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‘Travelling in the West’: The Writing of Amitav Ghosh

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SOURCE: “‘Travelling in the West’: The Writing of Amitav Ghosh,” in Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol. 31, No. 1, Spring, 1996, pp. 3–24.

[In the following essay, Dixon examines The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, and In an Antique Land to demonstrate Ghosh's discontentment with the Western imperialism imposed on Arabic and Indian cultures.]

In the geography of human history no culture is an island. … In effect Tulunad was a region in the sense of the word desa, or the French pays—“country” is too loaded a term to use—an area … not “independent” but distinctive and singular, and precisely because of that, enmeshed with its neighbours in an intricate network of differences.1


Is this, then, another irony of history, doubly confirming the appropriative powers of the dominant discourse: that like the subaltern himself, those who set out to restore his presence end only by borrowing the tools of that discourse, tools which serve only to reduplicate the first subjection which they effect, in the realms of critical theory?2

This paper is in one sense a survey of the increasingly substantial body of writing by the Indian novelist and anthropologist Amitav Ghosh. Born in Calcutta in 1956, Ghosh has a Ph.D. in social anthropology from Oxford and has taught in both Indian and American universities. His oeuvre now includes two novels, The Circle of Reason (1986) and The Shadow Lines (1988), the ethnography In an Antique Land (1993) and a number of essays, notably the scholarly article “The Slave of MS.H.6,” published in Subaltern Studies in 1992. My interest in Ghosh's work arose initially from a growing concern with the way theories of colonial discourse have become globalized, while the practice of a good deal of post-colonial criticism has become overly theoreticized and predictable. Ghosh's training in historical and anthropological research, his eschewing of grand theoreticist gestures and his links with the Subaltern Studies project, make his work an interesting site around which current arguments in post-colonial theory can be conducted.

Ghosh's writing reflects the recent concern of anthropologists with the porosity of cultural boundaries. As Renato Rosaldo argues, “In contrast with the classic view, which posits culture as a self-contained whole made up of coherent patterns, culture can arguably be conceived as a more porous array of intersections where distinct processes cross from within and beyond its borders.”3 The characters in Ghosh's novels do not occupy discrete cultures, but “dwell in travel” in cultural spaces that flow across borders—the “shadow lines” drawn around modern nation states. Yet, like Edward Said's Orientalism, these novels also remain bound up in the notion of a universal humanity; and like the otherwise very different work of Homi K. Bhabha, they postulate a global theory of the colonial subject. As the Australian anthropologist Nicholas Thomas argues, “Orientalist … pre-occupations … can be displaced, not by a new universalism, but by an interest in a plethora of differences that would crosscut ethnic-cultural totalities.”4 Ghosh's ethnography In an Antique Land follows this trajectory. Influenced by his association with the Subaltern Studies scholars, Ghosh returns to a rigorous mode of empirical research to recover the historically situated subjectivities of a network of traders and their slaves operating between North Africa and south-west India during the Middle Ages. This cultural space is a vast, borderless region with its own hybrid languages and practices which circulate without national or religious boundaries. Ghosh's nuanced and self-reflexive writing means that the subaltern consciousness remains a trace rather than a presence, “a theoretical fiction” that allows him to avoid what Rosalind O'Hanlon, in her critique of the Subaltern Studies project, calls “the slide towards essentialism.”5

THE TRANSIT LOUNGE OF CULTURE

In his article, “The Transit Lounge of Culture,” the American anthropologist James Clifford has attempted to frame Ghosh's work in the context of recent developments in the discipline of anthropology. Texts like Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera have shifted anthropology away from the study of separate, authentic cultures toward the borderlands between cultures; away from separate to “comparative inter cultural studies.” Such diaspora cultures are not oriented towards lost origins or homelands, but are produced by ongoing histories of migration and transnational cultural flows. Once we begin to focus on these inter-cultural processes, Clifford argues, the notion of separate, discrete cultures evaporates; we become aware that all cultures have long histories of border crossings, diasporas and migrations.6

In Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis Clifford's colleague Renato Rosaldo describes a symptomatic exchange between delegates at a conference where the contesting paradigms within anthropology were vividly expressed in the metaphors of a museum and a garage sale:

… at a conference … on the crisis in anthropology, Cora Du Bois, a retired Harvard professor, spoke of the distance she felt from the “complexity and disarray of what I once found a justifiable and challenging discipline. … It has been like moving from a distinguished art museum into a garage sale.”


The images of the museum, for the classic period, and the garage sale, for the present strike me as being quite apt, but I evaluate them rather differently than Du Bois. She feels nostalgia for the distinguished art museum with every thing in its place, and I see it as a relic from the colonial past. She detests the chaos of the garage sale, and I find it provides a precise image for the postcolonial situation where cultural artefacts flow between unlikely places, and nothing is sacred, permanent or sealed off … The image of the garage sale depicts our present global situation. … Ours is definitively a postcolonial epoch … the third world has imploded into the metropolis.7

The remaking of social analysis Rosaldo describes in his book has re-defined anthropology's field of study, while at the same time drawing attention to the role of the observer in producing that field. In this new context, “the fiction of the uniformly shared culture increasingly seems more tenuous than useful.” “More often than we usually care to think,” Rosaldo argues, “our everyday lives are crisscrossed by border zones, pockets and eruptions of all kinds … Along with ‘our’ supposedly transparent cultural selves, such borderlands should be regarded not as analytically empty transitional zones but as sites of creative cultural production that require investigation.”8

James Clifford illustrates this new paradigm with an allegorical reading of Amitav Ghosh's text, “The Imam and the Indian,” a chapter from what was then his work-in-progress, In an Antique Land, which Clifford assumed to be a short story.9 It describes the expectations of an anthropologist doing fieldwork in an Egyptian village, which he assumes to belong to a settled, “authentic” culture. What he finds, instead, is a palimpsest of movement, travel and inter-cultural crossing that is centuries old: “The men of the village had all the busy restlessness of airline passengers in a transit lounge. Many of them had worked and travelled in the sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf … a few had visited Europe: some of them had passports so thick they opened out like ink-blackened concertinas.”10 Clifford argues that there could be no better image of postmodernity than this conflation of an Egyptian village with an airline transit lounge. Ghosh's writing, he argues, draws attention to the complex “roots” and “routes” that make up the relations between cultures: “Everyone is on the move, and they have been for centuries: dwelling-in-travel.”11

THE CIRCLE OF REASON

One consequence of the paradigm shift in anthropology has been to foreground the “literariness” of ethnography. As James Clifford put it in the preface to Writing Culture, “the ‘literariness’ of anthropology—and especially of ethnography—[is] much more than a matter of good writing … Literary processes … affect the ways cultural phenomena are registered.”12 The fact that Amitav Ghosh has been able to move freely in his writing between anthropology, history and fiction is symptomatic of the extent to which traditional boundaries between those disciplines have themselves broken down.

