Idea Transcript
CHAPTER FOUR
AN ANTIQUE LAND
[
231 ]
An Antique Land
We are fully aware of the fact that Amitav Ghosh is an anthropologist. He received a scholarship to do a D. Phil, in social anthropology at Oxford University.
It
anthropological
Alexandria
study
which
took
him
to
is this
University and consequently to the villages of Egypt.
He
admits that his campus life and travels within, and without the country contributed to his development as a creative writer.
In An Antique Land
shows
that
'.
he
is
not
a mere
fictionist
but
an
indefatigable researcher, a social an thropologist and a keen traveller as well.
It bears testimony
to Ghosh's interaction with at least four languages and
cultures
across
spread
several
over
countries.
other contemporary writers, conquering new linages, ideas and
three
continents
Unlike
of
his canvas
the
and some
keeps on
giving expression to new
themes.1
In an interview, Ghosh talks about the book's. theme and form:
No, this time I am not writing a novel. Not; even
[
124
]
sociology,
history
Historical
or
bettes-letters
research.
My
new
book
based
on
cannot
be
described.as anyone of these. It's a strange sort of work. Within the parameters of history, I have • .
tried narrative, narrative,
without to
without
historical novel. have
capture
story,
a
write
a
as a writer,
I
attempting
You may say,
faced a technical
a
to
challenge.I 2
The anthropologist Ghosh is at his best in wearing a complex pattern of fact and fiction.
It was in 1978 while
going through manuscripts in Oxford library that Amitav. Ghosh
read
about
Abraham
Ben
Yiju,
a
Tunisian
Jewish
merchant, who came to India via Egypt around 1130 A.D. and Ben Yiju's slave is from Tululand of ancient India.
Says
Ghosh:
I was a student, twenty-two years old, and I had recently
scholarship
awarded
by
a
foundation
established by a family of expatriate Indians. It was only a few months since I had left India and so I was perhaps a little more befuddled by my situation than students usually are. At that moment the only thing I knew about my future was that I was expected to do research leading towards a doctorate in social anthropology.
I had never
heard of the Cairo Geniza before that day, within a Arabic. 1980,
I
few months At
I was
in Tunisia
but
learning
about the same time the next year,
was
in
Egypt, [
125
]
installed
in
a
village
called
Lataifa,
a
couple
of
hours'
journey
to the south- east of Alexandria.3
In An Antique Land is one,
Amitav Ghosh's books
in English,
among many
in which the novelist dives deep into
books, archives, manuscripts, in quest of the past and its connection with
the
present.
For
instance,
the
British
novelist, A. S. Byatt, in her novel Possession: A Romance. (1990) shows a latter-day version of the romance quest. It is also a thoughtful work about two contemporary academics researching
the
lives
mid-Victorian
romantic
La
this
Motte.
Bradbury
In is
and
romantic
poets,
relations
Randolp
connection,
the
Ash
of
two
and Christine
comment
of
Malcolm
worth-noting:
Through a plot of complicated literary detection, and a multiplication of stories and texts,
the
novel explores the relationship between romance and
reality,
lies
and
truths,
the
Victorian
conception of the romantic self and the modern notion of the self as 'a discontinuous machinery and electrical message-network of vanous desires, ideological forms
Similarly,
beliefs
and
responses,
language-
and hormones and phenomones.4
David Lodge's Small World is a version of the
medieval quest romance, where the
heroes and heroines no
longer go on pilgrimages but on academic conferences.
Agarwalla
says:
t 126 ]
V.
S.
Naipaul's
contains,
like
A
Way in
the
the histories
Madmum and Boimna, Raleigh and his
World
(1994)
of Ben Yiju and
the histories of Sir Walter discovery of Eldorado
In the
early seventeenth century, and Francisco Miranda and his
attempts
to
liberate Venezuela
from
Spanish rule in the early nineteenth century. Both are written as fiction, both subtitled An Unwritten Story,as if they were unused fragments from the narrator's archives Unlike Naipaul who privileges Europe and European ways at the cost of non-European,
Ghosh privileges both African
and Asian ways,
with unjaundiced
eyes
which
increases the value of In An Antique Land.5 In An Antique .Land includes the Granta
as
"The
Imam and the
article "The Slave of Ms.
H.
Indian"
text published and the
in
scholarly
6," published in Subaltern
Studies in 1992, both of which were incorporated into the ethnography.
In An Antique Land (1993),
Dixon says:
In An Antique Land is an archaeology of a great mercantile
civilization that,
from about the
tenth century to the sixteenth century, extended from Fez and Saville in the West, through Cairo and Aden around the Red Sea,
across the Indian
Ocean to Calicut and the Malabar Coast.6 Clifford Geertz observed in his review of the book:
[
127
)
In this mobile, polyglot and virtually borderless region, which no one owned .and no one dominated, Arabs, Jews, Iberians, Greeks, sorts of
Indians, various
Italians and Africans pursued trade,
and learning, private lives and public fortunes, bumping up against one another.
.
