by Amitav Ghosh
Acclaim for
AMITAV GHOSH’S
IN AN ANTIQUE LAND
“Delightful … This curious book [is] a mixture of history, travelogue, social anthropology and personal memoir. Ghosh skillfully draws our attention to parallels and contrasts to both the medieval and the modern stories.”
—Washington Post Book World
“Ghosh has found his own distinctive voice—polished and profound … wistful in its tone, assured in its achieved vision.”
—The Times Literary Supplement (London)
“Remarkable … Ghosh uses his writing skill to create captivating vignettes, [and] offers a subtle glimpse into ordinary life in contemporary rural Egypt in a manner that at times rivals anything by the masters of social realism in modern Egyptian literature. The painstaking research and astonishing attention paid to minute details [are] admirable. [Ghosh is] an uncannily honest writer.”
—Anton Shammas, The New York Times Book Review
“An inviting travel tale … In an Antique Land revolves around Egypt past, present and metaphorical, and relies on a large assemblage of characters to give [it] shape. Ghosh details the various stories in this book with energetic descriptions and his own research.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Fascinating … the tiny peephole Ghosh has opened into the Middle East of the twelfth century reveals a compelling and terrible diorama.”
—Boston Globe
“Like the best travelogues, this book is also an intellectual and historical journey. Ghosh’s closeness to the villagers gives life and color to his gradual discovery of their customs, history and culture.”
—Washington Times
“Extraordinary: a travel book that reaches back into the twelfth century as it touches on the dilemmas of our own time.”
—Sunday Times (London)
“Ghosh is an engagingly humble and receptive traveller.… A refreshing reversal of the usual power relationship between the observing (European) travel writer and his indigenous subjects.”
—The Guardian (London)
“A rich and satisfying journey.”
—The Times (London)
AMITAV GHOSH
IN AN ANTIQUE LAND
Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956 and studied in New Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria. He has traveled extensively throughout Europe, the Middle East and North Africa and has taught at New Delhi, the University of Virginia and Columbia University. He is the author of two widely acclaimed novels, The Circle of Reason and The Shadow Lines.
BOOKS BY AMITAV GHOSH
The Circle of Reason
The Shadow Lines
In an Antique Land
FIRST VINTAGE DEPARTURES EDITION, APRIL 1994
Copyright © 1992 by Amitav Ghosh
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Granta Books, London, in 1992. First published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1993.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ghosh, Amitav.
In an antique land/Amitav Ghosh.—1st Vintage Departures ed.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York: A. A. Knopf, 1993.
eISBN: 978-0-307-79226-6
1. Ghosh, Amitav—Journeys—Egypt. 2. Ben Yijû, Abrahim 12th cent.
3. Merchants, Jewish—Egypt—Biography. 4. Bomma, 12th cent.
5. Slaves—Egypt—Biography. I. Title.
DT56.2.G48 1994
916.204′.2—dc20 93-43555
Author photograph © Jerry Bauer
v3.1
For Debbie
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Lataîfa
Nashâwy
Mangalore
Going Back
Epilogue
Notes
PROLOGUE
THE SLAVE OF MS H.6 first stepped upon the stage of modern history in 1942. His was a brief debut, in the obscurest of theatres, and he was scarcely out of the wings before he was gone again—more a prompter’s whisper than a recognizable face in the cast.
The slaves first appearance occurred in a short article by the scholar E. Strauss, in the 1942 issue of a Hebrew journal, Zion, published in Jerusalem. The article bore the title ‘New Sources for the History of Middle Eastern Jews’ and it contained transcriptions of several medieval documents. Among them was a letter written by a merchant living in Aden—that port which sits, like a fly on a funnel, on the precise point where the narrow spout of the Red Sea opens into the Indian Ocean. The letter, which now bears the catalogue number MS H.6, of the National and University Library in Jerusalem, was written by a merchant called Khalaf ibn Iaq, and it was intended for a friend of his, who bore the name Abraham Ben Yijû. The address, written on the back of the letter, shows that Ben Yiju was then living in Mangalore—a port on the south-western coast of India. In Strauss’s estimation, the letter was written in the summer of 1483AD.
In the summer of its writing, Palestine was a thoroughfare for European armies. A German army had arrived in April, led by the ageing King Conrad III of Hohenstaufen, known as Almân to the Arabs. Accompanying the king was his nephew, the young and charismatic Frederick of Swabia. The Germans struck fear into the local population. ‘That year the German Franks arrived,’ wrote an Arab historian, ‘a particularly fearsome kind of Frank.’ Soon afterwards, King Louis VII of France visited Jerusalem with his army and a retinue of nobles. Travelling with him was his wife, the captivating Eleanor of Aquitaine, the greatest heiress in Europe, and destined to be successively Queen of France and England.
