Amitav Ghosh

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Out of the Dustbin of History

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SOURCE: “Out of the Dustbin of History,” in Washington Post Book World, Vol. XXII, No. 13, March 28, 1993, p. 6.

[In the following positive review, Irwin compliments Ghosh's technique of comparing and contrasting present-day and twelfth-century Egypt in In an Antique Land.]

About a quarter of the way in to this curious book [In an Antique Land] (a mixture of history, travelogue, social anthropology and personal memoir), Amitav Ghosh has occasion to remark that “it is not easy, after all, to see oneself sitting down to leaf through a collection of eight-hundred-year-old documents, written in a colloquial dialect of medieval Arabic, transcribed in the Hebrew script, and liberally strewn with Hebrew and Aramaic.” But that is what Ghosh did, and his account of the difficulties involved can be appreciated as treasurable understatement.

While still a student, Ghosh, an Indian who studies anthropology in Cambridge, became interested in the Geniza, a body of documents whose existence is hardly known, save to specialists in medieval Middle Eastern studies. The Geniza can be thought of as a kind of sacred wastepaper basket—a very large one. The Geniza that was attached to the Synagogue of the Palestinian Jews in Fustat (the oldest part of Cairo) was two-and-a-half stories high and contained over a quarter-of-a-million leaves of paper. The Jews of the Medieval Fustat had an abhorrence of discarding any scrap of paper on which it was conceivable that the name of God might have been written, lest that paper be trodden underfoot. Consequently a great chamber was set aside in the Synagogue for the storage of writings, and all sorts of papers ended up in it.

The vast accumulation of torn scraps includes prayers, poems, wills, contracts, mystical treatises, laundry lists and merchants' letters, mostly from the 11th to 13th centuries. The survival of this mass of miscellaneous documentation permits the writing of a detailed social history of people who would otherwise have little or no history—quite humble religious scholars, merchants, artisans, laborers and even slaves. S. D. Goitein, almost certainly the greatest scholar to have written on the social and economic history of the Near East, made brilliant use of the Geniza materials in his exhaustively researched, fluently written and magisterial five-volume work, A Mediterranean Society. Ghosh seems to have made it his hobby to follow up certain leads provided by Goitein and trace the history of a small group of Tunisian Jews who had migrated to Egypt and who became involved in the 12th-century trade with India. In particular, Ghosh is fascinated by references to a certain Indian slave, Bomma, who served as their agent in Aden.

However, Ghosh's account of his researches into the fortunes of these medieval traders and their households constitutes only one thread of In an Antique Land. This story is interwoven with Ghosh's account of his sojourn for research purposes in a small agricultural village on the Nile Delta. The fellaheen who scrape a living from the land are friendly, but they are puzzled by what Ghosh is up to. They think that he is like a child. “That's why he's always asking questions.” The aged mother of one of Ghosh's Arab friends wants to know when he is going home. “Isn't your holiday over yet?”

To some extent, I shared their puzzlement. I presume that Ghosh was pursuing some anthropological thesis. However, he is evasive about this and confines himself to a much more personal account of friendships and conversations. There are some delightful cameos. The fellaheen find Hindu ways most curious, and there is nothing that Ghosh can say that will dissuade from concluding that Indians worship cows and that they burn their dead in the hope that they will thereby spare their bodies the pains of hellfire.

When Ghosh first visited his chosen village in 1980, he was delighted to discover a way of life that in many respects had not changed since medieval times. Blood feuds were pursued, the evil eye was feared and sickness was combatted by magic. However, the unchanging appearance of the peasants' way of life proved to be illusory. When Ghosh returned on a nostalgic visit in 1988, he found the village almost unrecognizable. Money sent back by migrant laborers working in Iraq and other parts of the Arab world, as well as the preaching and social-welfare program of Muslim fundamentalists, had wrought massive change in the living standards and the attitudes of the villagers.

Ghosh's slyly mocking yet affectionate account of the lives of these villagers is even more interesting than the reconstruction of the careers of his medieval Jewish traders. Of course, certain themes and issues are common to both the medieval and the modern stories, and Ghosh skillfully draws our attention to parallels and contrasts. Even so, I wondered why he had organized things as he had; and, by the time I reached the end, I concluded that I had read not one but two good books.

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