The heart of Amitav Ghosh’s book In an Antique Land is not linguistics but
people. It’s an elusive book, in a way, telling several stories – of Ghosh
himself, of the modern and very poor rural Egyptians he becomes friends with
while trying to do research, and of the twelfth century Jewish trader in Egypt,
Yemen and India named Abu Yiju and his slave – or perhaps more accurately his
assistant – whose Indian name, Bomma, is part of what Ghosh uncovers in the
book. Ghosh doesn’t usually say, or at any rate doesn’t usually highlight, how
these stories intersect, though they seem to resonate with each other again and
again.
But at the end he makes himself clear. He finds himself back
with his Egyptian friends in their village as the first Gulf War is beginning.
They are glued to the TV, not out of general interest but out of acute concern
for another of the villagers, a friend of Ghosh’s whom he calls Nabeel. Nabeel,
like many Egyptians, had gone to work in Iraq; Iraq wasn’t kind to them, but it
was profitable. But now war was falling upon them, and the villagers back at
home are watching the footage of an “epic exodus” of people fleeing the coming
fighting. Ghosh writes:
There
were more than a dozen of us in the room now. We were crowded around the TV
set, watching, carefully, minutely, looking at every face we could see. There
was nothing to be seen except crowds: Nabeel had vanished into the anonymity of
History. (353)
Ghosh is no fan of History. I think what he believes in are
people, individual people. The friends he describes in Egypt are not prominent
men and women in any sense, but they come vividly and movingly alive in his
telling. The twelfth-century merchants whose stories he unearths are now known
only to specialists – and even to them only because of an amazing storehouse of
documents piled up over more than 800 years in the “geniza,” a special chamber
in the Synagogue of Ben Ezra in Cairo (documents which, by virtue of the forces
of History, made their way out of Egypt by 1914 and apparently are now largely
in Western hands (80-95)). The slave, mentioned in the documents, emerges only
as a result of Ghosh’s research as the bearer of a name likely derived from
that of an Indian deity, a deity itself disregarded in conventional accounts of
Indian religion. (251-54, 264)
So, too, there is a story to be preserved about the holy man
whose tomb Ghosh attempts to visit at the end of a trip to Egypt, who turns out
to be a saint revered by both Jews and Muslims (342). Ghosh goes home and
finds, first under “anthropology” and “folklore” rather than “religion” or
“Judaism,” accounts of “a famous line of zeddikim – the Jewish counterparts of
Islamic marabouts and Sufi saints, many of whom had once been equally venerated
by Jews and Muslims alike.” (342) But he has already sensed, in trying to
explain to the suspicious local authorities his own interest in the tomb (as a
person neither Jewish nor Muslim),
that there was nothing I could point to
within [the official’s] world that might give credence to my story—the remains
of those small, indistinguishable, intertwined histories, Indian and Egyptian,
Muslim and Jewish, Hindu and Muslim, had been partitioned long ago. (339)
Those words are all the sadder because Ghosh himself experienced as a child some of the anguish that followed the Hindu/Muslim "Partition" of India and Pakistan. (204-10)
Ghosh does not care for History. He does care for individual
people and the decisions, some good and some bad, that they made as they lived
in the world where they found themselves.
That seems very important, in a summer when Robin Williams
and other artists who gave us joy have
died, and in a summer when History, not least the History made by Jews and Muslims, seems to be taking so many unpleasant turns.
