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In an Antique Land
Once upon a time an Indian writer named Amitav Ghosh set out to find 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 imagined, 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.
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 imagined, 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.
400 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1993
277 people are currently reading
4793 people want to read
About the author
Amitav Ghosh
55 books4,156 followersAmitav Ghosh is an Indian writer. He won the 54th Jnanpith award in 2018, India's highest literary honour. Ghosh's ambitious novels use complex narrative strategies to probe the nature of national and personal identity, particularly of the people of India and South Asia. He has written historical fiction and non-fiction works discussing topics such as colonialism and climate change.
Ghosh studied at The Doon School, Dehradun, and earned a doctorate in social anthropology at the University of Oxford. He worked at the Indian Express newspaper in New Delhi and several academic institutions. His first novel, The Circle of Reason, was published in 1986, which he followed with later fictional works, including The Shadow Lines and The Glass Palace. Between 2004 and 2015, he worked on the Ibis trilogy, which revolves around the build-up and implications of the First Opium War. His non-fiction work includes In an Antique Land (1992) and The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016).
Ghosh holds two Lifetime Achievement awards and four honorary doctorates. In 2007, he was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India's highest honours, by the President of India. In 2010, he was a joint winner, along with Margaret Atwood, of a Dan David prize, and in 2011, he was awarded the Grand Prix of the Blue Metropolis festival in Montreal. He was the first English-language writer to receive the award. In 2019, Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the most important global thinkers of the preceding decade.
Ghosh studied at The Doon School, Dehradun, and earned a doctorate in social anthropology at the University of Oxford. He worked at the Indian Express newspaper in New Delhi and several academic institutions. His first novel, The Circle of Reason, was published in 1986, which he followed with later fictional works, including The Shadow Lines and The Glass Palace. Between 2004 and 2015, he worked on the Ibis trilogy, which revolves around the build-up and implications of the First Opium War. His non-fiction work includes In an Antique Land (1992) and The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016).
Ghosh holds two Lifetime Achievement awards and four honorary doctorates. In 2007, he was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India's highest honours, by the President of India. In 2010, he was a joint winner, along with Margaret Atwood, of a Dan David prize, and in 2011, he was awarded the Grand Prix of the Blue Metropolis festival in Montreal. He was the first English-language writer to receive the award. In 2019, Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the most important global thinkers of the preceding decade.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 354 reviews
August 6, 2007
I would rate this book as perhaps the most important book I have read in my life. Top five or 10 at least.
Not least because it creates a new genre -- we have yet to give it a name. But most importantly it struggles to arrive at how "temporal displacement" is not merely some theoretical device invented by tenuring academics, but rather something that everyday people in the 3rd world actually feel and experience.
Not least because it demonstrates the power of the archive; the ability of the West to loot and hoard the documents that would give identity and meaning to alternative visions within the 3rd world.
Not least because, it explodes in our faces the presumption that we are more free or more global or more cosmopolitan than our ancestors.
Not least because it shows us how to give life to the dead facts of history without fictionalizing narratives (a wholly appropriate strategy -- but not the one Ghosh deploys.)
Not the least because, it shows us how the living experience of real religion differs from, and is perhaps superior to, the textualized routines of formal religions.
And because he is funny -- laugh out loud funny.
Read this twice in the morning and then twice again...
And because he presses his healing fingers along the wounds that constitute the separation between first and thirds worlds.
Not least because it creates a new genre -- we have yet to give it a name. But most importantly it struggles to arrive at how "temporal displacement" is not merely some theoretical device invented by tenuring academics, but rather something that everyday people in the 3rd world actually feel and experience.
Not least because it demonstrates the power of the archive; the ability of the West to loot and hoard the documents that would give identity and meaning to alternative visions within the 3rd world.
Not least because, it explodes in our faces the presumption that we are more free or more global or more cosmopolitan than our ancestors.
Not least because it shows us how to give life to the dead facts of history without fictionalizing narratives (a wholly appropriate strategy -- but not the one Ghosh deploys.)
Not the least because, it shows us how the living experience of real religion differs from, and is perhaps superior to, the textualized routines of formal religions.
And because he is funny -- laugh out loud funny.
Read this twice in the morning and then twice again...
And because he presses his healing fingers along the wounds that constitute the separation between first and thirds worlds.
November 23, 2023
'In an Antique Land` is a remarkable book. I would say it is one of the best books by Ghosh. It is a story of Ghosh's research that takes him from England to various obscure places in Egypt. So what we see in the book is how he navigates these places, whom he meets, what sort of conversations he has and so forth. As a reader, I feel transplanted in the Egyptian countryside.
This part, which reads like a brilliant travelogue, is highly entertaining as well as informative especially in regard to culture and religion-related (miss)understandings. What kind of stories we tell ourselves about the so-called 'others' and how these stories often have the potential to create and distort us. I guess clever people across cultures and national geographies understand this; they are actually the ones who profit by actively creating others. It is only the masses who really buy these distortions at face value, and very often get manipulated.
In one of his talks with young Muslim men, they ask Ghosh a range of questions about India and Hindus. Obviously, these questions are not really questions; their answers are already known to the questioners. They just seek to confirm the stories (prejudices) they have heard about the strange 'others,' In this case, 'the others' are Hindus. One of the Muslim men tell Ghosh that Hindus are very clever people, they burn their dead so that they do not have to face Allah on the day of judgment. In another instance, these men show a great surprise that Hindus do not perform 'Khatna' (circumcision), and as the conversation develops, Ghosh feels a bit embarrassed and wonders where it will lead. These men out of curiosity might ask him to show them his uncircumcised (hindu) penis. There are many such talks in the book which might make the book more palatable and interesting to non-history fans.
The story of his research has two segments that unfold side by side. He goes in search of knowing about an anonymous Indian slave who lived in the 12th century. This is the most fascinating and formidable part of the book. What is so amazing about the book is that it gives interesting, almost unbelievable, glimpses into the deep past, and tells it in a way that history reads seems less dry and distant.
I must add that there are also certain claims, which very often appear fictitious in his novels, but one should check them before dismissing them as fiction (after all who checks facts in fiction). I never found anything purely fantastic in his work. In this book, however, one can actually trace the sources and be stunned by them.
This part, which reads like a brilliant travelogue, is highly entertaining as well as informative especially in regard to culture and religion-related (miss)understandings. What kind of stories we tell ourselves about the so-called 'others' and how these stories often have the potential to create and distort us. I guess clever people across cultures and national geographies understand this; they are actually the ones who profit by actively creating others. It is only the masses who really buy these distortions at face value, and very often get manipulated.
In one of his talks with young Muslim men, they ask Ghosh a range of questions about India and Hindus. Obviously, these questions are not really questions; their answers are already known to the questioners. They just seek to confirm the stories (prejudices) they have heard about the strange 'others,' In this case, 'the others' are Hindus. One of the Muslim men tell Ghosh that Hindus are very clever people, they burn their dead so that they do not have to face Allah on the day of judgment. In another instance, these men show a great surprise that Hindus do not perform 'Khatna' (circumcision), and as the conversation develops, Ghosh feels a bit embarrassed and wonders where it will lead. These men out of curiosity might ask him to show them his uncircumcised (hindu) penis. There are many such talks in the book which might make the book more palatable and interesting to non-history fans.
