- 1 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?, London: Verso, 2009.
- 2 Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998.
1Seminal work on war and grievability underlines the connections between war and violence on the one hand and the notions of framing and recognition, thereby taking cognisance of a subject, on the other hand.1 Only when life is framed as life do we care about it as life, in Butler’s understanding. In other words, life becomes life, once it is narrated or framed as recognisably held by those who are deemed worthy of it. Taking it further from Susan Sontag’s work on photography, there is a connection made in Butler’s work between photography and narrative which I wish to explore in Amitav Ghosh’s celebrated work The Shadow Lines.2 Ghosh’s work attempts to provide a connection between personal histories and official narratives of the nation and the world. Set in London and Calcutta, for most of its narrative, and encapsulating a time frame spreading from the Second World War to the Partition of India and Pakistan, the 1962 Indo-China war, and the conversion of East Pakistan into Bangladesh, the novel makes important connections between national tales and family tellers.
- 3 See Lucio de Capitani, “Riots, Crowds and the Collective in Amitav Ghosh’s politica (...)
- 4 See Sabine Lauret, “Excavating Memories and Unlayering History: The Archaeological Narrativ (...)
- 5 See Francesca Orsini, “Significant Geographies in the Shadow Lines,” in Esterino Adami, Car (...)
- 6 Thomas F. Halloran, “National Allegory and Partition in The Shadow Lines,” in Amitav Ghosh: (...)
2In recent times, critical appraisals of Ghosh’s work have largely been based on three overlapping trajectories: Ghosh’s political imagination3, narrative style4 and geographic imaginaries5, highlighting important contributions of Ghosh’s imaginative visions to the contemporary. However, even as some of these interpretive frameworks rely on the use of Ghosh’s depictions of war, the Partition as well as riot and communal discord, none of them focus on the intricate relationship between representations of war, photography and narrative style. This article focusses on the manner in which representations of war as photographic visions are highlighted in the novel. Ghosh’s profound connection of nationalism and national allegory, his use of “microstoria” to counter the grand narrative of European colonial history, has already been discussed6 but never in connection with Ghosh’s interest in photographs and photography, especially those in times of war.
3In what follows, I argue that war occupies a central presence in the novel. The narrative begins by depicting and then provincialising the Second World War, as not a global war but one that is specific to certain parts of the world. This argument in the novel is juxtaposed with the depiction of the Indo-China War and its paramount importance to those who suffered in it. Yet, the force of the Second World War is shown in sections of the postmodernist novel which discusses the Tresawsen family photographs. I then discuss the narrative style in relation to this section and term it Ghosh’s photographic vision. The third section highlights the manner in which the personal and the public coincide, intermingle and overlap in the novel, as well as how memory of war is both slippery, public and private simultaneously. The last section links the novel’s discussion of war with its photographic vision, by underlining the historical link between war and photography. The photograph and thus the photographic vision’s connection with death is highlighted, showing its culmination in death and the novel’s denouement.
- 7 Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines, op. cit., 104.
4In an argument over the importance of historical events, Ila, the narrator’s cousin, his childhood love interest, and the globe-trotting Londoner, fight over what counts as history with the narrator of Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines: “Well of course there are famines and riots and disasters, she said. But those are local things after all – not like revolutions or anti-fascist wars, nothing that sets a political example to the world, nothing that’s really remembered.”7 According to Ila, Europe with “revolutions” and “anti-fascist wars” seeks to set “a political example to the world” and claim its place as central to history. Yet non-European atrocities like “famines and riots and disasters” are just “local things”. Ila articulates a Eurocentric view of events that are perceived as having historical import while the narrator looks on in incredulity.
- 8 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, 25 (...)
- 9 Ibid., 4.
5The notion of Europe as centre making history through war has, of course, occupied modern discourse. A counter-argument is made by the narrator questioning Ila’s stance of European Wars as central and all other wars as marginal. This stance of the narrator bringing into question the marginal status of local histories of war is one understood in the postcolonial humanities as the ethical requirement to “provincialize Europe”.8 “Europe” as the centre of all thought and the bearer of humanistic ideas of political modernity, namely the public sphere, human rights, democracy, and social justice is shown to not simply be a straightforward project. The bearer of ideas of political modernity also bears traces of discriminatory treatment. In Chakrabarty’s words, “The European colonizer of the nineteenth century both preached this Enlightenment humanism at the colonized and at the same time denied it in practice”.9
- 10 Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, New Delhi: Routledge, 2006.