Ghosh's first novel, The Circle of Reason (1986), concerns the picaresque adventures of Alu, a weaver from a small village near Calcutta, who leaves home to travel across the Indian Ocean to the oil town of al-Ghazira on the Persian Gulf. Reviewers of the novel read it as an allegory about the destruction of traditional village life by the modernizing influx of Western culture, and the subsequent displacement of non-European peoples by imperialism. In the long opening section, set in the village of Lalpukur, Alu is apprenticed as a weaver, while his uncle, Balaram, the village schoolmaster, is obsessed with Western ideas, epitomized by his passion for phrenology and the writings of Pasteur. Balaram establishes the Pasteur School of Reason, alternatively bores and terrorizes people with his scientific notions, and eventually destroys the village by sterilizing it with carbolic acid. Anthony Burgess read the episode as a satire on Western imperialism: while Alu stands for tradition, Balaram “stands, in his demented way, for progress.”13The Circle of Reason certainly explores the relation between culture and imperialism. But Burgess's argument that it juxtaposes stable, traditional cultures with a diasporic, post-colonial culture is a reading made within the paradigm of classical ethnography. For Ghosh, even societies that appear to be static and traditional are always already diasporic.

Balaram's enthusiasm for Reason can certainly be read as satire on those diasporic Indian intellectuals who enthusiastically embrace the theories of the West, and it is surely significant that his greatest heroes are French. Balaram has made his mind “a dumping ground for the west.”14 But Ghosh's novel deconstructs any simple opposition between tradition and modernity, or discrete oriental and occidental cultures. His Ph.D. thesis at Oxford was a history of weaving and the cloth trade between Britain and India in the nineteenth century. In each of his subsequent texts, weaving is a synecdoche of that “intricate network of differences” in which all cultures are enmeshed with their neighbours. When Balaram decides to make the young Alu a weaver, he tells him a history of the technology of weaving that evokes cultural instability and borrowings across borders. According to Balaram, “… [the loom] has created not separate worlds but one, for it has never permitted the division of the world. The loom recognizes no continents and no countries. It has tied the world together” (p. 55). Balaram develops the idea that culture is a process of circulation that has nothing to do with national borders:

Indian cloth was found in the graves of the Pharaohs. Indian soil is strewn with cloth from China. The whole of the ancient world hummed with the cloth trade. The Silk Route from China, running through central Asia and Persia to the ports of the Mediterranean and from there to the markets of Africa and Europe, bound continents together for more centuries than we can count … All through those centuries cloth, in its richness, and variety, bound the Mediterranean to Asia, India to Africa, the Arab world to Europe, in equal, bountiful trade.

(pp. 55–6)

The history of weaving, then, has no single national root, as Burgess assumed in his review, but follows complex international routes. It is not a “traditional” craft opposed in a binary sense to Western science, but another part of a diaspora that unravels the distinction between Orient and Occident.

Yet Ghosh's understanding of these routes is also resistant to the framework of postmodern inter-cultural studies in which James Clifford attempts to place it. Clifford's border crossings run the risk of de-contextualizing specific local instances; the passengers in his transit lounge of culture are caught up in a seemingly universal postmodern condition that is innocent of specific economic determinants. Ghosh, by contrast, understands that the routes of international trade are over-determined by economic forces; that they tell a history of imperial exploitation. Balaram continues his lecture on the history of the loom by placing it in the context of British imperial trade: “Lancashire poured out its waterfalls of cloth, and [the] once … peaceful Englishmen … of Calcutta … turned their trade into a garotte to make every continent safe for the cloth of Lancashire, strangling the very weavers and techniques they had crossed oceans to discover” (p. 57). As the image of the garotte suggests, the trade routes may cut across national borders, but they are infected by blood and overdetermined by the asymmetries of economic and military power.

If Balaram's interest in Reason is part of the influx of foreign ideas into the village of Lalpukur, that village is not the symbol of an “Indian tradition” that can be placed in simple opposition to the West. Lalpukur was settled by refugees from East Pakistan after the formation of Bangladesh in 1971. The village, apparently a symbol of traditional India, is itself the product of a diaspora. The people of Lalpukur were “vomited out of their native soil years ago” and “dumped hundreds of miles away … borders dissolved under the weight of millions of people in panic-stricken flight from an army of animals” (pp. 59–60). Lalpukur, with its mixture of technologies, its blend of Hinduism and Bruce Lee movies (p. 75), is not a site of tradition, but of hybridization: the village is “churning like cement in a grinder, and Balaram was busy chasing its shooting boundaries with buckets of carbolic acid, his hair wafting behind him, in the germ-free air” (p. 76).

When Balaram reduces the village of Lalpukur to rubble in his efforts to apply European theories to Indian life, Alu joins a tide of diasporic Indians drawn to the rich oil economies of the Middle East. Part Two of The Circle of Reason is set in al-Ghazira on the Persian Gulf. Alu there resumes his craft of weaving, but is accidentally buried alive when a new concrete building in which he is working as a labourer collapses. The collapse of this building can be read as an allegory about the effect of postmodernity on the traditional societies of the Middle East. But again, Ghosh's writing is too highly nuanced for such facile binary oppositions.