The story of his research has two segments that unfold side by side. He goes in search of knowing about an anonymous Indian slave who lived in the 12th century. This is the most fascinating and formidable part of the book. What is so amazing about the book is that it gives interesting, almost unbelievable, glimpses into the deep past, and tells it in a way that history reads seems less dry and distant.
I must add that there are also certain claims, which very often appear fictitious in his novels, but one should check them before dismissing them as fiction (after all who checks facts in fiction). I never found anything purely fantastic in his work. In this book, however, one can actually trace the sources and be stunned by them.
December 14, 2025
Could my (or your) life be reconstructed 700 or 800 years after my (your) death? What would remain that would allow a scholar or anthropologist to know of my existence, what I did for a living, where I lived, how I fit in with my community, who I married? Will the ways that we store data today be readable to people in the centuries ahead?
This book is a beautiful meditation on small human lives, not the big movers and shakers recorded in history books. It is partly a memoir of the people the author met as an Indian graduate student doing research in Egypt in the 1980s, and the men whose lives he was attempting to reconstruct from the tantalizing records in the Cairo Geniza, a treasure trove of medieval documents stored in the synagogue of Ben Ezra in Fustat, or the old section of Cairo where Jews lived and stashed documents that might have contained the word “God”- and thus required special care. It was this practice that created a repository unlike any other. Typically, a geniza would store documents for a while and then they would be burned in a respectful, pious process. For some reason, the pyre didn’t happen in Fustat, and in the 19th century this incredible pile of documents was found, containing a crazy assortment across different spheres of life, business letters and transaction records, personal letters and tribal news.
At some point, the hundreds of documents got split up and went to libraries or museums across many countries. Even so, anthropologists have mined the Geniza, and Ghosh does his share, specifically looking to understand the life, times and world of Ben Yiju, a Muslim from Egypt who migrated in 1025 or so to live and work on the Malabar coast of India, and his servant, known at first simply by the designation “the slave of MS H.6”, which is a catalog number among the Geniza documents.
The timeline is split. We spend the 1980s with the author in the Egyptian village where he studied and researched , and come to know the way of life for the locals who befriend him. And we go back in time to understand the historical context of trade and multicultural diversity in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea trade during the 1100s as he uncovers information about Ben Yiju and his servant.
Ghosh never really explains why he so tenaciously pursues documenting these lives, but his curiosity and humanity makes the pursuit lovely. When he wraps it up, we see the changes of centuries, and of mere years (he went back for a visit about 8 years after his research was complete). Not for everyone, but I really enjoyed this volume.
This book is a beautiful meditation on small human lives, not the big movers and shakers recorded in history books. It is partly a memoir of the people the author met as an Indian graduate student doing research in Egypt in the 1980s, and the men whose lives he was attempting to reconstruct from the tantalizing records in the Cairo Geniza, a treasure trove of medieval documents stored in the synagogue of Ben Ezra in Fustat, or the old section of Cairo where Jews lived and stashed documents that might have contained the word “God”- and thus required special care. It was this practice that created a repository unlike any other. Typically, a geniza would store documents for a while and then they would be burned in a respectful, pious process. For some reason, the pyre didn’t happen in Fustat, and in the 19th century this incredible pile of documents was found, containing a crazy assortment across different spheres of life, business letters and transaction records, personal letters and tribal news.
At some point, the hundreds of documents got split up and went to libraries or museums across many countries. Even so, anthropologists have mined the Geniza, and Ghosh does his share, specifically looking to understand the life, times and world of Ben Yiju, a Muslim from Egypt who migrated in 1025 or so to live and work on the Malabar coast of India, and his servant, known at first simply by the designation “the slave of MS H.6”, which is a catalog number among the Geniza documents.
The timeline is split. We spend the 1980s with the author in the Egyptian village where he studied and researched , and come to know the way of life for the locals who befriend him. And we go back in time to understand the historical context of trade and multicultural diversity in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea trade during the 1100s as he uncovers information about Ben Yiju and his servant.
Ghosh never really explains why he so tenaciously pursues documenting these lives, but his curiosity and humanity makes the pursuit lovely. When he wraps it up, we see the changes of centuries, and of mere years (he went back for a visit about 8 years after his research was complete). Not for everyone, but I really enjoyed this volume.
July 26, 2014
I bought In An Antique Land from a small bookshop in Mussoorie, a lovely town in Northern India. I read it while travelling in Northern India Dec 2012-Jan 2013. I love this magical book. The story is like nothing I've read before. A mix of antiquity, the interaction of several faiths and contemporary travels and the author researching records of a 12th century slave. Amitav Ghosh is an extraordinarily gifted writer.
One gets to know the slave and his master, who is a merchant. The slave is entrusted with large sums of money and sent on trading missions to other countries. I was surprised to learn that it was agreed that the oceans were free for trading, until the Portuguese started controlling the seas. After that it was on for young and old with the rest of Europe, thus the start of establishing colonies.
This is an illuminating work on several levels. I highly recommend this book.
One gets to know the slave and his master, who is a merchant. The slave is entrusted with large sums of money and sent on trading missions to other countries. I was surprised to learn that it was agreed that the oceans were free for trading, until the Portuguese started controlling the seas. After that it was on for young and old with the rest of Europe, thus the start of establishing colonies.
This is an illuminating work on several levels. I highly recommend this book.
March 17, 2017
I am personally giving it four stars because I am quite fond of books that give me insight into life in the Middle East or Asia, so I found it interesting. That being said, it was very difficult to follow. In addition, the thread involving Ben Yiju and his "slave" was not nearly as central to the book as the reviews led me to believe. It felt more like a book of loosely related short stories than a narrative. Nonetheless, I liked it, but I wouldn't really recommend it to most people.
October 24, 2012
In the early 1980s Amitav Ghosh was living in rural Egypt, engaged in field world for his social anthropology doctorate. In this book Ghosh plaits together three different stories: that of his time living in two Egyptian villages, his return to the villages eight years later and the life of 12th century North African Jewish merchant Ben Yiju and his Indian `slave' (actually more of a business associate) Bomma. Ghosh discovered the Ben Yiju story by examining documents from the massive haul found in the Geniza (synagogue document repository) of the Palestinian synagogue in the Egyptian town of Fustat. The documents were acquired by Cambridge University, where Ghosh tracked them down.
Ghosh parallels his own sojourns in Egypt, the Malabar coast and return to Egypt, with those of Ben Yiju, who spent some twenty years in Mangalore, marrying a freed Indian slave, before returning to North Africa. Gradually pictures are built up of Egypt and India, ancient and modern. The fascinating revelations about Jewish life in medieval Egypt and the Maghreb , the close relationship between the Muslims and Jews, destroyed only in the last century, are intertwined with Ghosh's own story, a perception of Egyptian villagers through Indian eyes, and, even more interesting, their perception of the Indian catapulted into their midst. Some aspects of his culture were so alien to them that they sometimes seemed to view him as an ignorant refugee from a primitive country, rather than understanding the ignorance of their own unworldliness.