6Yet what Chakrabarty does not account for is the suspension of these ideas of European political modernity during war in the twentieth century in Europe: when war comes to Europe, the practices that colonialism and empire fostered are brought to the mainstream, the “centre”. War in Europe becomes a Derridean hauntology of the ideas and practises of colonialism brought to Europe.10 War becomes an extension of the discursive practises accompanying colonialism. Yet, even in the discussion of the war in The Shadow Lines, war is considered necessary in the fight against fascism. Wars also are hierarchically organised in the spectrum of violence unleashed by the human imagination. Europe’s wars, jus ad bellum, are just while those of the erstwhile colonies are riots and local things, if Ila and European historiography are to be believed. Ila acts as a ventriloquist of European historiographic practices.
- 11 C. Vijayashree, Meenakshi Mukherjee, Harish Trivedi, and T Vijaya Kumar (eds), Nation in Im (...)
- 12 Amitav Ghosh and Dipesh Chakrabarty, “A Correspondence on Provincializing Europe,” Radical (...)
7The narrator and authorial voice in The Shadow Lines, of course, tries to argue to the contrary. This voice of the narrator argues for the centrality of wars and even more so of riots as not “local things”, but central to the nation and, correspondingly, the family. The novel discusses the various ways in which the nation and narrations are inextricably linked in the imagination.11 For instance, the family becomes a way of “displacing the ‘nation’” whereby the familial is discussed in terms of impact of national events.12
8While the novel discusses this relationship of family and nation, nation and narration, it also has at its core, a representation of wars. An often ignored aspect of this well discussed novel is its representation of the Second World War. As the novel tries to decentre Europe, to provincialise it in the literary and narratorial imagination, it is caught up in the double bind of not being able to ignore the weight of historical fact. In other words, the novel tries to provincialise Europe and de-centre it from history, yet it cannot but help derive its logical structure and representational style from episodes in the narrative set in the Second World War. War is pictured in the novel as a stark display of the titular shadow lines: lines and borders considered imaginary but also bearing the weight of the naked force that overpower those that try to transgress these boundaries.
- 13 Suvir Kaul, “Separation Anxiety: Growing Up Inter/National in The Shadow Lines,” The Shadow (...)
- 14 Sujala Singh, “Inventing London in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines.” Kunapipi, vol 21, no 2 (...)
9The partition of Bengal into India and East Pakistan, the war and riots in India in the 1960s, the division of the country into “us” and “them” has often been discussed as representative of the meaning of the shadow lines13, scant attention has been paid to the double bind that posits Europe through the representation of the Second World War as centre even as it tries to provincialise European history. It has been argued how “[t]his unquestioning endorsement of England's 'finest hour' reads like a parody of England’s mythic exaltation of itself as a country that had saved the world but lost an Empire because of the war”. 14
10This feat – of exaltation and parodic mimicry – is accomplished by the use of comparison that, for instance, juxtaposes the war and frenzy generated during the Second World War in Britain to the frenzy of riots in Calcutta. Yet, this tour de force is incomplete without the vision that exists in the novel, especially in episodes around the Second World War in Britain. The narrative technique is one that makes use of the visual and the literary, the political and the private, as well as the imaginative and the objective. The novel’s narrator hovers around the description of the Tresawsen photographs in a section on the Second World War in the novel and frequently goes back and forth to them in the plot. The vision – which I call the photographic vision – becomes a way of seeing and describing all that exists in the photograph through photographic memory. It is a gaze and mode of looking that exists in the narratorial imagination and, instead of a look into the camera, it is a look of the photograph. This vision of the photograph, the photographic vision, combines the visual with the textual, conflates the subjective with the objective as well as the imaginative with the factual.
- 15 Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines, op. cit., 59.
- 16 Ibid, 60.
