TheDaak review

In An Antique Land by Amitav Ghosh, Penguin Publication, 2009, 336 pages, ISBN 9780143066491 (ISBN10: 0143066498), Price 252

By Vinay Rajoria

The novel, In an Antique Land, is enmeshed in two overlapping narratives separated by some eight hundred years of history. The book’s prologue provides a historical framework to the turbulent and cosmopolitan world of the Middle-East¹: starting from the 12th century, a time when the Crusades reached Jerusalem, and when Khalaf Ibn-e-Ishaq (one of the historical characters in this novel) wrote a letter to his friend Yiju in Mangalore, India. It is their story, along with other characters from that time, that Ghosh will retrace, using historical documents combined with fictional soldering, as one of the key plotlines in the novel. On the other hand, in the prologue, we embark on a fascinating journey with Amitav Ghosh, a 22-year-old Oxford research scholar in social anthropology. He arrives in Latifa, a small village in Egypt, to collect data and unravel the story of an Indian slave, Yiju, (called the slave of M.S H.6). The journey takes us from England to Egypt, and finally, all the way to India. Through these two parallel and connected plot lines, Ghosh presents a comparative analysis of pre-and post-colonial Egyptian and Indian societies; by historically recreating the Indian Oceanic trade world of the Middle Ages and juxtaposing it with his experiences across India and Egypt in the latter half of the 20^th century. 

Written in the first-person narrative voice, Ghosh’s alternative treatment of history lends the novel an academic mood, where narrative passages from his amiable time in Egypt and India are interspersed with entire chapters on the social, political and cultural world of these colonised nations; as they were before the Europeans arrived and when colonisation began. Though it must be mentioned that Ghosh’s descriptions of the past are not dry and lacking in vigor. This is in part because the language he employs is not jargonistic and abstract, but is lucid, literary and fable-like; which makes this work a literary text and not a historical or anthropological guide. 

 Through his eyes, we get to see the secular, cosmopolitan, and syncretic world of medieval India and the Middle-East which is more tolerant, flexible, and truly modern towards differences and diversities than our so-called ‘modern’ age. It is because of its ability to contradict and unsettle our core historical presumptions, which are a product of the colonisation of our minds, that makes In an Antique Land such a crucial piece of literature. In this text, Ghosh deconstructs our tainted, colonial conceptions of the Middle Ages or the ‘Dark Ages’ – a prized creation of the ‘white’ historiographers – which make us look back upon this swath of history as backward, dogmatic, intolerant, violent and ‘dark’. Contrary to this, Ghosh’s characters concoct, through the medium of their letters, an entirely different and unforeseen world which must be an ideal for today and, therefore, worthy of our attention. For instance, the deep friendship between an Arab Jew (Yiju) and an Arab Muslim (Khalaf ibn Ishaq) formed in 12th century Africa and Asia is heartwarming and endearing. We also see the fluidity and acceptance of varied identities in the medieval Arab-Indian world through the unconventional but intimate relationship between different characters in the story. Ghosh also demonstrates to us the ardent trust and familial relationships between a slave (Bomma) and a master (Yiju), and even between Bomma and Ishaq (master’s friend); which subverts our conceptions of the brutal and inhumane master-slave imagery that we have imbibed from the trans-atlantic slave trade of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Through Bomma’s travels Ghosh narrates the tale of a medieval Indian Oceanic trade world that is non-violent, tolerant, and full of love and affection for people who are different from each other. In the prologue of the novel, while explaining the nature and tone of Ishaq’s letters from Aden to Yiju in India, Ghosh writes:

Yet, despite all the merchandise it speaks of, the letter’s spirit is anything but mercenary: it is lit with a warmth that Goitein’s translation renders still alive and glowing, in cold English print. ‘I was glad,’ writes Khalaf ibn Ishaq, ‘when I looked at your letter, even before I had taken notice of its contents. Then I read it, full of happiness and, while studying it, became joyous and cheerful… (Ghosh, p. 7).