The documents Ghosh worked with provided the framework of Ben Yiju's existence. The meat was provided by Ghosh through painstaking research and logical supposition both in Egypt and in India. Most thought-provoking was his visit at the end of the book to the tomb of a Muslim saint, who, it transpired, was also a Jewish Rabbi. Certainly in the 1980s when Ghosh's visit took place, the tomb was attracting pilgrims from both the Muslim world and Israel, the latter contributing to a huge tourist industry built around the saint's annual festival. This, and the theme throughout the book of Jews and Muslims co-existing like brothers graphically demonstrated the tragedy of what has happened to this brotherhood in the last half century.
Whenever I need inspiration, both as a reader and as a writer, I will dip into this book again and again.
Ghosh parallels his own sojourns in Egypt, the Malabar coast and return to Egypt, with those of Ben Yiju, who spent some twenty years in Mangalore, marrying a freed Indian slave, before returning to North Africa. Gradually pictures are built up of Egypt and India, ancient and modern. The fascinating revelations about Jewish life in medieval Egypt and the Maghreb , the close relationship between the Muslims and Jews, destroyed only in the last century, are intertwined with Ghosh's own story, a perception of Egyptian villagers through Indian eyes, and, even more interesting, their perception of the Indian catapulted into their midst. Some aspects of his culture were so alien to them that they sometimes seemed to view him as an ignorant refugee from a primitive country, rather than understanding the ignorance of their own unworldliness.
The documents Ghosh worked with provided the framework of Ben Yiju's existence. The meat was provided by Ghosh through painstaking research and logical supposition both in Egypt and in India. Most thought-provoking was his visit at the end of the book to the tomb of a Muslim saint, who, it transpired, was also a Jewish Rabbi. Certainly in the 1980s when Ghosh's visit took place, the tomb was attracting pilgrims from both the Muslim world and Israel, the latter contributing to a huge tourist industry built around the saint's annual festival. This, and the theme throughout the book of Jews and Muslims co-existing like brothers graphically demonstrated the tragedy of what has happened to this brotherhood in the last half century.
Whenever I need inspiration, both as a reader and as a writer, I will dip into this book again and again.
September 13, 2019
This is a very touching travelogue of the time that Ghosh spent living in a small Egyptian village on the cusp of modernity during the early 1980s, as well as his return there at the end of that decade. There is also a parallel narrative based on a historical Arab Jewish trader whose life he tries to piece together, but I found this less compelling. If it can be appropriate to describe a book as being warm and kind, those would be the most apt words to describe this one. The villagers that Ghosh lived with have a lot of warmth and curiosity about him, which he also felt in turn. After reading so much scathing V.S. Naipaul this book almost felt like a relief.
The fellaheen and their families take him in as a local novelty. There is a lot hilarity in the effect upon him of their astonished questions about India and his religious practices. The people he lives among practice a kind of folk Islam, heavily influenced by Sufism. This is an image of the historical norm of how Islam has been practiced throughout most of the world, particularly by rural people, women and the poor. Ghosh reflects at one point that, despite its periodic storms, life in Egypt is overall far more gentle and less violent than the cruel and extreme violence of the Indian subcontinent. This is a sobering thought. You can also see how the lives of these simple Egyptians are also on the brink of change, with the impact of remittance money sent by workers from Iraq and a ruthlessly modernizing state hovering on the periphery of their antique villages.
Ghosh makes a historical case that there is a cosmopolitan past in which India and Egypt, Muslims, Jews and Hindus were much more mixed than they are today, in a world largely shaped and partitioned by European power or influence. It is a poignant, melancholy thing to consider. Maybe the important thing is to try and rebuild that cosmopolitanism as he does here.
The fellaheen and their families take him in as a local novelty. There is a lot hilarity in the effect upon him of their astonished questions about India and his religious practices. The people he lives among practice a kind of folk Islam, heavily influenced by Sufism. This is an image of the historical norm of how Islam has been practiced throughout most of the world, particularly by rural people, women and the poor. Ghosh reflects at one point that, despite its periodic storms, life in Egypt is overall far more gentle and less violent than the cruel and extreme violence of the Indian subcontinent. This is a sobering thought. You can also see how the lives of these simple Egyptians are also on the brink of change, with the impact of remittance money sent by workers from Iraq and a ruthlessly modernizing state hovering on the periphery of their antique villages.
Ghosh makes a historical case that there is a cosmopolitan past in which India and Egypt, Muslims, Jews and Hindus were much more mixed than they are today, in a world largely shaped and partitioned by European power or influence. It is a poignant, melancholy thing to consider. Maybe the important thing is to try and rebuild that cosmopolitanism as he does here.
January 23, 2014
No where near the best from Amitav, yet eminently readable because the immaculate research and the prose so typical of him. He is one of the few who can come up with subtly remarkable criticism of the west: " Unable to compete in the Indian Ocean trade by purely commercial means, the Europeans were bent on taking control of it by aggression, pure and distilled, by unleashing violence on a scale unprecedented on those shores". He goes on to state further: " the determination of a small, united band of soldiers triumphed easily over the rich confusions that accompany a culture of accommodation and compromise". Hopefully Amitav will one day write about the present-day west and its conquests.
June 9, 2017
While this is a good account of the author's stays in Egypt in the 1980s,
A) It is not exceptional as an account
B) The link with the medieval Jew and his slave seems a forced one.
I am a little wary when i pick a book by Amitav Ghosh. 50 shades of ratings, from the incomprehensible Circle of Reason to the mindblowing Sea of Poppies and everything in between, u dont know what u will get. But, may avoid reading his non-fiction.
A) It is not exceptional as an account
B) The link with the medieval Jew and his slave seems a forced one.
I am a little wary when i pick a book by Amitav Ghosh. 50 shades of ratings, from the incomprehensible Circle of Reason to the mindblowing Sea of Poppies and everything in between, u dont know what u will get. But, may avoid reading his non-fiction.
August 27, 2016
I actually didn't care much for the history part (the slaves and all), what I enjoy the most in this book was the part where the author recounted his stay in Egypt. It sure was terribly awkward (and amusing, to me) to be a Hindu Indian in a rural Muslim village.
Do you burn your dead in India? (villagers recoil from you with horror)
Do the Indians not circumcise themselves? (villagers looking at you strangely)
Do you really worship cows in India? (villagers laughing at you)
Imagine having to deal with that every time! I also didn't know that for the Indians, it was not mere questions. The terror that a Muslim felt in India or a Hindu in Pakistan was not something to laugh about. One day, I will find a book that explore the India/Pakistan relationship more fully.
It was a strange charm, reading about the rural village where everyone knew everyone else and possibly connected in some ways. So backwater a village that the one thing that suddenly raised the villagers respect to our dear author was none other than an Indian-made water pump! That pump was the single most advanced piece of technology the villagers had. I really couldn't stop laughing at that.
Do you burn your dead in India? (villagers recoil from you with horror)
Do the Indians not circumcise themselves? (villagers looking at you strangely)
Do you really worship cows in India? (villagers laughing at you)
Imagine having to deal with that every time! I also didn't know that for the Indians, it was not mere questions. The terror that a Muslim felt in India or a Hindu in Pakistan was not something to laugh about. One day, I will find a book that explore the India/Pakistan relationship more fully.