11In the novel, the Tresawsen photographs are mentioned in a flashback. The narrator, looking at Mrs. Price’s room, is reminded of his uncle Tridib having shown him the room through photographs. A complicated frame tale is evoked and created which forms the backbone of the narrative technique. The tale is a mingling of the times when Tridib is in the photographs as a young child visiting the Price family in London and also when Tridib is outside the photographs showing the narrator the photographs and the accompanying details which are being recounted by the narrator in the novel. The episode begins with the statement that ends the narration of one section “I was looking around in the room”15 but continues into the next section with “Tridib had once shown me pictures of that room”.16 The episode recounts when Tridib’s family visits the Price family in London, Mrs Price invites her brother Alan Tresawsen and the people who live with him in Brick Lane on one occasion. The Shaheb (Tridib’s father) has a camera and takes pictures of the inmates and visitors of the house. The year, we are told, is 1939 and the context of the beginning of the Second World War is implicit.
- 17 Idem.
- 18 Idem.
- 19 Ibid., 60-61.
12Yet, it is not the war that is the centre of narratorial attention but the photographs of that time. The narrator remarks on the curious nature of the photographic pose that governed the photographs of the period: “It has nothing to do with age or colour, or the feel of the paper. […] It has to do with the way the camera looked at people then”.17 The camera is thought of as an outsider, an invader of private space where people can be at ease. The camera needs to be presented with formal postures and “a public face”.18 These formal poses are then described in the subsequent pages: “Snipe is at the far left of the group. He is dressed in a crumpled corduroy jacket and a woollen tie that is somewhat askew”.19 This tableau of information regarding each photographed character is displayed in a starkly realist verisimilitude.
13The formality of the description of the pose is broken with the interspersion of the informal insight into their characters that the narrator provides. “He is unmistakably an academic. For the moment, however, he has temporarily left his job as a lecturer in Middle English, at a Hampstead college, and has been assigned to the Ministry of Food ‘for the duration’”.20 The narrator, of course, knows this because the older Tridib has presumably given him this information. Yet, in this retelling of tale and photograph, a conflation of Proustian meanderings and mimetic realism occurs. The story is non sequitur yet combines in its telling a realist handling of time and space.
- 21 Ibid., 255.
- 22 The Bartholomew Atlas in India and the A-Z in London are a collection of maps, aspects of w (...)
14Meenakshi Mukherjee, in her seminal work on the novel, describes this amalgamation and handling of time and space that is governed by the coordinates of “maps” and “mirrors”.21 She mentions the shift between concise detailing of description and a constant creation of imaginative, illusionary space. If maps are the tropes that highlight the concise use of space, mirrors posit space which is extra-real. Space is marked in the novel by a meticulous understanding of the roads and streets and houses. The passing of time similarly is unambiguously and solidly detailed. But space and time are also shown as being constructed, such that spaces are notional, fanciful and time passes in a non-linear manner. Maps too are constructed spaces, notional, and, as in the case of Partition, have devastating consequences for those on the “wrong” side of mapped boundaries. The Bartholomew Atlas, the A-Z22, become symbols of this space-time mimetic exercise but the narrator’s imagination and his memory of Tridib’s account becomes another guide.
15The narrator’s memory of Tridib’s account offers another mode of thinking about space and time and how space and time are mediated by memory. This becomes a literary enterprise reminiscent of Marcel Proust. Memory and memories of memories also serve as a type of mirroring. These are not exactly extra-real, outside the realm of reality and part of fantasy. Rather, these enable perspectival shifts in memory and space-time.
16In the episode in The Shadow Lines concerning the description of the photographs and the people in them, the tableau created is one that inhabits multiple photographic frames. Tridib is both in the photograph and looking and telling the narrator about the people inside it. Yet, the narrator, following Tridib’s advice and training from earlier, can also be presumed to be adding perspective to detail, showing the “mirror” to the “map” simultaneously. There are thus multiple slippages between the photographs, the “reality” it captures, and the varied ways in which the photograph lives on in memory.
- 23 Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines, op. cit., 12.
- 24 Ibid., 21.
- 25 Ibid., 24.
