In an Antique Land

This is a beautifully written tale of the author’s time living in rural Egypt in the 1980s.

Ghosh’s accounts of his meetings and friendships with Egyptians unused to foreigners resonate with my own experiences in rural Africa, and the way he pieces together the long-forgotten history of an anonymous twelfth-century Indian slave and his Arab Jewish trader master and weaves it into the story is astonishingly deft.

I read it again recently and enjoyed it just as much as the first time.

While this may not be Amitav Ghosh’s best work, it is perhaps his most experimental writing in which he brings together his non-fiction travel writing with historical fiction of a subject he was researching as a PhD student. The book opened my eyes to the possibility that two genres can live together in one book, and if merged well can tell a beautiful, fascinating, and complete story.

I choose this volume though each of Ghosh’s novels, including his forthcoming Nutmeg’s Secret, I presume might deserve my encomium. He manages to entangle his novels with lively pictures of different social aspects of India over the last two centuries. He emphasizes the interactions of whatever is occurring in India with the broader world. This particular novel draws on an earlier period with an Indian in Egypt with experience based on documentation from the period 1000-1200 found in the discarded book room of a Cairo synagogue— including extensive commercial correspondence covering the trade between India and Egypt.

Most of the travel writing we see is suffused with Western perspectives and assumptions. In an Antique Land shows a different kind of encounter – that of an Indian graduate student conducting doctoral research among rural Egyptian villagers in the early 1980s. A Bengali Hindu among Arab Muslims, a scholar among peasants, Ghosh (best known for his Ibis Trilogy of historical novels), is a fish out of water. Living far from Calcutta in a converted chicken coop amid fields of carrots and arugula, he contends with a marvelous cast of characters, including a part-time witch casting spells for tips; a… show more.