Moreover, In An Antique Land, Ghosh builds on Frantz Fanon’s critique of the West and displays the lingering legacy of colonialism that, with centuries of domination, has become part of the Eastern psyche. It has not only affected his world materially but has also altered the ways in which he experiences and articulates his emotions, thoughts and memories. In this light, Ghosh reflects not only on how the West distorted and ghettoised the heterogeneity of the East, but also how in the decolonised world of these ancient lands, the natives have consented to the hegemonic structures of Western epistemes. 

The syncretic and accepting world, once inhabited by Yiju, Bomma, and Ashu is, therefore, lost forever. All traces of those humane and affectionate worlds have been systematically and carefully erased. With the invasion of the West in the East – religious, linguistic, and national identities have become solidified and sterilised. Rather than being used to define people, identities are employed in modern nation-states as potent weapons to categorise and divide. Ghosh’s work is important as it offers us an alternative morality of a medieval world where individualities were not rigid; where a Jewish merchant could be friends with an Arab Muslim, marry a Hindu girl out of love, and have the most trusted ally in an Indian slave.

This sense of loss for the East is pertinently made manifest by Ghosh towards the end of the novel, when he visits the shrine of Abu-Hasira in Damanhur, Egypt. Abu Hasira was a 19^th century Jewish saint who is revered among Jews, particularly of Israel and Morocco. Because of his Hindu identity, Ghosh is stopped from entering the premises and is interrogated by the Egyptian personnel on suspicions of being a spy. Conditioned on the Western model of identity, the policemen fail to comprehend what a Hindu man from India has to do at a Jewish shrine. Unlike the world of Yiju and Bomma, in modern nation-states religious identities are perceived to be straight-jacketed, with no overlap whatsoever and only suspicion and fear prevailing within them. In this divided world, Amitav Ghosh and his curiosity seemed like a dangerous anomaly to the personnel. While in  custody, Ghosh muses:

But then it struck me, suddenly, that there was nothing I could point to within his world that might give credence to my story – the remains of those small, indistinguishable, intertwined histories, Indian and Egyptian, Muslim and Jewish, Hindu and Muslim, had been partitioned long ago. (Ghosh, p.283)

Nine hundred years later today, in that same Promised Land, in the same Fertile Crescent, in the same Arab World, can you imagine a similar friendship being forged just as naturally and amiably between an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Muslim? Can you think that in current times when the right-wing is on the rise and with it nationalism is turning into ‘the opium of the masses’ inter-religious love of the kind of Yiju and Ashu will be tolerated by this world? I contemplate that let alone letters being exchanged or marriage knots being tied, even a mere mention of such a bond will be looked upon with utter suspicion and with inklings of national and international conspiracy. 

Ghosh, through this novel,  repeatedly warns the previously colonised people to be aware of their true stories and not buy or succumb to the stories sold to them by the West. Ghosh’s novel, thus, sheds light on how global power is still carefully guarded and held by the barrels of Western guns while marginalising other voices; especially those coming from the Global South. 

This is echoed, in a different way, in a later novel A Calcutta Chromosome by Ghosh, where he subverts the West’s notion of scientific discovery and advancement (that was cemented during the Enlightenment) vis-a-vis the magical and mysticism of the East (another tainted construct of Europe). In this work, he argues that the genealogy of modern science is in itself a cultural fiction – a part of the colonial discourse – of the West and is therefore not as objective and neutral as it claims to be. Similarly, in his most celebrated text Shadow Lines, Ghosh challenges our fundamental assumptions about national identities, wars and migration. Like Rushdie does in Midnight’s Children, in this work, Ghosh consciously chooses memory as the epistemological tool to reconstruct history over the supposedly objective gimmicks of Western historiography. In the light of these other works, a novel like In An Antique Land becomes even more urgent and relevant since these books help us articulate the questions of identity, power, and epistemology in East-West encounters from the past to the current times.

1. The term ‘Middle-East’ used for the geo-political region encompassing Asia and Africa is a construct of the colonial academia itself. I am using it, solely, because Ghosh employs it in the original text, though, from the perspective of decolonial theory, ‘West-Asia’ will be a more appropriate term for the same. ↩︎