Chapter 3 In an Antique Land: History in a Traveller's Tale - Shodhganga [PDF]

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Chapter 3 In an Antique Land: History in a Traveller's Tale

In an Antique Land, subtitled "History in the Guise of a Traveller's Tale," defies classification of literary genre in the strict sense of the term since it encompasses and synthesises history, anthropology, travel writing, memoir and fiction. It includes the essay "The Imam and the Indian" published in Granta and the scholarly article "The Slave of MS H.6" published in Subaltern Studies in 1992, which were incorporated into it in 1993. The work consists of two stories: one is that of Abraham Ben Yiju and his slave Bomma, whose action takes place in Egypt, Aden, Tunisia and Mangalore in the Middle Ages; the other is that of Ghosh and the Egyptian rustics such as Abu-'Ali, Shaikh Musa, Ustaz Sabry, Imam Ibrahim, Zaghloul, Jabir, Isma'il and Nabeel. The action of the latter story takes place in Egypt, India, the U.S.A., England and Iraq, in the twentieth century. The novel beginning with the Crusades and ending with the breaking out of the Gulf War is divided into six sections: "Prologue," "Lataifa," "Nashawy," "Mangalore," "Going Back" and "Epilogue." In an Antique Land vividly reveals through small identical and interweaving histories the rich trade relations between Egypt and India transacted in the spirit of brotherhood among Hindus, Muslims and Jews. The book, though a traveller's tale, is in fact a subaltern and subversive history, and most significantly, it narrates the "dreams and aspirations of ordinary human beings and the effect of political and historical changes on their lives" (Trivedi 142). Colonialists exploited Egypt in the Middle Ages by appropriating its knowledge and degrading its languages—a subject that constitutes the foundation of Edward Said's Orientalism. Ghosh voices this hidden historical truth while describing

99 Egypt's medieval history: "The experience and language of the colonized were denied and despised, leaving them marginalised, dispossessed, subjugated within their own land. Africa had become a metonym for a new slavery" (Parker and Starkley 5). The word Masr, the ancient, historical name in Arabic used for Egypt or Cairo by Egyptians, is a derivative of a root which means to " 'settle' " or to " 'civilize.' " Ghosh points out that Egypt has been known by this name in the civilised and cultured world for at least a millenium. It is only Europe which has "always insisted on knowing the country not on its own terms, but as a dark mirror for itself (Ghosh, In an Antique Land 32). Thus, the name carries an alternate history of Egypt. Ghosh also reveals Europe's fabrications and prejudices against Egypt through two biblical phrases explained by the Oxford English Dictionary: " 'Egyptian darkness' " means " 'intense darkness' " and " 'Egyptian bondage" means "bondage like that of the Israelites in Egypt' " (32). Further, European languages derive the name for Egypt from the Greek "iEgyptos," a term related to the word " 'Copt,' " the name generally used for Egypt's native Christians. Similarly, a seventeenth-century English Law states that words like " 'gypsy' " and " 'gitano' " are derived from " 'Egyptian.' " Ghosh argues that "Europe's apparently innocent 'Egypt' ... is almost as much a weapon as a word" (33). Ghosh exposes the ruthless colonial exploitation of Egyptian culture and knowledge in the name of European Enlightenment, and contrasts it with pre-colonial sharing of trade and culture. He narrates how from the late seventeenth century onwards Europeans were gripped by Egyptomania: they displayed sphinxes and pyramids in their houses and gardens, and wrote operas with themes centering round ancient Egypt. Popes and their successors became interested in the placing of Rome's obelisks. Sir Isaac Newton stated that Osiris, Bacchus, Sesostris and Sisac were

100 different names for the same deity. Western scholars also explored Egypt for her antiquities and mysteries and made journeys of discovery into Egypt: "unknown to herself, she was already well on her way to becoming a victim of the Enlightenment's conceptions of knowledge and discovery" (82). The novel further reveals the destruction of Egyptian knowledge and culture through its oppression and subjection when Egypt became a province of the Ottoman or Turkish Empire, which in turn was at the mercy of European powers. Egypt was invaded by Napoleon in 1798, and after the construction of the Suez Canal in 1869, it fell under the British control and its culture and trade become a past history: "The Indian Ocean trade, and the culture that supported it, had long since been destroyed by European navies. Transcontinental trade was no longer a shared enterprise; the merchant shipping of the high seas was now entirely controlled by the naval powers of Europe" (80-81). Colonial theories of racial and cultural supremacy were offered to justify the colonial claim of absolute rights over the lands and the subjects they ruled. The colonised people were disparaged as shirkers and "good-for-nothings." Anthony Trollope in his South African travelogue stated that work on European lines could be the only salvation for African people since religion, philanthropy and liberal ideas had failed to civilise them. However, as is common knowledge, profit motive was the ruling reason for colonial expansion: "Motives and justifications for imperialism can perhaps best be seen as having formed a complicated interlocking matrix, comprising many layers. Within this matrix, justifications—such as the need to 'civilize' natives, or the appeal to the technological superiority of the West—could transmute into motives" (Boehmer 36).

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Ghosh exhaustively elaborates on the colonial exploitation of knowledge through the loss of an Egyptian storehouse of rare knowledge called Geniza in the Synagogue of Ben Ezra, which was enriched with old books, scriptural and rabbinic documents, letters, bills, poems, etc. Rebuilt in 1025 AD such documents continued to accumulate inside it for almost a millennium before it attracted a large number of foreigners, specially knowledge-hunters. Simon Van Geldem, a Jewish traveller who was an ancestor of the German poet Heinrich Heine published the first report on Geniza around 1752. In 1864, Jacob Saphir, a collector of Judaic antiquities, visited it several times, revealing that its two and a half storeys were filled with documents. Soon the Geniza was probably also visited by Abraham Firkowitch, a Crimean Jew of Karait sect who, through deception, was able to obtain a huge collection that now lies in the state Public Library in St. Petersburg. Paul Kahle, a German scholar, who devoted many years to the study of Firkowitch's collection, estimated that all the libraries of Europe taken together did not have even one third of the number of Biblical manuscripts as there were in this single collection. Continuing with the colonial appropriation of Egyptian ancient golden knowledge, during the next few years more and more documents fell into the hands of foreign powers, and in the 1880s substantial quantities were carried away to Palestine, Europe and the U.S.A., mostly by those collectors who were unaware of the existence of the Geniza. In their 1882 armed uprising under the leadership of Ahmed Arabi Pasha the Egypfians were defeated by the Brifish who, soon after becoming Egyptian administrators, demolished the Synagogue, thus paving the way for the rapid dispersal of its documents. The avaricious Synagogue officials ia. connivance with the antiquities dealers sold a large number of documents which were passed on to libraries in Paris, Frankfurt, London, Vienna and Budapest. The Bodleian Library at

102 Oxford also managed to gain a large quantity of Geniza documents: "At the heart of Ghosh's corpus is the contention that knowledge is produced by structures of dominance particularly the military, economic and epistemic strategies of colonialism" (Chambers 1). The novel also exposes how the colonialists, apart from using the tools and strategies of oppression and cultural superiority, also applied those of lures of power and rank. Representing colonial usurpation of knowledge, Elkan N. Adler, a British Jew, visited, in 1888, a highly influential family in Cairo called Cattaouis, which had a direct relationship with the Synagogue officials. This family of Sephardic Jews formed part of the majority against the minority consisting of poor " 'Oriental' " Jews. Yaqub Cattaoui, the founder of the clan, was granted the title of "Bey" and also made a Baron of the Habsburg Empire, unaware of the colonial conspiracy that he and his family were to be " instrumental, one day, in providing Adler with an opportunity to observe an aboriginal feast" (Ghosh 86). Adler was shown by the Cattaouis a rare document of Caliph's eight-hundred-year old orders, giving possession of the Synagogue of Ben Ezra to its congregation. As part of the colonialists' stratagem. Queen Victoria later sent Moses Cattaoui her portrait in return for his cormiving warm service towards her representative. Adler again visited Cairo in 1896 with a recommendation from his brother Herman Adler who later became the Chief Rabbi of the British Empire. Received cordially by the then Chief Rabbi of Cairo he was able to acquire a large quantity of material that has become a rich possession of several libraries including that of the Jewish Theological Seminary of New York. •>.

i

Continuing

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the

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epistemological dominance, Dr Solomon Schechter, a Cambridge scholar, visited the Geniza in 1896, and carried with him two letters of recommendation, one from

103 Herman Adier, the then Chief Rabbi of England, to the Chief Rabbi of Cairo and the other, sealed and attractively ribboned, from the Vice Chancellor of Cambridge to the President of the Jewish community of Cairo. Ghosh emphasises that the second letter was not merely a piece of embossed stationary but it was the "backroom equivalent of an imperial edicf (91). Supported by Dr. Charles Taylor, the Master of St. John's College, Cambridge and some British officials in key positions under Lord Cromer's supervision, Schechter was allowed by the Chief Rabbi of Cairo and Joseph M. Cattaoui Pasha to take everything he wanted despite their full awareness of the significance of the materials. Ghosh thus reveals that the colonialists' motives for knowledge, power and profit were paralleled by those of Egyptian religious leaders who conspired with the former to ruin their cultural heritage: "like the elites of so many other groups in the colonized world, they evidently decided to seize the main chance at a time when the balance of power—the ships and the guns—lay overwhelmingly with England" (92). Schechter filled about thirty sacks and boxes with the materials which were handed over to the Cambridge University Library in 1898. These documents have been catalogued under the Taylor-Schechter collection that contains about one hundred forty thousand fragments—the largest single collection of the Geniza material in the world. Similar documents were discovered in the Jewish cemetery in Fustat at the end of the century and a decade later that too reached Europe and America. Thus, by

the First World War after suffering a numerous assaults of

colonial greed, aggression and diplomacy, the Geniza had been robbed of all its materials of Egypt's rich Islamic culture: "The Geniza of The Antique Land ... becomes a metaphor for what is lost to history as well as what it carefiiUy conceals . . ." (Moral 225).

