A Meditation on History

Review-Article on Amitav Ghosh. In An Antique Land. New Delhi: Ravi Dayal Publisher; London: Granta, 1992; New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993. 393 pp. Clothbound, Rs. One Hundred Fifty.

by Vinay Lal

Some ten years ago Amitav Ghosh, then a graduate student in anthropology at Oxford, chanced upon a letter written in 1139 A.D. by a merchant, Khalaf ibn Ishaq, and addressed to a friend and fellow merchant by the name of Abraham Ben Yiju. Khalaf ibn Ishaq was at that time living in Aden, and it is perhaps, as Ghosh avers, "nothing less than a miracle that anything is known about him", for ibn Ishaq was just one of many merchants involved in the Indian Ocean trade and had done scarcely anything that would merit him a name in the annals of history. His correspondent, Ben Yiju, was resident in Mangalore, on the south-west seaboard of India, usually known as the Malabar Coast, and was no more or less distinguished than ibn Ishaq. This letter might well have escaped Ghosh's attention, but for the fact that it bore a reference to Ben Yiju's slave. A subsequent letter from ibn Ishaq to Ben Yiju, written in 1148, would again refer, just as mysteriously, to Ben Yiju's slave.

It was in quest of the identity of this slave that Ghosh was led to Egypt and eventually to the complex undertaking that In an Antique Land represents. If Ghosh's reputation in literary circles (and beyond) was not already assured, In An Antique Land should establish him as the most significant voice in the world of (Indian) English literature, and indeed as one of the most gifted and nuanced writers anywhere in the world today. To appreciate the richness of his achievement, we can begin by considering the audacity of his latest enterprise. Why should the identity of the slave of Ms. H.6, the number that the letter in the National and University Library in Jerusalem now bears, have been of such interest to Ghosh? Who was this slave and, more importantly, why should it matter so much? This question is not unimportant, particularly in view of recent developments in Indian historiography encapsulated under the term 'Subaltern Studies'. While recent work on Indian history has indeed moved us from 'The Great Man Theory of History' to classes, structures, and the idioms of cultural and political life by which the subalterns can be identified, within the newly emerging history of subalterns there has been little room for individuals. The subalterns have been endowed with agency, they may even be exemplars, in the jargon of the day, of a self-fashioning subjectivity, but they are nonetheless bunched and huddled together, and they are of concern to us in the mass. The Oriental, as the colonial historiography had it, exists only in the mass, and subaltern historiography has seemingly been able to do little better. So, when from the bowels of the earth, from this class of subalterns, there arises an individual, albeit a slave, we must pause to reflect on the dignity of a vision that thinks of no individual as not worthy of a history.

If the letter that launched Ghosh's book is in Jerusalem, and if the merchant who owned the slave whose identity Ghosh was determined to 'discover' was living in Mangalore, why should Ghosh have gone to Cairo? Ben Yiju, after some twenty years in India, where he had amassed great wealth, decided to return -- in a manner not uncommon with expatriates -- for the last years of his life to his native land, Egypt. His papers found their way to a synagogue in Cairo. It is to Cairo that Ghosh must first repair -- but to go to Cairo is to stumble upon Egypt itself, for Cairo is Egypt, it is Egypt's own metaphor for itself (p. 32). In a Neitzschean-like display of philological skill, Ghosh unravels what Cairo has meant to Egyptians and others. Egyptians call it Masr, meaning 'to civilise', 'to settle', and "most of the cultures and civilizations with which it has old connections have accepted its own self-definition.". "Only Europe", and let us mark the only, "has always insisted on knowing the country not on its own terms", and this insistence has been the characteristic insignia of a civilization that has made all other civilizations learn its own language. Far from associating Egypt with civilization, the West assimilated that nation to a hideous darkness, and sought to invest that interpretation with eschatological authority. As Exodus (10.22 ff.) tells us, darkness came down on Egypt, but this is not the only association of Egypt with darkness. Thus, to invoke that other authority, the Oxford English Dictionary , yoked to the first, "Egyptian bondage" is the "bondage like that of the Israelites in Egypt"; more dramatic still is "Egyptian days: the two days in each month which were believed to be unlucky" (p. 33). The Orient is not only dark, but licentious too: so states a seventeenth-century English law: "If any transport into England or Wales, any lewd people calling themselves Egyptians, they forfeit 40 pounds" (p. 33). In European discourse, Egypt is more than a metaphor, it is indeed a weapon as much as a word. The question is: What will Egypt, that fount of civilization and thus (to invoke Socrates) of interrogation, be in Amitav Ghosh's own interrogative discourse of history and ethnography? Moreover, who shall be interrogating whom?