The collapsed building, called The Star, is contrasted with the traditional market place, the Souq: “the old bazaar's honeycomb of passageways … obscur[ed] every trace of the world outside … Nor did any but the most alert in the Souq feel the soil of al-Ghazira tremble when the Star fell” (p. 194). But the Souq does not represent a discrete culture rooted in one nation. Rather, it is part of a network of trade routes, confirming Balaram's argument that weaving produces not to one world but many. Alu has begun weaving again at the loom of his Egyptian neighbour, Hajj Fahmy, who abandoned his traditional craft for the more profitable construction business. As part of his revival of weaving, Alu must now learn Arabic as he had earlier learned English. His landlady, an Egyptian brothel owner named Zindi, plans to install Alu as her manager when she buys the Durban Tailoring House from another diasporic Indian, Jeevanbhai Patel. Patel is a Gujarati Hindu from Durban in South Africa, who has come to al-Ghazira after a marriage of which his parents disapproved. His movements evoke the flow of the Indian Ocean trade: “the Indian merchants along the coast pulled [the couple] northwards like a bucket from a well. First they went to Mozambique, then Dar es Salaam, then Zanzibar, Djibouti, Perim and Aden” (p. 221). Zindi's house is full of migrant labourers whom she hopes to divert from the construction industry to the now declining cloth trade: al-Ghazira “was a merchants' paradise, right in the centre of the world, conceived and nourished by the flow of centuries of trade. Persians, Iraqis, Zanzibari Arabs, Omanis and Indians fattened upon it and grew rich” (p. 221). Like the village of Lalpukur, the Souq of al-Ghazira does not represent a stable authentic culture, but a network of trade, centuries old, that unfurls like cloth through a vast, borderless region.

When Alu is buried in the Star, Ghosh contrasts this mobile trading culture with the modern oil economy that threatens to subsume it. Alu's friends Rakesh and Isma'il go inside the ruins to search for him. Like Fredric Jameson in the Bonaventura Hotel,15 they find themselves lost in the postmodern space of a collapsed glass and concrete dome: “It was like the handiwork of a madman—immense steel girders leaning crazily, whole sections of the glass dome scattered about like eggshells” (p. 232). The “voice” heard by the rescuers in the chapter “A Voice in the Ruins” turns out to be a transistor radio accidentally switched on during the collapse of the building, which echoes through the ruins (p. 232). The “voice” concisely evokes the aesthetics of postmodernism: the loss of affect, the de-centreing of the bourgeois subject, the loss of interiority and the relentless commodification of culture. Alu, the Indian weaver, is trapped inside postmodernity like Jonah inside the whale, and when the rescuers reach him, they find him lying beneath a slab of concrete that is kept from crushing him by two antique sewing machines (p. 260). The episode is an allegory about the cultural logic of global capitalism destroying the ancient trading cultures logic of the Middle East.

Ghosh's symbolism therefore complicates Clifford's too-easy application of the label postmodern to the inhabitants of the Egyptian village, for the collapse of the Star is connected to a more specific genealogy of British colonialism in al-Ghazira. “Since the beginning of time, al-Ghazira has been home to anyone who chooses to call it such” (p. 261). But when the British discovered the oil deposits, they broke with the past by using military force to persuade the elderly Malik to sign a treaty: “al-Ghazira was just a speck of sand floating on a sea of oil. So the British … sent a resident to al-Ghazira, to make the Malik sign a treaty which would let them dig for oil. … The Resident arrived, in a battleship” (pp. 248–9). As Renato Rosaldo observes, “all of us inhabit an interdependent late-twentieth-century world marked by borrowing and lending across porous national and cultural boundaries,” but we do not do so on equal terms. Those boundaries are “saturated with inequality, power and domination.”16

THE SHADOW LINES

The plot of Ghosh's second novel, The Shadow Lines, also takes as its originary moment the diaspora of East Pakistan. The narrator's family are Hindus who fled from their home in Dhaka to Calcutta after the formation of East Pakistan. There, during the Second World War, when Europe itself lies in ruins, they befriend an English family, the Prices, and the two families are woven together by a complex series of cultural crossings. Mrs. Price's father, Lionel Tresawson, lived in India before Independence, and is a type of the travelling Englishman, having left his home in Cornwall to travel widely in the Empire: in Malaysia, Fiji, Ceylon and finally Calcutta. The narrator's uncle, Tridib, went to London and lived with the Prices during the war. The narrator's own history continues this pattern of dwelling in travel. He is writing shortly after his return to Calcutta from England, where he too becomes involved with the Prices. The metaphor of weaving is again an organizing figure in the text, for in the narrator's recollections the lives of three generations of his family are woven together, as are the cities in which their lives have been acted out: Dhaka, Calcutta and London. He does not inhabit a culture rooted in a single place, but a discursive space that flows across political and national boundaries, and even across generations in time.

Since the conventions of the Anglo-Indian novel were designed to reinforce the classical notion of discrete cultures, in writing The Shadow Lines, Ghosh had to subvert what Sara Suleri has called “the Rhetoric of English India.”17 The opening sentence of the novel immediately unsettles this rhetoric: “In 1939, thirteen years before I was born, my father's aunt, Mayadebi, went to England with her husband and her son, Tridib.”18 Unlike the usual colonial novel, in which Westerners travel to India to observe an ancient and self-contained culture, The Shadow Lines begins with an Indian passage to England: the natives are the travellers. The central fact of travel in this Indian family's experience immediately demands that we modify our expectations about Indian culture and the way it is depicted in English novels about the Raj. Furthermore, these Indians are going abroad in 1939, the year Britain declared war on Germany. Classical ethnography assumes that the culture of the Western observer is a stable and coherent point from which to observe native society. Ghosh undermines this notion by depicting Britain at war with Germany, so that Partition takes place against the background of an equally unstable Europe. The parallels between England and Germany, and India and Pakistan effectively undermine any distinction between East and West, colony and metropolis, and point to similarities and continuities that cut across these differences.

Ghosh's subversion of the rhetoric of English India is reflected in the two-part structure of The Shadow Lines, which alludes to one of the classic texts of colonialism, Joseph Conrad's novella, The Shadow-Line (1917). In the preface to this story, Conrad explains that an invisible line divides youth from maturity. The protagonist, a young naval officer, is given his first command of a ship in South-East Asia with orders to return it to London. In crossing back from the Orient to the West under difficult circumstances, he successfully crosses the shadow line into maturity, which is superimposed in complex ways on to the opposition between Europe and the Orient.19 In The Shadow Lines, Ghosh complicates this “classical” mapping of the world into East and West by dividing his novel into two parts, “Going Away” and “Going Home.” The irony is that his characters come and go in so many different directions that the narrator is obliged to pose the question, what is home, and is there such a thing as a discrete homeland separable from one's experiences elsewhere?

