The Shadow Lines: Outlook Editor On Life And Struggles At the Border

바카라�It is a fear that comes of the knowledge that normalcy is utterly contingent, that the spaces that surround one, the streets that one inhabits, can become, suddenly and without warning, as hostile as a desert in a flash flood. It is this that sets apart the thousand million people who inhabit the subcontinent from the rest of the world바카라�not language, not food, not music바카라�it is the special quality of the loneliness that grows out of the fear of the war between oneself and one바카라�s image in the mirror.바카라�

바카라�The Narrator in The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh

Since forever, and forever is 바카라�recent history바카라�, because that바카라�s how we apply the convenience of a past to all times known and unknown. We have lived within fixed state borders negotiating them, redrawing those lines in our imaginations and on paper, forming allegiances and alliances on the basis of who is on which side of the line. Memory is another landscape where borders dissolve to extract a story from the past. The Partition is one such case. The border people know how arbitrary the lines can be and how trauma haunts those who lived through that time and those who inherited those memories. Borders were drawn.

Some of our borders are messy. Some are impossible to breach. A few are fenced. Others are unfenced. Where does one country begin and the other end? Many years ago, in Samba in Jammu, I had seen the wall of a local school on the border of India and Pakistan dotted with bullet marks. The school바카라�s window opened to mustard fields on either side. I remember asking, how do you then pick flowers? Ours and not theirs?

The 1959 Ground Rules between India and Pakistan aimed to resolve Indo-East Pakistan border disputes along the Zero Line. Borders also run through the deep seas. India has maritime borders with Sri Lanka and the Maldives.

For those who live on the borders, their lives are shaped by the borderland milieu. They become peripheral people who must be ready to face loss whenever there is a breach. They must also always be prepared for war. Bunkers are part of their lives. Construction of more such bunkers has been announced in Jammu after the flare-up between the two countries in the aftermath of the Pahalgam terror attack. More siren systems have been planned.

The Line of Control (LoC)바카라�the de facto border that separates India and Pakistan바카라�is a fragile place. There has never been permanent peace along this 740 km-long LoC which began as a Ceasefire Line in 1949 after the first India-Pakistan war. It is a line of suspense.

Long ago, I read The Shadow Lines, which brings these questions to the forefront. What constitutes a border then? Are the lines drawn in blood? Or in sand? Can water ever be a line? Can the sky be divided?

Is nationalism becoming too narrow to hold the many people and their multiplicities?

Is war always a thought now?

Operation Sindoor is still trending. It is a statement now of Indianness, with some Indian actresses wearing it to the Cannes Film Festival바카라�s red carpet. The Prime Minister announced at a rally that it isn바카라�t blood that courses through his veins, but sindoor. In all of this, the border people witnessed yet again the precarious nature of their belonging. These purposeful lines are, in the end, shadow lines that people who inhabit both sides of it know because the devastation brought about by their creation must eventually strip any meaning from it. That바카라�s how Ghosh fused history with fiction and memory with borders in this 1988 book.

The self is played off against the other. The rhetoric of location isn바카라�t about borders only, but it also exists in the minds. Places also travel with people. They migrate too.

Geographical borders, political maps, frontiers are post-colonial division lines that only provoke violence.

In Ghosh바카라�s novel, Jethamoshai, a fictional character says that 바카라�they had drawn these borders, believing in that pattern, in that enchantment of the lines, hoping that once they had etched their borders upon the map, the two bits of land would sail away from each other like shifting tectonic plates바카라�바카라�

Borders are to be brought under control. But nations also exist in memories that people of the borders hold. Borders are political and personal. They are visible and invisible. They are sites of violence and separations, of loss and fear. They don바카라�t have to be. People who live on either side of any border anywhere carry the scars of divisions where shadows become elongated and flashlights become a norm. Peace must be kept. Violations must not happen.

In Manto바카라�s Toba Tek Singh, a madman seeks his village, Toba Tek Singh, but finding it claimed by both sides, he chooses to stand in no-man바카라�s land.

바카라�After fifteen years on his feet, he was lying face down on the ground. India was on one side, behind a barbed wire fence. Pakistan was on the other side, behind another fence. Toba Tek Singh lay in the middle, on a piece of land that had no name,바카라� Manto writes.

This issue of Outlook is about the borderlanders and their lives. It is about that calamity called war. It is about remembering stories.

In the hope that reading stories like Toba Tek Singh and The Shadow Lines will help us think beyond borders.

In the hope that peace will come and no bunkers will be used in the future. It is very dark inside.

Chinki Sinha is editor, Outlook Magazine

This article is part of Outlook Magazine's June 11, 2025 issue, 'Living on the Edge', which explores India바카라�s fragile borderlands and the human cost of conflict. It appeared in print as 'The Shadow Lines.'