. but more or
less getting along, or getting by, within broad and general rules for communication, and the conduct of business.
propriety
It was,
we might
say, a sort of multicultural bazaar. Today this part of the world is divided, like the rest of . the globe, into singular and separated national States.7 ■ Those who have read his Reason,
will
first novel,
realize Amitav Ghosh's
The Circle of
close
knowledge
of
and Intimate relation with the Middle East and the Arab world. In An Antique Land, Ghosh is in quest of the basic traits of hum anity in the two oldest civilizations of the world, that of, Egypt and India, in the 'medieval' and the 'modern'
periods
mini-narrative
of
of the world history. the
stories
Ghosh uses the
of Abraham Ben
Yiju,
a
Jewish merchant who travelled between the Middle East and India during the twelfth century, and of his Indian slave, Bomma.
The material used by Ghosh
called Geniza collation.
for this
is the
so-
Javed Majeed explicates "on it:
He charts the history of this body of archival material from its inception in the geniza storehouse)
{or
of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Cairo [ 128
]
to
its
formation
as
the
Taylor-Schechter
collection at
Cambridge- University.
the basis
the
Yiju's
of
letters
the
that
fragmentary
and their
author pieces
It
remains
references
is of
on Ben
to Bomma
together the personal
narratives of two of the main characters of the text. The
removal
of
this manuscript material
from the Middle East to Europe and later- to the US becomes a Orientalist
paradigm of methods of European scholarship' in
post-colonial period.
the
colonial, and
.
Migration in the text is mainly about the uprooting of bodies of archival material, which becomes measure of the
disruptive
European colonial expansion. text
conveys
There
are
a
strong
also
As
a
effects result,
sense of the
references
to
the
of the
archival. quality of
paper, and the author points out that one of the major commodities of trade in the medieval world between the Middle East and India was paper. For Ghosh, imposition modern by
then,
of what
knowledge'
European
cultural decline and the he
calls
(341-42)
colonial
the
brought
expansion
dispersion of manuscript material.®
[
129
.
]
map
of
the
into being is
to
the
Dixon goes
further in this direction:
Ghosh's
point
fleeting
of
entry
reference
collection of eleventh
into
to
an
this
space
is
a
Indian
slave
in
a
letters written
century.
The
slave,
in
Egypt
whose
in the
name
was
"Bomma" belonged to the Jewish merchant Abraham Ben Yiju. Bomma's first appearance in print was in a letter to Ben Yiju from another merchant, Khalaf ibn Ishaq,
- written in Aden in 1148.9
A "sense of entitlement" led Ghosh to go to Egypt and the USA, following trails left by a Hebrew journal',
Zion,
Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders, translated and edited by
S.
D.
Goitein
of
Princeton
University.
"origin lay in a region that was known as
Ben Yiju's
Ifriya in the
Arabic-speaking world Middle Ages-an area centred around what is now Tunisia."10 Following the migration of traders to
Egypt, . Ben
Yiju
"Synagogue
of the
last until
a
good
also
migrated
Palestians,'
to
Egypt,
the building
joined
the
designed to
seven hundred years after Ben Yiju's
lifetime. "A man of many accomplishments,
a distinguished
calligrapher, scholar and poet,"11 Ben Yiju, a born trader, migrated from Egypt to Aden, sat astride the most important sea-routes
connecting
the
Middle
East
and
the
Indian
Ocean. His paper shows that his acquaintance with a wealthy and powerful trader Madmun ibn ai-Hasan ibn Bundar proves to be a turning point in his life. It is possible that Ben Yiju was introduced to Madmun, by letters of introduction by his
friends and relatives. [
Agarwalla
130 ]
says:
Ghosh, by deft sleight of hand, term
'Geniza,'
come
into
introduces the
a word that is thought to have
Hebrew
from a
Persian
root,
ganj,
meaning 'storehouse'-a common element in placenames in India and Iran,
particularly beloved
of the British who sprinkled it liberally across their Indian.settlements in old anglicized forms like 'Ballygunge' and 'Daltongunge.' Geniza, in the synagogue, of the Jew,
was the depository of writings
intended to prevent the accidental
desecration of any written form of God's name. By another sleight of hand,
he says:
"I found
that some of the usages of the dialect of Lataifa were startlingly close to those of North African Arabic spoken by Ben Yiju." There was startlingly a similarity of certain words and turns of phrase in the Ben Yiju. document with Lataifa and and Nashawy.
Ghosh Cleverly
linguistically
first
brings the ancient Egypt closer to India,
and
then,
the
the
twelfth-century
Egypt
to
contemporary Egypt.12
Agarwalla's point of view is corroborated by Felperin: . as
.
. the past would have to be constructed not empiricism
and
structuralism alike-but as a vital issue:
not
in
a
remote
terms
object-as
of discrete
in
self-containment but
persisting relation. To qualify as political.
of .
discourse, the study of past cultures have import
[
131
]
and must present consequence.
...
genuinely political
historicism
present
the
as
well
diachronic,
as
past:
In sum,
inscribes
it
is
not
a
the only
but at the very least dialogic.13
Dixon goes one step further and says:
It is precisely such a 'dialogic' relation between past and present that Ghosh achieves in In An
Antique
Land.