The second part of the novel climaxes in the narrator's return visit to the family home in Dhaka in 1964. But this homecoming abounds with ironies. His grandmother wants to bring her uncle back from Pakistan, the land of their Muslim enemies, to her home in Calcutta—but Pakistan is her real home, the goal of her ritual homecoming. She is nostalgic for the “classical” conception of cultures. She believes that her children should not be mixing with English people, and is particularly critical of the narrator's cousin Ila for living in England: “Ila has no right to live there … It took those people a long time to build that country; … They know they're a nation because they've drawn their borders with blood. … That's what it takes to make a country” (p. 82). But when the grandmother looks down from the plane as they pass from India into Pakistan in 1964, she is surprised that there is no visible border on the ground, and asks, “if there aren't any trenches or anything, how are people to know? I mean, where's the difference then? And if there's no difference, both sides will be the same; it'll be just like it used to be before” (p. 154). The elderly relative in Dhaka delivers the final blow to her view of the world when he refuses to go back to Calcutta, even denying its existence in reality: “I don't believe in this India-Shindia. It's all very well, you're going away now, but suppose when you get there they decide to draw another line somewhere? What will you do then?” (p. 216).

The Shadow Lines is therefore a fictional critique of classical anthropology's model of discrete cultures and the associated ideology of nationalism. The “reality” is the complex web of relationships between people that cut across nations and across generations. In his critique of nationalism, Ghosh's narrator celebrates “that indivisible sanity that binds people to each other independently of their governments” (p. 231). After the trip to Pakistan, the narrator looks at Tridib's old atlas, measuring the distances between nations with a compass, and reflects on the disjunction between memory, human experience and national boundaries. He realizes that the Euclidean space of the atlas has nothing to do with cognitive and cultural space:

I was struck with wonder that there had really been a time, not so long ago, when people, sensible people, of good intention, had thought … that there was a special enchantment in lines … They had drawn their borders, believing in that pattern, in the enchantment of lines, hoping perhaps that once they had etched their borders upon the map, the two bits of land would sail away from each other like the shifting tectonic plates of the prehistoric Gondwanaland. What had they felt, I wondered, when they discovered that … there had never been a moment in the 4000–year-old history of that map when the places we know as Dhaka and Calcutta were more closely bound to each other than after they had drawn their lines.

(pp. 233–4)

These ideas are summed up in the final act of the novel, the sexual union between May Price and the narrator on his last night in London, through which he is granted “the glimpse of … a final redemptive mystery” (p. 252)—the mystery of lived human experience that transcends the artificial borders of nation and race.

GLOBAL THEORY

Finally, then, The Shadow Lines builds its critique of cultural borders upon the notion of a universal humanity. In so doing, it parallels Edward Said's work in Orientalism (1978). Said's project was to counter the production of discrete, essentialized racial collectivities—particularly “the Arab”—with the idea of a shared humanity. Yet, as James Clifford pointed out in his review, this rests upon a humanism entirely at odds not just with Said's chief theoretical debt to Foucault, but with the perspective of much recent work in anthropology.20The Shadow Lines shares these theoretical difficulties, apparently replacing the notion of discrete national cultures with an untheorized and utopian belief in a common humanity. In this celebration of “syncretic civilisations” (p. 226), Ghosh has moved further in the direction of global theory than in The Circle of Reason, where the flow of trade was overdetermined by an asymmetrical economy of power that favoured Western interests.

Ghosh's investment in a utopian humanism is one version of a problem that besets contemporary theories of colonial discourse—their tendency to become globalized. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. puts it, “anti-imperialist discourse has proved a last bastion for the project, and dream, of global theory.”21 The irony—and danger—of investing in universal categories of post-colonial subjectivity seems particularly acute for diasporic Indian intellectuals like Homi K. Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Amitav Ghosh, who might be seen as “travellers in the west,” a phrase from Ghosh's text “The Imam and the Indian.” In a recent critique of post-colonial discourse theory, Nicholas Thomas argues that theory must be brought more often into a dialogical relation to localized historical research:

… it is becoming increasingly clear that only localized theories and historically specific accounts can provide much insight into the varied articulations of colonizing and counter-colonial representations and practices. Much writing in the field, however, seems less inclined to localize or historicize analysis, than put Fanon and Lacan (or Derrida) into a blender and take the result to be equally appetizing for premodern and modern; for Asian, African and American; for metropolitan, settler, indigenous and diasporic subjects. It is striking also that many writers stress, in principle, the localized character of colonial and postcolonial subjectivities, while resisting much engagement with either localities or subjects. I am not saying that Fanon's interests, or deconstruction, still less “theory” in general, are unimportant for the kinds of inquiries and critiques that need to be pursued, but that colonialism can only be traced through its plural and particularized expressions. The paramount irony of contemporary colonial studies must be that critics and scholars, who one presumes wish to expose the false universality and hegemony of imperial expansion and modernization, seem unwilling themselves to renounce the aspiration of theorizing globally on the basis of particular strands in European philosophy.22

The work of Homi K. Bhabha represents a particularly strong form of this impulse toward global theory, and Thomas attacks it on a number of grounds. Typically in Bhabha's essays there is a tendency not to examine specific fields of governmentality “while instead attributing general characteristics [such as hybridity, ambivalence and mimicry] … to the singular totality of colonial discourse.”23 Part of the weakness arises from Bhabha's use of “universalised psychoanalytic terms,”24 the generality of which is matched by the inclusiveness of cases to which they are made to refer. In Bhabha's essays, the totality “colonial discourse” is projected across a variety of local and historical contexts—from the Caribbean to Africa to India, as part of a general “colonial project.”25

Thomas's critique of Bhabha's work is conducted in part by reading it against the very different work of the Subaltern Studies scholars. The difference between these projects, Thomas suggests, “may arise from the fact that Bhabha is attempting to parade a theoretical and political genealogy, or array of affiliations.”26 This project is entirely different to the historicized critique advanced by the Subaltern Studies group: “Though mainly diasporic academics, their arguments have been deeply and consistently grounded in Indian history and politics, and at a considerable remove from the ‘Fanon etc.’ category which Bhabha frequently invokes.”27 Thomas's strategies for redressing the problems of current theory show at least a strategic alignment with the work of the Subaltern Studies scholars, and he advocates “a more socially and historically grounded kind of characterization, than … Bhahba … is interested in.”28 The most recent work of Amitav Ghosh, which emerges from his association with Subaltern Studies, follows a similar trajectory.

