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

In an Antique Land (1992) is a book written by Amitav Ghosh which interweaves descriptions of his experiences in rural Egypt in the 1980s with an attempt to reconstruct the life of a 12th-century Jewish merchant and Bomma, an Indian man he enslaved. Ghosh is a renowned Indian author, known for his ability to combine genres and employ complex narrative strategies to examine national and personal identity. He employs these strategies in In an Antique Land to compare the medieval world to the modern, exploring The Impacts of Colonialism and Globalization, Personal Histories within the Historical Narrative, and The Complexities of Cultural Identity. The book was generally favorably received, with many critics praising its intuitive and unique storytelling methods. However, some have criticized it for raising problems and questions surrounding identity but having no answer to these issues.

This study guide uses the 1992 Granta Books publication.

Content Warning: The source material discusses enslavement.

Summary

In an Antique Land opens with Ghosh describing a medieval letter which was sent from the Yemeni city of Aden by the merchant Khalaf ibn Ishaq to Abraham Ben Yiju, another merchant who was living in Mangalore, India. In it, Khalaf did not focus on the important historical events of his time (such as the Second Crusade) but instead on business, sending a greeting to Ben Yiju’s enslaved Indian. Ghosh calls this letter a “trapdoor” into a world of ordinary people whose lives continued, largely uninterrupted, during the major events they lived during. Another letter from Khalaf to Ben Yiju repeated these points and again contained a greeting for the enslaved person. Ghosh says he first read these letters as a 22-year-old graduate student at Oxford. They inspired him to go to the Egyptian town of Lataifa and learn Arabic.

For the rest of the book, Ghosh follows two narrative strands: One is a first-person recounting of his time in the rural Egyptian towns of Lataifa and Nashawy across his 1980/1 and 1988 trips. The other is a historical study into the lives of Ben Yiju and his enslaved Indian man. In the beginning of his Egyptian narrative, Ghosh lives in Lataifa with a man named Abu-‘Ali, a greedy shop owner whom he dislikes. He befriends an older fellah (agricultural worker) named Shaikh Musa, who tells him about life in the village and invites him into his family. During Ramadan, Ghosh leaves Lataifa to explore Cairo and arranges for a new place to live, this time in the nearby village of Nashawy.

The historical narrative up to this point focuses on Ben Yiju’s stay in Egypt, near the end of his life. He lived in Fustat, Cairo, and attended a synagogue in nearby Babylon. In this synagogue, Ben Yiju deposited all his correspondence in a special chamber known as a “Geniza,” which was meant as a holding place until his writings could be ritually disposed (to avoid accidentally disrespecting God’s written name). This chamber was, unusually, never cleared out. When historians discovered that it contained historical letters, its contents were spread across the world for study. It is evidence from this Geniza that Ghosh uses to study the lives of Ben Yiju and the enslaved man. He sets out to learn the hybrid language Judeo-Arabic that Ben Yiju’s letters are written in and discovers that the Arabic is a dialect remarkably similar to that of Lataifa.

In Nashawy, Ghosh makes a wide variety of relationships with the locals. He befriends an up-and-coming intellectual named Ustaz Sabry, the largely-disliked family Jammal, and the cousins Nabeel and Isma’il. However, he and the once- respected Imam Ibrahim grow to dislike each other and Ghosh is consistently questioned about Indian practices, generally in a rude manner. Near the end of his stay in Nashawy, he and Imam Ibrahim get into a shouting match over India and Egypt’s respective places in the world.

In the historical narrative again, Ghosh covers Ben Yiju’s early rise as a merchant, his move to the Yemeni city of Aden (where he made the contacts that many of his Geniza letters were written to), and then his move from here to the Indian city of Mangalore. He stayed here for almost 20 years, something Ghosh argues may not have been entirely his choice. In Mangalore, he acquired the enslaved man mentioned in the letters, got married, and had children. Ghosh believes that his wife was a formerly enslaved person of his named Ashu, an Indian woman.

In 1990, Ghosh visits India to find out more about the enslaved man. After an investigation into hints in the letters that his name contained the letters B-M-A or B-M-M-A and conversation with a respected folklorist of the Mangalore area, he concludes that the enslaved man’s name was Bomma. Ghosh then spends time expanding upon him and the culture he likely came from. Ghosh also tries to explore what Bomma’s enslavement to Ben Yiju meant, insisting that it was not like the chattel slavery of the trans-Atlantic. Instead, it was more of a master-apprentice relationship, whereby Bomma was trained in trade—something that he seems to have had an increasing role in over time. Ghosh ends his discussion of Mangalore by stating that no power had tried to militarily dominate the Indian Ocean Trade routes until the Portuguese came in the 16th century. This lack of militarization, he argues, was not ill-preparedness but instead a cultural choice, based off the pacifist beliefs of many participant peoples in the trade routes.

Ghosh’s second trip to Egypt, in 1988, was to changed villages. Many of the youth, including Nabeel and Isma’il, had gone off to work in Iraq. This brought money into the village for electricity, appliances, and renovations to properties. Ghosh spends much of this trip exploring the changes that have occurred and catching up with those left in the village. Before he leaves again, he attempts to visit the tomb of a Sidi (saint/figure of respect) who was Jewish and then converted to Islam, but he is apprehended by the guards of this tomb. He is then questioned on why he would be there and realizes he cannot explain his interest in the multicultural figures of Egypt, because there is so little evidence of them left. An officer tells him he should not be interested in the tomb as it was just superstition that made people revere it, not modern Islam. This prompts Ghosh to study the folklore of the area when back in America; he learns that the Sidi of the tomb had been worshipped by Jews and Muslims across North Africa and the Levant. He demonstrates a still-existing link to the multicultural medieval world that Ghosh studies.

In wrapping up the stories of Ben Yiju and Bomma, Ghosh covers how Ben Yiju eventually moved back to Aden, where he was defrauded by his brother and his son died. He moved from here to Fustat, where he arranged a marriage between his daughter and nephew. He then drops out of the historical record. Bomma is mentioned following Ben Yiju’s move to Egypt only in one document, but this proves he continued to play a role in Ben Yiju’s business.

In the Epilogue, Ghosh visits Egypt again shortly before the Gulf War. While most of those who went to Iraq have returned, Nabeel has not. The book ends with Ghosh and Nabeel’s family watching the news, hoping for a sign of Nabeel.