Its
very
title
is
ambiguous,
suggesting,
that although he is researching the
history
medieval
of
Egypt,
every turn discovers
the
historian
at
continuities between past
and present.14
After before
Ben
1132,
Yiju
settled
as
a
trader,
there was a continuous
between Madmun,
Yusuf
ibn Abraham
in
the
Malabar
exchange of letters
and
Khalaf
Ibn
Ishaq
from Aden and Ben Yiju from India. What is more interesting is the fact that, unlike other traders cum travellers, Abu Said Halfon and Abu Zikri Sijlmasi, Yiju "does not seem to have
travelled back
to Aden
or
Egypt
even
once
in
the
nineteen or twenty years that he was in India."15
Once he had settled In Mangalore, according to a document available,
he
married Ashu,
a
slave
girl.
She
is
not
anywhere In the en tire corpus of Ben Yiju's except in a set of accounts scribbled on the back of one of Madmun's letters.
"It
links
her
to
the
matrilineal
ommunity
of
Nairs, who still form a substantial section of the population of the southern part of the Malabar Coast. "16 The document [
132
]
reveals that in India "concubinage is permitted between everyone, so long as it not with married woman." Indian temple
dancers,
devadasis
in
Sanskrit term,
literally mean 'servant or slave of God.' Their tradition was matrilineal, a situation which inevitably led to the unusual valuing of the
female over the male.
Agarwalla
writes: . . . even Europeans like Domingos.Pacs, Abbe Du b'ois and Beryl De Zoete have' wdtten disparaging comment them.
So
far as history reads,
So on
devadasis were given their due status and prestige during the Chola and Pallava dynasty. They were skilful
in
art
and dance
and they dedicated
their lives to the cause of God by saying regular prayers, chanting hymns and cleaning the temple precincts. When Ben Yiju married Ashu, Europeans were far behind his time, in writing derogatory language about .devadasis' and Indians, following, the writings
of
these
campaigns against, R.
K.
Narayan,
in
his
Europeans,
had started
this System.17 novel
The
Man-Eater.of
Malgudi,Introduces a- devadasi character,
Rangi. Although
never
is
actually
called
a
devadasi,
she
alternately
identified as a "Public woman,"18 "a woman of the temple,"19 "a temple prostitute,"20 all of which epithets point to this South Indian profession and heritage.
[
133 ]
Dixon had earlier argued that Ghosh's quest is a form of commentary that uses the past to speak indirectly about the present.
Ghosh's
essay
in
Subaltern Studies,
Slave of MS.H.6," begins with the
Image of
"The
the Cairo
Geniza systematically raided by Cambridge anthropologists and Orientalists.
It
ends
with
the
Indian
researcher
working in the bowels of an American library: Bomma's story ends in Philadelphia. At the corner of
4th and Walnut,
Philadelphia, an
imposing
mistaken
In the heart of down town
stands, a
sleek modern building,
structure
for
the
that
could
headquarters
' multinational corporation.
of
In fact,
easily be a- great it is the
Annenberg Research Institute, a center for social and historical research;
it owes
its creation
to the vast fortune generated by the first and most popular of America's television magazine, "TV Guide" ... The documents are kept in the Institute's rare book room, the
Building,
equipped with
a great vault in the bowels of steel-sealed and alarms
that
laser-beamed,
need no more
than
seconds to mo bilize whole fleet of helicopters and police cars.Within the sealed interior of this vault are two cabinets that rise out of the floor like catafalques. The documents lie inside them, encased in sheets of clear plastic, within exquisitely crafted covers... [
134 ]
Between the leaves of one of those volumes lies
a
torn
Yiju's.
sheet
of
paper
distinctive
covered
handwriting.
characters are tiny and faint,
Philadelphia
then,
Ben
.
the
.
as though formed
by an unsteady and ageing hand.
In
with
.
cared
.
.
for
by
the
spin-offs of 'Dallas' and 'Dynasty' and protected by the awful might of the American police lies entombed the last testament of the life of Bomma, the
toddy-looking
fisherman
from Tulunad.21
Bomma is referred in some. letters of Ben Yiju to him. They merely business
explain
agent,
a
him as
Ben Yiju's
respected member
Indian
of
his
slave
and
household.
"According to a specialist in history," Barna is "vernacular for
Brahma."
Professor
Vivek
Rai
corrects
'Barna'
for
'Bomma'. The research of Amitav Ghosh on Bomma reveals one more
aspect
of
Indian
culture,
centred
in
and
around
Mangalore, embedded in the Tulu culture of the area. First of all,
there were various groups and clans
Secondly,
despite
diversity
spoke Tulu for one, rules
of
Thirdly,
inheritance they
shared
in
social
in Tuiunad.
hierarchy,
they
and "they also followed matrilinealfor
certain
in the
kinds
worship
of
of
property."22
certain
spirit-
deities known as Bhutas, There were also many untouchables among them. The Indian history speaks of the assimilation of the Dravidians and Aryans, their living in peaceful co existence,
in
South
India,
since
time
immemorial.
