In An Antique Land: History In The Guise Of A Traveler's Tale (1994) - Plot & Excerpts
I’m impressed! In 1981, Ghosh was a bright young man from India who studied at Oxford. For his dissertation in anthropology he moved to a backwater village in northern Egypt and spent hours hanging out with and befriending a variety of people, including simple fellahin, young students, and village elders, immersing himself in the village culture and sympathetically connecting with the peoples’ struggles. As related here, Ghosh also engaged in an esoteric research project that required him to learn to read and decipher medieval fragments from the Cairo Geniza, written in Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic. He did this in order to probe the life of a 12th-century Jewish trader, Abraham ben Yihu, born in North Africa, who lived at various times in Fustat, near Cairo, Aden in Yemen, and Mangalore on the Malabar western coast of India. Ghosh was able to piece together Ben Yihu’s peripatetic life story from his correspondence, over the years, with other Jewish traders and family members in Egypt, Sicily, and Aden. While living in Mangalore, Ben Yihu apparently married a local woman who was not from Jewish ancestry originally and also employed her brother. He also had a slave, Bomma, who served as his agent on far-reaching mercantile missions. What animates Ghosh’s researches is his interest in the intersection of and interplay among cultures. His story throws a spotlight on a medieval time—the 12th century—while Christians were waging war on Muslims and massacring Jews—when a continent away, Jews, Muslims, and Hindus were partners in trade, plying the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Gulf with ships and parts of Africa and Asia with camel caravans laden with all manner of merchandise. These groups did not see one another as “the other”, Ghosh suggests. Rather, they worked together and trusted one another. In the 15th and 16th century, the Christians came with warships, turned the Indian Ocean into their possession, and imposed heavy taxes and religion-based exclusions on the traders, ending this era of free trade and inter-group collaboration.These groups' interchange, Ghosh points out, was not only mercantile but extended to philosophy, spiritual practices and poetry. The Sufis strongly influenced Jewish thought and religious practice—Bahya ibn Pekuda’s seminal philosophic tract, The Duties of the Heart, presented Sufi ideas to Jewish readers; furthermore, one of Maimonides’ grandsons boasted that he was more Sufi than the Sufis! Medieval Jewish poets used images and formats that were common to Sufi and other Arab poets (see Hillel Halkin’s wonderful biography of Yehuda Halevi).One aspect of this shared world of ideas and images was the use of slavery as a metaphor for the relationship between a man and his beloved and between people and God. While utilizing slavery to represent positive emotions may seem incongruous to modern Western readers, Ghosh points out that the concept during medieval times did not necessarily represent cruel oppression by an overlord as we think of it today. Rather, it was a system by which people with limited economic or social status could attach themselves to a powerful and/or enterprising individual and perform valuable work and even get paid for it. Bomma, as ben Yihu’s slave, served as his representative on long voyages, carrying out substantial financial transactions on his master’s behalf.Ghosh, the anthropologist, also touches on the rise and fall of religion and cultures. Both in India and Egypt, he learns about older indigenous cults that eventually get absorbed and subsumed into more dominant cultural systems. Ghosh is a talented storyteller, and he held my attention as he toggled back and forth between the Egyptian village where he stayed (and revisited nine years later) and the medieval exploits of the Jewish trader ben Yihu. Occasionally, the villagers’ identities took some effort to sort out and the history of medieval cults got to be a little dense, but it was more than worth the effort. The two strands of his story are quite different (albeit complementary) but eventually at the end, they get to rub together in a surprising way!
Friends have been constantly telling me to read Amitav Ghosh, as his tales about lands and people and the great journeys of South Asian history are the very stories I've always been interested in. And so here I'm.In an Antique Land has a premise that will hook any reader interested in the spirit of place. Ghosh relates to us his experiences as a young anthropologist in rural Egypt, and sets it against the life of a Jew merchant from Ifriqiya (modern Tunisia) and his Tulu slave, about whom we only know from archival records and letters, miraculously preserved thanks to an old Jewish custom.The narratives alternate, of a young Bengali in an alien land, with people he has nothing in common with, and of a Jewish merchant and his slave in Mangalore, right in the middle of the medieval Indian Ocean trade. History comes alive as we walk the great ports of that age; we watch these men toil and trade far away from home. We see their prosperity and their customs, we see how trade, now as then, shaped the world in its image. And we also see, in Ghosh's picture portrait of Egypt, a land locked in time. Ghosh's writing is fluid and natural, his criticisms subtle, and his judgements well thought out. The characters he introduces are timeless; it is here that Ghosh's writing shines through - you identify and assimilate their stories so easily, even though their customs and ideas are so different, so unknowable.There are unforgettable scenes, scintillating images that Ghosh draws up in this narrative of ancient trade routes. When Ghosh travels through the Malabar in search of the slave Bomma's past, he comes across an old Muslim spirit in a Hindu temple, a relic of a more tolerant, intermingled time. But by far the most brilliant image Ghosh paints is when he imagines a drunk Bomma on the port of Aden in Yemen, brandishing a bottle towards a wave of withdrawing pirates. A Tulu slave from the faraway shores of India in the land of his master, drunk on the liquor of the Middle East hollering at Yemeni pirates; it is an indelible image.There is a subtle critique of imperialism in the last pages, when Ghosh laments that the honest trading ways of the Malabar coast was what made it easy game for the European powers that would arrive to pillage, and forever end the era of trade, tolerance and peace that Bomma was part of.All that said, somehow, somewhere the two narratives don't seem to fit into each other perfectly, as they should. Like for instance, in William Dalrymple's City of Djinns, the reader feels no difference between the travelogue and the history lesson that accompanied it. I'm not comparing the books themselves here; these are different books from vastly different writers, written with different goals in mind; but as a reader, City of Djinns pulled me in and didn't let go. On that level, In an Antique Land falls short just a little bit.That doesn't diminish the book the least bit though. It's a satisfying, very enjoyable read, and a remarkable window into a different age. Very highly recommended.