SUBALTERN STUDIES

The term “subaltern” is drawn from Gramsci's essay “On the Margins of History,” and is used by the Subaltern Studies group to identify a mode of historical practice that seeks to recover an indigenous culture which it assumes to be unaffected by colonialism. This contentious claim is most clearly made in Ranajit Guha's Introduction to the first of the Subaltern Studies volumes (1982):

Parallel to the domain of elite politics there existed throughout the colonial period another domain of Indian politics in which the principal actors were not the dominant groups of the indigenous society or the colonial authorities but the subaltern classes … This was an autonomous domain … Far from being destroyed or rendered virtually ineffective … it continued to operate vigorously … adjusting itself to the conditions prevailing under the Raj.29

The most searching discussion of this project to date has been Rosalind O'Hanlon's review article, in Modern Asian Studies, on the first four volumes of Subaltern Studies. O'Hanlon expresses serious theoretical reservations about the project of recovering a subaltern consciousness, arguing that “at the very moment of this assault upon western historicism, the classic figure of western humanism—the self-originating, self-determining individual … is readmitted through the back door in the figure of the subaltern himself.”30 She warns that “recovering the experience” of those “hidden from history” involves theoretical assumptions about subjectivity and agency. The historian's task becomes one of “‘filling up’: of making an absence into presences, of peopling a vacant space with figures.” “If this is the task,” O'Hanlon asks, how is it be carried out without recuperating the subaltern as “a conscious human subject-agent … in the classic manner of liberal humanism?”31

In her own powerful reading of the Subaltern Studies project, Gayatri Spivak has argued in its defence that the contributors make “a strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest.”32 As Robert Young puts it, Spivak “reorients subaltern history away from the retrieval of the subaltern's consciousness and will, an activity which ‘can be no more than a theoretical fiction to entitle the project of reading,’ towards the location and reinscription of subject-positions which are instrumental in forms of control and insurgency.”33 For Spivak, “the historian must persist in his efforts in this awareness, that the subaltern is necessarily the absolute limit of the place where history is narrativized into logic.”34

While Spivak implies that this is largely achieved in the Subaltern Studies essays, O'Hanlon does not accept that the idea of a “strategic essentialism” is effectively used, or even understood, by all of the contributors.35 She argues that the project of retrieving a subaltern consciousness “remains the dominant trope in the series”:

The difficulty … is that in the assertion—which is very difficult not to make, without having to abandon the strategy altogether—that subordinate groups have a history which is not given to them by elites, but is a history of their own, we arrive at a position which requires some subtlety and skill if it is to be held from slipping into an essentialist humanism … Skill of this kind, the ability to argue for a distinctness of practice without slipping into a metaphysics of presence, is clearly very difficult to achieve, and most of all so where our object is a recovery of presence. Some of the contributors possess this skill in greater proportion than others.36

Finally, O'Hanlon questions the political location and effects of the work of the Subaltern Studies scholars. To draw the conclusion, as Ranajit Guha does, “that our efforts can be co-terminous with the struggles of the dispossessed … seems to me fundamentally misconceived. We may wish in all faith for their freedom from marginality and deprivation … But if we ask ourselves why it is that we attack historiography's dominant discourses, why we seek to find a resistant presence which has not been completely emptied or extinguished by the hegemonic, our answer must surely be that it is in order to envisage a realm of freedom in which we ourselves might speak.”37

This brings us back to Spivak's argument that the essays in Subaltern Studies are a form of allegorical narration, a form of strong reading of the past that brings it into a subversive relation with the present. Invoking Paul De Man's notion of allegory, Spivak sees the articles as effecting a displacement of contemporary discursive systems. She notes that “all of the accounts of attempted discursive displacements provided by the group are accounts of failures.”38 I take Spivak's argument to mean that, in recounting the failures of subaltern groups, the historian is using the past allegorically, reading it in a way that disturbs the established “readings” or meanings not only of the past, but also of the present. A similar argument about the allegorical function of ethnography has been advanced by James Clifford in the essay “On Ethnographic Allegory”: “Allegory … denotes a practice in which a narrative … continuously refers to another pattern of ideas or events.” Clifford argues that ethnographic writing is allegorical in the sense that it invites interpretation: “to the extent that they are ‘convincing’ or ‘rich’ [all cultural descriptions] are extended metaphors, patterns of associations that point to coherent (theoretical, aesthetic, moral) additional meanings.”39

IN AN ANTIQUE LAND

Amitav Ghosh's most recent work is characterized by a “rich” metaphoric style that derives from his association with the Subaltern Studies project. This work includes the text published in Granta as “The Imam and the Indian” and the scholarly article “The Slave of MS.H.6,” published in Subaltern Studies in 1992, both of which were subsequently incorporated into the ethnography In an Antique Land (1993). Like the work of the Subaltern Studies scholars, and unlike the work of other diasporic Indians such as Spivak and Bhabha, these texts seem almost wilfully to avoid European theoretical models, grounding their method in a rigorous elaboration of archival and field research which offers itself as a series of “extended metaphors” for allegorical interpretation. These texts also share the concern with recovering subaltern consciousness as a “theoretical fiction” that motivates an allegorical reading of the past while seeking to avoid the “slide towards essentialism.”

In an Antique Land is an archaeology of a great mercantile civilization that, from about the tenth century to the sixteenth century, extended from Fez and Seville in the West, through Cairo and Aden around the Red Sea, across the Indian Ocean to Calicut and the Malabar coast. As Clifford Geertz observed in his review of the book, “in this mobile, polyglot and virtually borderless region, which no one owned and no one dominated, Arabs, Jews, Iberians, Greeks, Indians, various sorts of Italians and Africans pursued trade and learning, private lives and public fortunes, bumping up against one another … but more or less getting along, or getting by, within broad and general rules for communication, propriety and the conduct of business. It was, we might say, a sort of multicultural bazaar. Today this part of the world is divided, like the rest of the globe, into singular and separated national States.”40

Ghosh's point of entry into this space is a fleeting reference to an Indian slave in a collection of letters written in Egypt in the eleventh century. The slave, whose name was “Bomma,” belonged to the Jewish merchant Abraham Ben Yiju, who traded between Aden and Mangalore on the Malabar coast. Bomma's first appearance in print was in a letter to Ben Yiju from another merchant, Khalaf ibn Ishaq, written in Aden in 1148. Ghosh's reconstruction of Bomma's life and times is intercut by accounts of his search for textual evidence, which takes him to archives in England, North Africa and the United States, and of his field work in Egypt in 1980–81, 1988–89, and in 1990, just before the outbreak of the Gulf War.