104 Describing the colonialists' exploitation and torture of the Egyptian subalterns before the revolution of 1952, Ghosh highlights how the farmers calledfellaheen were cruelly forced to labour and treated like slaves by the rich Pashas, the King and the British Army. These poor and helpless Egyptians had to work for a couple of piastres from morning till evening in an estate of cotton fields of a rich Pasha whose armed overseers would mercilessly whip them at the slightest sign of fatigue or slackness. Nashawy, an Egyptian village, had been ruled like a personal fiefdom by an angry authoritative Badawy headman, and it was only with the revolution that these farmers became free from the tyranny and exploitation of the powerfiil, thus revealing the submissive as well as defiant core of their confradictory subaltern mentality: "the poor and the oppressed have, time and again, and in different histories, made voluntary sacrifices in favour of the rich and the dominant, at least as often as they have rebelled against the latter" (Bhadra 54). Ghosh correlates how in India also colonialism asserted its designs and motives of territorial expansion, oppression and exploitation when Vasco de Gama, a Portuguese, reached Calicut in 1498, about three hundred fifty years after Ben Yiju had left Mangalore. About two years later, a Portuguese fleet led by Pedro Alvarez Cabral arrived on the Malabar coast. Cabral, representing his ruler, asked Samudri, the then Hindu ruler of the city-state of Calicut to expel all Muslim fraders from his kingdom whom his countrymen regarded as enemies of the "Holy Faith," thus implicitly stating their policy of "divide-and-rule." Meeting with a blank refiisal from the Hindu King who was hospitable and liberal to all traders, the Portuguese bombarded Calicut for two days. About a year later Vasco de Gama returned with another fleet, more powerfiil, repeating the demand in order to gain territorial confrol, to turn India into a colony. They attacked the Indian shores to confrol the Indian

105 Ocean trade by force of arms, and shocked the innocent traders who had most probably witnessed violence on land but not on the sea. This unprecedented violence followed by victory is strangely and ironically justified by Western historians by terming it as necessity: "Within the Western historiographical record the unarmed character of the Indian Ocean trade is often represented as a lack, or failure, one that invited the intervention of Europe, with its increasing proficiency in war" (Ghosh, In an Antique Land 287). Revealing the colonial epistemology of greed and oppression further, Ghosh asserts that before the attack the hidian rulers had tried to reach an amicable solution with the Europeans but the latter had insisted on the former either to submit or to resist but not to co-operate. Unable to compete commercially, the Europeans followed the cruel, immoral but profitable strategy to gain a proprietorial monopoly over the Indian Ocean through destruction of the peaceftil trading culture: "In 1509 AD the fate of that ancient trading culture was sealed in a naval engagement that was sadly, perhaps pathetically, evocative of its ethos. A transcontinental fleet, hastily put together by the Muslim Potentate of Gujarat, the Hindu ruler of Calicut, and the Sultan of Egypt was attacked and defeated by a Portuguese force off the shores of Diu, in Gujarat" (288). Contrary to this colonial victory marked by unilateral violence and destruction of harmonious culture is the fact of the long bilateral traditions of jfriendship and cooperation between India and Egypt, their shared histories as agricultural nations, their common exploitation and plunder by the imperialists and their joint fight against colonialism: Mahatma Gandhi visited Egypt to share his views with Sa'ad Zaghloul Pasha, the leader of the Egyptian nationalist movement, and later Naser and Nehru forged a close alliance. India had unforgettably supported Egypt during the Suez

106 Crisis of 1956 when the latter came under an unprovoked attack by the British and the French: "Anti-colonial nationalism is a struggle to represent, create or recover a culture and a selfhood that has been systematically repressed and eroded during colonial rule" (Loomba 182). The author highlights the communal divide created by nationalism. For Ghosh and his parents Dhaka was their ancestral city although they had settled in Calcutta. But with the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, Dhaka became a foreign city to them although they could still speak its dialect and had several relatives living in it. Thus, Ghosh questions the significance of national borders which come in the way of maintaining and enriching human relationship based on the spirit of communal harmony and co-existence. This happens in the case of Tha'mma's relationship with her home town Dhaka, during the communal riots, which has been amply explored in The Shadow Lines. Similar to The Shadow Lines, In an Antique Land also narrates the communal riots of 1964 in both Calcutta and Dhaka. The word conmiunalism, a derivative of the word "commune" denotes a community spirit. S.L. Malhotra defines it thus: Commimalism is a type of consciousness, true or false, that makes the members of a community feel that they constitute a distinct group.... In other words, the community constitutes an organic whole. It is homogenous or cohesive. This kind of consciousness, if sufficiently strong and real, develops into nationalism, (qtd. in Chopra 26) Unfortunately in India this word with such a positive meaning is used in a derogative sense of antagonism between people belonging to different religions and races. A communal community believes that even the secular interests of its members are common because of their particular religion, that its religious interest is above the

107 national interest and that every religious community has different interests from the other community. Thus communalism is generally associated with the selfish, divisive and aggressive posture of a religious community. In fact, it is an ideology that preaches hatred against the followers of other religions. Bipin Chandra and others trace the three stages of communalism in modem India, which follow one another: in its first stage it is believed that followers of a particular religion have identical secular interests, i.e., they have common political, economic, social and cultural interests. This stage creates the "notion of sociopolitical communities based on religion" (Chandra et al. 398). The second stage of commimalism follows when in a multi-religious country, like India, it is believed that the secular interests of one religious community are dissimilar and divergent from those of another religious community. This type of communalism, described as "moderate" still embraces liberal, democratic and nationalist values which can accommodate and harmonise religious differences between communities. The third stage of communalism is reached when the interests of different religious communities are viewed as mutually incompatible and hostile. Communalism has various kinds—ethnic, social or religious. It is ethnic in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. In South Afiica, it is based on colour, and in India, on religion. Jawaharlal Nehru highlights this subaltern historic truth hidden by colonial historians: "It is interesting to trace British policy since the Rising of 1857 in its relation to the communal question. Fundamentally and inevitably it has been one of preventing the Hindu and Muslim from acting together, and of playing off one community against another" (Nehru 460). Communalism in India struck its roots during the British rule as before the 1870s it was almost an \mfamiliar thing. Nehru also calls it a "latter-day phenomenon."

108 Ghosh reminisces how the Hindus were killed by the Muslims in Dhaka and vice versa in Calcutta, leading to huge migration from and into both countries. Ghosh attributes the cause of these conmiunal riots to elitist history that popularised symbols of identities on communal lines: "The stories of those riots are always the same : tales that grow out of an explosive barrier of symbols—of

cities going up in flames

because of a cow found dead in a temple or a pig in a mosque; of people killed for wearing a lungi or a dhoti, depending on where they find themselves; of women disemboweled for wearing veils or vermilion, of men dismembered for the state of their foreskins" (210). Contrary to this communal antagonism, Ghosh voices the incidences of protection of the Hindus by the Muslims and vice versa in both Dhaka and Calcutta during the communal riots in which more people were saved than killed. This subaltern history of brotherhood is often suppressed by elitist historians: "Some people think that the Hindus and the Muslims have always been hostile to each other. This is not even half the truth. The fact is that over the centuries they lived a life of peaceful co-existence" (Chitkara 10). The richness of the past in the light of the present-day corrmiimal disharmony has been explored by Ghosh. He narrates how the civilisation in the past was syncretic before the introduction of the concept of nationalism, marked by territorial divisions. The novel provides many small, intertwined histories of Jews and Muslims and Indians and Egyptians. During the Middle Ages the Jews and the Muslims in the Middle East led a harmonious relationship, and did not indulge in sectarian and religious violence against one another. Although the Jews were strongly aware of their religious identity, yet living in the Arabic-speaking world they shared in their religious life the language of Muslims of that region: "when they invoked the name of

109 God in their writings it was usually as Allah, and more often than not their invocations were in Arabic forms, such as Insha'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" (261). The novel fiirther explores the intertwined culture of the Jews and the Muslims through Judaeo-Arabic, a hybrid and colloquial dialect of medieval Arabic, which was written in Hebrew script. It combined Arabic and Aramaic—which was spoken by the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in the seventh century. It was different from literary Arabic as it had the vocabulary and grammar of the spoken language. Ben Yiju's docxaments were mostly written in this language. The Judaeo-Arabic writers knew the Hebrew Scriptures but they could not usually speak it. Their writings were marked by Hebrew proverbs, biblical passages as well as legal and religious terms from the archaic Armaic language. Sufism influenced both Judaism and Orthodox Islam and thus served as a source of link between the Jews and the Muslims. Shortly before Ben Yiju's time the Jewish mystic Bahya Ibn Paquda wrote The Duties of the Heart, a long book, largely drawing from Sufi sources, and it immensely appealed to the Jews of the Mediterranean region. Egypt was famous for mystical beliefs that, over the centuries, exercised a great influence on many members of the Synagogue of Ben Ezra in Fustat. Abraham Maimonides (1186-1237), a Sufi Jew once remarked that the "Sufis were 'worthier disciples of the Prophets of Israel than were the Jews of his time' " (Ghosh, In an Antique Land 261). Ghosh discovers in an American library that Sidi-Abu Hasira of Damanhour, a cabalist mystic, who had been famous for his miracles in his lifetime, had been venerated by both the Jews and the Muslims:

110 As an embodiment of disinterestedness, syncretism creates conditions for a form of governance where class differences, allegiances and interests vanish, with the state functioning as the sponge that absorbs difference. Syncretism is thus harmonization without disproportionate empowerment of any one element of the whole. (Vishwanathan 3) Similarly, India and Egypt in the Middle Ages had shared cordial relations between them: "the people of Egypt and India have been like brothers for centuries" (Ghosh, In an Antique Land 186). In both countries had prevailed similar religious customs, attitudes and life-styles. Etymological exchanges took place between the two, such as the Arabic word sukkar for sugar is derived from a Sanskrit source whereas in North India crystallized sugar is still known as misri which was imported from Masr in those days. The great doctor, scholar and philosopher Musa ibn Maimum, known as Maimonides and a member of the Synagogue's congregation and regarded as one of the finest minds of the Middle Ages, had established, like countless other Jews including Ben Yiju, familial links with the India frade. Ghosh also provides a wider spectrum of cosmopolitan culture as he not only encompasses the trade relations between India and Africa but also maps the frade histories of other continental countries. While subverting Western history Ghosh fraces the medieval world of frade and culture between India, Egypt and Aden through the Indian Ocean, and brings out a conceptual confrast between the egalitarian cross-cultural regions of the Middle Ages and hegemonic nation-states of the modem period. He portrays in a non-coercive and non-manipulative way historical societies tied in a linguistic, religious and ethnic multiculturalism. Ghosh narrates that medieval Fustat had been one of the most important trade routes and global cities that linked the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Fustat

Ill peacefully traded with as far afield as East Afiica, Southern Europe, the Western Sahara, India, China and Indonesia. Clifford Geertz emphasises this harmonious spirit and ethos of cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism in his review of the novel: in this mobile, polyglot and virtually borderless region, which no one owned and no one dominated, Arabs, Jews, Iberians, Greeks, Indians, various sorts of 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 commxmication, propriety and the conduct of business. It was, we might say, a sort of multicultiiral bazaar. Today this part of the world is divided, like the rest of the globe, into singular and separated national states, (qtd. in Dixon 26) India's transcontinental trading relation with other countries through the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean is exhaustively explored with Mangalore and Calicut serving as busy and bustling ports. It was a favourite destination of merchants from the Middle East, Egypt, Aden and far-off places since India offered them an ideal place for conducting economic activities as well as for building friendly ties. This rich medieval period of trade and culture is misrepresented as a dark period by Europeans in their histories and fictions. S.D. Goitein in his Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders, which is translated fi-om the Arabic notes, and has one full chapter on Indian traders, reveals the spirit of universal brotherhood and co-existence of different cultures: As far as the information provided by the Geniza letters is concerned, the India trade was an extension and a branch of the commerce uniting the countries of the Mediterranean. The traders who left us their

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writing were, of course, all Arabic-speaking Jews although Hindus are mentioned as close and reliable "Brothers" and Abyssinians and other Christians as business friends, (qtd. in Parikh 152) Exploring further India's rich trade relation in the medieval world, the novel reveals that despite the dangers of pirates and the perilous sea, Indian traders made voyages from the ports of Gujarat, Malabar and Coromandel. Goiten further adds: "Over one-half of the commodities traded on the Mediterranean market, specially spices, perfumes, pharmaceuticals, dyeing stuffs, and certain textiles, were imported from India and the far East.. ." (qtd. in Parikh 152). Ghosh unearths that Mangalore, a part of modem Kamataka, boasted of about four thouszind foreign merchants. The Moroccan fraveller Ibn Battuta, who visited the city about two hundred years after Ben Yiju's departure, reports that merchants from the Yemen and Persia regularly disembarked at Mangalore, which was then famous for its industrial crafts and was one of the most spice-producing places of the medieval world. It still bears the Persian name Bandar for a port; the merchants including the large community of Middle Easters had constructed their offices and godowns close to the port, probably uphill which were suitable for incoming ships. The adventurous but peaceful spirit of coexistence of Gujarati Jains and Vanias is noted by a European who felt bewildered by their unfamiliar non-violent customs. Ghosh quotes him in the text: 'The heathen of [Gujarat],' wrote Tome Pires, early in 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 Gujarat law among the heathen.' (qtd. in Ghosh 287)

113 Calicut, about two hundred miles to the south of Mangalore had even larger and more diverse community of traders. Ibn Battuta also reports that Calicut regularly received merchants from China, Sumatra, Ceylon, the Maldives, Yemen and Iran. Durate Barbosa, a Portuguese sailor, also quoted in the text, reports in the sixteenth century that the city's merchants included " 'Arabs, Persians, Guzarates, Khorasanys and Decanys' " (243). Known collectively as pardesis or foreigners, many of them had settled there with their families for a long time, enjoying a luxurious life with large houses and many servants. They used a pidgin language which was largely composed of Perso-Arabic and north hidian elements. In the medieval era, the ancestors of the Magavira also called Mongera, a small community of fisher-folk in the present Malabar had always enjoyed close links with Moors, Middle Eastern sailors and foreign merchants; many of them were successfiil traders, sailors as well as ship owners. In an Antique Land raises an interesting point whether Ghosh proposes to abolish divisions between nations, peoples and cultures. Gauri Vishwanathan thinks so but Murari Prasad refutes her point: Ghosh's point is that without giving up the distinctiveness of our own traditions we can engage the other in the mutual transformation of dialogue, and retrieve the ecumenical legacy of a "world of accommodations". . . . He does not propose to dissolve "barriers between nations, peoples and commvmities," as Gauri Vishwanathan states in her critique of lAAL, but rather makes a plea for cross-border ties and inter-civilizational alliance.... (Prasad 58) As an anthropologist Ghosh vividly narrates the cultural history of medieval Mangalore which does not find an important place in elitist historiography. Mangalore

114 city, a part of Tulunad, was governed by the Alupa dynasty for several hundred years. Its people were divided into traditional hierarchy, from prosperous and powerful landlords to poor peasants and untouchables. Despite it they shared a common culture by speaking Tulu and by following matrilineal rules of inheritance for certain kinds of property: Tulu was one of the five members of the Dravidian family of languages: Though rich in folk traditions and oral literature, it did not possess a script of its own and is usually transcribed in Kannada: "It is this language that has given the area around Mangalore its name, Tulunad: like so many other parts of the subcontinent, it forms a cultural area which is distinctive and singular, while being at the same time closely enmeshed with its neighbours in an intricate network of differences" (Ghosh 244). Ghosh describes the religious fabric of Mangalore woven from an equal mixture of local forms of worship: the Bhuta-cult and the high Sanskritic tradition. The Bhuta-cult followed by the Dravidians had certain aspects of common religion as each member of Tulunad except the Brahmins (Aryans) participated in it by contributing money or looking after the shrines or performing ritual dances. The rites took place at frequent and regular intervals. Since the cult was tied to agriculture, the Brahmins were excluded from it because they neither owned the land nor worked on it. However, they played an important role in being religious representatives of the other half of the population which worshipped in temples. Displaying their religious liberality and syncretism, most of the people participated in both types of worship as for them "Bhutas and Sanskritic deities represented aspects of divine and supernatural power that shaded gently and imperceptively into each other" (252). The novel also presents the medieval cultural history of Malabar, a part of Kamataka, the destination of Ben Yiju and other foreign travellers. Having been given

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its Arabic name by Middle Eastern travellers, it had a distinct language, closely akin to Kannada. Like its southerly neighbours, the tradition of matrilineal descent prevailed in this region. Regarding clothing, both men and women kept the upper parts of their bodies bare and wore garments around the middle, running down above the knees. However, it was not clothes but ornaments and jewellery that served as a mark of social status. Ghosh narrates the custom of concubinage in medieval India when the country was known for the freedom of sexual relations. He quotes foreign travellers to authenticate this historical reality. Sharifal-Idrisi, a contemporary of Ben Yiju's stated that in hidia " 'concubinage is permitted between everyone, so long as it is not with married women' " (qtd. in Ghosh 228). A fifteenth-century Italian traveller to India, Nicolo Conti was left amazed at the number of courtesans: " 'Public women are everywhere to be had . . . , 'residing in particular houses of their own in all parts of the cities, who attract the men by sweet perfiimes and ointments, by their blandishments, beauty and youth; for the Indians are much addicted to licentiousness' " (qtd. in Ghosh 228). However, in the text, Ghosh's repeated citations of European travelwriters in order to authenticate the indigenous cultural truths tend to thwart his attempt at decentralization of Western cultural history. Continuing with his cultural kaleidoscope of medieval India, Ghosh also narrates Sufism as a subaltern instrument of dissolution of human hierarchy, which was popularised by the Vachanakara saint-poets in South India during Bomma's own lifetime. Most mystics regarded themselves as pantheistic and blasphemous in their desire to merge themselves with God. Their own conceptions of extinction (fand) and subsistence (baqa) were based on the firm belief in a transcendent God. In their poetry, slavery served as the paradoxical embodiment of perfect freedom. They often

116 used slavery as an image or a spiritual metaphor to represent the devotee's quest for God. Androgynous in their longing, they treated themselves as God's servants and lovers, searching for Him with a passion that dissolved the multifarious hierarchies of selfhood, wealth, caste and gender, and in fact, difference itself Their egalitarian devotional movement emphasised fraternal communities of artisans and working people, defying the rules of caste and kinship. Although they believed in a supreme God, in their quest they acknowledged a commonality. Slavery for them represented the notion of relationship, of human bonds as well as the possibility of their transcendence: "For the Sufis as for the Vachanakaras, the notion of being held by bonds was one of the central metaphors of religious life. They too drew some of their most powerful images from the institution of slavery: metaphors of perfect devotion and love strung together in an intensely charged, often erotic, spiritual imagery" (262). Ghosh's humanism situates the individual at the centre of society and thus he "seems to parody history's claim to objective factuality in order to highlight the personal and individual" (Pandit 137). His portrayal of the characters is, to a great extent, fictional that subverts the concept of objective representation or of collective identity claimed by Western historians. Ghosh did not get adequate details from the Geniza documents to draw the actual or historical character of Ben Yiju, or specially that of Bomma who is mentioned only in the margin. Ghosh repeatedly uses the word "story" for the word ''history-r "BoMMa's Story ENDS in Philadelphia" (Ghosh 348). Since institutional history has created stereotypes about the Orient termed as objective records of truth, Ghosh believes that the continuum of the past with the present can be maintained through fiction and not through historical facts: "What history has to offer is not a general and overall, but selective picture of the past.