It was a strange charm, reading about the rural village where everyone knew everyone else and possibly connected in some ways. So backwater a village that the one thing that suddenly raised the villagers respect to our dear author was none other than an Indian-made water pump! That pump was the single most advanced piece of technology the villagers had. I really couldn't stop laughing at that.
November 9, 2010
This turned out to be a really lovely book. I couldn't make up my mind about it for the first 100 pages or so, because although the narrator provides some interesting cultural anecdotes about the small towns in Egypt where he was living, he doesn't insert himself into the narrative in a way that becomes productive or reflective for the reader.
That changes about half-way through the book, however, when he begins to push back from becoming a stereotyped expatriate, and describes an incredibly vivid and complicated scene from his personal history in old East Palestine in 1964. It's the best chapter in the book.
The book continues to complicate itself throughout it's second half, merging narratives and coming to deceptively simple and elegant conclusions about the relationships between people, between states, and between the present and past.
And in terms of craft, this is really the best kind of rag-tag storytelling, founded in the way conversations with people actually work: how you mention something and then have to qualify it with an explanation before finally weaving back. Sometimes you don't weave back at all. It's a comforting proposition.
Finally, I learned really fun words like fellaheen, jallabaya, and effendi. SO WHAT'S NOT TO LOVE.
That changes about half-way through the book, however, when he begins to push back from becoming a stereotyped expatriate, and describes an incredibly vivid and complicated scene from his personal history in old East Palestine in 1964. It's the best chapter in the book.
The book continues to complicate itself throughout it's second half, merging narratives and coming to deceptively simple and elegant conclusions about the relationships between people, between states, and between the present and past.
And in terms of craft, this is really the best kind of rag-tag storytelling, founded in the way conversations with people actually work: how you mention something and then have to qualify it with an explanation before finally weaving back. Sometimes you don't weave back at all. It's a comforting proposition.
Finally, I learned really fun words like fellaheen, jallabaya, and effendi. SO WHAT'S NOT TO LOVE.
January 19, 2016
Beautiful. I fell in love with this novel, it's soft narration, quaint characters, and rich intricate history <3
May 19, 2022
An unusual and thought provoking book, a mixture of history and memoir, mostly centered around Egypt, where the author did fieldwork for an anthropology doctorate. I listened to the audio recording by Simon Vance, who read well but has a peculiar accent. Does he normally roll all his R's, or was this put on perhaps because of the "foreign" content of this book?
February 24, 2013
I suppose the reasons Ghosh is so much better than Katherine Boo at imparting reality to the people he portrays in this book is that first of all, he's a novelist, so he knows how to breathe life into characters, secondly, that he learned Arabic and lived with the people he speaks of over an extended period of time, and finally, that he really liked and cared for these people, as they evidently did for him. You get a sense of the warmth and engagement that he as a person must give out, which bridged the otherwise huge gap between this cultivated Indian PhD student and people who are almost out of time.
Because the amazing thing about these fellaheen is that, pace cars, TV sets, mobile phones etc, they really seem like they might have existed at any time over the past 2000 years in Egypt. The book is called 'In an Antique Land' and there is the sense that in the mindset of these people, you get a glimpse into an ancient civilisation that is stayed unchanged over millennia. It's like travelling backwards in time.
So that when he writes about the those other people, the merchants and slaves from 1000 years ago, whose correspondence he is researching, the vast gap in time is bridged by the ancientness and continuity of the Egyptian civilisation, and those people from a thousand years ago suddenly seem as real and alive to you as the fellaheen of today.
Likewise, the persistence of the geniza in Cairo, with its thousand years of Jewish documents is again a monument and a bridge to the past. At one point in the book, the author and a man from the village get into an argument about whether India is cilivised or not and they end up arguing about it purely in terms of the criteria of Western projections of power - India is 'civilised' because it has guns and tanks and bombs. Contrast this with the kind of civilisation where over a thousand years, the Jews could go about their business in peace, archiving their culture in the geniza without the synagogue ever having been looted, pillaged and burned to the ground, as would have happened anywhere in the West over that same time period. And this in the middle of a thriving bustling city, not some treasure trove of documents buried in the sand somewhere, in a 'they made a desert and called it peace' kind of a way.
A book that is just packed with ideas and warmth and humanity and connections. Lovely.
Because the amazing thing about these fellaheen is that, pace cars, TV sets, mobile phones etc, they really seem like they might have existed at any time over the past 2000 years in Egypt. The book is called 'In an Antique Land' and there is the sense that in the mindset of these people, you get a glimpse into an ancient civilisation that is stayed unchanged over millennia. It's like travelling backwards in time.
So that when he writes about the those other people, the merchants and slaves from 1000 years ago, whose correspondence he is researching, the vast gap in time is bridged by the ancientness and continuity of the Egyptian civilisation, and those people from a thousand years ago suddenly seem as real and alive to you as the fellaheen of today.
Likewise, the persistence of the geniza in Cairo, with its thousand years of Jewish documents is again a monument and a bridge to the past. At one point in the book, the author and a man from the village get into an argument about whether India is cilivised or not and they end up arguing about it purely in terms of the criteria of Western projections of power - India is 'civilised' because it has guns and tanks and bombs. Contrast this with the kind of civilisation where over a thousand years, the Jews could go about their business in peace, archiving their culture in the geniza without the synagogue ever having been looted, pillaged and burned to the ground, as would have happened anywhere in the West over that same time period. And this in the middle of a thriving bustling city, not some treasure trove of documents buried in the sand somewhere, in a 'they made a desert and called it peace' kind of a way.
A book that is just packed with ideas and warmth and humanity and connections. Lovely.
September 15, 2007
A complex, layered novel steeped in etymology and irony. Based on the experiences of anthropologist Amitav Ghosh while he studied in a hamlet in Egypt. Woven into those modern experiences are stories of the medieval composition of the Holy Land. Really worth reading. Elegantly written.
To get the most of this book, don't be afraid to wiki references (Galen, Maimonides) for a historical context and also it's good to have a pretty decent working knowledge of Muslim and Hindi culture.
To get the most of this book, don't be afraid to wiki references (Galen, Maimonides) for a historical context and also it's good to have a pretty decent working knowledge of Muslim and Hindi culture.
August 18, 2015
Intensely boring. The novelty of mixing historical writing with personal narrative was not enough to save this book from being just plain uninteresting. A better example of this unique genre would be Maria Rosa Menocal's "Ornament of the World" where she deftly combines historical vignettes with research. Unfortunately, Ghosh's memoirs were largely unrelated to his own work. Truly a shame because his research on the Indian slave of a Jewish Egyptian merchant held great promise initially but eventually fell victim to academic circumlocution. However, the author's commentary on globalization and cultural relativism were both insightful and somewhat comical at parts.
December 15, 2013
Amitav Ghosh is essayist and blogger as well as novelist, and it was the sheer pleasure from some of his essays and blog posts that induced me to take on one of his novels.
Of his work this book appealed to me most, due to half-remembered reviews describing it as a melange of genres, of nationalities, of languages, cultures, professions, and eras. And because Ghosh in "Confessions of a Xenophile" says his time in Egypt was "my equivalent of writing school. While living in [the governorate of] Beheira I maintained a detailed journal, in which I made extensive notes about my conversations with people, and the things I saw around me. Not only did this teach me to observe what I was seeing; it also taught me how to translate raw experience on to the page. It was the best kind of training a novelist could have and it has stood me in good stead over the years."