“Bomma” is the subaltern consciousness whose recovery justifies Ghosh's allegorical reading of the destruction of a polyglot trading culture by Western influence. Unlike some contributors to Subaltern Studies, Ghosh develops a style of writing that is sufficiently nuanced and elusive to sustain the “theoretical fiction” of a recovery of presence without actually falling back into essentialism. This is achieved by a fluid and at times confusing deployment of the lexicons of both liberal humanism and post-structuralism, though without allowing his writing to be affiliated with either—in the hundreds of endnotes to In an Antique Land, there is not one that refers to a European theorist. Introducing the textual evidence of Bomma's life, Ghosh comments that “the [first] reference comes to us from a moment in time when the only people for whom we can even begin to imagine properly human, individual existences are the literate and the consequential … the people who had the power to inscribe themselves physically upon time. But the slave of Khalaf's letter was not of that company: in his instance it was a mere accident that those barely discernible traces that ordinary people leave upon the world happen to have been preserved.”41 Ghosh's apparently confusing juxtaposition of the words “properly human, individual existences” with the Derridean term “trace” is part of his strategic avoidance of affiliation with either humanism or post-structuralism. This theoretical duplicity enables him to continue the project of recovering the subaltern consciousness while retaining an awareness of the inevitably textual nature of that process. This self-reflexivity is supported by the image of “the stage of modern history,” upon which the slave makes his fleeting appearance from the wings (p. 13). The image suggests both the literariness of Ghosh's own writing, and also the textuality of all history, which deals with textual “traces” of the “properly human.” Ghosh's writing flickers between suggesting a metaphysics of presence and a Derridean trace. In a theoretically elusive way he suggests that “real life” can only be grasped as a performance in the “theatre” of writing, which actually produces the presence it seems to describe.

Ghosh is playfully aware that “Bomma,” in Spivak's words, “can be no more than a theoretical fiction to entitle the project of his [allegorical] reading” of the past. The very title of his Subaltern Studies article, “The Slave of MS.H.6” is radically ambiguous, suggesting that the historical subject Bomma is still a slave of the manuscripts that bear his name; that writing cannot ground his identity. Like the genie of the Arabian Nights, the “real” Bomma is trapped inside the bottle of textuality, his hypothetical “presence” serving as the “absolute” and “theoretical limit” of Ghosh's allegory.

The metaphors through which Ghosh reconstructs the “real life” of his trading culture are derived by synecdoche from the historical circumstances of trade. Aden is characterized as “one of the principal conduits in the flow of trade between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean” (p. 16). In one of his letters to Khalaf, Ben Yiju informs him that a consignment of Indian pepper has been lost in a shipwreck off the narrow straits that lead into the Red Sea: “the currents there are notoriously treacherous; they have earned the Straits a dismal name, Bab al-Mandab, ‘the Gateway of Lamentation’” (p. 18). The texture of daily life, then, is built up imaginatively from textual traces that record the circulation of objects—pepper, paper, cardamom, a lost frying pan; it is this circulation of objects that signifies human culture. The “properly human” is not an essence but a practice—it exists in the circulation of symbolic objects.

This semiotic economy suggests a post-structuralist understanding of language and textuality. Yet Ghosh elusively introduces another lexicon to describe these textual traces. The letters are assumed to be a more or less efficient “conduit” for the “flow” of feeling between “individual” human agents who entrust their inner lives to cross the “treacherous straits” of language. If “business weighs heavily” on Khalaf's mind, it does so solely because the letter that bears news of the shipwreck effectively communicates the properly human. Ghosh comments, like a liberal humanist, that “despite all the merchandise it speaks of, the letter's spirit is anything but mercenary: it is lit with a warmth that … translation renders still alive and glowing, in cold English print. ‘I was glad,’ writes Khalaf ibn Ishaq ‘when I looked at your letter, even before I had taken notice of its contents. Then I read it, full of happiness and, while studying it, became joyous and cheerful’” (p. 18). We associate the figure of “translation” with a postmodern theory of language; but Ghosh asserts that translation “works” efficiently—that something of the “properly human” is conveyed by the freight of symbolic capital across the treacherous straits of language. This appears to be an example of that “slide towards essentialism” which O'Hanlon sees as characteristic of the project. But in Ghosh's text this is part of a general refusal to be pinned down—to strategically use an implied recovery of “presence” while at the same time forever retreating into a post-structuralist lexicon of textual traces.

Ghosh's use of the trope of circulation as a model for culture has an obvious affinity with American New Historicism. In the major texts of Stephen Greenblatt, for example, culture is seen as an effect of the circulation of mimetic capital. Despite this similarity, Ghosh's use of figures such as circulation and trade differs from New Historicism in certain key respects. Howard Felperin has criticized Stephen Greenblatt's work by discovering in it features of the high structuralist poetics Greenblatt disavows, arguing that what he is really seeking to describe is a “deep structure,” expressed through the imagery of circulation and exchange. Felperin argues that these figures are so pervasive as to constitute another version of the familiar high structuralist quest for the langue of so many paroles: “For these newly essentialist categories … are so inclusive as to apply to virtually every activity conceivable within every historical culture under the sun.”42 The real target of Felperin's attack, however, is the politics of the New Historicism. Just as structuralist poetics tended to be profoundly anti-historical in its attempts to explain the production of meaning by the internal relations of a self-contained synchronic system, Felperin suggests that the New Historicist model of circulation has the same potential to de-historicize the cultural practices it models:

In approaching Elizabethan culture as if it were a self-contained system of circulating energies cut off from his own cultural system, Greenblatt's cultural poetics, relinquishes its potential for an historical understanding that might exert political influence upon the present. For such an understanding to arise, the past would have to be constructed not as a remote object—as in empiricism and structuralism alike—but as a vital issue; not in terms of discrete self-containment but of persisting relation. To qualify as a political—as distinct from an antiquarian, archaeological, or anthropological—discourse, the study of past cultures must have present import and consequence. … In sum, a genuinely political historicism inscribes the present as well as the past; it is not only diachronic, but at the very least dialogic.43

It is precisely such a “dialogic” relation between past and present that Ghosh achieves in In an Antique Land. Its very title is ambiguous, suggesting, that although he is researching the history of medieval Egypt, the historian at every turn discovers continuities between past and present. This returns us to the concept of allegorical reading as a dialogic connection between levels or instances. Above all, the Western military interventions that have destroyed the ancient trading culture Ghosh describes make their presence felt again and again: the book begins with the Crusades and ends with the Gulf War. It is precisely this sense of living in the midst of “antique” problems that makes Ghosh's cultural poetics more politically engaged than Greenblatt's. It is a poetics that at once attends to the circulation of symbolic capital in the past, and also to the succession of such systems—their dialogic, or allegorical relation with contemporary cultural systems. This dialogic structure is inscribed in the complex temporality of Ghosh's text, which cuts insistently between past and present.

