The Shadow Lines Themes

The Shadow Lines follows the unnamed narrator, the youngest member of the Indian Datta-Chaudhuri family, as he pieces together his family history. This history spans several decades and follows many different family members—including his grandmother's youth in Dhaka in the 1910s and 1920s, his uncle Tridib's experiences of World War II in England as a child, the Partition of India in 1947, and finally, the riots in Calcutta and Dhaka in 1964, which…

The narrator of The Shadow Lines is endlessly fascinated by the relationship between memories as they exist in people's minds and memories that are transformed into stories and passed on through the spoken word. As a child, he lives for the stories his uncle Tridib tells him of living in England, as well as other stories about the Price family, which is the family that Tridib and his parents stayed with. As the narrator grows…

For all of the characters in The Shadow Lines, social standing is a major motivating factor in their lives. By exploring how people's desire for wealth and social standing gets out of control as a result of excessive pride, the novel suggests that these things should be treated with caution and not be taken too seriously. The narrator notes that though his education and his family's standing have had innumerable positive effects on his…

The events of The Shadow Lines center primarily around riots that took place in Calcutta, India, and Dhaka, East Pakistan, in late 1963 and early 1964. Though the narrator doesn't discover the truth until the very end of the novel, it's this riot in Dhaka that kills Tridib, a realization that suddenly forces the narrator to reevaluate his experience of the conflict from his hometown in Calcutta and consider the ways in which the…