It was a busy season in Palestine. On 24 June a great concourse of the crowned heads of Europe gathered near Acre, in Galilee. They were received by King Baldwin and Queen Melisende of Jerusalem, with their leading barons and prelates, as well as the Grand Masters of the Orders of the Temple and the Hospital. King Conrad was accompanied by his kinsmen, Henry Jasimirgott of Austria, Otto of Freisingen, Frederick of Swabia, Duke Welf of Bavaria, and by the margraves of Verona and Montferrat. Among the nobles accompanying the King and Queen of France were Robert of Dreux, Henry of Champagne, and Thierry, Count of Flanders.
Between festivities, the leaders of the crusading armies held meetings to deliberate on their strategy for the immediate future. ‘There was a divergence of views amongst them,’ their enemies noted, ‘but at length they came to an agreed decision to attack the city of Damascus …’ For the Muslim rulers of Jordan and Syria, who had only just begun to recover from the first hundred years of the Crusades, this was a stroke of unexpected good fortune because Damascus was at that time the only Muslim state in the region that had friendly relations with the Crusader kingdoms.
On 24 July 1148AD the greatest Crusader army ever assembled camped in the orchards around Damascus. Its leaders had some successes over the next couple of days, but the Damascenes fought back with fierce determination and soon enough the Crusaders were forced to pack up camp. But Turcoman horsemen hung upon their flanks as they withdrew, raining down arrows, and the retreat rapidly turned into a rout. After this battle ‘the German Franks returned’ wrote the Arab historian who had so dreaded their arrival, ‘to their country which lies over yonder and God rid the faithful of this calamity.’
It was not until 1942, the very summer when Khalaf’s letter slipped quietly into twentieth-century print, that the Middle East again saw so great and varied
a gathering of foreigners. Nowhere were there more than in the area around Alexandria; the Afrika Corps and the Italian Sixth Army, under the command of Erwin Rommel, were encamped a bare forty miles from the city, waiting for their orders for the final push into Egypt, and in the city itself the soldiers of the British Eighth Army were still arriving—from every corner of the world: India, Australia, South Africa, Britain and America. That summer, while the fates of the two armies hung in the balance, Alexandria was witness to the last, most spectacular, burst of cosmopolitan gaiety for which the city was once famous.
WITHIN THIS TORNADO of grand designs and historical destinies, Khalaf ibn Ishaq’s letter seems to open a trapdoor into a vast network of foxholes where real life continues uninterrupted. Khalaf was probably well aware of the events taking place farther north: the city he lived in, Aden, served as one of the principal conduits in the flow of trade between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, and Khalaf and his fellow merchants had a wide network of contacts all over North Africa, the Middle East and southern Europe. They made it their business to keep themselves well-informed: from season to season they followed the fluctuations of the prices of iron, pepper and cardamom in the markets of Cairo. They were always quick to relay news to their friends, wherever they happened to be, and they are sure to have kept themselves well abreast of the happenings in Syria and Palestine.
But now, in the summer of 1148, writing to Abraham Ben Yiju in Mangalore, Khalaf spends no time on the events up north. He begins by giving his friend news of his brother Mubashshir (who has set off unexpectedly for Syria), letting him know that he is well. Then he switches to business: he acknowledges certain goods he has received from Ben Yiju—a shipment of areca nuts, two locks manufactured in India and two bowls from a brass factory in which Ben Yiju has an interest. He informs Ben Yiju that he is sending him some presents with the letter—‘things which have no price and no value.’ The list seems to hint at a sweet tooth in Ben Yiju: ‘two jars of sugar, a jar of almonds and two jars of raisins, altogether five jars.’
It is only at the very end of the letter that the slave makes his entry: Khalaf ibn Ishaq makes a point of singling him out and sending him ‘plentiful greetings.’
That is all: no more than a name and a greeting. But the 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 wazirs and the sultans, the chroniclers and the priests—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. It is nothing less than a miracle that anything is known about him at all.
THIRTY-ONE YEARS were to pass before the modern world again caught a glimpse of the slave of MS H.6: the so-called Yom Kippur War was just over and the price of oil had risen 370 per cent in the course of a single year.
The Slave’s second appearance, like his first, occurs in a letter by Khalaf ibn Ishaq, written in Aden—one that happened to be included in a collection entitled Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders, translated and edited by Professor S. D. Goitein, of Princeton University. Like the other letter, this one too is addressed to Abraham Ben Yiju, in Mangalore, but in the thirty-one years that have passed between the publication of the one and the other, the Slave has slipped backwards in time, like an awkward package on a conveyor belt. He is nine years younger—the letter in which his name now appears was written by Khalaf ibn Ishaq in 1139.
