the archives literature is an important ah so literature ah actually plays an important role in the societies that have faced unendurable violence where we see that where we see literally literary characters ah being rendered very complex nuanced shades where where they are they are in a way diff they are a departure from the clear cut facts stated by a disinterested history the literary characters can be the perpetrator and the victim at the same time and this is ah this complexity is something that literature has achieved above ah you know and and beyond ah formal documentation of formal historical documentation literature plays an important role in the society to to show these nuanced characters the characters that have various shades of grey in the absence of public testimonials literature compels us to take stock through which we can face the self other and in fact we can understand we can realize the ideas of our justice and freedom through these stories of characters stories about characters experiences of literary characters that are far removed from our own experiences and our own situation so i think literature plays a great role in in creating empathy in creating uh you know a fellow feeling for a human whose situation is different from us so in recalling ah reading criticizing and discussing something that was deposited in the past humans participate in an extended horizon of meaning production so memory capacity is limited by focus and bias because of psychological pressures as well as because of the incongruent memories that are hidden overwritten and possibly effaced so ah we see that on the level of cultural memory retrieving the past is always a dynamic at work right forgetting can have different forms there can be a passive form of cultural forgetting one can actively forget through destroying documents through trashing documents and then one can actually resort to passive forgetting passive cultural forgetting through hiding neglecting abandoning or leaving the documents behind so in this in these cases the objects are not materially destroyed basically they are they fall out of the frame of attention valuation and use museum whatever we see in the museum ah actually is whatever is represented in the museum is you know something that is arranged to catch attention public attention and make a lasting impression the same museum also has store rooms where other paintings documents are archived in peripheral spaces such as sellers such as attics that are not publicly displayed so a januszman refers to the actively circulated memory that keeps the past present as canon so what what januszman says is that what is displayed to the public according to jan asman is the canon and the passively stored memory preserves the past as an archive so canonization means sanctification of certain aspects of the past which endows texts persons artifacts and monuments with a sanctified status ah and is and it i mean sets them off from the rest as charged with the highest meaning and value so ah can canonization is a process of selection which uh pre presupposes decisions and power struggles it ascribes value to certain objects from the past certain person of from the past adds an aura and and sacrosanct status to them and so duration in cultural memory is the central pro aim of this procedure of canonizing and making you know ah certain objects as synonymous with a certain event from the past so ah and this happens at the expense of sidelining the others ah and so canon is independent of historical change and it is immune to ups and downs of social taste it is not built up anew by every generation rather it outlives the generations who have to encounter and reinterpret it anew according to their time right so we understand that selection what goes into becoming a cannon and rather you know becoming durable against time and in the cultural memory involves some power struggles some decisions ah by you know decisions by the major influential forces in the society and it also brings in the the politics of representation what is synonymous with partition and what are not who are actually relegated to the fringes so ah partitions fictions from punjab or bengal contain all that is locally contingent and truthfully remembered ah and therefore constitute an important means of our self making we what makes ourselves from the past is also ah involved with the question of canon because the canon ah greatly supplies ah material that shapes our understanding of a certain ah you know certain of certain events from the history from the past this brings us so reading partitions literature is not just an archival retrieval but a way in which the past can be understood to make it signify in the present how does literary imagination cope with the violence and genocide to reconstitute human subjectivity enabled by the land how do narrations so how do narratives create us how to narrate our narratives responsible for formation of social groups and communities these are some of the questions that we need to look at now shadow lines by amitabh ghosh ah is a novel that weaves fact and fiction together through a narrative of lives of the people that are living across nations it spans almost half a century of recent indian history in the postmodern time and the story is a blend of cultural differences and social norms tabish care notes that the novel shadow lines romanticizes the imaginations romanticizes the imaginations as a whole so the story by amitabh ghosh is set against the backdrop of world war ii and the communal riots in 1964 which happened in some parts of india and is pakistan which is now bangladesh and the narrative presence that the partition i mean which resulted in the diver in in the division the partition which resulted in the division of a nation into two parts ah was actually unable to divide the memories of the people the unified memories of the people who were a section of whom were forced to migrate to the