Like any other anthropologist, what Ghosh had first to do was to master the language of those in whose midst he would be settling. Ghosh apparently took to Arabic quite readily, but that is not all. Ben Yiju's letters and some other documents from that time were written in what today would surely be construed by many as an unimaginable monstrosity, that is Judaeo-Arabic. As one might surmise from the name, Judaeo-Arabic was a colloquial dialect of medieval Arabic, written in the Hebrew script. Unlike dialects of Arabic, Judaeo-Arabic was a written language; unlike written (or classical) Arabic, it had the vocabulary and grammar of the spoken language. If, as it has been said, language is nothing but a dialect backed up by an army and a navy, then we may think of Judaeo-Arabic as a language equipped with military hardware that was to become obsolete. As Ghosh details in his work, Judaeo-Arabic is known to only a handful of scholars around the world, and his intrusion into that most private and elite world could not but have caused tremors. Yet it is altogether fitting that Judaeo-Arabic should have interested Ghosh, for it represented a syncreticism and hybridity that seems largely unavailable today. It is only in that liminal space of hybridity that we can attain a Narasimha-like luminosity, a luminosity at once of those who have knowledge and use it for the good and of those who can live gracefully with difference.

So we have these dim traces: documents from the twelfth century reminding us of the hybridity of language and dialect, the written and the spoken word, Hebrew and Arabic, Muslims and Jews. The scholar must be a detective at times, and having ascertained that in a village called Lataifa, a couple of hours journey to the south-east of Alexandria, a dialect is spoken which bears a "startlingly close" resemblance to the usages of the North African Arabic in which Ben Yiju was conversant, Ghosh proceeded to install himself in that village (p. 104). "I knew nothing then about the Slave of MS. H.6", says Ghosh, "except that he had given me a right to be there, a sense of entitlement" (p. 19). Less complacent than others in his profession, Ghosh felt that he had to earn the right to be there, and Ghosh's disclosure here is a telling one. Are we -- or should we be -- such respecters of boundaries that we need to have a right to be somewhere? Ghosh was then an anthropologist, and we scarcely need to be reminded that the anthropologist has seldom bothered with the rights of others, those whom he cast into objects of his study; rather, he assumed the right of inquiry as his very own, as his to arrogate to himself necessarily if the natives were not to be bereft of knowledge about themselves. In order for Ghosh to effect a departure from this nefarious tradition, he has to persuade us that he had earned, in that inequitable condition of power and knowledge, the prerogatives of the anthropologist. The fact that he takes the slave, unknown at this point, as the object of his inquiry is perhaps already sufficient to confer this right upon Ghosh, for by construing the slave as worthy of inquiry he confers upon him a certain parity. But, as we shall see, parity with the dead, in this respect at least, is rather more easy of achievement than parity with the living, and Ghosh too has occasion, if not for resentment, certainly for discomfort when he finds that his prerogatives as an anthropologist gain him scant respect.

In Lataifa, and in neighboring Nashawy, Ghosh encounters, to use that dreadfully cliched word apropos the Third World, a 'colorful' cast of characters. (We know just how drenched in color is the East.) Many of these characters belong to a complicated web of kinship relations, and Ghosh's curiosity about the relationships between them is more than the curiosity of the layman. Kinship has been the timeless obsession of the anthropologist and Ghosh, certainly in his early years as a student of anthropology, was not exempt from partaking in that obsession. There is Abu Ali, his landlord, Zaghlul the Weaver, Khamees the Rat, the Imam, and many others, all quite unforgettable. They have certain perceptions of India, and Ghosh finds himself in the position of being interrogated about his culture, and having to assume positions and identities for which he has no evident sympathy or affinity. What is unsettling for Ghosh, to begin with, is that it is not he who is directing the interrogation, but rather they who were supposed to be the informants: the ethnographer is not in control of the investigation, the mastery over the other is not easily achieved. Just as troubling is the tendency of his interlocutors to construct, howsoever unknowingly, an (in Roland Barthes' phrase) empire of signs by which India, and in particular Hindu India, can be known. To identify just a few of those signs, Hindus are those who remain uncircumcised (pp. 63, 203), cremate their dead (pp. 61-2), consume spicy food (p. 46), and worship cows (pp. 47, 126, 170-71, 186, 234). The conversation between Ustaz Mustafa, a one-time law student at the University of Alexandria, and Ghosh is rather typical:

'I have read all about India,' said Ustaz Mustafa, smiling serenely. 'There is a lot of chilli in the food and when a man dies his wife is dragged away and burnt alive.'