117

Amitav's attempt at 'scholarly' research on the lives of Ben Yiju and Bomma is also an attempt at questioning Orientalist History. Amitav does not make any statement about the merchant or his slave; he makes references to historical anecdotes to justify his research. Nevertheless, in the end, the story of the merchant comes across as important not as objective, coherent truth but as an event which has connections with various events of present times, though it happened centuries ago" (Pandit 137). Ghosh's characters are not elite but ordinary; instead of enjoying any national stature and aura, they are localised with the obscurity of a subaltern. Ben Yiju, Bonrnia, the narrator, Nabeel, Isma'il and the cook are such subaltern characters who will never find a place in recorded history. Ben Yiju, a Jewish merchant with sharp business acumen, was bom perhaps at the end of the eleventh or the beginning of the twelfth century in Mahdia, which was then a major centre of Jewish culture as well as one of the most important ports in Ifiiqiya now called Tunisia. His Hebrew family name "ibn Yiju" or Ben Yiju was derived from the name of a Berber tribe that had once been the protectors of his clan. Ben Yiju had two brothers, Yusuf and Mubashshir and one sister, Berakha; however, nothing is known about his parents except that his father was called Perahya: a Rabbi and a respected religious scholar who, despite his poverty, provided Ben Yiju excellent education. Resultantly, Ben Yiju, a multitalented personality, became well versed in religion, literature and calligraphy. Constructing the subaltern history of Ben Yiju as a trader Ghosh reveals that following the migration of traders, mostly Jews from Ifiiqiya to Egypt due to some adverse conditions, Ben Yiju also migrates to Fustat, and around 1120 to Aden, the port that was accessible to the important sea-routes connecting the Middle East and the Indian Ocean. Thus, Ghosh's diasporic imagination sees "history as that frajectory

118 of events that causes dislocations, disjunctions, movements and migrations, eventually replacing solid markers with shadow lines, destabilising our notion of the past in the reverberations of the present" (Bose 15). In Aden, through the recommendations of his intimates, Ben Yiju meets Madmun ibn Bundar, a trader of great substance and influence, who was then the Chief Representative of merchants or Head of the city's large and wealthy Jewish community in Aden as well as a key figure in the Indian Ocean trade. Ghosh celebrates the harmony in power relations between Ben Yiju, a junior partner, and Madmun, a senior partner. Being short-tempered and domineering, Madmun at first doubts the business abilities and efficiency of Ben Yiju while working as his assistant in India. The tone and content of Madmun's earliest extant letters reveal that "Ben Yiju's relationship with Madmim at that time fell somewhere between that of an agent and a junior partner" (Ghosh 156). But soon the former is so impressed by the latter's "inspiring loyalty," "charm" and "warmth" that Ben Yiju's not only gains his parental affection but also joins his close-knit circle: "he may even have taken the young Ben Yiju's to live in his household, regarding him as a part of his family, in much the same way that artisans sometimes made their apprentices their presumptive kin" (156). In Aden, his friends include Madmim's extensively-travelled wealthy correspondents: Yusuf ibn Abraham and Khalaf ibn Ishaq—^the writer of the letter of MSH.6, and Madmun's two fiiends: Abu Sa'id Halfon and Abu-Zikri Sijilmasi—who were amongst the most widely travelled persons of the medieval era. Moreover, in Aden, because of his meeting with several famous Hebrew poets and being himself gifted with poetic sensibility and an emulating prose style, he is warmly received in the exclusive circle of Aden: "it needs to be noted that if Ben Yiju succeeded in

119 finding ready acceptance within the society of the weahhy merchants of Aden, despite his comparatively humble standing as a young apprentice trader, it must have been largely because of his individual gifts" (158). However, Ben Yiju has to leave Aden, most probably because of a blood feud and around 1130 he comes to the Malabar Coast and stays there for seventeen years. James Clifford points out such human movement in the past fi"om one place to another, and thus contests the notion of separate and authentic culture: " 'Everyone is on the move, and they have been for centuries: dwelling-in-travel' " (qtd. in Dixon 12). Ben Yiju hires Bomma, an Indian slave, as a business assistant. Soon after his arrival Ben Yiju has a liaison with Ashu, a slavefi"omthe matrilineal community of Nairs in Malabar, which leads to their marriage. This story is spun around a document revealing that Ben Yijufi^eesa slave named Ashu. Ghosh simultaneously admits that neither Ben Yiju nor his correspondents ever mention Ashu although their children are mentioned. Ghosh speculates that Ben Yiju may have converted her to Judaism before their marriage, or may have entered into a temporary marriage, widely practised then by expatriate Iranian traders. Ghosh also admits that much of his narration of Ben Yiju's personal life could be wrong; it is possible that he may never have married Ashu though she has borne Ben Yiju's children. Yet Ghosh wants us to believe that they have married outside their community because of love. "If I hesitate to call it love it is only because the documents offer no certain proof " (Ghosh 230). Thus, Ghosh illustrates the incompleteness of historical documents as well as the fact that there is no distinction between history and fiction. "The book is . . . both subaltern history and also a reminder that history and fiction are inseparable. That history is story... is by now a commonplace" (Mongia 81-82).

120 Significantly, with his hidian wife and hidian slave, Ben Yiju is presented as a cosmopolitan character. Further, Ben Yiju's life-style represents the harmonious coexistence of native and global culture through which Ghosh in contrast to the indifference of the Subaltern Studies group of the first phase also reveals his keen interest in the study of materialistic culture: his proper dress consists of a double layer of clothing—a robe over a loose garment and a kerchief serving as a turban and is fond of Egyptian robes and nice Alexandrian cloaks. His household items include fiying-pans and sieves fi"om Aden; crockery, soap, goblets and glasses fi"om the Middle East, and at least one velvet-like carpet from Gujarat. Apart fi-om the usual supply of raisins, dates and almonds, his fiiends send him regularly his favourite Middle Eastern cane-sugar. Because of his literary taste they along with Madmun ensure him Talhi paper or Sultani paper of matchless quality. Ghosh also introduces Ben Yiju as a cosmopolitan trader in Malabar, supplying goods between India, Aden and Middle East: in the medieval period, the exports of Egypt included paper and cane-sugar and those of India included areca nuts and spices like pepper and cardamom. While delving into Ben Yiju's cordial relationship with Indians, like Madmun's, several Hindu Gujaratis of the "Vania" caste are shown as his closest business intimates. Being his patron's representative he is shown as intimating them about market trends in the Middle East, as delivering letters/greetings to the "Baniyan of Manjalur," and brokering joint entrepreneurial ventures between them and Madmun. Ghosh brings to the forefront cultural exchange among countries and different communities in the past. Although confined to Malabar, Ben Yiju never regards it as separate fi-om India. A believer in cultural, religious and linguistic harmony, he also establishes peacefiil trade ties with Muslims, Brahmins fi-om Tamilnadu and

121 Nambiars from Kerala conducted in an "elaborated pidgin language." His patron is shown as once proposing a joint venture "between himself and three traders in Mangalore, each of different social or geographical origins—one a Muslim, one a Gujarati Vania and the third a member of the landowning caste of Tulunand" (Ghosh 278). A religious scholar, Ben Yiju must have read something about the Sufis and shared in some of their beliefs and practices. Migration leads to alienation from and longing for home as also happens with Ben Yiju. Despite his rich relationship in the Malabar Coast, Ben Yuji lives like a homesick fixgitive, reminding of James Clifford that every home or centre is someone else's periphery and diaspora. Because of his hasty departure from Aden he is probably not able to contact his family; however in 1140 he hears of his brother Mubashshir, living in Ifiiqiya and also of the misery and poverty suffered by his family due to successive attacks by the Sicilian army on his homeland. Longing for his family all the more and desiring to help them including Mubashshir financially, he reaches Aden in 1149 along with his adolescent son and daughter and worldly goods. But he is left shocked when he is ironically defrauded of his huge money by Mubashshir himself Ghosh voices a series of miseries and fragic events suffered by this muUitalented subaltern frader towards the end whose life story lies excluded from Western history: shaken by the death of his son bom of his union with Ashu and by the death of Madmun, separated from his wife Ashu and deserted by his faithfiil fiiend Khalaf Ibn Ishaq, Ben Yiju pathetically dies in the Synagogue of Ben Ezra by the side of his true slave Bomma. The slave Bomma represents "cosmopolitan subaltemism." He comes to notice in 1942 when E. Strauss, a scholar, mentions him in an article in a Hebrew

122 journal Zion published in Jerusalem. The article entitled "New Sources for the History of Middle Eastern Jews" contains several transcripted documents, one of which is a letter written from Aden in 1148 by Khalaf ibn Ishaq to Ben Yiju living then in Malabar. It is only at the end of the letter where the slave is mentioned for sending him "plentiful greetings." The letter now bears the catalogue number MS H.6 of the National University Library, Jerusalem. The slave is also mentioned in another letter to Ben Yiju, also by Ishaq written earlier in 1139 and published in 1973 in a collection entitled Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders, translated and edited by Professor S.D. Goitein of Princeton University. In this letter, the slave, apart from "plentiftil greetings" also earns a footnote wherein he is mentioned as "Ben Yiju's Indian 'slave and business agent, a respected member of his household' " (18). It is Goitein's book of franslations found in an Oxford library in 1978 that precipitates Ghosh's interest in the slave. Ghosh considers it a miracle that such letters serving as "discernible fraces" of ordinary people like the slave should remain unharmed in that world of "properly human, individual existences" lived under the rulers and their ministers, historians and priests who had the power and education to dictate history and record themselves in it. For Dixon, Bomma is the subaltern consciousness whose recovery validates Ghosh's allegorical reading of the destruction of a polyglot frading culture by Western influence. The critic fiarther points out that Ghosh's juxtaposition of the words "properly human individual existences" with the Derridean term "frace" entails his strategic avoidance of affinity with either humanism or post-structuralism. The fleeting image of the slave upon "the stage of modem history" (13) suggests the literariness of Ghosh's own writings as well as the textuality of all history dealing with textual traces of the "properly human." This theoretical duplicity enables him to