other side so ah we see that the novel narrates the story of three generations ah spread over calcutta london and dhaka so we see ah a span of time and space being used for ah you know building of a narrative ah the narrative actually happens through ah joining across ah a large span of time and a significant you know significant spans geographical spans including calcutta london and dhaka so the narrative includes a large span of time and you know geography a geographical expanse including calcutta london and dhaka the novel is constructed on the memories and experiences of a young boy that is growing up in calcutta and later on he moves to delhi and further to london the narrator is the observer of the entire situation and the character what is interesting is that the character actually takes shape through his interaction with other characters in the novel so the title itself signifies that there are shadow lines between different nations these are not real lines but these are shadows of lines virtual lines which can be surpassed through ah emotional transnational emotional bondings and this transcendence is reflected through the characters of the authority and three sources and later and and later the prices we see that the memories of the english and the bengali families connect across time and across space although their nationalities their their cultural social realities differ so the lines drawn between different countries cannot really ah cut through the emotions and feelings that bind together that bring together a humanity the question that amitabh gosh puts here is whether cultures can be actually contained and you know cultures can be if cultures can be compartmentalized and put into airtight boundaries made by ah select politicians so with shadow lines amitabh basically challenges the the one of the most dehumanized creations of human society which is the border a border that ah legitimizes ah habitation of a few people within a given geopolitical territory at the cost of marking others as you know legit illegitimate as outsiders ah and and and thereby justifying their their evacuation so ah the border is the basis on which nations and nationalities are ah outlined and and the and the uh you know and and the uh the process of forming a nation is definitely not a benign one formation of nation is actually scripted on scripted through you know violent meanings through violent language and and rules that that do not actually accommodate all so the narrative follows a non-linear style with the story moving back and forth moving into flashbacks and moving in and out of contexts in and out of situations and episodes it symbolically indicates that borders are non-linear just like a story cannot just move progress in a simplified manner its very difficult to etch borders clearly and unproblematically borders are metaphorically represented as shadows like the title suggests the narrative traverses the stories of characters like trideep the narrator and his grandmother and the plot is structured around the deeply impacting tragedies of war riots partition displacement killings and and the formation of nations like bangladesh india and pakistan it also delves on it also ah you know refers to the swadeshi movement on the one hand and the blow of the world war on england on the other so shadow lines are superficial in the entirety and basically nothing can divide a people who form a strong cultural emotional bonds with one another so the narrator's concrete imagination dwells heavily on tridib's memories and experiences the narrator go goes to london for his doctoral work but then he feels that it is not a new place to him because he have learned he has learned about london through other characters he has seen london through the eyes of his mentor and inspiration the narrator uh actually understands a place that he has never visited through even before he has visited london the narrator uh you know learns about london so much in the london and says that london is familiar to him he has seen london even before visiting it through the eyes of his mentor and inspiration tridib so tridib's account of london and the narrator's extraordinary imagination makes him feel that he has already been here he has already visited the place before he stays in london for about a year but his life is so we see that a person is physically located in one part of the globe but his life is affected by what is happening back at home or back next to home in the neighborhood so his life is most affected not by the incidents happening ah immediately geographically around him in london but by what is happening in dhaka a place that has never that he has never personally visited in his life he is a place he has only heard in terms of stories ah so the narrator has seen dhaka through the eyes of his grandmother who had migrated years back decades ago from there so the tr a tragedy in dhaka however changes his life forever although he has never been there he loses his mentored in the roads of dhaka right so ah the figure of the grandmother is very important in the story she represents india's national identity in the nationalist movement she is a migrant from dhaka but her ardent love for india cannot be questions so ah she goes back to dhaka after 20 years in order to bring her bring her uncle to calcutta and just then a revolution ah you know breaks out ah revolution starts she realizes that she has after coming back ah to dhaka decades later she realizes she has become an alien to her birth place ah and she also realizes she tells ah so so ah tridib says in this regard you are a foreigner now so it is an irony that the grandmother has become foreigner to her birth land she is a as foreigner as uh may may is actually you know not from this part of the globe and in fact says that you have become the grandmother has become more foreigner as compared to me because at least may does not need a visa to come to dhaka but the grandmother