After reading it, a phrase from Ghosh's lecture Bonds of Captivity: Indians and Armenians in the prison camps of Ras al-`Ain, 1916-18 (video, blogged as Shared Sorrows) can, I think, best summarizes this novel story: "reality often exceeds fiction in its improbability" (at 2:45 in the video). A number of times while reading this book I had to remind myself that the story told therein was non-fiction.
To me this book spoke volumes, as someone with Indian, Arab, and Muslim roots (long since relegated to memory) and with historic, economic, linguistic, and religious interests (still going strong). The two parts of the story told are Ghosh's long stay and subsequent visits to rural Egypt and the historic relationship that so captivated the then-young anthropologist-in-training's interest in the Middle East: the correspondence between Jewish merchants in Aden, in Yemen, and a North African Jewish merchant who lived in the Malabar, in western India, for twenty years who married a Nair woman and who sent a slave from Mangalore on his behalf to the Middle East. This correspondence, from the 1100s, survived because of a habit of these Jews to store all their written correspondences when not needed, and the discovery of such a cache in Fustat, once a Jewish center in Cairo.
This skeletal summary of me and of this book is really all I can give when I try to summarize its thesis. Or rather, there are just so many theses present---and they are all coherent and graspable despite their number because this book is a piece of rock carved from the mountain of Reality, perhaps sculpted and polished, but evoking the whole within the part, like a fractal or a hologram.
But perhaps one of the things that most surprised Ghosh is, in today's world of oil and post-colonialism and derivatives trading and Israel, how unlikely and foreign such a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual story from a millenium ago sounds. This set of relationships, spanning continents, spanning language families, crossing religious boundaries, that to him is so real because of his study of thousand year old letters and ledgers, is incomprehensibly unlikely to most people today, who unthinkingly think globalization presupposes an electronic civilization.
I have learned so much from this book and from this writer that I hope you will forgive me for not trying to enumerate them more than I have so far.
Of his work this book appealed to me most, due to half-remembered reviews describing it as a melange of genres, of nationalities, of languages, cultures, professions, and eras. And because Ghosh in "Confessions of a Xenophile" says his time in Egypt was "my equivalent of writing school. While living in [the governorate of] Beheira I maintained a detailed journal, in which I made extensive notes about my conversations with people, and the things I saw around me. Not only did this teach me to observe what I was seeing; it also taught me how to translate raw experience on to the page. It was the best kind of training a novelist could have and it has stood me in good stead over the years."
After reading it, a phrase from Ghosh's lecture Bonds of Captivity: Indians and Armenians in the prison camps of Ras al-`Ain, 1916-18 (video, blogged as Shared Sorrows) can, I think, best summarizes this novel story: "reality often exceeds fiction in its improbability" (at 2:45 in the video). A number of times while reading this book I had to remind myself that the story told therein was non-fiction.
To me this book spoke volumes, as someone with Indian, Arab, and Muslim roots (long since relegated to memory) and with historic, economic, linguistic, and religious interests (still going strong). The two parts of the story told are Ghosh's long stay and subsequent visits to rural Egypt and the historic relationship that so captivated the then-young anthropologist-in-training's interest in the Middle East: the correspondence between Jewish merchants in Aden, in Yemen, and a North African Jewish merchant who lived in the Malabar, in western India, for twenty years who married a Nair woman and who sent a slave from Mangalore on his behalf to the Middle East. This correspondence, from the 1100s, survived because of a habit of these Jews to store all their written correspondences when not needed, and the discovery of such a cache in Fustat, once a Jewish center in Cairo.
This skeletal summary of me and of this book is really all I can give when I try to summarize its thesis. Or rather, there are just so many theses present---and they are all coherent and graspable despite their number because this book is a piece of rock carved from the mountain of Reality, perhaps sculpted and polished, but evoking the whole within the part, like a fractal or a hologram.
But perhaps one of the things that most surprised Ghosh is, in today's world of oil and post-colonialism and derivatives trading and Israel, how unlikely and foreign such a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual story from a millenium ago sounds. This set of relationships, spanning continents, spanning language families, crossing religious boundaries, that to him is so real because of his study of thousand year old letters and ledgers, is incomprehensibly unlikely to most people today, who unthinkingly think globalization presupposes an electronic civilization.
I have learned so much from this book and from this writer that I hope you will forgive me for not trying to enumerate them more than I have so far.
September 15, 2024
Amitav Ghoshs "In an Antique Land" erfüllt eine paradoxe Funktion in meinem Leben. Es gewährte mir Einblicke in eine Heimat, die ich nie wirklich kannte. Eine Heimat, die mir aufgrund meiner eigenen Familiengeschichte zugleich unheimlich bekannt und fremd zugleich vorkommt. So war ich zu jedem Zeitpunkt zugleich Nashawy als auch Amitav. Ein einzigartiges Leseerlebnis. Und damit ist kaum etwas von der parallelen Erzählung um den Kosmopoliten Ben Yiju gesagt, die Ghosh nutzt, um ein Panorama und eine Biografie zwischen dem mittelalterlichen Sizilien, Nordafrika, Ägypten, Yemen und Indien auszubreiten.
May 29, 2019
Immaginate un giovane Amitav Gosh (anni '80) che parte e va in Egitto per scrivere un articolo storico sociologico. E' timido e impacciato e fa un sacco di gaffes, però è curioso e intraprendente, alla fine si fa un sacco di amici. La storia del manoscritto è a proposito della sua ricerca, è parallela al racconto della sua esperienza e altrettanto interessante, in quanto ci fa scoprire quanto fosse cosmopolita il Medio Oriente nel Medioevo, dove arabi cristiani ebrei indù convivevano pacificamente. Ci ha poi pensato l'Occidente a inoculare il germe della discordia che ancora oggi dilania questo mondo anticamente armonioso. Un romanzo/saggio allo stesso tempo divertente e dotto, un Gosh che ancora mi mancava (dopo il Cromosoma Calcutta e la trilogia dei papaveri), molto godibile.
May 12, 2025
dry book.
October 25, 2010
In In an Antique Land, Amitav Ghosh intertwines the story of the life of medieval Jewish trader, Abraham Ben Yiju, with an account of his own journeyings as an anthropology student in a rural Egyptian community in the early 1980s.
The tale of Ben Yiju’s life is painstakingly pieced together by Ghosh from fragments of letters ‘discovered’ by Western scholars in a Cairo synagogue in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, the stories of the agricultural communities of Lataifa and Nashawy, where the author lived while studying the local dialect of fellah (peasant) Arabic and the mores and strictures of the fellah community are born of the author’s personal experience, and are interspersed with light hearted anecdotes, often the result of the locals trying to understand Ghosh with as much, or more, puzzlement than that with which he studies them.
In narrating the story of Ben Yiju’s life, Ghosh offers glimpses into the lives of the communities of traders that lived along the twelfth century Indian Ocean trade routes. Ben Yiju’s is a continuous world stretching from Morocco to the Malabar Coast of India in which Arabs, Jews and Indians plied the trade routes of the Middle East and the Indian Ocean in relative harmony, and where business and personal relationships crossed bounds of ethnicity, religion and culture that can seem almost impermeable today.