17Earlier in the novel, Tridib has shown this narratorial blend of fact and fiction through the accounts he has told the young narrator of the story. “If you believe anything people tell you, you deserve to be told anything at all …” Tridib exclaims.23 Yet, the narration also needs a trace of the imaginative as well, the narrator learning from Tridib comments “that a place does not merely exist, that it has to be invented in one’s imagination; that her [Ila’s] practical, bustling London was no less invented than mine, neither more nor less true, only very far apart”.24 The invention of time and place is not a task mired in fantasy, however, but needs the precision of the imagination. Tridib is eager to teach this to the narrator at the start of the narrative.25
18The unique blend of imprecise facts and precise inventions become clear in the section of the Tresawsen photographs. Written as they are with an admixture of subjective truth and objectively described invention, the narrative in this section creates a blend of visuality within words as well. As the author describes the scene, the visual is brought to life verbally:
… in the foreground of one of those pictures, there is a large, shallow pit. … This pit is intended to be the foundation of an Anderson air raid shelter, his second line of defence against the expected German bombs. It is a serious pit therefore. But in the picture it looks anything but that; it looks like a dishevelled flower bed.26
19However, added to the description is not just a photograph-like documentation of the visible. There is also speculation of what the picture represents:
It was probably as some kind of joke that they decided to stand beside it; one of Tresawsen’s friends must have thought of it. Perhaps moments before the picture was taken they were doubled up with laughter, looking down at this pathetic would-be shelter. But now that the camera is upon them only one of them is laughing, defying the lens. The rest have composed their faces.27
20The composure of the face, part of the formality associated with the photographic pose, is foregrounded. The documentary status of the photograph is used but garnished with subjective description.
- 28 Meenakshi Mukherjee, “Maps and Mirrors: Co-ordinates of Meaning in The Shadow Lines,” The (...)
21The memory of the war, with the photograph of the war produce an intermingling of public and private memory. This has, of course, been remarked in the context of the “upside down house” and integrated with the Partition of the subcontinent.28 The upside down house is the narrative remembering the divided childhood home of the narrator’s grandmother, Tha’mma, where the division is inscribed in memory as an othering. The residents of the other part of the divided house are considered to be living upside down. The inversion becomes a way of othering what was once a part of the self. The reverberations with the Partition are evident, where the divided side is seen as a mirror of the self-same nation. Personal experience and public events are intermingled: Tha’mma’s memories are the memories of the Partition. Tridib faces the post-1962 war riots and dies in the process. The memories of the newspaper and what individuals remember though can also be in opposition. The insistence that people need to have the freedom to invent their own stories is emphasised.
- 29 Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines, op. cit., 252.
22War and nationalist propaganda, the violence the state unleashes and the cultural apparatus of forgetting that it creates thus can be seen as at odds with personal remembrances. For instance, in the novel, remembering what happened to Tridib, a question that creates suspense in the narrative and is the “redemptive mystery”29 that the narrator has given himself the task to uncover, becomes a disjunct from public memory (or, in this case, amnesia) of the riots. Similarly, personal apathy about war (the 1962 Indo-China war), a public event, is seen, when it does not touch upon the lives of the individuals involved:
At dinner, my father, smiling good-humouredly, would ask her what they had talked about: did they have any views, for instance, on the recent war with China?
Oh we’re not interested in anything as current as that, my grandmother would reply.30
23At other times, the family is caught up in the conforming and patriotic demands of nationalism:
I leapt out of his arms and went running up to my grandmother’s room, cheering all the way. Tha’mma, I shouted. There’s a war, a war with China.
She laughed, I remember—it was a long time since she had laughed—and gave me a hug, and said: Let’s hope we teach them a lesson.31
24Yet, the importance of the 1962 war and those it doesn’t touch is highlighted in the slippery doubleness of memory. The events remembered are not those of national importance but of personal relevance instead:
Isn’t it odd, someone said, that we can remember it so well?
Why no, said Malik. It’s not odd at all. It was the most important thing that happened in the country when we were children.
The others nodded in agreement, but I had my reputation for contrariness to preserve, so I shook my head and said: Oh come on, it was just a stupid little skirmish somewhere in the hills. It wasn’t important at all. We wouldn’t even remember it if the Indian army hadn’t taken such a beating. It didn’t mean a thing to most people.32
25The aspect of a country going to war is shown as distant to the narrator even though it was important as a public memory when compared to the more personal remembrance and grief over a riot:
“Surely you remember, I said. There were terrible riots in Calcutta in 1964.
[…]
There was a riot, I said helplessly.
There are riots all the time, Malik said.
This was a terrible riot, I said.