Ghosh
is quest of religious and cultural roots of the slave. The t 135 ]
Aryans
(Brahmins)
practised the
folk-region
of the high
Sanskritic tradition and the Dravidians followed Bhu tacult, the local form of worship. There were Brahmin temples as well as Bhuta shrines.
There was no contradiction in this, for
to
them
Bhutas
and
of course,
Sanskritic
deities
represented aspects of divine and supernatural power that shaded gently and imperceptively into each other.
Indeed,
under the benign' cover of
that shade, there was a good deal of trafficking between would
the
two
pantheons: .some
occasionally
appear within
Bhuta
deities
the mists
of
high Sanskritism, while others fell from favour . and vanished into the nether world.23
The origin of the name of the slave 'Bomma' likelihood,
is,
in all
a diminutive of 'Berme,' the principal figure
in the ■ pantheon
of
Tuluva
Bhu ta-deities
and this
Tulu
deity, overtime,, with the growth of Brahminical influence, is
slowly assimilated to the Sanskritic deity Brahma'.
Agarwalla points this
Ghosh, that
out:
in a parallel study of history, in
the
time
of
Ben
Yiju,
there
reveals was
no
sectarian and religious clash between the Jews and the Muslims in the Middle- East.
In .Persian
Letters, dismayed by the sectarian nonsense that he
meets
within
religious
matters,
Usbek
concludes, "whatever religion a man lives under, [
136 ]
the
observation
neighbour,
of
the
Laws,
duty to our Parents,
love
of
our
are the chief
Acts of Religion."24 In Middle-East, the Jews were strongly aware of their distinctive religious identity but they, living in the Arabic-speaking world,
simultaneously,
shared the everyday
language of their religious life with the Muslims of-that region. When they
invoked the name
of God in
their-
writings it was usually as Allah, and more often than not their invocations were in Arabic forms, such as lnsha allah and al-hamdul-illah. Distinct though their faith was, it was still a part of the religious world of the Middle East-and that world was being turned upside down by the Sufis, the mystics of Islam.25
The
Sufis
influenced
Judaism as, they influenced the
orthodox Islam in the Middle East. One Jew Sufi, Abraham Maimonides, is known to have remarked once that the Sufis were "worthier disciples of the prophets of Israel than were the Jews of his time."26 In Bomma's time in India, as Ben Yiju's time in the Middle East, Vachanaka; the saintpoet,
taught an egalitarian culture,
creating fraternal
communities of artisans and working people. For the Sufis as for the Vachanakas, the notion of being held by bonds was one of the central metaphors of religious life. "They too draw
some
of
their most
powerful
[ 137 ]
images
from the
institution of slavery: metaphors of perfect devotion and love strung together in an intensely charged, often erotic, spiritual imagery."21 meaning of
slavery,
Therefore, in
the
it
time
is possible that
of
Bomma
and
the
Ben Yiju
means the ties
that bound an apprentice-to a master craftsman, an accountant to a merchant ... as links that were
in
some
small
connections,
way
pledges
enno
bling
human
commitment,
of
in
relationships that could just as well have been • a matter of mere exchange of coinage.28
Bomma is, therefore, a slave and business agent, a respected member of the household of Ben Yiju.
5
Amitav Ghosh is also in quest of the linguistic diversity and similarity of the Ben Yiju's time.
It is likely that
Ben Yiju corresponded with his friends in Aden in Arabic. But the question still nags us: how did Ben Yiju communicate with
Ashu : and
Bomma
or
with
his
business
associates,
hailing 'from various regions of India. There is no evidence that he ever acquired fluency in Tulu or any other South Indian
Language.
South Indian language. Indeed, the linguistic diversity was
formidable.
fact,
The
Arab
to a language called
geographer 'Lariyya,'
Masudi
refers
In
which he describes
as being spoken along much of the length'of the Malabar Coast.
It
is
impossible
that
[
138 ]
"he
was
referring
to
a
pidgin, one that was possibly compounded largely of PersoArabic and north Indian elements, and was in Use amongst merchants and traders all along the coast."29 In the matter of dress,
diversity persists.
Ben. Yiju
continued to wear the customary garments of the. Middle East-robes,
turbans
and the
like.
During the business
tour of Aden, Bomma brought back to India two 'gowns' for Ben Yiju. The people of Malabar, on the other hand, generally left the upper part of their bodies bare,
men
and women alike-their preferred markers of class distinction being ornaments and jewellery rather than articles of clothing.30 Agarwalla comments: Ghosh, once again, by sleight of hand, says that Ben Yiju received delicacies nougat,
such as raisins^
dates and "Middle Eastern cane-sugar.'
India produced palm-sugar but Egypt had pioneered the production of cane-sugar which were exported to many parts of Asia, including India.31 And, the Arabic Word 'sugar')
is
'sukkar'
(hence
the
itself ultimately derived
English from a
Sanskrit Source: today, throughout north India, crystallized sugar is still
[
139 ]
known as misri in
commemoration of traders like Ben Yiju and the tastes they imported from Mars.32
The religious, cultural, social and linguis tic studies, gleaned
from the
letters,
are
images
of
Oriental
life,
fruits of the herculean research Work of Amitav Ghosh.