'Not always,' I protested, 'my grandmother for example . . .'

Jabir was drinking this in, wide-eyed.

'And of course,' Ustaz Mustafa continued, 'you have Indira Gandhi, and her son Sanjay Gandhi, who used to sterilize the Muslims . . .'

'No, no, he sterilized everyone,' I said.

His eyes widened and I added hastily: 'No, not me of course, but . . .'

'Yes,' he said, nodding sagely. 'I know. I read all about India when I was in college in Alexandria.' (p. 46)

What more could one want to know about Hindu India? Worse still, to speak of 'Hindu India', as Ghosh's neighbors do, is to have entered the world, a world that Ghosh seeks to defy, where 'Hindu' and 'Muslim' are marked as sharply defined, demarcated, and irreconcilable categories with histories that cannot intermingle. What then might be the gestures with which Ghosh must respond to this attempt to reduce India to 'Hindu India', and that in turn to a constellation of signs, and himself to a specimen of that empire which produces and reproduces such signs? One response predictably is that of denial; the other is to admit the practice in question, such as forced sterilization, but to say that it was not characterized by exclusivity. If that is so, Ghosh has still to recuperate a space wherein he himself is not so marked: "No, not me of course . . ." Yet, being not so marked is just as problematic. That dreaded question is finally put to him: they have circumcision where Ghosh comes from, do they not (p. 61)? The import of this question is scarcely innocuous, and how could it be when few symbols are such, but here the question had a particularly ominous resonance. "In Arabic the word 'circumcise'", writes Ghosh, "derives from a root that means ' to purify': to say of someone that they are 'uncircumcised' is more or less to call them impure" (p. 62). Incredulous as it is that he himself is 'impure', Ghosh has to admit then that many people in his country are 'impure'; he is, as he puts it, "trapped by language." How easily, he appears to be suggesting, do we appear 'impure' in the sight of others!

Since Ghosh is neither a Christian nor a Muslim nor a Jew, he is something of a mystery to his fellow villagers, and impurity in someone who is a mystery can almost be tolerated. It is really the betrayal from within, the purported apostasy of a Rushdie, that is unpardonable. The villagers even humor Ghosh, but they do not recognize that the chain of their questioning assumes a life of its own, nor do they "understand an Indian's terror of symbols" (p. 210). To be uncircumcised is to appear impure, and to invite pity as one incapable of full sexual enjoyment, but do the Egyptians know that in India men have been killed on account of being or not being circumcised? Do they understand the tortured history, so largely fabricated around symbols, that goes under the name of 'communalism'? Their questioning of Ghosh is never altogether innocuous, but the poignancy of their queries is something that the Egyptian villagers cannot fully appreciate; at the same time, it is not certain that the Indian alone has a "terror or symbols", and Ghosh may have done well to reflect on the particular manner in which this "terror" is manifested in India, rather than assuming that very essentialist reading to which he is opposed.

Though the symbols by which Ghosh and his 'Hindu' culture are sought to be understood may well constitute an empire of signs, it is an unfinished empire, an empire that allows for modes of recognition that we could well consider universals. There is an occasion, for example, when he is being questioned about life in India, and the woman with whom he is conversing comes to the conclusion that "Everything's upside down in that country" (p. 171). Here is a moment when, to appropriate Stephen Greenblatt's phrase from Marvelous Encounters, "mimetic blockage" could have taken place. But it does not, for when Ghosh sees a baby lying in the shade of a tree, and says that its father must be a very happy man, Khamees the Rat gives a cry of delight: "The Indian knows. He understands that people are happy when they have children: he's not as upside down as we thought" (p. 172). Similarly Ustaz Mustafa, aghast as he is at hearing that Ghosh is uninterested in religion, will nonetheless not attempt to convert him to Islam, for there is the recognition that his conversion to Islam may not be pleasing to his father. As Ghosh writes, "he had a son himself and it went against his deepest instincts to urge a man to turn against his father." They come to an understanding as "the rival moralities of religion and kinship gradually played themselves to a standstill within him" (p. 52). What allows for this feeling of kinship is ultimately the refusal, a refusal that colonialism by contrast refused to honor, to posit an absolute, unconditional, and irrevocable difference.

