In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler's Tale

“Khalaf ibn Ishaq’s letter seems to open a trapdoor into a vast network of foxholes where real life continues uninterrupted.”

This quote is demonstrative of Ghosh’s goals in exploring the lives of individuals who would otherwise be anonymous within the grand historical narratives, and how the Geniza letters provide a unique opportunity to examine Personal Histories within the Historical Narrative.

“I knew nothing then about the Slave of MS H.6 except that he had given me a right to be there, a sense of entitlement.”

Here, Ghosh reveals another important aspect of his book: The personal investment he feels in discovering details about Bomma’s life. His feeling of connection to Bomma as another Indian living in Egypt prompts him to try to understand what brought Bomma to Egypt, raising the theme of The Complexities of Cultural Identity. This, in turn, leads to him investigating the Indian Ocean Trade routes.

“The last skeletal remains of the city whose markets once traded in the best the world could offer lie a little further along the path.”

Within In an Antique Land, Ghosh often stresses that colonialism was a destructive force on the world, introducing the theme of The Impacts of Colonialism and Globalization. An important aspect of these impacts is the end of the Indian Ocean trade routes due to European domination, which causes the decline in Fustat’s markets.

“‘I was born a Hindu,’ I said reluctantly, for if I had a religious identity at all it was largely by default.”

Ghosh’s reluctant acceptance of the identity “Hindu” shows a key difference between him and the people of Lataifa and Nashawy: While their Islamic beliefs form a central part of their personal identity, one which defines their outlook, Ghosh seeks not to be defined by his religion. This difference in their views is a large element of the friction and lack of understanding between them in the book, invoking The Complexities of Cultural Identity.

“[T]he exercise helped me to understand why so many people in the hamlet had told me not to fast: to belong to that immense community was a privilege which they had to re-earn every year, and the effort made them doubly conscious of the value of its boundaries.”

Ghosh’s commentary on the Ramadan fasting in the village shows an aspect of his exploration of The Complexities of Cultural Identity. The ritual shared among a worldwide community shows that one’s cultural identity is not necessarily limited to their immediate surroundings, but instead connected to a series of other, wider phenomena. Here, the Egyptians of Lataifa are part of a community much broader than themselves, but one that still has definitive limits.

“If there is an irony today in the thought that a Jewish collector, not so very long ago, would have seen reason to steal manuscripts from his fellow Jews in Palestine in order to take them to Russia, it is not one that would have been apparent to Firkowitch: he was merely practicing on his co-religionists the methods that Western scholarship used, as a normal part of its functioning, throughout the colonized world.”

Abraham Firkowitch’s decision to remove objects from a Synagogue to take them to Russia is regarded by Ghosh as reflective of The Impacts of Colonialism and Globalization in shaping an individual’s worldview. Firkowitch’s relationship with the people of the Synagogue was defined by the power relationship of colonizer-colonized instead of their shared religious beliefs; this, Ghosh argues, is par for the course within Western, colonizing, academic views.

“[T]here were times when the magnifying glass would drop out of my hand when I came upon certain words and turns of phrase for I would suddenly hear the voice of Shaikh Musa speaking in the documents in front of me as clearly as though I had been walking past the canal, on my way between Lataifa and Nashawy.”

In this quote, Ghosh shows how the two, generally separate, narrative strands in the book are in fact connected and mutually supporting. It is the knowledge he gains in Egypt that helps him understand the Geniza letters. It also suggests that the world of the Indian Ocean trade—which he often fears is entirely lost—may still have a legacy.

“You should try to civilize your people. You should tell them to stop praying to cows and burning their dead.”

Ustaz Sabry’s mother here critiques Ghosh in a manner that he hears many times throughout the book. Many of the Egyptians he meets are worried about India’s spiritual life, being especially appalled by the practice of cremation. The linking of these practices to a lack of “civilization” shows the lack of understanding that Ghosh sees in most of his travels, something that he compares to a more multicultural past.

“Our countries were very similar, for India, like Egypt, was largely an agricultural nation, and the majority of its people lived in villages, like the Egyptian fellaheen, and ploughed their land with cattle. Our countries were poor, for they had both been ransacked by imperialists, and now they were both trying, in very similar ways, to cope with poverty and all the other problems that had been bequeathed to them by their troubled histories.”

Ustaz Sabry draws out similarities that exist between India and Egypt, making him one of the only characters in the book to not focus on their differences. In this quote, much of Ghosh’s own views can be seen. By showing Ustaz Sabry sharing such views, Ghosh suggests that he supports the praise Ustaz Sabry receives from others in Nashawy.

“For Isma’il it was Ustaz Sabry who was a figure of respect, not Imam Ibrahim.”

The change in the local figures of respect, from Imam Ibrahim to Ustaz Sabry, is an early sign of the broad changes that the village undergoes during Ghosh’s visits. While the most dramatic of these changes happen with the influx of money from Iraq, Ghosh shows that a cultural shift is already occurring during his 1980/1 visit.

“To the young Ben Yiju, journeying eastwards would have appeared as the simplest and most natural means of availing himself of the most rewarding possibilities his world had to offer.”

Ben Yiju’s travel eastwards is placed, in the text, directly after Ghosh hearing that Nabeel and Isma’il left for Iraq because of the economic opportunities that arose. By doing this, Ghosh shows that immigration to exploit economic opportunities was a common feature throughout human history, thereby linking his historical narrative to the present-day Egyptian one.

“I knew then that he would never talk to me about the remedies he had learned from his father; not merely because he was suspicious of me and my motives, but also because those medicines were even more discredited in his own eyes than they were in everyone else’s.”