All riots are terrible, Malik said. But it must have been a local thing. Terrible or not, it’s hardly comparable to a war”.33
26Malik’s viewpoint is made to sound like an echo of the war frenzy and centrality given to the Second World War in Ila’s mind. While compared to the European relevance of the Second World War, war and riots in India would be local events, the echo of that same sentiment in Malik shows the mirrored shadow line that is created to give centrality to certain wars over internal riots. Clearly, some public events are considered more equal than others.
27The episode with the Tresawsen photographs becomes an important one. It becomes a central point in the narrative schema of the novel that radiates to other wars, other riots, other public and personal memories and creates a shadow line connecting them. The Tresawsen photograph episode highlights several other remarkable features as well. The first is that the documentary status of the war photograph is linked with the narrator’s photographic memory.
- 34 Caroline Brothers, War and Photography: A Cultural History, New York: Routledge, 19 (...)
- 35 Idem.
28It has been remarked how photographs, especially those of war, convey an indexicality and give truth to the claim that the events in the photograph happened34. For historians of war photography, war and its photographs are linked and culturally generated in a discursive production and rooted in cultural circulation and semantics35. Yet in the novel, as argued earlier, the memory of the photograph, its cultural ramifications, are informed by the photograph itself. The photographs are connected to Tridib and the narrator – who acts as Tridib’s shadow – as remnants of a photographic memory. The details are accurate and the memories vivid.
- 36 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, New York: Hill and Wang, 1981, 26.
- 37 Ibid., 27.
- 38 Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines, op. cit., 60-68.
- 39 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, op. cit., 26.
29The second feature is the representational value of the photograph, its place in philosophical thought and colonial discourse that is relevant here. In the episode of the photographs, the photographs seem to contain what Roland Barthes called the “studium”36 and “punctum”37. The photographs are cultural artefacts of an out-of-ordinary situation. They are also repositories of the cultural and political manifestation of the war. The pose of formality, the pit dug out for a war38 are all studium, according to Barthes’ schema. But the pictures in the ambit of personal memory also wound the viewer and hence contain the punctum as well. The photographs carry an ability to remark on the cultural processes that carry them out but also seek to “pierc[e]”39 and call attention to themselves.
- 40 Sharon Sliwinski, “A painful labour: responsibility and photography,” Visual Studies (...)
- 41 Gary D. Sampson, Review of Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the Briti (...)
30Moreover, the link between the colonial project and photography has been made evident by several scholars.40 Photography becomes a tool for the colonisers in the project of colonialism. Colonising and interpellating colonial subjects and capturing them on camera can be linked. The camera becomes a classificatory tool in the hands of the coloniser. As Gary D. Sampson comments, “As a new form of visual representation in the nineteenth century, photography offered a significant means of strengthening Britain’s grip on its empire”.41 Here, photography is linked to processes of making the colonised as imperial subject. Therefore, photographs of colonised people were brought into an interpretive frame (to derive from Butler’s work from the beginning).
- 42 Francesca Orsini, “Significant Geographies in the Shadow Lines,” in Esterino Adami, Carmen (...)
31Yet what is starkly different about Ghosh’s work is the presence of the coloniser as subject as well. The presence in the novel of the Tresawsen family photographs, photographs of the British Tresawsen family, highlight the colonising nation’s people as subjects of the frame as well. The coloniser is photographed instead by the formerly colonised subject, reversing the gaze of the photographic lens, thereby complicating the photographer-photographed binary and the associated power dynamics. This continues the project of not just provincialising Europe. Rather, instead of dwelling on the boundaries of the local and the global as separate entities, one central and the other marginal, the narrative of The Shadow Lines complicates the dichotomous logic of this separation. As Francesca Orsini notes, the logic of The Shadow Lines defies such neat categorisation and offers instead what is a more “significant geography”.42
32Third, the Tresawsen photographs come to figuratively embody memory and evidence but also seem to present the interiority and subjectivity of the persons photographed by portraying them as well-rounded characters. Instead of the objectification made available through the colonial induction of photography, the novel’s instance shows a fully rounded, three-dimensional representation of those photographed. Even when there is very little information available to the narrator, the thrust is on imagining Alan Tresawsen, Mike, Dan, Francesca Halevy as three-dimensional figures and bringing them to life.
- 43 Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines, op. cit., 64-65.