123 recover the subaltern consciousness amidst the awareness of textual nature of the process that " 'real life' can only be grasped as a performance in the 'theatre' of writing which actually produces the presence it seems to describe" (Dixon 27). In his treatment of history Ghosh seems to agree with Hayden White who regards it as a mode of figurative discourse and not a narrative of fixed objective facts, and does not believe that the fictive element in history degrades it, rather thinks that it gives history better self-awareness: History—the real world as it evolves in time—is made sense of in the same way that the poet or novelist tries to make sense of it, i.e., by endowing what originally appears to be problematical and mysterious with the aspect of a recognizable, because it is a familiar, form. It does not matter whether the world is conceived to be real or only imagined. The manner of making sense of it is the same. (qtd. in Prasad 55) Owing to Ghosh's scholarly and subversive pursuits fi"om Oxford and Cambridge to Egypt, to Mangalore, to Philadelphia, an anonymous and ordinary slave attains a name, a home and a profession. It is through Ghosh's learning of Arabic, and his examination of ancient manuscripts, anthropological enquiry and avoidance of "high theory" that an \mrecorded slave acquires an identity: "To retrieve him fi-om his status as a footnote and make him one of the primary subjects of the historical narrative is an affirmation of his life and an acknowledgement of the many histories erased by official narratives" (Mongia 79). Bomma's relationship with his master Ben Yiju is largely predicated on the meaning of the word "slavery" as it meant in the Middle Ages. It was altogether different fi-om the Hegelian or European sense of master-slave relationship governed by narcissism, antagonism and annihilation. Slavery was, in Bomma's time, the

124 principal means of recruitment into service such as apprenticeship to trade and crafts or probation in the army or the civil service or personal bondage to God. It served as a means of creating ties of kinship between people who were otherwise strangers. Among the Jewish merchants of Medieval Cairo and many tribes in Africa, slaves lived like family members: "the rich affective alliance (cutting across cultures and social hierarchies) between Bomma and Ben Yiju, also produces in Ghosh a profoundly elegiac longing to recuperate, in the modem world, parallel conditions of accommodation and compromise" (Gandhi 66-67). Despite his drunken revelries Bomma has a cordial relationship with Ben Yiju, and also with Madmun who, in his letters, always sends a friendly greeting for Bomma. Being proficient in business Bomma keeps on enjoying the confidence, respect and importance of all his business associates: "Over the years, as Bomma's role as business agent grew in importance, Ben Yiju's fiiends in Aden came to regard him with increasing respect, and in time Khalaf ibn Ishaq even began to prefix his name with the title of 'Shaikh.' Ben Yiju, for his part, seems to have reposed a great deal of trust in Bomma from the very beginning of their association" (Ghosh 266). As a gesture to express his love and care for Ben Yiju and his family, Bomma, during one of his visits to Aden, brings back many gifts for them, which include four mats, a leather table-cloth for playing games, an iron-frying pan, a sieve, a large quantity of soap, Egyptian gowns, and several presents from Madmun such as sugar, raisins, a quire of white paper and a piece of coral, specifically for Ben Yiju's son, Surur. Another time he returns also with clothes, utensils and many presents for his master from Aden. Ghosh, through this study of materialistic culture, draws a paradoxical or antagonistic parallel between a master's gifts for his slave and a slave's gift for his master, revealing an ahistorical reciprocity in this relationship.

125

The slave's name becomes a source of confusion for Ghosh which manifests the poor treatment of elitist historians towards the slave. For Ghosh, particular names, like Masr used for Egypt as well as Cairo, have cultural connotations, so he wants to investigate the innate meaning of the slave's name in order to have some important clue to his identity. He finds that in Goitein's translated version of Khalif s second letter, the slave's name is plausibly mentioned as Bama which is interpreted by a historian as a diminutive of Brahma. It was originally written in Arabic as B-M-H or B-M-A since the letter H in Arabic is not a consonant but an open vowel. As a single letter in Arabic often represented a doubled letter, then the name would be B-M-M-A which filled in with a short vowel could be Bomma or Bamma—names which were popular in certain parts of India in those days. Professor Rai Ghosh clears for the writer that the slave's name is not Bamma but Bomma—a name popular in Tulu culture, of a Bhuta deity and different fi-om brahamnic deity Brahma. Thus Ghosh as a subaltemist historian steers the slave's name awayfi^omhigh Sanskritic culture. To what extent Ghosh has been able to recover the subaltern consciousness of the slave is a moot point. Robert Dixon thinks that Ghosh has been partly successfiil in this effort: Bomma remains the slave of MS. H.6, of textuality. But it does mean that Ghosh has performed a conjuring trick, using that 'voice' to intervene allegorically in the present, not sliding into essentialism so much as sustaining a writing that is itself 'slippery' in its dealings with the vexed issue of identity politics. It is an exemplary instance of what Spivak calls a 'strategic essentialism.' (Dixon 34-35) Contrarily, Mongia appreciates Ghosh for transforming Bomma into a cosmopolitan character: "Bomma's medieval world is richly created by Ghosh as a

126 vital, cosmopolitan one that puts to shame our current notions of cosmopolitanism" (Mongia 82). Nabeel is another subaltern in the novel. He is a modem version of Bomma in view of the callous treatment he also receives from history. Like Bomma, he is also claimed by the anonymity of history. Nabeel along with his cousin Isma'il is introduced as a young student of the Agricultural Training College in Damanhour, whom the narrator meets while living in their village Nashawy, Egypt. Since childhood both have dreamed of becoming officers in the village Co-operative in order to gain esteem among their uneducated villagers. They are individualistic and logical in their thinking and have a clear perception of life; they respect their teacher Ustaz Sabri for his intelligence and rationality. As representatives of their new generation they dislike hnam Ibrahim for his orthodoxical religious views. Ghosh constructs a binary opposition in these "minor" characters which is mainly due to their different upbringings: Nabeel is, without being shy, contemplative, serious, considerate and self-respecting; Isma'il is talkative and hillarious. Of the two, Nabeel is more determined to succeed in life. Since childhood, he has suffered the scourge of poverty which he hated with a dogmatic attitude. He wants to relieve himself and his family from the embarrassing and agonising burden of poverty for which he regards his father responsible as the latter, despite his most powerfiil lineage in the village, is working as a wage-earner on the land of their villagers. He desires to acquire a lucrative clerical job to improve the condition of himself as well as that of his family among his rich and supercillious relatives. Thus, Ghosh also shows a binary antagonism between the attitude and conditions of Nabeel and his relatives: Nabeel "had always been treated as a poor relative by his more

127 prosperous Badawy cousins, and he had responded by withdrawing into the defensive stillness of introspection" (Ghosh 150). Similar to the modem youth, Nabeel along with Isma'il falls prey to the materialistic lure of earning quick money offered by modernity, and both migrate to Iraq to find better job opportunities and fulfil their economic aspirations. As a contemporary character Nabeel "represents the youth of the third World developing countries who are hypnotized by the dream of success, and are eager to go to any extent to achieve this success" (Damor 128). Nabeel works as an assistant in a photographer's store and Isma'il works as a construction labourer. Although their jobs don't carry high status or respect they earn far more than they would have earned in their homeland as officers in the Co-operative. Nabeel not only escapes poverty but also provides his family modem amenities such as a television set and a washing machine; for the sake of material comforts, he asks them to dismantle their old mudhouse and to constmct a concrete house before his home-coming. Ghosh reveals the distressing effects of migration on the character of Nabeel whose illusive material success is gained at the cost of his alienation fi-om or the loss of his emotional ties with his family. After earning a lot, he is regarded merely as a money-minting machine by his unrequiting family, who do not show any emotional care and concern for him. The narrator is left amazed at the response of Nabeel's sister-in-law about his enquiry to Nabeel's well-being in Iraq: Nabeel "was very happy, she said; in his tapes he always said he was doing well and that everything was fine" (322). But the narrator is more stvmned at the nonchalant response of Nabeel's brother, AH, marked by a shmg: "Nabeel was well enough. That was what he always said at any rate. The fact was, he didn't know; he had never been there himself (324). Thus the family overwhelmed by the lure of money and material goods—a

128 creation of modernity—never tries to see the real state of mind under Nabeel's simulated face of happiness, put up for the sake of their happiness: "Nabeel's alienation is never understood by his family. Nobody tries to penetrate through the mask of happiness that Nabeel fashions, whenever he tries to contact them. All they understood was the money that he sent. Nabeel had become an 'outsider' by going to work 'outside' " (Damor 130). The narrator empathises with Nabeel; he is able to realise Nabeel's alienation because he himself has been living in Egypt, away from his homeland. Nabeel's loneliness and anguish in Iraq becomes almost vocal during his conversation with him: "I told him about his own family in Nashawy, and about my visit to their new house. He was eager to hear about them, asking question after question, but in a voice that seemed to grow progressively more quiet" (Ghosh 347). When the narrator enquires Nabeel after his health, the latter's employer obstructs the conversation, ordering Nabeel to return to his work. Thus, Nabeel is living there like a slave who has bargained his freedom for material success. Ghosh depicts the catastrophic effects of the Gulf War on Nabeel. The sfrain of such disastrous event creates a "unique predicamenf for Ghosh's character like Arjun in The Glass Palace, revealing his idiosyncrasy or particular response to such crisis—which is of fiindamental interest for Ghosh. Nabeel's sufferings become more excruciating with the breaking out of the war because he is left all alone to face the frauma since Nabeel's friends from Nashawy and Isma'il have already left for Egypt. The Egyptians in Iraq have to live in the frightening shadow of death from the Iraqi soldiers who regard them as their enemies for having usurped their jobs as well as their money. Nabeel has to stay longer so as to earn more for the completion of his unfinished concrete house. But his unusual concern and attachment for his family at