What do You think about In An Antique Land: History In The Guise Of A Traveler's Tale (1994)?
I forget what made me grab this book it an put it on Mt. Bookpile but whatever instinct that was, it was a good one!This is an odd book, part history, part personal memoir, and the intertwining of the two doesn't always work well. Ghosh is intrigued by mention of a slave, an Indian owned by a Jew, Ben Yiju, some 700 years earlier; the scraps of information found in the Cairo Geniza provide tantalizing clues to the existence of both Ben Yiju and the man Ghosh eventually names Bomma, and his travels to Egypt and Mangalore help (somewhat) to fill in the blanks. It's hard to read this without spending time researching some of the places, people and events, making it a longer read than I anticipated.The non-history part is about that author's time staying in Egypt, during the 1980s, in a couple of rather poor villages. The characters he meets are interesting, with a range of awareness about the outside world and modern times that is, at times, breathtaking. A The idea that one can travel from their village to Ghosh's Indian village by donkey? One would think that even in the 80s people would know that couldn't happen... but not here! It's also easier to understand the Indian problems between Hindus and Muslims once you hear what these Egyptians think of the Hindu religious practices. A worthwhile read for the social history alone!
—Laura
In an Antique land for me was a very different experience...It was the first time I read a journal/memoir kind of non fictional account of an author's travels. I started out expecting some really good medeival tales from Ben Yiju and the slave but it was Ghosh's own experiences in Egypt that proved more intriguing and better to me. This is my first Amitav Ghosh book and I really didn't know it was non fiction until I was 30 pages into it. By then I found it really informative and I thought what the hell, I will complete reading it and I was not disappointed.I was moved in certain places especially where he gives an explanation for an Indian's fear of symbols with an anecdote from his childhood and the Europeans destroying the rich trading culture between India and the middle east by claiming the Indian Ocean trade routes for themseleves.Ghosh's vast knowledge and the amout of research he has put into this book is mind blowing. The amount of information one can glean even from a superficial reading is remarkable. I will one day definitely read this book again. And also this has piqued my interest and propelled me into buying other books of Ghosh..Let us see how that works out for us!
—Abhinav Jaganathan
In the early 1980s Amitav Ghosh was living in rural Egypt, engaged in field world for his social anthropology doctorate. In this book Ghosh plaits together three different stories: that of his time living in two Egyptian villages, his return to the villages eight years later and the life of 12th century North African Jewish merchant Ben Yiju and his Indian `slave' (actually more of a business associate) Bomma. Ghosh discovered the Ben Yiju story by examining documents from the massive haul found in the Geniza (synagogue document repository) of the Palestinian synagogue in the Egyptian town of Fustat. The documents were acquired by Cambridge University, where Ghosh tracked them down.Ghosh parallels his own sojourns in Egypt, the Malabar coast and return to Egypt, with those of Ben Yiju, who spent some twenty years in Mangalore, marrying a freed Indian slave, before returning to North Africa. Gradually pictures are built up of Egypt and India, ancient and modern. The fascinating revelations about Jewish life in medieval Egypt and the Maghreb , the close relationship between the Muslims and Jews, destroyed only in the last century, are intertwined with Ghosh's own story, a perception of Egyptian villagers through Indian eyes, and, even more interesting, their perception of the Indian catapulted into their midst. Some aspects of his culture were so alien to them that they sometimes seemed to view him as an ignorant refugee from a primitive country, rather than understanding the ignorance of their own unworldliness.The documents Ghosh worked with provided the framework of Ben Yiju's existence. The meat was provided by Ghosh through painstaking research and logical supposition both in Egypt and in India. Most thought-provoking was his visit at the end of the book to the tomb of a Muslim saint, who, it transpired, was also a Jewish Rabbi. Certainly in the 1980s when Ghosh's visit took place, the tomb was attracting pilgrims from both the Muslim world and Israel, the latter contributing to a huge tourist industry built around the saint's annual festival. This, and the theme throughout the book of Jews and Muslims co-existing like brothers graphically demonstrated the tragedy of what has happened to this brotherhood in the last half century.When I need inspiration, both as a reader and as a writer, I will dip into this book again and again.
—Irene Black