33This is how, for instance, Mayadebi and Mrs Price are shown having a discussion about Halevy. The episode is of course one imaginatively constructed by the narrator of The Shadow Lines. Ghosh writes, “Mrs Price has often speculated about Francesca to Mayadebi: she knows that Francesca shares that house in Brick Lane with the three men. But the trouble, as she puts it, is that she doesn’t know which of them exactly Francesca shares it with”.43
- 44 Ibid., 65.
- 45 Ibid., 233.
34The fourth remarkable feature in the portion in the novel about the family photographs is the mention of the “shadowy” frame. The notion of “shadowy” ties in with the title and its thematic relevance in the text. The narrator discusses Tridib’s favourite photograph: “It is a shadowy, indistinct picture, taken in the failing evening light, on a very long exposure”.44 The shadow lines meant to connect the several generations of characters across time and nationalities and regions is thematically emphasised. The photograph is shadowy, blurred, and thus the photographic vision extends itself as a vision not just about the Tresawsen photographs but also about the blurred boundaries and binaries that the social order seeks to impose in a rigid manner. It is as the narrator writes later, “[t]hey had drawn their borders, believing in that pattern, in the enchantment of lines, hoping perhaps that once they had etched their borders upon the map, the two bits of land would sail away from each other like the shifting tectonic plates of the prehistoric Gondwanaland”.45
- 46 Ibid., 4.
- 47 Ibid., 63.
35Linked to this is the fifth feature which the novel speaks of, the photographs’ relation to death. Photography has often been linked to having a deathly aspect to it. This link between the photograph and death, for instance, is Roland Barthes' concern. Barthes states at the start of Camera Lucida, “[w]hat the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially”.46 Photographs are linked to the totality accorded to death. Photographs capture a moment infinitesimally repeating that which can never be repeated. Writing on the death of his mother, Barthes is referring to this connection of “fatality” that exists within the photograph while observing the photographs of his late mother.47
36Ghosh’s concern in the novel also extends Barthes’ ruminations. Did those that were photographed know they were dying? The novel introduces this question through Tridib’s imaginings. He imagines Alan, Francesca and Dan walking back to their house in Brick Lane, but acknowledges he can only imagine the events of what took place inside the house.
37But of the world they were going to, that house in Brick Lane, he knew nothing; […] It would drive him to despair that he could not guess where that tawdriness lay […] Whatever it was, at that moment, walking down Lymington Road, with their arms clasped around each other, they were exactly one week away from the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet pact, after which nothing in their house would ever be the same again.48
38Tridib, who ironically would die himself in a mirrored riot later, is speculating on the unknowability of death and his failure to imagine through his photographic vision what the life of the inmates was like. Ghosh writes the following:
Which was the more real, their dirty bathtubs and shared bedrooms or that other reality, waiting one week away? Most of all he would despair because he could not imagine what it would be like to confront the most real of their realities: that within two years three of the four of them would be dead. […] But not that other infinitely more important reality: the fact that they knew, that even walking down that street, that evening, they knew what was coming—not the details nor the timing perhaps, but they knew, all four of them, that their world, and in all probability they themselves, would not survive the war.49
39Death becomes the final, infinite reality that goes beyond the vision of the photograph. It becomes the final unknowable world that they knew they were entering. The world of the war, the frenzy that accompanies it, is presented in vivid detail. The photograph enables Tridib (and the narrator’s) imagination to guess the life of those photographed but not their death. It is this meditation on the unknowability of a subject beyond death that becomes relevant to the novel’s denouement. The novel creates a suspenseful narrative where the unnamed narrator tries to unravel the conditions of Tridib’s death. May Price’s revelation to the narrator leads to the solution of the “redemptive mystery” of Tridib’s demise.50
40Thus, even here, the centrality of the section on the Tresawsen photographs to the ending of the narrative is evident. The photographic vision that exists in The Shadow Lines becomes central to the novel’s concerns. The photographic vision takes root structurally at the centre of the novel. The Tresawsen episode with the photographs provides a way of seeing the novel, and the photographic vision becomes an organising principle as well as a narratorial technique. The episode creates a milieu for various discussions around photography, most notably around the coloniser as subject, the relation of colonialism and photography and death’s hold on photography. At the heart of these discussions is the oft discussed notion of state violence and nationalism but also of war and the central place it occupies in the public imagination.