Three episodes stand out as exemplifying this dialogic or allegorical mode: they are Ghosh's account of the Cairo Geniza, his encounter with a village Imam, and his final visit to an American research library on the eve of the Gulf War.

Among the most suggestively allegorical episodes in the book is Ghosh's account of his visit to the Synagogue of Ben Ezra, or the Synagogue of the Palestinians in Cairo, which Ben Yiju attended in the early eleventh century, and where letters referring to Bomma were originally lodged. The Geniza was the archive of the Synagogue, and was used as a storehouse where writings containing the name of God could be kept to prevent their desecration. The Geniza was therefore founded on the metaphysical idea that writing can ground essences—in particular the identity of God's name (p. 56). As such, it makes a suggestive location as a storehouse for letters referring to the subaltern, whose consciousness is the supposed object of historical recovery. Yet in his description of the Synagogue, Ghosh deploys a postmodern idiom that playfully undercuts any suggestion of presence or recoverable origins. Originally built in the eleventh century, the old building was demolished in 1890 and a new one built in its place. That new structure is itself in ruins and in need of restoration: “a team of Canadian experts and restorers has arrived, Mountie-like, to rescue the Synagogue from the assaults of Time” (p. 58). Ghosh is aware that the Geniza in this new ruin is not the original, but “of course, you have no cause to be disappointed. … The fact is that you are standing upon the very site which held the greatest single collection of medieval documents ever discovered” (p. 59). Ghosh's hunt for the identity of the subaltern brings him to this simulacrum of the Geniza; inside there is not a presence, but an absence, even of the original letters, which have long since been dispersed.

The dispersal of the Geniza material during the late nineteenth century under the impact of European and particularly British “scholarship” coincides with the age of high imperialism and Orientalism. Ghosh offers his own account of how the Geniza was gutted in the name of scholarship as “a sly allegory on the intercourse between power and the writing of history” (p. 82). Here Ghosh is pointing to the “allegorical” quality of his writing—allegory in the sense invoked by Spivak, Clifford and Felperin as a dialogic relation between cultural instances. By elaborating on the social text of the past, Ghosh produces a commentary which invites us to interpret it in ways that subvert the authority of anthropology and scholarship in his own time.

The Geniza collection was produced in the first place by a medieval trading culture without borders, in which Arab and Hebrew traditions blend. The dispersal of the collection is attributed to the age of imperialism, which brought that culture to an end by the inscription of borders: “Trans-continental trade was no longer a shared enterprise … the geographical position that had once brought [Egypt] such great riches had now made her the object of the Great Powers' attentions, as a potential bridge to their territories in the Indian Ocean” (pp. 80–1). Ghosh connects these military and commercial forces directly with the development of Orientalist scholarship: “Over the same period that Egypt was gaining a new strategic importance within the disposition of European empires, she was also gradually evolving into a new continent of riches for the Western scholarly and artistic imagination. From the late seventeenth century onwards, Europe was swept by a fever of Egyptomania” (p. 81).

From the mid nineteenth century the Geniza was visited and described by several European scholars and antiquarians—Saphir, Firkowitch and Adler among them—and by the 1880's a steady flow of Geniza documents was already making its way into collections in Europe and America. By far the largest single acquisition was made by Solomon Schechter, Reader in Talmudics at Cambridge University. Ghosh describes the powerful conjunction of academic interest and British administrative influence that allowed Schechter to gather the most substantial collection of Geniza documents: “by the time Schechter arrived in Cairo, a beribboned letter from the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University was no mere piece of embossed stationery: it was the backroom equivalent of an imperial edict” (p. 91). Ghosh speculates on why the local community acceded to these incursions: “the motives for their extraordinary generosity are not hard to divine: like the elites of so many other groups in the colonized world, they evidently decided to seize the main chance at a time when the balance of power—the ships and the guns—lay overwhelmingly with England” (p. 92). The acquisition of the Geniza materials is an echo of the intimidation of the Malik of al-Ghazira, who was also induced by gunboat diplomacy to allow his country's wealth to be mined by the British. In 1898 the manuscripts that Schechter had brought back from Cairo were formally handed over to the Cambridge University Library (p. 95).

The first section of In an Antique Land ends at this point with the scholarly depletion of the treasures of the Cairo Geniza by Cambridge University, intercut with Ghosh's account of his own experiences in the modern Egyptian village of Lataifa. In the revised version of “The Imam and the Indian” Ghosh now develops continuities between the fate of the Geniza material and his own insertion into the history he is writing as an Oxford graduate researching in Egypt.

Recognizing that the Imam is a representative of “Tradition,” Ghosh wishes to interview him about his role as a healer, but he is confounded to find that the Imam has totally lost faith in his profession, which he now regards as a relic of the past. Instead, he shows him a glistening new biscuit tin: “half a dozen phials and a hypodermic syringe lay inside the box, nestling in a bed of soiled cotton wool … This is what he had been learning … the art of mixing and giving injections … There was a huge market for injections in the village; everybody wanted one” (p. 192). When the Imam realises that the fieldworker wants to ask about traditional medicine, he avoids the subject because the influence of the West has made it shameful: “I knew then that he would never talk to me about the remedies he had learned from his father; not merely because he was suspicious of me and my motives, but also because those medicines were as discredited in his own eyes as they were in every one else's” (p. 193). As a scholar, Ghosh stands in the same relation to the Imam as Schechter to the Geniza and its riches, and their feelings of shame and embarrassment are caused by their common imbrication in the larger forcefield of “the West”: “So there we were, the Imam and I, delegates from two superseded civilizations … At that moment, despite the vast gap that lay between us, we understood each other perfectly. We were both travelling, he and I: we were travelling in the West. The only difference was that I had actually been there, in person” (p. 236). Like Schechter's sacking of the Cairo Geniza, this is another triumph for the West: “I felt myself a conspirator in the betrayal of the history that had led me to Nashawy; a witness to the extermination of a world of accommodations that I had believed to be still alive, and, in some tiny measure, still retrievable” (p. 237).