With, a
view
to
verifying
the
authenticity
of
the
available material, Amitav Ghosh had gone to Tunisia and learnt Arabic;
he journeyed to Egypt in 1980,
in a village called
"installed
Lataifa, a couple of hours journey to
the south-east of Alexandria."33 He was in a trail of the story of the slave of MS.H.6, a story "miraculously preserved in the footnotes of history." It is a strange, world-at once medieval
colourful
and modern-presented in the garb
of a traveller's tale. It is here, in the Egyptian backwater, that Amitav Ghosh sought to retrieve the remnants of the antique
civilization
in both the obese,
villages
gargantuan
good-humoured
skill
guarded
of
"in
landlord;
century.
neighbours:
Shaikh Musa,
elder;
Jabir,
His
Abu Ali,
the
the
guides
gentle
son
of
his and
Ali's
Ghosh's caretaker in Nashawy, who had a ferreting
household
individualistic
twelfth
were his
village
cousin; Amm Taha, rare
of the
out.
.
secrets;"34
Busaina;
.
the
the
Zaghloul,
most
self the
jealously
reliant
and
superstitious
weaver who was very fond of stories and "had a manner of telling
them
that
was
marvellously
faithful
to
the
metaphorical resonances of his chosen craft;"35 Ustz Sabri, the
well-educated
battling,
with
the
and
knowledgeable
other [
young 140 ]
school
neighbourhood,
teacher, against
ignorance,
poverty and exploitation and fashioning post-
Revolution
Egypt
into
the
Islam;
the
college
students,
Ismail and Nabeel; the Rat, the beady-eyed local wit; and the village' Imam with whom Ghosh had a: Ghosh's
journey
pageant
of
Ghosh
to
Egypt
presents
before
Indians
a
characters.
narrates,
anthropologist, manners,
in
serious quarrel.
from
the
view
point
of
a
social
the lives of these people-their dialects,
social and religious customs-and points out the
commonalties
and
differences
between
Medieval
Masr
and
the post-Revolution Egypt. One such thread of commonality is between the dialects of the villages and the language of the manuscripts
he
studies:
Over the next couple of years, as I followed the Slave's
trail
from
library
to
library,
there
were times when:the magnifying glass would drop out of my hand when I and turns
of phrase
came upon certain words
for
I would suddenly hear
the voice of Shaikh Musa informants
in
his
(one
villages)
of the author's 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 Nashwy.36
Apart
from
the
history of
modern,
developing
Egypt,
there is an account of another Egypt, teeming with poverty, superstition, miracles, blood-feuds,- and exorcism ritualsa world not far removed from the antique world inhabited
[
141
]
by Ben Yiju and Bomma. Although Ghosh found there men like Ustaz
Sabri
who
were
aware
of the
age-old and
intimate
ties between India and Egypt and of the similarity of the problems 'that had been bequeathed to them by their trouble histories,"37 Most Of the villagers had no clear ide.a about the country where Ben Yiju spent seventeen valuable years of his life.
But
it
was
with
these
simple
and
largely . unlettered
fellaheen, who were devoutly religious but had no interests in politics,
that Amitav Ghosh
felt
at
home
since
they
seemed to belong to a "familiar world."38 Tapan Kumar Ghosh comments:
In
spite
people
of
and
their
ignorance
religion-which
of
is
India
evident
barrage of questions they asked him: invariably
about
cow~worship>
the
and her from the questions
burning
of
the dead, circumcision of men and clitoridectomy of women that often nonplussed him-they befriended Amitav Ghosh and provided him with information he needed for his research.39
Someone like Busaina even earnestly proposed to Ghosh: "You had better not go back. Stay here and become a Muslim and maxry a girl from the village.
Persistently,
Ghosh's
active
"40
and
inquisitive
mind
searches for the relevance of Egypt-India relations over the time. Through Ustaz Sabry, Ghosh voices his own opinion:
[
142 ]
Our
countries
were
very
similar,
for
'India,
like Egypt, was largely an agricultural nation. . been
Our countries were poor, ransacked by
imperialists
for they had. and
now both
were trying in similar ways to cope with poverty. .
. our two countries had always supported each
other In the past:
Mahatma Gandhi had come to
Egypt to consult Sa'ad Zaghloul Pasha. later
Nehru
and
Nasser
had
forged
»
. and
a
close
relation.41 "Going Back" is the section which concentrates on the visit to Egypt in 1988. It registers sociocultural change which has
occurred in Egypt
in recent years
under the
spell of the Western influence. People in villages are no longer ignorant about the city glamour. to
the
Iraq-Iran
refrigerators,
war..
In
1988,
washing machines,
It is partly due
the
people
television sets,
Toyota
pick—up trucks,
food processors,
pens and watches.