In Lataifa and Nashawy, Ghosh describes the characters he meets and records their family connections and histories, social positions, hopes and aspirations. He returns almost a decade later in the hope of catching up with old friends to find that many of the young men who had befriended him have left to work in Iraq or other Gulf states, and the resulting influx of Gulf money has changed these small communities irreversibly.
The two stories are knitted together quite deliberately, with the author switching from one tale to the other at points where there are obvious parallels between the two. What ultimately brings the two narratives together is the undercurrent of nostalgia for a bygone, simpler and more peaceful age. While Ghosh’s nostalgia is focused on Ben Yiju’s now extinct world, the decline of that world is mirrored in the inexorable changes that seem to be affecting modern Egypt over a mere ten years.
The events with which Ghosh concludes Ben Yiju’s tale hint that even in the world of Ben Yiju, which Ghosh paints with a slightly idyllic brush, ties of family and shared identity could overcome those built on a lifetime of personal friendship and familiarity. The picture I am left with is not one where all communities lived in perfect harmony, but rather one where the borders of certain communities were more fluid, and drawn differently to how they are perceived today, and where complex notions of identity may have been less of a hindrance in choosing one’s associates, friends, and even spouses.
The tale of Ben Yiju’s life is painstakingly pieced together by Ghosh from fragments of letters ‘discovered’ by Western scholars in a Cairo synagogue in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, the stories of the agricultural communities of Lataifa and Nashawy, where the author lived while studying the local dialect of fellah (peasant) Arabic and the mores and strictures of the fellah community are born of the author’s personal experience, and are interspersed with light hearted anecdotes, often the result of the locals trying to understand Ghosh with as much, or more, puzzlement than that with which he studies them.
In narrating the story of Ben Yiju’s life, Ghosh offers glimpses into the lives of the communities of traders that lived along the twelfth century Indian Ocean trade routes. Ben Yiju’s is a continuous world stretching from Morocco to the Malabar Coast of India in which Arabs, Jews and Indians plied the trade routes of the Middle East and the Indian Ocean in relative harmony, and where business and personal relationships crossed bounds of ethnicity, religion and culture that can seem almost impermeable today.
In Lataifa and Nashawy, Ghosh describes the characters he meets and records their family connections and histories, social positions, hopes and aspirations. He returns almost a decade later in the hope of catching up with old friends to find that many of the young men who had befriended him have left to work in Iraq or other Gulf states, and the resulting influx of Gulf money has changed these small communities irreversibly.
The two stories are knitted together quite deliberately, with the author switching from one tale to the other at points where there are obvious parallels between the two. What ultimately brings the two narratives together is the undercurrent of nostalgia for a bygone, simpler and more peaceful age. While Ghosh’s nostalgia is focused on Ben Yiju’s now extinct world, the decline of that world is mirrored in the inexorable changes that seem to be affecting modern Egypt over a mere ten years.
The events with which Ghosh concludes Ben Yiju’s tale hint that even in the world of Ben Yiju, which Ghosh paints with a slightly idyllic brush, ties of family and shared identity could overcome those built on a lifetime of personal friendship and familiarity. The picture I am left with is not one where all communities lived in perfect harmony, but rather one where the borders of certain communities were more fluid, and drawn differently to how they are perceived today, and where complex notions of identity may have been less of a hindrance in choosing one’s associates, friends, and even spouses.
October 24, 2012
In the early 1980s Amitav Ghosh was living in rural Egypt, engaged in field world for his social anthropology doctorate. In this book Ghosh plaits together three different stories: that of his time living in two Egyptian villages, his return to the villages eight years later and the life of 12th century North African Jewish merchant Ben Yiju and his Indian `slave' (actually more of a business associate) Bomma. Ghosh discovered the Ben Yiju story by examining documents from the massive haul found in the Geniza (synagogue document repository) of the Palestinian synagogue in the Egyptian town of Fustat. The documents were acquired by Cambridge University, where Ghosh tracked them down.
Ghosh parallels his own sojourns in Egypt, the Malabar coast and return to Egypt, with those of Ben Yiju, who spent some twenty years in Mangalore, marrying a freed Indian slave, before returning to North Africa. Gradually pictures are built up of Egypt and India, ancient and modern. The fascinating revelations about Jewish life in medieval Egypt and the Maghreb , the close relationship between the Muslims and Jews, destroyed only in the last century, are intertwined with Ghosh's own story, a perception of Egyptian villagers through Indian eyes, and, even more interesting, their perception of the Indian catapulted into their midst. Some aspects of his culture were so alien to them that they sometimes seemed to view him as an ignorant refugee from a primitive country, rather than understanding the ignorance of their own unworldliness.
The documents Ghosh worked with provided the framework of Ben Yiju's existence. The meat was provided by Ghosh through painstaking research and logical supposition both in Egypt and in India. Most thought-provoking was his visit at the end of the book to the tomb of a Muslim saint, who, it transpired, was also a Jewish Rabbi. Certainly in the 1980s when Ghosh's visit took place, the tomb was attracting pilgrims from both the Muslim world and Israel, the latter contributing to a huge tourist industry built around the saint's annual festival. This, and the theme throughout the book of Jews and Muslims co-existing like brothers graphically demonstrated the tragedy of what has happened to this brotherhood in the last half century.
When I need inspiration, both as a reader and as a writer, I will dip into this book again and again.
Ghosh parallels his own sojourns in Egypt, the Malabar coast and return to Egypt, with those of Ben Yiju, who spent some twenty years in Mangalore, marrying a freed Indian slave, before returning to North Africa. Gradually pictures are built up of Egypt and India, ancient and modern. The fascinating revelations about Jewish life in medieval Egypt and the Maghreb , the close relationship between the Muslims and Jews, destroyed only in the last century, are intertwined with Ghosh's own story, a perception of Egyptian villagers through Indian eyes, and, even more interesting, their perception of the Indian catapulted into their midst. Some aspects of his culture were so alien to them that they sometimes seemed to view him as an ignorant refugee from a primitive country, rather than understanding the ignorance of their own unworldliness.
The documents Ghosh worked with provided the framework of Ben Yiju's existence. The meat was provided by Ghosh through painstaking research and logical supposition both in Egypt and in India. Most thought-provoking was his visit at the end of the book to the tomb of a Muslim saint, who, it transpired, was also a Jewish Rabbi. Certainly in the 1980s when Ghosh's visit took place, the tomb was attracting pilgrims from both the Muslim world and Israel, the latter contributing to a huge tourist industry built around the saint's annual festival. This, and the theme throughout the book of Jews and Muslims co-existing like brothers graphically demonstrated the tragedy of what has happened to this brotherhood in the last half century.
When I need inspiration, both as a reader and as a writer, I will dip into this book again and again.
September 22, 2012
I think and talk about this book a lot. I listened to it on CD, and think it would have been better for me to have read it - there are numerous names that all mushed together for me (like in a Russian novel) that would have been easier if I had visual clues.
