The Silence of the Crowd: Rememory and the Violence of Forgetting in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines
This research paper investigates the representation of communal violence and mob psychology within the context of South Asian literature. Amitav Ghosh’s canonical novel illustrates the tension between collective aggression and individual agency, specifically regarding the recurring riots that have shaped the Indo-Pak subcontinent since Partition. The theoretical framework arises from classical crowd psychology, which views the mob as a dehumanized, irrational mass where individuals lose their sense of self, and further incorporates contemporary perspectives provided by Floyd Allport and Ralf Turner. These theories suggest that crowd behavior is often structured, coherent, and purposeful, emerging from shared norms or pre-existing individual dispositions rather than a complete loss of identity. Using a qualitative textual analysis, the paper examines how Ghosh employs “rememory”, the process of recalling repressed or forgotten traumatic events to challenge nationalistic narratives. The analysis highlights the narrator’s “epiphany” that the borders (shadow lines) created during Partition fail to separate the shared fates of people across India and East Pakistan. Instead, these events create “mirror images” of communal discord on both sides of the line. Tridib’s death lies at the heart of this analysis. The authors argue that Ghosh’s refusal to provide graphic descriptions of violence or a specific identity to the mob that killed Tridib is a deliberate act of authorial responsibility. By maintaining a silence over the senseless acts of violence, Ghosh shifts the reader’s focus toward Tridib’s individual courage and his legacy of pluralism. This narrative strategy acts as a form of resistance against the ‘violence of forgetting’ that often follows communal trauma, while emphasizing that an individual’s responsibility persists even within a crowd. Through fragmented histories and individual pasts, Ghosh creates a deliberate response to the chaos of the mob. Literature serves as a vital tool for bearing witness to history while preserving stories that restore faith in human solidarity in the face of political and communal division.
Keywords: Mob Psychology, Rememory, The Shadow Lines, Communal Violence, Partition, Amitav Ghosh, the Individual vs the Crowd