In this paper I have argued that Ghosh's empirical research can be read as an ethnographic allegory in James Clifford's sense—a form of commentary that uses the past to speak indirectly about the present. His essay in Subaltern Studies, “The Slave of MS.H.6,” begins with the image of the Cairo Geniza systematically raided by Cambridge anthropologists and Orientalists. It ends with the Indian researcher working in the bowels of an American library that recalls Fredric Jameson's description of the postmodern space of the Bonaventura Hotel:

Bomma's story ends in Philadelphia.


At the corner of 4th and Walnut, in the heart of downtown Philadelphia, stands a sleek modern building, an imposing structure that could easily be mistaken for the headquarters of a great multinational corporation. In fact, it is the Annenberg Research Institute, a centre for social and historical research; it owes its creation to the vast fortune generated by the first and most popular of America's television magazines, “TV Guide.” …


The documents are kept in the Institute's rare book room, a great vault in the bowels of the building, steel-sealed and laser-beamed, equipped with alarms that need no more than seconds to mobilize whole fleets of helicopters and police cars. Within the sealed interior of this vault are two cabinets that rise out of the floor like catafalques. The documents lie inside them, encased in sheets of clear plastic, within exquisitely crafted covers.


Between the leaves of one of those volumes lies a torn sheet of paper covered with Ben Yiju's distinctive handwriting. … the characters are tiny and faint, as though formed by an unsteady and ageing hand. …


In Philadelphia then, cared for by the spin-offs of “Dallas” and “Dynasty” and protected by the awful might of the American police, lies entombed the last testament of the life of Bomma, the toddy-loving fisherman from Tulunad.


Bomma, I cannot help feeling, would have been hugely amused.

(pp. 348–9)

This is a remarkably restrained and highly suggestive piece of writing that is surely to be taken as an ironic raspberry blown at the theoretical and critical pretensions of the West. The archive is a synecdoche of postmodernism and postmodern theoretical practice, with its globalizing tendency, and its complicity with the most imperialistic aspects of the modern American state. In Philadelphia, Amitav Ghosh might be travelling in the West, but his sly civility ensures that he is not travelling with the West. To recover the subaltern consciousness, Ghosh has learned not French but village Arabic; instead of affiliating his text with high theory, he has spent years reading ancient manuscripts and talking to Egyptian peasants. The painstakingly specific and situated nature of his historical research and anthropological inquiry, and the way he has foregrounded his own location, not only in relation to his Egyptian informants but also to the intellectual and military culture of the West, is a challenging model to literary critics in the Western academy whose critical practice involves the application of high theory to third world texts—we might call that “travelling in the East.” The fact that In an Antique Land ends with Bomma's laughter does not mean that Ghosh thinks he has recovered the presence of the subaltern. It is no more a “real” voice than the transistor radio in the ruins of the Star in The Circle of Reason. Bomma remains the slave of MS.H.6, of textuality. But it does mean that Ghosh has performed a conjuring trick, using that “voice” to intervene allegorically in the present, not sliding into essentialism so much as sustaining a writing that is itself “slippery” in its dealings with the vexed issue of identity politics. It is an exemplary instance of what Spivak calls a “strategic essentialism.”44

Notes

  1. Amitav Ghosh, “The Slave of MS.H.6,” Subaltern Studies, VII (1992), 175–6.

  2. Rosalind O'Hanlan, “Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia,” Modern Asian Studies, 22, 1 (1988), 218.

  3. Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis, Boston: Beacon Press, 1989, p. 20.

  4. Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government, Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1994, p. 24.

  5. O'Hanlon, “Recovering the Subject,” p. 201.

  6. James Clifford, “The Transit Lounge of Culture,” Times Literary Supplement, 4596, 3 May 1991, p. 7.

  7. Rosaldo, Culture and Truth, p. 44.

  8. ———. p. 208.

  9. Amitav Ghosh, “The Imam and the Indian,” Granta, 20 (Winter 1986), 135–46.

  10. Cited in Clifford, “The Transit Lounge of Culture,” p. 8.

  11. ———. p. 8.

  12. James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986, p. 4.

  13. Anthony Burgess, Review of The Circle of Reason, New York Times Book Review, 6 July 1986, p. 6.

  14. Amitav Ghosh, The Circle of Reason, 1986; London: Abacus, 1987, p. 53. All subsequent references are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the text.

  15. See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London: Verso, 1991.

  16. Rosaldo, Culture and Truth, p. 217.

  17. Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

  18. Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines, 1988: London: Black Swan, 1989, p. 9. All subsequent references are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the text.

  19. Joseph Conrad, The Shadow-Line, 1917; London: Dent, 1962, pp. v–viii.

  20. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1988, pp. 258–9.

  21. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Critical Fanonism,” Critical Inquiry, 17, 3 (Spring 1991), 469–70.

  22. Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism's Culture, pp. ix–x.

  23. ———. p. 43.

  24. ———. p. 47.

  25. ———. p. 48.

  26. ———. p. 47.

  27. ———.

  28. ———. pp. 50–1.

  29. Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies, I: Writings on South Asian History and Society, Delhi: Oxford UP, 1982, p. 4.

  30. O'Hanlon, “Recovering the Subject,” p. 191.

  31. ———. p. 196.

  32. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,Subaltern Studies, IV: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha, Delhi: Oxford UP, 1985, p. 342.

  33. Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West, London: Routledge, 1990, p. 160.

  34. Spivak, “Deconstructing Historiography,” p. 346.

  35. O'Hanlon, “Recovering the Subject,” p. 196.

  36. ———. p. 197.

  37. ———. p. 219.

  38. Spivak, “Deconstructing Historiography,” p. 333.

  39. James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Allegory,” in Clifford and Marcus, eds, Writing Culture, pp. 99–100.

  40. Clifford Geertz, Review of Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land, The Australian, 25 August 1993, p. 30 (reprinted from New Republic).

  41. Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land, New York: Knopf, 1993, pp. 16–17. All subsequent references are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the text.

  42. Howard Felperin, The Uses of the Canon, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990, p. 152.

  43. ———. pp. 155–6.

  44. A version of this paper was delivered at the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association Twenty-Eighth Congress, University of New England, Armidale, NSW, Australia, 6–10 February 1995. For their constructive comments, I wish to thank Ken Goodwin, Subhash Jaireth, Phillip Kitley, Philippa Kelly, Christopher Lee and Brian Musgrove, and members of the post-colonial discussion group, University of Queensland.

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