There are several stories. First, the story of the author, an Indian(actually a Bengali) and a Hindu, living in a very small, rural Egyptian village. I never quite figured out what exactly he was doing there other than that he was an anthropology graduate student, but I loved his interactions with the people. He becomes more the object of anthropological study by the village. He is bombarded by questions about those "Hindookis" burning their dead and worshiping cows and about circumcision and body hair. He also finds that he cares more about the village people as friends than as subjects.
The next story of finding Jewish manuscripts in Genizah or storerooms in the synagogue in Cairo (and elsewhere). I could have read an entire book about these documents and the Genizah. The manuscripts and fragments were mostly ignored but in 1896 two sisters brought fragments of manuscripts to England and showed them to Solomon Schechter of Cambridge University. He recognized the importance of these manuscripts in telling the story of life as earl as the 9th century. There seems to have been a collecting frenzy and today manuscripts and fragments are scattered in archives in many parts of the world.
The third story is of the author's recreation of the history of a 12th century Jewish merchant, Abraham Ben Yiju, and his "slave" Bomma. The story is uncovered slowly as the author locates and learns to read Genizah documents and learns about the people and culture of his subjects. I found it a beautiful description of how we recreate history and how history and anthropology work.
Now, how do these stories come together? I am not sure. But it is a gentle, beautiful book.
There are several stories. First, the story of the author, an Indian(actually a Bengali) and a Hindu, living in a very small, rural Egyptian village. I never quite figured out what exactly he was doing there other than that he was an anthropology graduate student, but I loved his interactions with the people. He becomes more the object of anthropological study by the village. He is bombarded by questions about those "Hindookis" burning their dead and worshiping cows and about circumcision and body hair. He also finds that he cares more about the village people as friends than as subjects.
The next story of finding Jewish manuscripts in Genizah or storerooms in the synagogue in Cairo (and elsewhere). I could have read an entire book about these documents and the Genizah. The manuscripts and fragments were mostly ignored but in 1896 two sisters brought fragments of manuscripts to England and showed them to Solomon Schechter of Cambridge University. He recognized the importance of these manuscripts in telling the story of life as earl as the 9th century. There seems to have been a collecting frenzy and today manuscripts and fragments are scattered in archives in many parts of the world.
The third story is of the author's recreation of the history of a 12th century Jewish merchant, Abraham Ben Yiju, and his "slave" Bomma. The story is uncovered slowly as the author locates and learns to read Genizah documents and learns about the people and culture of his subjects. I found it a beautiful description of how we recreate history and how history and anthropology work.
Now, how do these stories come together? I am not sure. But it is a gentle, beautiful book.
October 6, 2015
Firstly when I start in reading I was so feared because this is the first time to read in English so I fear to misunderstand or don't get the main idea for this novel ,so I began it in slowly steps but suddenly I felt in love with this novel I really appreciate this kind of travelers novel I think it have a lot of information , knowledge ,experience, history ,tradition and excitement.
Amitav have the ability to draw exact images by words ,while you read you can hear the voices of speaker and watch the reactions on their faces .
I love this way which he describe the people who met and the information which putted between lines so you can't feel bored because you feel that's some stories which your friend telling you in café
I traveled from lataifa to Cairo to Alex to nashawy and finally to Mangalore in the same time .while I reading I remembered the quote for( Abbas Elaqad)- Egyptian writer which said ( I read because I have one life and one life don't enough for me , only read it gave me more than one life )
Amitave make this to me they give all of experience from all around the place he went to it and tell us about it in really funny way you can read and stop for a while to laugh
The three main points I get it from this book :
Point 1 :
The importance of archiving which enable us to know about cultures and roots and what all of ancestor made
Point 2 :
I'm not a Sophie or mystic one but I like to read about this and he represent this in different religions.
Point 3 :
His searching journey about the indain slave and his master bin yiju's in documents called geniza which is written by jews in medieval centuries
I'm really interested in reading this informative novel
Amitav have the ability to draw exact images by words ,while you read you can hear the voices of speaker and watch the reactions on their faces .
I love this way which he describe the people who met and the information which putted between lines so you can't feel bored because you feel that's some stories which your friend telling you in café
I traveled from lataifa to Cairo to Alex to nashawy and finally to Mangalore in the same time .while I reading I remembered the quote for( Abbas Elaqad)- Egyptian writer which said ( I read because I have one life and one life don't enough for me , only read it gave me more than one life )
Amitave make this to me they give all of experience from all around the place he went to it and tell us about it in really funny way you can read and stop for a while to laugh
The three main points I get it from this book :
Point 1 :
The importance of archiving which enable us to know about cultures and roots and what all of ancestor made
Point 2 :
I'm not a Sophie or mystic one but I like to read about this and he represent this in different religions.
Point 3 :
His searching journey about the indain slave and his master bin yiju's in documents called geniza which is written by jews in medieval centuries
I'm really interested in reading this informative novel
April 9, 2012
In an Antique land for me was a very different experience...It was the first time I read a journal/memoir kind of non fictional account of an author's travels. I started out expecting some really good medeival tales from Ben Yiju and the slave but it was Ghosh's own experiences in Egypt that proved more intriguing and better to me. This is my first Amitav Ghosh book and I really didn't know it was non fiction until I was 30 pages into it. By then I found it really informative and I thought what the hell, I will complete reading it and I was not disappointed.
I was moved in certain places especially where he gives an explanation for an Indian's fear of symbols with an anecdote from his childhood and the Europeans destroying the rich trading culture between India and the middle east by claiming the Indian Ocean trade routes for themseleves.
Ghosh's vast knowledge and the amout of research he has put into this book is mind blowing. The amount of information one can glean even from a superficial reading is remarkable. I will one day definitely read this book again. And also this has piqued my interest and propelled me into buying other books of Ghosh..Let us see how that works out for us!
I was moved in certain places especially where he gives an explanation for an Indian's fear of symbols with an anecdote from his childhood and the Europeans destroying the rich trading culture between India and the middle east by claiming the Indian Ocean trade routes for themseleves.
Ghosh's vast knowledge and the amout of research he has put into this book is mind blowing. The amount of information one can glean even from a superficial reading is remarkable. I will one day definitely read this book again. And also this has piqued my interest and propelled me into buying other books of Ghosh..Let us see how that works out for us!
August 12, 2010
Ghosh has a fantastically open and honest voice. A wonderful interweaving of past and present. This is how I like my history written. Medieval Islamic culture, India and Her trade with Egypt and Arabia, the Jewish diaspora and a discovery of medieval documents in a synagogue in the Old Town in Cairo and our modern fracture lines... the The common thread here, and common, I may add to most contemporary Indian writers with good reason, is the shifting and surprisingly amorphous boundaries between cultures. This book was written pre-9/11 and is very much a product of "Imperialism Studies"so "the West" naturally bears the brunt of Ghosh's criticism. I am no fan of the Rachel Corrie crowd so his assumptions seem rather dated and forced. I wonder if he will write a preface? I think the basis of his assumptions about victim-hood and aggression, which he obviously inherited from the egregious Said, have been proved wanting. Yet if he hadn't written this book, then Sea of Poppies would never have come into being. So I am grateful.