129 the cost of his own safety, serving as an antagonistic force, is contrasted against his family's lack of it for him: " 'What would Nabeel do back here? Look at Isma'il—just sitting at home, no job, nothing to do . . .' " (351). As against their indifference, Isma'il, who himself has experienced horror in Iraq, is fully sensitive to and sympathetic with Nabeel's miserable life: " 'But still, he wanted to come back. He's been there three years. It's more than most, and it's aged him: Life's not easy out there' " (352). The climax of Nabeel's tragic story takes place when more than a dozen persons including the narrator, huddled around a television set, are carefully and minutely looking for the face of Nabeel in the epic exodus of thousands of men towards the Red Sea, but imfortunately they are unable to find it as "Nabeel had vanished into the anonymity of History" (353). Thus, it is the Gulf War that claims the precious life of a poor migrant. Like Ghosh Nabeel also suffers the consequences of a historical event: "Nabeel and Ghosh, both do not know the causes of unrest, yet they are innocent victims of unrest and historical changes. Ghosh is a victim of partition, Nabeel—a victim of the Gulf-war" (Trivedi 147). Ghosh also concentrates on the other native Egyptians of lower ranks and narrates their historically unrecorded experiences of loneliness and alienation, their struggle against poverty as well as against one another, their exploitation and oppression, their hankering for a materialistic life and their conflict as well as harmony towards the narrator. He talks about the "seclusion" and "grief of Imam Ibrahim, about his indifference to his hereditary profession of barbering as against the dexterity and passion of his son for it who by setting up the first barber-shop in Nashawy gains a monopoly over a half-dozen barbers who have to go from house to house for cutting hair. The novel narrates the story of Zaghloul, an incompatible

130 husband at home, but a sought-after brilliant story-teller outside, who was not allowed by his father to marry a city girl of his own choice due to the conflict in different patterns and ways of city and village life. Being an unskilled weaver, he earns a "generous measure of ridicule" for his products. 'Amm Taha works variously as a vendor of eggs, cheese and vegetables, as well as a house caretaker; however, despite these many professions he is able to earn only a marginal profit. The novel also focuses on Shaikh Musha, a gentle, trustworthy and humorous person, who as the narrator's fiiend, philosopher and guide transcends, like Nabeel, the barricades of nationalities, religions and languages. Being peace-loving and contented, Musha, unlike Abu-'Ali or many other Egyptians, does not send his young family members to Iraq for earning money. His sons, Ahmed and Husan are described as opposite to each other in their choice of professions and attitudes towards life. Ghosh underlines the animosity between the prosperous landlords of the Badawy clan and the poor tenant farmers of the Jammal clan whom the former regards as uncivilised, quarrelsome and haughty. It is because of this antagonism between the two that Khamees' youngest brother cannot think of marrying his Badawy beloved. The power relations between Ahmed Effendi, an old Badawy landlord and his Jammal tenants before the Revolution of 1952 is authentically constructed on the basis of Zaghloul's memory. The Badawy headman with his friendly relationship among the Pashas was so dominant that he ruled and exploited his tenants like slaves, forcing them even through whipping to work in his house and on his fields, without wages. He was also ruthless in as well as notorious for his sexual exploitation: " 'I want that woman in my house for the night,' and sure enough, she would go, for there was nothing anyone could do. He had only to raise his voice and you would see

131 twenty men throwing themselves in front of him, crying 'at your service Effendi' " (216). Unlike the subaltemists of the earlier phase, Ghosh constructs the binary relationship within commoners: Khamees is shown as quarrelsome and erratic because of which, like Zhagloul or Abu-'Ali, he is incompatible with his wife or the narrator. He remains childless even after his second marriage, and the first wife, feeling discriminated and exploited, discards him. Busaina, Khamees' sister—a mother of two young sons—^being unusually quarrelsome and interfering, is discarded by her husband for his second marriage. While living in her brother's house, she renounces her wifely domesticity to visit every house in Nashaway for buying stale remnants of vegetables, and selling them in the market where she works for long hours in order to fulfil her ambitions about her sons. Ghosh also portrays the poverty and troubles of Khamees' father and his family. A thin, frail old man, he owns one of the shabbiest and most dilapidated houses in Nashawy. Being too poor to afford even a sweater in winter, he suffers from a severe cold when draughts of cold wind blow through the crumbling walls of his house. He remains worry-stricken because of Khamees' frustration in being childless as well as imtimely estrangement of his daughter, in her twenties. Although neglected, scolded and taunted by Khamees, he tolerates him with a remarkable patience, showing no protest, rather holding himself responsible for his son's misfortune. Treating subaltemity as a relationship, Ghosh also concenfrates on the subaltern experiences of the educated diaspora, i.e., Amitab, the narrator, who is no other than Ghosh himself In 1978, as a student of Oxford University, Ghosh, as mentioned earlier, happened to read Goitein's Letters of MedievalJewish Traders that contains letters regarding Ben Yiju and Bomma. To decipher their stories, he went to

132 Tunisia next year to learn Arabic. In 1980, he visited Lataifa, an Egyptian village to do his fieldwork as part of his doctorate in Social Anthropology. He left Egypt in 1981 until his return in 1988 to begin a serious enquiry into the histories of Ben Yiju and Bomma. He studied various letters including those exchanged between Ben Yiju from India and his mentor Madmun and the two traders—Yusuf ibn Abraham and Khalaf ibn Ishaq from Aden. Pursuing his enquiry fiirther he visited Princeton University and the Anneberg Research Centre, Philadelphia. In Lataifa, the narrator feels miserable, befrayed and alienated — more alienated than he was in London. Amitab has been brought to Abu-'All's house by Doctor Aly Issa, Professor

at the University of Alexandria and eminent

anthropologist. He is unfortunate to be the tenant of Abu-'Ali who is so abominable that his family, relatives and villagers dislike as well as fear him. Even the village children avoid him because of his being short-tempered, abusive and loud-mouthed. But the narrator feels helpless as he cannot avoid him: "Everybody in the area knew of Abu-'Ali's temper and most people did their best to avoid him, so far as they could. As for me, I had no choice in the matter: by the time I had learnt of Abu-'Ali's reputation, I was already his lodger, and he on his own initiative, had assumed the role of surrogate father as well as landlord" (Ghosh 24). The power relations between Abu-'Ali and the narrator or between many other subaltern characters or people in the novel are based on the power paradigm of subaltemity that illusfrates the Foucaultian bottom-up model of power which does not regard power simply as a one-way fransmission from top to bottom, or simply a system of relations between the dominant and the dominated. Foucault conceptualises power as a system of all relations which are spread throughout a whole society. For Foucault, power is not located simply within particular institutions such as the State or

133 the government but in different multiple forms including family, institution or administration. He regards power more as a strategy which needs to be performed constantly, rather than as a possession of powerful agents who force their will over powerless people. Foucault considers individuals not as recipients of power or passive victims of State's oppression and ideology—a view held mostly by conventional Marxist theorists but rather as the "vehicles" of power or the "place" where power is enacted and contested: His theorising of power forces us to reconceptualise not only power itself but also the role that individuals play in power relations— whether they are simply subjected to oppression or whether they actively play a role in the form of their relations with others and with institutions. (Mills 35) The narrator being submissive as well as sensitive has to suffer endless miseries, tortures and exploitation at the hands of his cunning and authoritative landlord. Amitab lives on the roof in a makeshift room which was earlier used as a chicken-coop. The narrator feels terrified when Abu-'Ali castigates his wife or shouts at some "unfortunate customer" with whom he is displeased at the shop. At such a time the narrator tries to shut out the noise by concentrating on his book or diaries or by raising the volume of his transistor radio. But all his efforts, helped by the thick mud walls of the house and squawking of the ducks, geese, chickens and pigeons, fail to muffle Abu-Ali's overwhelming voice, which serves as an instrument of power for him: "Abu-'Ali's voice exploded out of the porch below, roaring abuse at his wife . . . As the night wore on, the thought of hearing Abu-'Ali's voice for months on end, perhaps years, began to seem utterly intolerable" (31).

134 The relationship between the landlord and the tenant is also that of the exploiter and the exploited. Amitab is left shocked by the cunning demeanour and designs of Abu-'Ali when the latter lays claim to the former's transistor radio as well as shows his dissatisfaction with the rent paid by Amitab, which is ironically contrary to Abu-'Ali's vow made to Doctor Issa while renting out the accommodation: " 'I swear to you, ya doktor, the Indian shall stay here and we will look after him as we do our own sons, for your sake, ya, doktor because we respect you so much' " (29). The helpless narrator becomes a plaything in the hands of Abu-'Ali: when the latter offers his purse for money, and the former believes that perhaps it is customary to touch the money or make some symbolic gesture of acceptance or obeisance like falling at Abu-'Ali's feet: "I saw myself shrinking, dwindling away into one of those tiny, terrified foreigners whom Pharaohs hold up by their hair in New Kingdom basreliefs" (30). The narrator is left stupefied when Abu-'Ali puts the purse back into his pocket in a flash before the former can react. For his financial exploitation, he is forced by Abu-'Ali to eat food with them and pay for it exorbitantly. He wants to seek the help of Shaikh Musa, a contemporary of Abu-Ali's in finding a new lodging but every time he tries to ask him about it he is interrupted, in a way to prolong his subaltern tortures and exploitation. Amitab is also tormented by Jabir, a malicious teenager, who is Abu-Ali's relative, for not knowing anything about sex or circumcision which means cutting off the foreskin of a male organ as a religious rite in Arabic and for not having his armpits or crotch shaved. Further, along with his companions Jabir again plagues him by projecting him as an ignoramus: " 'he doesn't know a thing,' said Jabir. 'Not religion, not politics, not sex, just like a child' " (63). However, ironically it is Amitab who through the power of his knowledge defeats them by telling the actual source of