Thus it is that the discourse of Egyptian villagers about India is saved from being wholly Orientalist. Yet, sad to say, the discourse of the modern West seems to have triumphed nonetheless: in Ashis Nandy's language, "the West is everywhere, within the West and outside; in structures and in minds". Nowhere is this more evident than in the conversation between Ghosh and the Imam: the "Indian doktor", who "doesn't even write in Arabic", and trumpets a familiarity with languages that a child would be loathe to use, appears to the Imam as a pitiful example of a civilization that worships cows and burns its dead. What else could a civilization like that be but "primitive and backward"? "Are you savages", asks the Imam, "that you permit something like that? You've even been to Europe; you've seen how advanced they are. Now tell me: have you ever seen them burning their dead?" And when Ghosh avers that in Europe "they have special electric furnaces meant just for that", the Imam must retort in the only language available to him: "He's lying,' he said to the crowd. 'They don't burn their dead in the West. They're not an ignorant people. They're advanced, they're educated, they have science, they have guns and tanks and bombs.'" As Ghosh reminds the Imam, the West does not have a monopoly on hideous weapons. What is, after all, a nation-state without its armory? What remains to be resolved is who, besides the West, has the better technology of mass destruction, and when Ghosh can claim with unassailable certainty that his country has "even had a nuclear explosion", which the Imam's nation "won't be able to match even in a hundred years", we know that the language of the barbarians has reached its apogee. There stand he and the Imam, "delegates from two superseded civilizations", reduced to "vying with each other to establish a prior claim to the technology of modern violence", and all that the West comes down to -- something that should make the West pause over its claims of Enlightenment rationality and democracy revolutionizing the world -- is "science and tanks and guns and bombs" (pp. 234-36). The very notion of 'development' is embedded in the belief of the "absoluteness of time and the discreteness of epoches" and it is the language in which that belief is echoed that now reigns supreme (p. 200). We, the Imam and I, says Ghosh, "had demonstrated the irreversible triumph of the language that has usurped all the others in which people once discussed their differences" (p. 237). In a world that appears to be increasingly cosmopolitan, where distances have collapsed, where commodities violate boundaries with maddening impunity, our options have in fact narrowed, and the multiplicities of history with which the medieval world easily cohabited now all speak in a univocal language.

Was this medieval world truly cosmopolitan, as Ghosh suggests, or can we say at least that it was more readily able to live with difference? The very idea that this could have been so will appear shocking to those who, even though they may be without the commitment to some naive notion of history as progress, think of the late twentieth century as exceptionally 'fluid' and post-modern. Let us reformulate the question to connect it to our narrative: when Ghosh arrives in Egypt, he is constructed as a radical other, but would he have been so perceived at the time when Ben Yiju and Khalaf ibn Ishaq were corresponding? Ghosh brings to bear upon his understanding of the postulated syncreticism and cosmopolitanism of the medieval world a cluster of facts. It is extraordinary that Ben Yiju would eventually manumit his slave girl and marry her, for what was common to a patriarchal Jew and a matrilineally-descended Tulu? Or consider the more complex kind of transnationalism that was entailed by virtue of the trading patterns existing in the Indian Ocean area. Ben Yiju had for his trading partners Arabs, Persians, Gujarati Banias, and Tulus, many settled in Mangalore. It was the Arabs who gave the coast the name of Malabar. "In matters of business", argues Ghosh, "Ben Yiju's networks appear to have been wholly indifferent to many of those boundaries that are today thought to mark social, religious and geographical divisions". As Janet Abu-Lughod has shown in her important study, Before European Hegemony, monsoon patterns prevented trading on the seas from taking place throughout the year, and as a consequence traders set up colonies with their own houses or worship and cultural associations in many places on the trading routes. The Indian Ocean trade before the late fifteenth century was on the whole, as both Abu-Lughod and Ghosh argue, an exemplary model of catholicity, a remarkable instance of where competition flourished and where all the players in the game abided by certain tacit rules. But then came along the Portugese: Calicut was submitted to a two-day bombardment, and for the first time a ruling power was attempting to dominate the Indian Ocean trade by force of arms. "Within the Western historiographical record the unarmed character of the Indian Ocean trade", writes Ghosh, "is often represented as a lack, or failure, one that invited the intervention of Europe, with its increasing proficiency in war. When a defeat is as complete as was that of the trading cultures of the Indian Ocean, it is hard to allow the vanquished the dignity of nuances of choice and preference" (p. 287). The determination of a small band of European soldiers, backed by superior technology, "triumphed easily over the rich confusions that accompany a culture of accommodation and compromise" (p. 288). It was a culture of adjustment and tolerance which made possible the retention of a large cache of documents in a Jewish synagogue that was the heart of Muslim learning, and it was that same culture which was exemplified in the makbara or tomb of a Jewish saint near Alexandria to which Jews and Muslims were alike drawn. Defiance against the "enforcers of History" was still possible then; now the makbara was already, as Ghosh's own harrowing experiences with Egyptian bureaucracy were to reveal, an "anomaly within the categories of acceptable knowledge" (p. 340).

