In an Antique Land

By Amitav Ghosh

Book Overview

Once upon a time, an Indian writer named Amitav Ghosh set out as an Indian slave, name unknown, who some seven hundred years before had traveled to the Middle East. The journey took him to a small village in Egypt, where medieval customs coexist with twentieth-century desires and discontents. But even as Ghosh sought to re-create the life of his Indian predecessor, he found himself immersed in those of his modern Egyptian neighbors. Combining shrewd observations with painstaking historical research, Ghosh serves up skeptics and holy men, merchants and sorcerers. Some of these figures are real, some only imagine, but all emerge as vividly as the characters in a great novel. In an Antique Land is an inspired work that transcends genres as deftly as it does eras, weaving an entrancing and intoxicating spell.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679727833
• ISBN13: 9780679727835
• Release Date: March 1994
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.7" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

A new look at the middle ages

This book is quite unique as it blends a travel account with the analysis of the history that covers the area from the Middle East to India. Ghosh, an accomplished scholar in social anthropology, provides a personalized view of the subject. Trading in the middle ages had many socio political implications and had many human tragedies. Indeed, slave trading can be seen as the worst form of human tragedy that we can imagine today. But in those days people of different religions and background profited from it.Ghosh also provides a very readable history of the study of history, how the documents and information related to these periods were discovered. He has been very successful in holding the reader's attention. The book is worth reading.

A truly enriching experience

I read IN AN ANTIQUE LAND because I greatly admire Amitav Ghosh's novels, and wanted to read more of him.As the reader quickly discovers, Ghosh in this book works with three narratives. One is a 'detective' story, albeit in the most scholarly of veins. As a student Ghosh recounts how he came across a reference -- one line -- to an Indian slave who worked for a Jewish master, Abraham ben Yiju. Who was this most marginal of historical personages, whose name emerges -- the time is 1148 AD -- "when the only people for whom we can even begin to imagine properly human, individual, existences are the literate and the consequential, the wazirs and sulatans, the chroniclers and the priests -- the people who had the power to inscribe themselves physically upon time...the slave of Khalaf's letter was not of that company: in his instance it was a mere accident that those barely discernible traces that ordinary people leave upon the world happen to have been preserved."The detective search for more information on the slave, his owner, the world they both inhabited, leads Ghosh to Geniza of Cairo, a storehouse of Jewish documents which miraculously survived the destruction that seems to be the fate of most paper over the course of many centuries. The documents are themselves a diaspora in miniature: none remain in Egypt, being dispersed to St. Petersburg, Oxford, Cambridge, Philadelphia...and yet the book recounts how Ghosh tracks them down.The second narrative requires Ghosh's novelistic gifts, as he attempts to reconstruct, from mere shreds of evidence, the life of Abraham and his slave. What results is a rich evocation of the way life was lived -- in Aden, Mangalore (India), Egypt, even Sicily and Yemen -- in the twelfth century; the life evoked is Jewish, Muslim, Hindu; it is Egyptian, Indian; it is mercantile, religious, familial. And it is, as stated, richly evoked.The third narrative is one of Ghosh's life in rural Egyupt, as he works on his Ph.D. research by observing two small Egyptian farming communities. The focus here is seldom on Ghosh: although a memoir, it is primarily an evocation (another one!) of Egyptian life in the relatively brief period after liberation from the British, and before modernisation transforms village life. Even though Ghosh keeps himself in the background, there is a continual counterpoint between his Indian/Hindu/educated background and the rural community in which he lives: a counterpoint which emerges not because of his self-consciousness, but because his Egyptian neighbors -- who become his friends, and even his extended family -- themselves continually question him about his Indian roots.Each narrative sheds light on the other. There is a point to the triple narrative, the point of view which motivates almost all of Ghosh's writing: it IS possible for human beings to live together, to live together harmoniously despite differences in religion, culture, language. But the imperatives of modern society -- be they

It Shouldn't Work!

But it does! This book takes three part-stories, dry academic scholarship, adapting to life in a completely different culture and a slave in 12th century Egypt, that are each individually neither compelling nor fulfilling. Yet the sum of the three parts is both compelling and fulfilling. The narrative jumps from story to story skillfully, creating tensions in each story line that would otherwise be absent and drawing the reader onward. Amitav Ghosh is a wonderful writer of lyric descriptions and this book is lovingly fulled with them, adding embellishments to the otherwise simple stories. Everything comes together to produce a book as good as his Shadow Lines.

Incredible

This is a must read book. Ghosh somehow weaves together the history of Cairo, a traveling Jewish merchant, marginalization, the fate of 2nd world countries, and a diary of his time in Egypt-- and makes it really, lively, and relavant to anyone's life. and it is written in a lovely, lyrical style

Dramatic search for History

This is a _very_ challenging and rewarding book. The interweaving of ancient and contemporary history summons the reader's skills of comparison and interpolation. Ghosh knew exactly when to switch time-frames in order to contrast regional attitudes then and now. Especially interesting is the revelation of ancient slavery: it was not at all the brutal forced-labor familiar to American history; in this case it was more like the adoption of a foster son. Highly recommended to those interested in an unusual slant on Moslem or Jewish culture.