It is no "surprise that Cairo absorbs
outsiders."42 But
ignorance,
calculators,
have
exotic
fanaticism and superstition
still prevailed. One example of modernity in Egypt is evident in the Imam.
Recognizing that the Imam is a representative of
"Tradition," Ghosh wishes to interview him about his role as a teacher, but he is confounded to find that the Imam has totally lost fait-h in his profession which he now regards as the past.. Instead,
he shows him.a glistering
new biscuit tin: [ 143 ]
Half a dozen phials and a hypodermic syringe lay inside
the box,
cotton wool. learning.
.
.
injections.
nestling .
. .
.
the .
.
That art
in
a bed
of' soiled
is what he had been of mixing
and
giving
There was a huge market for
injections in the village; everybody wanted one.43 . When the Imam realises .that the fieldworker wants to ask about
traditional medicine,
he
avoids the
subject
because the influence of the West has made it shameful: 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
as discredited in his own eyes as they were in every one.
else's.44
Dixon remarks on this point: As a scholar, Ghosh stands in the same relation to the Imam as Schechter to the Geniza and its riches,
and
their
embarrassment imbrication
are
in the
feelings caused larger
by
of
shame
their
and
common
forcefield of
"the
West. "4S Amitav Ghosh tells us: So there we were, the Imam and 1, delegates from two
superseded civilizations.
[
144
.]
...
At
that
moment,
despite the vast gap that lay between
us, we understood each other
perfectly: we were
both travelling, he and I: we were travelling in the West.
The only difference was
actually been there, Like
Schechter's
that
I had
in person.46
sacking of the Cairo beniza,
this
is
another triumph for the West: I .felt myself a conspirator in. the betrayal of the history that had led me to Nashawy: a witness to the extermination of a world of accommodations that
I had still believed- to be
still alive,
and, in some tiny measures, still retrievable.47 The world of accommodation betrayed Amitav Ghosh in 1988 in the field of religion and its practices. An unique culture,
which had been born of the
subversion of the
categories of Hinduism, Islam and Judaism and was nurtured by the "peaceful traditions of the oceanic trade" and the "pacifist
customs
and
beliefs"48
of
the
merchants-
irrespective of their religious faith-in Malabar and the Middle East, collapsed after the appearance of the maritime powers of Europe on the Indian Ocean. Tapan.Ghosh writes: The arrival of Vasco da Gama on the Indian Coast on May 17, years
after
1498-about three hundred and fifty Ben Yiju
consequent political
left
Mangalore-and the
developments
sounded the
death knell of the strange world of Ben Yiju.
[ 145 ]
.
..
.
The European aggression put an end to the
singular tradition. In 1981,
.
. had flourished.
.
in his visit to Nashawy and Lataifa,
.
,49
Ghosh
felt at home since the people of these two villages seemed to belong to "a familiar world."50 In his visit in 1988 to Egypt, things.have changed. The episode of Amitav's visit to the mowlid of Sidi Abu-Hasira gives us an inkling into the history of development of religious divide. Islam and Judaism have the same Semitic
origin. They have the same
mythological and historical background. They have physical proximity,
close
linguistic and
cultural
bonds-factors
which in a primitive civilization did forge a
kind of
acceptance between the two religious groups as is evident from the story of the Sidi who was born of Jewish parents and reportedly converted to Islam when he - came over to Egypt.
He had followers among these communities.
' But "intertwined histories, and Jewish,
Hindu and Muslim,
Indian and Egypt,
Muslim
had been partitioned long
ago"51 and that is why the Egyptian government officials find it so difficult to understand why an Indian who is neither Muslim nor Jewish should have any interest in the mowlid of Amitav
Sidi Abu-Hasira.. Ghbsh
generalises
the
role
of
religious
extremists in the eighties, In Egypt and India, which were once pluralistic in character and action. Muslim
extremists
contemptuous
of [
in
the 146 ]
the
He says:
Middle
traditional
East
Sufi
are
tariqas
that have so long been a.mainstay within popular Islam;
the political
leadership of the Hindu
extremist movement treats traditional mendicants and ascetics as a source of embarrassment.52 Ghosh narrates an incident that happened to him during his stay in Egypt, probably in 1981; One day a schoolboy of 15 .
.
. said to me: "Do
you know what I did today? I gave my mother and the womenfolk of my house a stern talking-to. I told them they could not go to the burial' ground any more to pray at our family's tombs. The
Image
of
that
adolescent
.
.
.
schoolboy
lecturing his mother on what she could and could not do stayed with me for a long time. . . . This is how religious extremism seems to work.53 Ghosh's
pursuit
of
his
cross-cultural
protagonists
becomes the more meaningful search for "human connections, " and systems of counter- belief capable of accommodating pluralistic
forms
Yiju forges his follows
the
of worship.
In Mangalore,
where
connections with Ashu and Bomma,
trail
of
the
Magarivas-iow
caste
Ben
Ghosh Hindu
fisherfolk whose distinctive identity is registered in a "deity known as the Boobariya-Bhutu, deemed by legend to be the spirit of a Muslim mariner who died at sea." The religious extremists in India,
as
in Egypt narrated by
Ghosh, are trying hard to demolish the age-old concept of religious pluralism.