One suspects that Ghosh may be rather too generous in his estimation of how far histories then were intertwined and even indistinguishable. That cosmopolitanism, one might argue, was already crumbling: Ben Yiju, who was to return to Egypt, arranged for his daughter's wedding with a largely unknown relative, and did so after rejecting an offer from a close friend and associate on behalf of his son on the grounds that she could not marry a 'foreigner'. Perhaps it is the case that every civilization has been parochial in this matter. But one unavoidably has the feeling that those critical faculties which Ghosh so agilely and persuasively brings to bear upon his dissection of the claims of modernity and rationality are somewhat suspended in his consideration of the ethos of the medieval period. Thus he appears to have an unaccountably 'soft' view of slavery. It may well be that the slave stood in a certain relation to the master which the West, with its wholly barbaric brand of slavery, cannot comprehend; and it is certainly the case, as is now well known to historians, that among certain ruling houses like the Mameluks [from Mamluk, 'slave'] the bureaucracy was in fact drawn from the slaves. (In Northern India, the slave dynasty held supreme for a considerable period of time.) Notwithstanding that, slavery has been nothing but irredeemably brutal for the vast majority of the millions who across history have been its victims. To dwell on this point, however, would be to obfuscate the more significant thrust of Ghosh's endeavor, which is to suggest to us that the pre-modern age may in fact have been more modern than the modern itself. The categories of pre-modern and modern, and thus the post-modern too, are perhaps quite antiquated, and we post-moderns may find that we have not been the first to understand what a true cosmopolitanism means. In any case, though Ghosh may be offering us illusions, one can scarcely begrudge him his extraordinary endeavor or dream, and indeed his book compels assent.

It is as a meditation on history that we may want to think of In An Antique Land, though finally Ghosh's book too, in emulation as it were of the in-between world of which he sings, defies categorization. Honorable and dignified as the quest is to uncover the identity of the slave of MS H.6, whom we eventually get to know as Bomma, what is regained can all too easily be lost. Consider, for example, the fate of Nabeel, a young student at the agricultural training college whom Ghosh had met in Nashawy. Nabeel has a particularly memorable place in at least two narratives, one which raises arresting questions about the status of Ghosh as an ethnographer in a foreign land, and the other a narrative about the status of history. Ghosh and his friends had been sitting in his room one afternoon; Ghosh was spooning tea into the kettle when Nabeel suddenly spoke up: "'It must make you think of all the people you left at home', he said to me, 'when you put that kettle on the stove with just enough water for yourself.'" It was, as Ghosh says, a remark that he could not put out of his mind, "for it was the first time that anyone in Lataifa or Nashawy had attempted an enterprise similar to mine -- to enter my imagination and look at my situation as it might appear to me" (p. 152). We need not confuse this with the task that ethnography set for itself in the age of colonialism, about which the by now all-too familiar thesis of orientalism has a great deal to say. The more poignant observation, it would appear, is that Nabeel utters a thought which renders him distinct, which marks him off from the others, and so his disappearance -- for alas! that is what happens -- from the pages of history, his complete absorption into anonymity, alerts us to the eventual fate of the subaltern. Nabeel becomes one of those Egyptians who joins the expatriate community in Iraq, where the pay for most jobs is higher; Saddam Hussein moves into Kuwait; and there begins another, yet another, exodus from that timeless and ancient land, this one too accompanied by pestilence, plague, sorrow, suffering. Gathered together in the house of Ismail, a dozen of them watched this exodus on the T.V. set. "There was nothing to be seen except crowds: Nabeel had vanished into the anonymity of History": and so ends In An Antique Land (p. 353). Is not Nabeel that subaltern whose identity some historian or ethnographer will be tracking down some five hundred years from today? It is no consolation that history swallows us all, that fish eats fish, for some of us are rather more easily swallowed than others. Finally, then, the question remains: Can the writing of history ever have emancipatory possibilities? The attitude of another ancient civilization, that of India, may be instructive in this respect, although I fear that what I shall say may well be confused for a species of orientalism. But I shall say it without qualification: ancient India was unequivocally of the view that the writing of History belonged to a lower order or intellectual and spiritual activity, and that appears to me to be perfectly apposite for a civilization that chose to cremate, not bury, its dead.

Originally published as "A Meditation on History", Social Scientist 21, nos. 7-8 (July-August 1993):8-98.

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