135 light falling on the canal water. But his knowledge-power ironically becomes a source of torture for him when he is accused by them of doing nothing except reading books and asking questions like a child. The narrator has to suffer the trauma of alienation: during his second visit to Egypt when he is travelling in a truck from Damanhour to Lataifa to meet Shaikh Musa, he is cross-questioned by the suspicious and domineering truck driver: " 'Are you a foreigner? Why are you going there all alone so late at night?' " (112). Despite the narrator's explanation about his research project "the story served to arouse his suspicion" (112). The driver frees the narrator only when the former himself goes to Shaikh Musa's house and is convinced of the narrator's old, friendly and harmless relationship with Shaikh Musa. Similarly, in Nashawy also Amitab suffers torment, discrimination and marginalisation for being a foreigner: during his visit to Ustaz Sabry, the village girls jeer at him, and harry him by repeatedly shouting "Hindi." On the marriage of Nabeel's brother, the narrator is harassed by about twenty interlocutors with their "barrage of inquiries." One of the antagonists, suspecting the narrator of being a spy or imposter, threatens to report about him to the Egyptian police, and questions him about his learning of Arabic, the intermediary that brought him to Egypt and whether for his visit he has the requisite permission from the Egyptian government. Amitab there suffers utter loneliness, alienation and terror among them: "I looked around quickly, searching for a familiar face, but to my dismay I discovered that they were all outsiders, from other villages, and that I knew no one there, no one at all, since Nabeel and his father had gone back to their post outside to receive their guests" (199).

136 Continuing with Amitab's tale of tortures and alienation, during his visit to Imam Ibrahim, the former innocently asks the Imam's son, Yashir, whether he has one sister and no brothers. This enquiry makes the whole family silent with grief although Imam Ibrahim has remarried to beget sons. The narrator, frowned at by the Imam, realises with pain and guilt that he has committed a solecism beyond forgiveness, and keeps sitting there silently, thus reminding one of Fokir in The Hungry Tide, sitting like a mute before his authoritative wife Moyna when Piya and Kanai visit their house. The narrator becomes a victim of ethnic discrimiation for being a Hindu: in Lataifa, he is not allowed to undertake a fast on Ramadan which is regarded as a privilege of the Muslims only: " 'No, you can't fast, you're not Muslim—only Muslims fast at Ramadan' " (75). Imagining millions of Muslims performing the same prayers and prostrations on this festival, the narrator becomes conscious of the divisions between the two communities preached by Western Orientalist and elitist historiographers: "to belong to that immense community was a privilege which they had to re-eam every year, and the effort made them doubly conscious of the value of its boundaries" (76). When the narrator in Lataifa tells Ustaz Sabry and others that the Hindus worship cows, Jabir and his friends call upon God to protect them from the "Devil." People in Nashawy react similarly when the narrator in response to Khamees' almost daily-repeated question answers that the Hindus bum their dead: "The moment he said it the women in the group clasped their hands to their hearts and cried in a breathless horror: " 'Haram! Haram!' and several of the men began to mutter prayers, calling upon the Lord to protect them from the devil" (168). The narrator is also tortured for his other Hindu ceremonies or rituals confrary to those of Muslims,

137 specially for regarding the Buddha as Prophet and for not following circumcision or clitoridectomy, i.e., cutting off the smallest erectile organ of the female mammals in Arabic. He is asked to stop his communal ceremonies in order to become civilised. Undoubtedly, for the narrator in Egypt, religion serves as a source of subordination, harassment, alienation, exploitation, fear and hatred. However, as against the above-mentioned antagonistic interlocutors, Nabeel is perhaps the only person who shares the torment and anguish of the narrator as an alien: " 'Why do you let this talk of cows and burning and circumcision worry you so much? These are just customs; it's natural that people should be curious. These are not things to be upset about' " (204). Transcending these religious and cultural differences, Nabeel exhibits a high degree of imaginative empathy and humanist concern for the narrator in his homesickness and troubles: " 'It must make you think of all the people you left at home when you put that kettle on the stove with just enough water for yourself " (353). Like in Lataifa, in Nashawy too Amitab as a subaltern suffers financial exploitation, inflicted both by the elite and the subaltern. In the market he is exorbitantly charged fifteen piastries for a little handfixl of peas. Another time he has to pay for rotten watercress to Busaina, a subaltern also, who otherwise was going to throw it into a canal for the food of catfish. Ustaz Sabry's mother wants the narrator to return home so as to snatch his kerosene stove. Amitab's shyness also makes him vulnerable to exploitation, embarrassment, teasing and trouble. In Nashawy, the narrator is teased by calling him "shy." In Lataifa, during one of his visits to Shaikh Musa's family which has three women, Amitab realises that he might have earlier passed them in the lanes but never glanced at them for fear of offending the Arab traditions of shame and modesty. But the situation becomes quite comic and

138 embarrassing a few days later when walking past them he out of shyness, never raises his head to greet them, provoking astonishment and laughter from them. Ghosh also constructs the story of his childhood cook, an anonymous subaltern, who hails from a maritime district of East Pakistan (Bangladesh). Like Ghosh he has also been a victim of communal violence that followed the Partition wherein he lost many members of his family. And this fragic blow forced him to work as a cook, away from his homeland, in India where he wants to emigrate. Having learnt cooking on the river steamers of his region he has become a legendary cook among the friends of Ghosh's family. He is a wonderfiil story-teller, who in his own dialect, narrated to Ghosh in childhood long "epic" stories about ghosts and ghouls, and about lands where cannibals ate their children. Like a magician he would hold Ghosh spellbound for hours continuously by spinning one story after another. As a child, Ghosh regarded him with fear as well as fascination. Despite being small and wiry, to Ghosh he seemed bigger with his large curling eyes that made him mysterious and menacing. To Ghosh's imaginative mind, the cook seemed to be like one of those ghouls and spirits narrated in his mysterious stories. During the communal riots in January 1964 when a number of Hindu refugees from Dhaka took shelter in Ghosh's garden in Calcutta, the cook freated them with a spirit of elation, and empathy: he laughed and joked with them cheerfially and tried to know about their lives and the circumstances which were forcing them to migrate. Like a subaltemist historiographer the cook narrated their riot-related stories to Ghosh who recognised them years later through a collection of old newspapers. As a subaltemist anthropologist, Ghosh studies his contemporary Egyptian society in terms of its history, religions, customs, beliefs, culture and hierarchies; he specially studies its fransformation during his first and third visit in 1981 and 1990

139 respectively. Anthropology is related to the fieldwork of some small, distant and enclosed society: Bernard S. Cohan states that what a document is to historians, fieldwork is to anthropologists. History and anthropology represent the antinomiovis relationship between political economy and culture, material and ideal, conflict and consensus, and class and community respectively. But the significant difference has often been teleological historical processes motivated by economic and material structures of production and reproduction as against timeless cultural ones. Clifford Geertz distinguishes their antagonistic characterstics thus: "High and Low, Dead and Living, Written and Oral, Particular and General, Description and Explanation, Art and Science" (qtd. in Aggarwala 119). Ghosh's research on the Egyptian society specifically relates to ethnography—a branch of anthropology which is a social research whereby the life and habits of a particular society, specially other than the observer's are recorded by participating in the lengthened process of asking questions for details from its people and by listening to and observing them: "Ethnography is that field of anthropological research based on direct observation of and reporting on a people's way of life" (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 85). But for Ghosh anthropology, due to its limitations as a science, comes in the way of his study of subalterns and for this reason, he prefers fiction. Unlike abstractions and generalisations, associated with anthropological study, Ghosh's focus is on the common people and their lives, perceived through a dialogic method and subversion of his narratorial authority. Unlike formal Arabic, he finds the dialect of Egyptian rustics more helpfiil in pursuing his research. As against the written sources of knowledge, he constructs the oral and traditional sources of wisdom of the East to subvert Western historiography:

140 As a non-Western secular scholar, Ghosh is only too aware of the need to abolish the dominant dichotomy dividing East and West upon which Orientalism is based. He is the subaltern ethnographer that lays claim to his own agency in the construction of scientific knowledge. (Hueso 59) The novel traces the subaltern consciousness of contemporary Egyptian rustics rooted in religions, rituals and miracles. They celebrate mowlids or religious fairs in sacred memory of their famous local saints specially Sidi 'Abbas of Nakhlatain in Lataifa and Sidi-Abu Hasira, a Jewish saint. Revered for centuries by Jews and Muslims alike, they had the supernatural power of bestowing blessings and creating miracles, marked by divinity, goodness, piety and communal harmony. The novel also reveals their beliefs in ghosts and the "Evil Eye." Thus Ghosh reveals that like the popular traditions and beliefs of Indian subahems, their Egyptian coimterparts have had similar religious customs, attitudes and syncretic culture. However, many contemporary Egyptians, specially believers in mainstream Islam, treat the beliefs of these Egyptian fellaheen as mere superstitions and contrary to Islam: Ustaz Sabri, a rational thinker and an antagonist to Imam Ibrahim for the latter's orthodox religion, opposes the celebration of these religious festivals and claims that it is not "a part of the true practice of Islam" (Ghosh 141). Similarly, Ustaz Mustafa, a religious chauvinist, who regards religion and politics as "single" and "indivisible," argues that the Egyptian subalterns including farmers "don't have much interest in religion or anything important" (51). This incompatible attitude is due to the fact that the colonialists in connivance with the colonised elite have suppressed or hidden such local histories and cultures and have thus rendered them ahistorical in the construction of their canonical type of history and culture. The narrator bemoans that

141 in present times the enmity between Egyptians and Indians, Muslims and Jews, and Hindus and Muslims is not due to any personal reasons but due to the stereotypes of history and religion created in Western Orientalist institutes. The novel constructs how imitation of modernity has created an attitude of antagonism in the contemporary society of Egypt like India's in contrast to their ancient values of communal harmony and co-existence. Imam Ibrahim, like the narrator, tries to boast and assert the superiority of his country in modem warfare. Imam's own country with its oldest civilisation of "antiquity and historicity," like that of the narrator's, is presented as following the Western concept of knowledge and power. Imam's virulent sophistry along with Islamic fanaticism followed by the Egyptian educated youth is nothing else than preaching the concept of modem violence. But he as well as the narrator realises with a sense of defeat that he has destroyed the ancient heritage of dialogue and accommodation followed by Ben Yiju and Bomma in the Middle Ages. Nirzari Pandit points out the reason for this hostility: "If History has created and named nations, it has also conditioned them into viewing each other differently and with feelings of antagonism. This feeling of fear and hatred of the "other" is very similar to what Said might call the Occident's fear of the Orient and therefore a desire to appropriate it" (Pandit 139-40). On his second visit in 1988 after a gap of seven years, keeping apart his third visit in 1990, the narrator is left amazed to find a dramatic change in the life-style and attitudes of the Egyptian people: " 'Everything's changed in all these years that you've been away,' said Shaikh Musa" (Ghosh 115). Following the Westem notions of "development" and "progress," the Imam, despite being well-versed in Ayurvedic medicines, has started treating his patients with injections and phials.

