Social Standing and Pride Theme Analysis

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 life, he also shows how the same things tear apart different factions of his family and prove to be, in some cases, lethal.

Over the course of the novel, the characters make it abundantly clear that even more important to them than climbing the social ladder is highlighting the differences, real or imagined, between themselves and those who exist on the social ladder below them. Ila's mother, who goes by the nickname Queen Victoria, is one of the most overt offenders. Although the woman she hires to nanny Ila, Lizzie, speaks fluent English and is semi-conversational in Hindi, Queen Victoria insists on speaking to Lizzie in her own made-up language designed to make Lizzie seem stupid and uneducated. In reality, Lizzie is just poor and from a different part of the country. Tha'mma also relies heavily on her sense of pride. When her husband died prematurely, leaving Tha'mma with a young son and no job, Tha'mma was too prideful to ask her wealthy family members for help. Instead, by a stroke of luck, she got a job as a teacher that she then held for the next thirty years, and impressed upon her son, the narrator's father, the importance of education. In her old age, she construes her relatives as greedy and unhelpful for not coming to her aid, though they didn't help her exactly because she refused their help. However, by juxtaposing Tha'mma's sense of pride in her self-made wealth and her sister's family's inherited wealth with an open distaste for poor people and an implied fear of living like poor people, the novel suggests that the characters' desire for wealth and standing is somewhat understandable. It's in their best interests to make sure their children attend the best schools and achieve the highest marks, as that will ensure that they don't end up poor.

Chronologically speaking, pride is the first thing that begins to destroy the narrator's family. When Tha'mma and Mayadebi are young girls, they live in a large house in Dhaka with a number of extended family members. When their father begins fighting with their uncle Jethamoshai, the two men decide that the only way to deal with the conflict is to divide the house in two with a wall and never speak to each other again. For Tha'mma, who is old enough to remember a time when the house was not divided, she sees that her father and uncle's excessive pride is what causes them to feel that their only option was to divide the house in a completely nonsensical way and cut off the other half of the family. Further, the prideful natures of both parts of the family don't end after the division: the patriarchs forbid their children from playing with each other, and thus, the two halves of the family fall out of contact. Most chilling is what Tha'mma discovers when she returns to the house in her sixties. Jethamoshai still lives there, an ancient man in his nineties, and is still very clearly upset about the conflict with his brother: he rants and raves about wanting to take his brother's family to court to legally claim the other half of the house, and indeed, ran out several family members who at various points tried to return to the house. By this point, Jethamoshai is completely unable to care for himself, and he  certainly would not be taken seriously in a court of law. In this way, the novel offers a dark cautionary tale of the consequences of pride, as Jethamoshai's pride leads to his own death, the death of his caretaker, Khalil, and Tridib.

Tha'mma believes wholeheartedly that it's important to make good use of one's social standing—a belief that stems from her own bootstraps story of success. As far as she's concerned, Tridib blatantly ignores this, which makes him untrustworthy and stupid in her eyes. Instead of becoming a professor, Tridib spends his time on the streets, talking—a sin to trump all others, according to Tha'mma. Again, however, Tha'mma turns this all on its head when, on the day before she dies, she writes a letter to the dean of the narrator's school, informing him that the narrator has been visiting brothels and therefore should be expelled—essentially, attempting to deprive her grandson of the social standing he would achieve through education. The narrator understands that his grandmother did this because she resents that the narrator is deeply in love with Ila, who attempts to reject her own high social standing by becoming involved with Trotskyism in London, a political movement that seeks to upend the class system altogether. Though Tha'mma is unsuccessful in ruining her grandson's chances at a better life through education, this instance illustrates again the dangers of excessive pride and obsession with social standing. Tha'mma ensures that her grandson will think poorly of her after her death, destroying her family in yet another way. The novel illustrates the innumerable ways that pride and fear can tear apart a family, ending with the assertion that though the reasoning behind people's pride can, in some cases, be understandable, the means absolutely do not justify the ends.