The walls [ 147 ]
of the Boobariya-Shrine
Ghosh visits in Mangalore are plastered over the posters of a fundamentalist Hindu political
organization.
Leela
Gandhi's comments are worth- noting and relevant: In
the
collision between political
interest
and long standing traditions of pluralism,
the
Magarivas, Ghosh observes, were 'now laying claim to the future.
.
. by discovering a History to
•replace the past." invites
...
In An Antique Land
resistance.54
Amitav Ghosh's main aim in journeying was to see human behaviour
closely.
'In An Antique Land,'
says
Pradeep
Trikha. Thus is a travel book for it records people and their manners.
Ghosh has an artist's eye,
his
perceptions are sensitive and observations are acute.
.
.
. Ghosh sets out to quench his quest
for more interesting fact. His is a "travellers' tale".
.
.
.
Ghosh
has
the
travel
writer's
infallible eye for the quirk that lays bare the soul of a people.55 What Amitav Ghosh observes
is
the
fluidity of the
medieval world and the inflexibility of modern boundaries. The cultures and style of medieval accommodation form a contrast with the rigid "ladder of Development"56 on which nations are linked.This contrast is also evident in the imperceptible merging of folk beliefs with high classical religion in the medieval as opposed to rigid hierarchies [
148 ]
of belief emerging from both Hindu and Muslim militancy in the modern world.
Amitav
Ghosh,-
a
perceptive
and
in
telligent
anthropologist and critic, laments the lost of the fluidity of the medieval world, be it Egypt or India. The trade and commerce
between
India
and
Egypt
as
well
countries brought immense wealth to India. might have made the Europeans, to resort to the use
as
Aden
and
Probably this
especially the Portuguese,
of military force
to take
control
'over trade in the Indian Ocean.
How it happened? Ghosh tries to unravel the plan of the Europeans.
The machination of the
age
old mercantile
The
arrival
prepared
of
the
bond between
Vasco
ground
da
Gama
for
the
in end
Portuguese India
and Middle-East.
India of
spoilt the
the
on
17
old
May world
1498 and
another age had begun in which the crossing of their paths would seem so unlikely that
its very possibility would'
all but disappear from human memory."57
One wonders why Indian Ocean trade came to such a sad impasse, and Amitav Ghosh provides an insight: "In all the centuries in which it had flourished and grown,
no state
or king or ruling power had ever tried to gain control of the Indian Ocean trade by force of arms."58 How perspective and points
of
view
differ
when
one
is
looking
at
the
situation from different cultural vantage points! How the Western
historiographical
record
looks
at
the
unarmed
characater of the Indian Ocean is interesting and diagonally
[
149 ]
opposite to the Indian perspective Western history often represented Indian Ocean trade, a lack,
or failure,
Europe,
with its
Ghosh
further
as Ghosh points out,
"as
one that invited the intervention of
increasing proficiency in war."59
adds:
When a defeat is as complete as was that of,the trading cultures of the Indian Ocean, it is hard to allow the vanquished the dignity of nuances of
choice
and
preference.'
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, rare
cultural
the product of a
choice-one that may have
owed a
great deal to the pacifist customs and beliefs of the Gujrati Jains and Vanias who played such an important part in it.60
Gujrat is known for her peaceful co-existence, traders, violence
the
people
of
Gujrat
cannot
make
predominates.
Ghosh
writes
about
and as
progress
if
a
similar
(of Gujrat),' wrote Tomme Pires,
early in
observation made by European:
'The heathen the
sixteenth
century,
'held that
they must
never
kill
anyone, nor must they have armed men in their company.
If
they were captured and (their captors) wanted to kill them all, they did not resist. This is the Gujrat law among the heathen.61 Thus,
it was due to such unique traditions of
.the trading community that "the rulers of the Indian Ocean [
150
]
ports were utterly confounded by the demands and. actions of
Portuguese."62 The
the
Portuguese
traders to be expelled from Calicut, of the
'Holy Faith'
wanted
all
Muslim
as they were enemies
as conveyed by the King of Portugal.
Pedro Alvarez Cabralled a Portuguese fleet and "delivered a letter from the King of Portugal to the Samudri (Samudraraja or Sea-king),
the Hindu ruler of the city-state of
Calicut"63 to such an effect.
The rulers of Indian ports,
had been long
accustomed to the trademan's rule of bargaining and compromise.
.
. tried time and time again to
reach an understanding with the Europeans-only to discover, choice
was
as one historian put it, between
resistance
and
that the
submission;
cooperation was not offered.'64
After that, all the trade and cultural exchange came to a
tragic
end
at
the
hands
of
the
Portuguese
in
the
1530sPearson provides details about the disappearance of such a fine cultural exchange: "Diu was constantly harassed, and finally the Portuguese were able to build a fort there in
1535.
ports/
Five
years
earlier,
along
with
other
Gujrati
Rander had been thoroughly sacked."65
Amitav Ghosh's journey into Egypt and the archives of medieval
period not
only
enriches
our
knowledge
of
the
people and culture of Egypt, but also throws light on the extortion and rapacity of colonialists,
who ruptured the
age-old cultural exchanges between India and some Middle
t 151 ]
East countries.