142 Unlike the Subaltern Studies group of the first phase, Ghosh as a subaltemist anthropologist studies material culture such as clothes, foods, housing, financial system and technology produced by the contemporary Egyptians in interaction with the institutions or structures created by modernity. The people are shown suffering fi-om the mania of money, materialism and consumerism: even the poorest families like those of Khamees and Amm Taha have new houses, bank accounts and gadgetry; Eid and Busaina have purchased the land they had been earlier tilling as tentants. Every family except that of Shaikh Musa whose source of income is only agriculture, owns a coloured television set, a refiigerator and a washing machine.This material prosperity is due to the money they are earning abroad in Iraq, Libya and the Gulf With the money sent by his sons fi-om Iraq, Abu-'Ali has become the owner of three luxurious, newly built apartments and two pick-up trucks. To expand his material web fiirther, he is thinking of setting up another business. Continuing with his materialistic study of his contemporary Egyptian commoners, Ghosh exhaustively and vividly highlights their clothes and foods like those of Ben Yiju and Bomma: jallabeya, a customary garb for an Egyptian male, is shown worn by various characters including Abu-'Ali, Jabir, Ustaz Mustafa and Nabeel's brother. An old fellah woman is shown wearing a customary dress of a black fiistan and heavy robe while a pretty young woman is dressed in a long, printed skirt. Shaikh Musa's meal served to the narrator consists of rice, fiied potatoes, cheese preserved in brine, salads of chopped tomatoes and fi-esh dill, cooked vegetables, corn-meal bread and "Nile Perch." The novel describes the large-scale migration of two to three million Egyptians as workers to Iraq to replace Iraqis fighting on the borders of Iran or Kurdistan, thus creating a hybridised culture. Ghosh being more of a novelist than an

143 anthropologist focuses more on the aftermath of the U.S.-supported Sadam Hussain's fraqi war against Khomeini's Iran war (January-February, 1991). He reveals the alienation, misery and deaths suffered by countless Egyptians like Nabeel who have migrated to fiilfil their materialistic needs and ambitions: Such a focus on the transnational movement of peoples, with its accompanying emphasis on the hybrid, unsettled aspects of cultures, is typical of Ghosh's writing, but his analysis remains rooted in material realities and a humanism that is a world away from the specular detachment of postmodernist and postcolonial commentators on the luminal, whose theorising bypasses the actualities of lived lives. (Thieme261) The novel constructs an antagonism in human relationship between Egyptians and Iraqis in present times and between Egyptians and Indians in the past. With the close of the war, the Egyptians in Iraq have to return home partly due to new strict rules framed against them by the Iraqi government and partly due to the ill-treatment by the Iraqis towards them. Pitted against this history of inhuman barbarity motivated by the spirit of nationalism is a subaltern story of syncretism which is narrated by Khamees' father. Working as a labourer in Alexandria during the Second World War he had met many Indian soldiers passing through the city in the beginning of the North African Campaign. These soldiers had deeply impressed him by their spirit of friendliness and generosity: " 'if you talked to them they were the most generous of all the solders; if you asked for a cigarette they gave you a whole packet' " (Ghosh 232). Ghosh, similar to his other fictional works, decentralises Western or institutional history in its structural technique and style: he blends history, fiction.

144 anthropology, memoir and travelogue, thus subverting their genre-specific boundaries. Both the stories move along side by side, contrasting the peaceful, accommodating and unrestricted past with the violent, materialistic and territoryobsessed present. The narrator builds the story of Ben Yiju and Bommafi-omhis own perspective, thus filling the gaps that exist in authorised histories and becoming simultaneously a subjective historian. The narrator's life experiences with the Egyptian rustics parallel those of Bomma: the former is to the Egyptian people what Bomma was to Ben Yiju and other traders. Ghosh's research on the relationship of Bonrnia with Ben Yiju in turn leaves room for fiiture anthropologists to investigate Ghosh's own relationship with the Egyptian rustics. Ghosh ends the novel with his own experiences in Egypt during his research, thus preferring his own story to the historical story of Ben Yiju and Bomma: "The "epilogue" of the novel prioritizes the individual and his/her own past over the 'research-oriented story' of recorded history, thus reducing History to one among many narratives" (Pandit 134). Memory, as usual, plays an important role in reminiscing about the childhood events and experiences of the narrator or other characters, thus providing many authentic pieces of historical reality. As has been argued, Ghosh is allegorical and figurative in his style with his use of tropes and metaphors. Thus the novel highlights the peacefiil and syncretic as well as materialistic cultures of two non-Western civilisations before the onslaught of colonialists' ruthless interference and destruction, transcending Eurocentric concept of identity. Ghosh explores the present through the lens of the past and vice versa. He attempts to imderstand Bomma by understanding the Egyptian natives. His syncretic leap across centuries may draw the accusation of essentialism. But his intimate interaction with

145

the Egyptian natives is an effective way to capture the historical and Ufe-sprang truths about Bomma for which he subverts anthropology as science in favour of fiction.

146

Works Cited Agarwalla, Shyam S. "Nouns and Conjunctions In an Antique Land." The Fiction of Amitav Ghosh. Ed. Indira Bhatt and Indira Nityanandam. New Delhi: Creative, 2001.112-24. Print. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies. London: Routledge, 2004. Print. Bhadra, Gautam. "The Mentality of Subaltemity: Kantanama or Rajadharma." Subaltern Studies VL Writings on South Asian History and Society. Ed. Ranajit Guha. 1989. Delhi: OUP, 1994. 54-91. Print. Boehmer, EUeke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. Oxford: OUP, 1995. Print. Bose, Brinda, ed. Introduction. Amitav Ghosh: Critical Perspectives. Delhi: Pencraft, 2005. 13-35. Print. Chambers, Clair. "Anthropology as Cultural Translation: Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land. Postcolonial Text 2.3 (2006): n.pag.Web.18 Dec. 2011. Chandra, Bipan, et al. India's Struggle for Independence 1857-1947. Delhi: Penguin, 1989. Print. Chitkara, M.G. Indo-Pak Amity: A New Concept. Delhi: Ashish, 1994. Print. Chopra, Viond K. Partition Stories: Mapping Community, Communalism and Gender. Delhi: Anamika, 2009. Print. Damor, Nutan. "Roots of Alienation." Bhatt and Nityanandam 125-32. Dixon, Robert. " 'Travelling in the West': The Writing of Amitav Ghosh." Amitav Ghosh: A Critical Companion. Ed. Tabish Khair. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003. 9-35. Print. Gandhi, Leela. " 'A Choice of Histories': Ghosh vs. Hegel In an Antique Land." Khair 56-72.

147 Ghosh, Amitav. In an Antique Land. New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 2000. Print. (All the references to this novel are to this edition of the book.) Hueso, Maria Elena Martos. "The Subaltern Ethnographer: Blurring the Boundaries through Amitav Ghosh's Writing." Miscelanea: A Journal of English and American Studies 36 (2007): 55-66. Print. Loomba, Ania.

Colonialism/Postcolonialism. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2005.

Print. Mills, Sara. Michel Foucault. London: Routledge, 2003. Print. Mongia, Padmini. "Medieval Travel in Postcolonial Times: Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land."' Khair 73-89. Moral, Rakhee."Filling the Gaps: Narrative Memory and Amitav Ghosh's Art of Telling." Reflections on Literature, Criticism and Theory: Essays in Honour of Professor Prafulla C. Kar. Ed. Sura P. Rath, Kailash C.Baral, and D. Venkat Rao. Delhi: Pencraft, 2004. 221-30. Print. Nehru, Jawaharlal. Jawaharlal Nehru: An Autobiography. Bombay: Allied, 1962. Print. Pandit, Nirzari. "Subversion of History in/through Fiction: A Study of The Shadow Lines and In an Antique Land." Bhatt and Nityanandam 133-41. Parikh, Bharati A. "Merging the Past and the Present." Bhatt and Nityanandam 15057. Parker, Michael, and Roger Starkley, ed. Introduction. Postcolonial Literatures. By Parker and Starkley. Hampshire: Macmillan, 1995.1-30. Print. Prasad, Murari "Transcending the Postcolonial: Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land." The Literary Criterion 42.2 (2007). 51-61. Print. Thieme, John "Amitav Ghosh." A Companion to Indian Fiction in English. Ed.Pier

148 Paolo Piciucco. Delhi: Atlantic, 2004. 251-75. Print. Trivedi, Darshana. "Footprints of History." Bhatt and Nityanandam 142-49. Viswanathan, Gauri. "Beyond Orientalism: Syncretism and the Politics of Knowledge." Stanford Humanities Review 5.1 (1995): n.pag.Web.lOct. 2009.