May 24, 2015
I found this book rather underwhelming. I was keen to really learn a great deal about the relationship among the countries that enjoyed centuries of trade across the Indian ocean, especially modern-day India, Yemen, and Egypt. The movement back and forth between Ghosh's travels in Egypt and the historical material he found from the Cairo Geniza was quite intriguing and I was willing to overlook the fact that these two parts of his story were quite disjointed. I kept expecting them to be tied together, but they never were. His research and relations with families in various Egyptian villages were never fully connected to the characters he was pursuing so many centuries ago. But the most frustrating piece was the fact that there were so many lacunae in his research--not his fault, of course--that he has to make up the various possibilities for Ben Yiju and Bomma. I think the story would have been far more compelling if he had merely used his research to compose a fictional tale instead.
February 15, 2009
This had a lot of promise, but didn't really live up to it. It's a parallel history of a Middle Eastern Jew and his slave from the 12th century, alongside Ghosh's own experience in 1970s/80s Egypt. The point was to provide a kind of contrapuntal narrative, but I never felt like they cohered very well. I also thought it degenerated into a pretty traditional tale of "The Middle East was a place of wonder and cultural dialogue and peace before the West came and ruined everything." His own narrative seems to undercut it, also. The parts about his time in Egypt are great, though; this would have been much better if it had just been a memoir about that.
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April 30, 2020عندما أمسكت الكتاب بين يدي توقعته كتاب أدب رحلات معتاد ونمطي، سيتحدث عن مصر والمصريين قلت والمواضع السياحية، ماذا سيقول!
لكن الكتاب بدا مختلفا تماما، باحث هندي يتحدث عن ريف مصر، عن قريتين من قرى دمنهور، اسمهما اطيفة ونشاوى، عن حياة الريفين، مكتوبة بلغة تختلف عن المستشرقين والغربيين الذي يكتبون من زاوية متفوقة مزعومة ولغة تشوبها الاحتقار، إنما هذا مؤلف هندي بلا أطماع استعمارية، تحدث عن العنف الطائفي في الهند مقارنة بوداعة الريف المصري في السبعينات، حتى التسعيتات أتوقع أن الأمر اختلف الآن لكن لا أعرف لأي حد
في نفس الوقت في الكتاب يتحدث عن رواية لرجل يهودي مصري جائت أسرته من تونس لتقيم بمصر ثم ينتقل التاجر للهند ويمارس تجارته بين الهند ومصر مرورا بعدن
تحدث عن العمالة المصرية المهاجرة للعراق زمن الحرب العراقية الإيرانية بحديث مؤلم وكيف كان الحدث سببا للتغير في القرى المصرية
كتاب مشوق ولا يمل منه حقيقة، تذكرت فلم خان الشهير خرج ولم يعد، عندما ذهب يحيى الفخراني للريف بشخصية ابن المدينة ليأسره الريف بوداعته وسحره، فقد تحدث المؤلف عن زراعة الأرز والذرة والمحاصيل الزراعية في الريف بلغة ساحرة وجذابة وكذلك العلاقات بين الناس بسيطة وفيها ألفة، فالمؤلف هندوسي لطالما واجهوه بالأسئلة عن الاختلافات بين المسلمين والهندوس مخصصين طقسين بكثرة الأسئلة وهما حرق الموتى وعبادة البقر بطريقة اندهاش وفضول وقليل من الانكار
لكن الكتاب بدا مختلفا تماما، باحث هندي يتحدث عن ريف مصر، عن قريتين من قرى دمنهور، اسمهما اطيفة ونشاوى، عن حياة الريفين، مكتوبة بلغة تختلف عن المستشرقين والغربيين الذي يكتبون من زاوية متفوقة مزعومة ولغة تشوبها الاحتقار، إنما هذا مؤلف هندي بلا أطماع استعمارية، تحدث عن العنف الطائفي في الهند مقارنة بوداعة الريف المصري في السبعينات، حتى التسعيتات أتوقع أن الأمر اختلف الآن لكن لا أعرف لأي حد
في نفس الوقت في الكتاب يتحدث عن رواية لرجل يهودي مصري جائت أسرته من تونس لتقيم بمصر ثم ينتقل التاجر للهند ويمارس تجارته بين الهند ومصر مرورا بعدن
تحدث عن العمالة المصرية المهاجرة للعراق زمن الحرب العراقية الإيرانية بحديث مؤلم وكيف كان الحدث سببا للتغير في القرى المصرية
كتاب مشوق ولا يمل منه حقيقة، تذكرت فلم خان الشهير خرج ولم يعد، عندما ذهب يحيى الفخراني للريف بشخصية ابن المدينة ليأسره الريف بوداعته وسحره، فقد تحدث المؤلف عن زراعة الأرز والذرة والمحاصيل الزراعية في الريف بلغة ساحرة وجذابة وكذلك العلاقات بين الناس بسيطة وفيها ألفة، فالمؤلف هندوسي لطالما واجهوه بالأسئلة عن الاختلافات بين المسلمين والهندوس مخصصين طقسين بكثرة الأسئلة وهما حرق الموتى وعبادة البقر بطريقة اندهاش وفضول وقليل من الانكار
April 4, 2024
In an Antique Land" by Amitav Ghosh is a mesmerizing journey that seamlessly weaves together the author's present-day experiences in Egypt with the ancient tale of the slave of MS H.6.
Ghosh's narrative skillfully oscillates between different time periods, offering readers a captivating insight into cultural shocks, identity suppression, and societal comparisons between India and Egypt.
Ghosh poignantly depicts his culture shock while living among Muslims in Egypt, contrasting Hindu traditions like cow worship and cremation with the beliefs of those around him. It serves as a bridge between the East and the Middle East, shedding light on how cultural pride and religious dynamics shape societal interactions. In addition, he addresses the suppression of women's identities, highlighting the anonymity that has historically cloaked them.
However, the book's only flaw lies in its lack of detailed descriptions of intricate incidents, especially when compared to Ghosh's Ibis Trilogy. While he attempts to decipher 12th-century events through antique letters stored in the Geniza of Ben Ezra Synagogue, the narrative feels scattered and disjointed at times.
Nevertheless, Ghosh's anthropological approach adds depth to the storytelling, as he deciphers the mysteries of the ancient past. Despite its shortcomings, "In an Antique Land" remains a thought-provoking exploration of cultural exchange and historical connections that transcend time and geography.
Ghosh's narrative skillfully oscillates between different time periods, offering readers a captivating insight into cultural shocks, identity suppression, and societal comparisons between India and Egypt.
Ghosh poignantly depicts his culture shock while living among Muslims in Egypt, contrasting Hindu traditions like cow worship and cremation with the beliefs of those around him. It serves as a bridge between the East and the Middle East, shedding light on how cultural pride and religious dynamics shape societal interactions. In addition, he addresses the suppression of women's identities, highlighting the anonymity that has historically cloaked them.
However, the book's only flaw lies in its lack of detailed descriptions of intricate incidents, especially when compared to Ghosh's Ibis Trilogy. While he attempts to decipher 12th-century events through antique letters stored in the Geniza of Ben Ezra Synagogue, the narrative feels scattered and disjointed at times.
Nevertheless, Ghosh's anthropological approach adds depth to the storytelling, as he deciphers the mysteries of the ancient past. Despite its shortcomings, "In an Antique Land" remains a thought-provoking exploration of cultural exchange and historical connections that transcend time and geography.
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