Since then,
the colonialist's reflection
fell on the Indian history. It created a wedge between two cultures.
Ghosh's
quest
ends
on
a
note
of
regret
and
anger.
REFERENCES 1.
R.
K.
Dhawan,
Ghosh, ed. 1999), p. 2.
R.
"Introduction," K.
Prestige Books,
Interview with Ranjan Banerjee in Calcutta's Ananda 13-12-1992.
"Introduction,» The Novels of Amitav Ghosh, p.
4. ' Malcolm Bradbury,
5.
(New Delhi:
24.
Bazar Patrika, 3.
Dhawan
The Novels of Amitav
The Modem British Novel pp.
(London:
Seeker and Warburg,
1993),
439-40.
Shyam S. Agarwalla,
"In An Antique Land: A Critical
Study," in The Novels Amitau Ghosh, p. 6.
25.
Robert Dixon,
176.
"Travelling in theWest: The Writing of
Amitav Ghosh," The Joomal ofComrrwnwealth Literature, Vol. x'xxi,
No.l
(1996), pp.
15-16.
7. Clifford Geertz, "Review of Amitav Ghosh's In An Antique Land, J1 The Australon, 25 Aug. 8. Javed Majeed,
1993, p.
30.
"Amitav Ghosh's In An Antique Land: The
Ethnographer-listorian and the Limits of Irony," The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol. xxx, .2 (1995), pp,
45-46.
9. Robert Dixon, p.
16.
10.
In An Antique Land, p. 55.
11.
Ibid., p.
19.
12. Shyam S. Agarwalla, p.
[
165.
152 ]
11. Ibid., p.
19.
13.
Howard
Felperin,
The
Uses
of Canon
(Oxford:
OUP
.
1990),
pp.
14.
Robert
Dixon,
15.
In An Antique Land, p.
16.
Ibid.,
17.
Shyam S.
18.
R. K. Narayan, The Man-Eater of Malgudi, (Harmondsworth
p.
155-56. pp.
18-19. 159.
229. Agarwalla,
Penguin,II(Reprint
p.
166.
1983),
p.
19.
Ibid.,
p.
20.
Ibid.,
pp.
21.
In An Antique Land, pp.
22.
Ibid.,
p.
251.
23.
Ibid.,
p.
252.
24.
Shyam S.
Agarwalla,
p.
168.
25.
In An Antique Land,
p.
261.
26.
Ibid., p.
261.
27.
Ibid., p.
262.
28.
Ibid., p.
263.
29.
Ibid.,
p.
281.
30.
Ibid.,
p.
267.
31.
Shyam S.
Agarwalla,
p.
169.
32.
In An Antique Land,
p.
269.
33.
Ibid.,
p.
19.
34.
Ibid.,
p.
127.
35.
Ibid.,
p.
137.
36.
Ibid.,
p.
105.
37.
Ibid.,
p.
134.
38.
Ibid.,
p.
167.
[
153 ]
115.
115. 149-50. 348-49.
39.
Tapan
Kumar
Ghosh,
"Amitav
Ghosh's
for the
Civilization," in The Novels of Amitav Ghosh, p. 40.
In An Antique Land, p.
41.
Ibid.,
42.
PeterTheroux,
p.
172.
314. "Cairo-Clamorous
National Geographic, No.4, 43.
In An Antique Land, p.
44.
Ibid.,
45.
Robert Dixon,
46.
In An Antique Land, p.
47.
Ibid.,
p;
237.
48.
Ibid.,
p.
287.
49.
Tapan Kumar Ghosh,
50.
In An Antique Land, p.
51.
Ibid.,
52.
Amitav
p.
p.
160.
pp.
Heart
of
Egypt,"
38-69.
192.
193. p.
21.
p.
236.
159. 167.
339.
Ghosh,
"The
Wilson Quarterly Spring, 53.
Ibid.,
p.
54.
Leela
Gandhi,
Challenge," The
Fundamentalist 1995),
p.
22.
23.
"In An Antique Land:
A.
View,"
The
Novels of Amitav Ghosh, p.193. 55.
Pradeep Tale,"
Trikha,
"In An Antique Land:
The Novels of Amitav Ghosh, pp.
56.
In An Antique Land, p. ,200.
57.
Ibid.,
p.
286.
58.
Ibid.,
p.
287.
59.
Ibid.,
p.
287.
60.
Ibid.,
p.
287.
61.
ibid.,
p.
287.
62.
Ibid.,
p.
2.87.
[
154 ]
A Travellers' 190-91.
63.
Ibid.,
p.
64.
Ibid.,
pp.
286. (
65. M. N.
286-87.
Pearson,
Coastal Western India: Studies from the
Portuguese Records (New Delhi: Concept, 1981), p. 129. XXX
(
155 ]