Imam Ibrahim’s changing role in the village and his fear of irrelevance is a key part of Ghosh’s examination of the broader changes in the village. It is this fear and insecurity that leads him to most fervently align himself with the modern, Western forms of knowledge and viewpoints. This will later cause him to argue with Ghosh over Egypt and India’s places in the world.

“I understood that their relationships with the objects of their everyday lives was never innocent of the knowledge that there were other places, other countries which did not have mud-walled houses and cattle-drawn plough.”

The common Egyptian fear that they had been irreversibly superseded by the West in terms of technology, and that they must try to catch up, explains the rapid adoption of technology during Ghosh’s absence. The mindset also shows The Impacts of Colonialism and Globalization on Egypt. Colonialism has not only extracted wealth from the nation, but also made many there internalize a worldview designed to “prove” their inferiority.

“The fact was that despite the occasional storms and turbulence their country had seen, despite even the wars that some of them had fought in, theirs was a world that was far gentler, far less violent, very much more humane and innocent than mine.

I could not have expected them to understand an Indian’s terror of symbols.”

Ghosh’s fear that he could not explain the religious strife that he saw to people who have never experienced the same shows the difficulty in overcoming entirely different cultural understandings. Ghosh argues from this situation that, since different people have experiences vastly different from each other, fully understanding them through simply being told or studying is impossible—lived experience is crucial.

“Yet, since Ben Yiju chose, despite the obvious alternative, to marry a woman born outside his faith, it can only have been because of another overriding and more important consideration.

If I hesitate to call it love it is only because the documents do not offer certain proof.”

Ghosh’s argument that Ben Yiju was in love with Ashu both shows his technique for reconstructing evidence and a part of his outlook. Ghosh builds arguments from small scraps of evidence, or the lack of any evidence, and a broader historical understanding of the period, allowing him to make educated assumptions. His placement of this story near that of ‘Eid’s love story with a Badawy girl shows that his views on the difficulty of overcoming cultural differences does not entail a lack of shared experiences. He presents consistent features of the human experience, including some falling in love with those outside of their traditional community.

“[I]t seemed to me that the Imam and I had participated in our own final defeat, in the dissolution of the centuries of dialogue that had linked us: we had demonstrated the irreversible triumph of the language that has usurped all others in which people once discussed their differences.”

Ghosh’s nadir in the story is during his argument with Imam Ibrahim, as he worries that this reveals the inescapability of a colonial worldview which relates progress with material power. Their argument contrasts with the more optimistic story of dialogue between peoples that he hopes to investigate, and, at this point, he suggests that the world he is examining is impossible to revive.

“It was thus that Bomma finally came of age and was ready at last to become a protagonist in his own story.”

Ghosh treats Bomma (and many of his historical subjects) here as a character within a novel, whose traits he is discovering through his historical investigation. This is not only a writing tool meant to keep the reader invested in his historical narrative, but also gives the reader hints as to who the person that Ghosh discusses was, instead of simply what they did. This approach is in line with Ghosh’s general attempt to provide a story of Personal Histories within the Historical Narrative.

“[T]he lines of demarcation between apprentice disciple and bondsman were so thin as to be invisible: to be initiated into certain crafts, aspirants had to voluntarily surrender a part of their freedom to their teachers.”

Ghosh is keen to separate the enslavement of Bomma to Ben Yiju from that of the later transatlantic slave trade. This differentiation is, in part, to back up his moral weighing of the Indian Ocean trade as better than what came after it.

“Having transformed its social and economic position it was now laying claim to the future, in the best tradition of liberalism, by discovering a History to replace the past.”

The Magavira village’s wish to recreate its history to make it more fitting to the needs of the modern world is part of the larger trend that Ghosh highlights of rejecting tradition in favor of western “progress.” The past that Ghosh values, with the culture of the Indian Ocean trade, is lost in this process, as it is not relevant to modern needs.

“Yet it is worth allowing for the possibility that the peaceful traditions of the oceanic trade may have been, in a quiet and inarticulate way, the produce of a rare cultural choice.”

In this quote, Ghosh proposes that the Indian Ocean trade routes were not dominated by any single power because of the peaceful beliefs of many of its participants. With this suggestion, he tries to suggest the possibility of a world different from the one based on scientific and military power which came to dominate with European colonialism. This is his late response to his argument with Imam Ibrahim.

“It was not just that the lanes looked different…something more important had changed as well, the relations between different kinds of people in the village had been upturned and rearranged.”

The economic and cultural changes of Nashawy and Lataifa, while already beginning during his first visit, show a rapid alteration by his second visit. The wealth brought in by working in Iraq exacerbated existing trends to the point of a near-revolution in village life, but it is one that Ghosh does not believe is entirely positive.

“[B]ut of course that tomb, and others like it, had long ago been wished away from those shelves, in the process of shaping them to suit the patterns of the Western academy. Then, recollecting what my interrogator had said about the difference between religion and superstition, it occurred to me to turn to the shelves marked ‘anthropology’ and ‘folklore.’”

Ghosh’s realization that the world he wanted to study might not be recorded as part of history or religion, but instead anthropology or folklore, shows both his views on the incompleteness of traditional historical study and the way in which the cultures he investigated survived. While not part of the traditional record, Ghosh realizes that there is still evidence of a multicultural medieval world.

“In Philadelphia then…protected by the awful might of the American police, lies entombed the last testament to the life of Bomma, the toddy-loving fisherman from Tulunad.

Bomma, I cannot help feeling, would have been hugely amused.”

The separation of the evidence of Bomma’s life (and therefore where his life would be studied) from his lived experience is a fact that Ghosh highlights to criticize a purely academic study of this topic. He posits that such an approach would give an incomplete understanding of Bomma, whereas Ghosh’s journeys and conversations gave him more insight.