needs her visa these are the the the paradoxes the the the the ironies ah that that have been you know laid out by ah a tragic event such as partition which amitabh gosh actually portrays in his novel the character of jata moshe jethro moshet thomas uncle says that i don't believe in this india's india suppose when you get there they decide to draw another line somewhere what will you do then where will you move to as for me i was born here and i will die here he along with therefore become and we see that later on he and tridi both become victims of communal writing in dhaka so ah the novel actually ah throws a light on how the ancient societies were more flexible whereas in in contrast to the modern societies that are that that actually are divisive and and it recounts the potential of symbols how symbols can virtually create social groups pit one social group against the other and they the symbols the symbol or what milan kundera calls as a symbolic voltage can virtually paralyze the subcontinent symbols that are ingrained in a person's consciousness and so we cannot overcome our perception of the other and and thereby connect which actually leads to the split inside the mind this is something i have been telling in my earlier lectures also so the partition first happens inside the mind of the person inside the consciousness followed by its physical you know presence on on the map so ah the the symbols through which social groups you know cohere together and conceptualize others as different from them linguistically ethnically racially religiously and so forth that is actually responsible for paralyzing the subcontinent and in fact the globe at large so so communalism according to amitabh ghosh is exclusive attachment to one's own community ah which is also and the communal feeling is actually honed further sharpened by one's hostility through one's hostility towards another community so community communalism is not only attachment to one's own community but also ah stimulating a sense of hostility towards other communities ah especially that share ah geographical and political space with one's own so the incongruities innate in this idea of nation are delved in complex dimensions in the novel the characters are unable to make any meaning of the intrinsic inconsistencies with respect to nation and home so the novel i mean we see the different aspects the different facets of space being represented in the novel ah in in very paradoxical manner the the representation of border map atlas game of houses a variety of real houses being depicted in various cities from colombo to ah you know dhana mundi and even baligans in calcutta so gauche basically portrays the concurrent presence of precise maps where maps can actually overlap one place can overlay on the other one can overlap on the other and so there is no such pressure precision rather what we have are the shared memories so although the reader examines the national accounts solidified in time in juxtaposition with personal stories the understanding of borders actually gets shadowed by one's personal views of space right and and this personal views are actually juxtaposed with the bartholomew at last for example so ah various critics critics have read this story this the novel in different ways so going away and coming back become ironical in shadow lines because the impression that emerges from gauss's handling of experiences is that after partition no one can go away and then come back there is no going away and coming back i would just hearken back the case of maulvi scythe that i was describing in in sleepwalkers who never moved out of old lucknow and he carried a piece of old lucknow to karachi when he he had been displaced he did not have any idea of it gauche therefore concentrates on the immense void in an individual's ability to assess the true meaning of repeated violence as the overlap into each other there are endless lines of parallel mirrors and so they reflect the same thing from different points of space and time ah dev janishin gupta notes that narrator reaches his own disenchantment with lines and borders as he wonders how rational well-intentioned people could believe that imaginary arbitrary theoretical lines could cause an actual separation actually the border becomes you know what is created is actually you know a kind of mirror a looking glass border and both sides of it are so symmetrical the people are very similar rendering the border a farcical ah or or a meaningless creation actually pavitra bharali says that the shadowiness of the borderline puts the question mark to the geographic boundary line between country nations and its identity gauche considers space place as a non-neutral non-objective for then in call notes that shadow line is a metaphor for evading rather than exploring political realities the happenings of dhaka prove that war or friendship between nations is a continuing political reality so uh we have different understandings i mean gauche is trying to tell us human history is not a culture in an island rather you know rather than being independent and distinctive and singular we are actually continuation of each other we are enmeshed with our neighbors our identities are enmeshed with our neighbors and in an intricate network of differences novi kapadia states that characters intermingle not as members of distinct cultures but as complex individuals in a world where geographical boundaries have truly become shadow lines and further kavita daya says states that the shadow lines reveal the fragility of partitions borders between nations has etched out in maps and of frontiers policed by nation states that separate people communities and families so communities i mean gauche all in all has tried to show the communities as transnational through the work of historical memory so with that we are going to stop today's lecture and we will meet again for another round of discussions thank you so much [Music] you