This is another eventful year in the Middle East: the atabeg of Damascus has been assassinated and the Levant is riven by wars between Muslim principalities. But as ever Khalaf, in Aden, is unconcerned by politics; now, even more than in the other letter, business weighs heavily on his mind. A consignment of Indian pepper in which he and Ben Yiju had invested jointly 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’. Divers have salvaged a few pieces of iron, little else. In the meanwhile a shipment of cardamom sent by Ben Yiju has been received in Aden, and a cargo of silk dispatched in return. There are also accounts for a long list of household goods that Ben Yiju has asked for, complete with an apology for the misadventures of a frying-pan—‘You asked me to buy a frying-pan of stone in a case. Later on, its case broke, whereupon I bought you an iron pan for a niâfî, which is, after all, better than a stone pan.’
Yet, despite all the merchandise it speaks of, the letter’s spirit is anything but mercenary: it is lit with a warmth that Goitein’s 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 … You mentioned, my master, that you were longing for me. Believe me that I feel twice as strongly and even more than what you have described …’
Again the Slave’s entry occurs towards the end of the main body of the text; again Khalaf sends him ‘plentiful greetings’ mentioning him by name. The Slave’s role is no less brief upon his second appearance than it was in his first. But he has grown in stature now: he has earned himself a footnote.
The footnote is very brief. It merely explains him as Ben Yiju’s Indian ‘slave and business agent, a respected member of his household.’
The letter is prefaced with a few sentences about Ben Yiju. They describe him as a Jewish merchant, originally of Tunisia, who had gone to India by way of Egypt, as a trader, and had spent seventeen years there. A man of many accomplishments, a distinguished calligrapher, scholar and poet, Ben Yiju had returned to Egypt having amassed great wealth in India. The last years of his life were spent in Egypt, and his papers found their way into his synagogue in Cairo: they were eventually discovered in a chamber known as the Geniza.
I CAME UPON Professor Goitein’s book of translations in a library in Oxford in the winter of 1978. I was a student, twenty-two years old, and I had recently won a scholarship awarded by a foundation established by a family of expatriate Indians. It was only a few months since I had left India and so I was perhaps a little more befuddled by my situation than students usually arc. At that moment the only thing I knew about my future was that I was expected to do research leading towards a doctorate in social anthropology. I had never heard of the Cairo Geniza before that day, but within a few months I was in Tunisia, learning Arabic. At about the same time the next year, 1980, I was in Egypt, installed in a village called Laaîfa, a couple of hours journey to the south-east of Alexandria.
I knew nothing then about the Slave of MS H.6 except that he had given me a right to be there, a sense of entitlement.
LATAÎFA
1
I FIRST BEGAN to dream of Cairo in the evenings, as I sat in my room, listening, while Abu-‘Ali berated his wife or shouted at some unfortunate customer who had happened to incur his displeasure while making purchases at his shop. I would try to shut out the noise by concentrating on my book or my diaries or by turning up the volume of my transistor radio, but Abu-‘Ali’s voice always prevailed, despite the thick mud walls of his house and the squawking of the ducks and geese who lived around my room.
Nobody in Lataifa liked Abu-‘Ali; neither his relatives, nor his neighbours nor anyone else in the hamlet—not even, possibly, his own wife and children. Some actively hated him; others merely tried to keep out of his way. It was hard to do otherwise; he was profoundly unlovable.
Still, dislike him as they might, Abu-‘Ali’s neighbours and kinsmen also held him in fear. The children of the hamlet were always careful to be discreet when they mimicked him: they would look up and down the lanes to make sure that neither he nor his burly eldest son, ‘Ali, were in sight, and then, screwing up t
heir faces in imitation of his scowl, making imaginary sunglasses out of their fingers and thumbs, they would arch their backs and stagger down the lane, labouring under the weight of gigantic bellies.
Everybody in the area knew of Abu-‘Ali’s temper and most people did their best to avoid him, so far as they could. As for me, I had no choice in the matter: by the time I had learnt of Abu-Ali’s reputation, I was already his lodger, and he, on his own initiative, had assumed the role of surrogate father as well as landlord.
I was not the first person in the hamlet to find himself thrust into an unwelcome proximity with Abu-‘Ali. It so happened that his house sat astride the one major road in the area, a narrow, rutted dirt track just about wide enough to allow two lightweight vehicles to squeeze past each other without toppling into the canal that ran beside it. The road served a large network of villages around Lataifa and a ragged procession of pick-up trucks roared up and down it all day long, carrying people back and forth from Damanhour, the capital of the Governorate and the largest city in the region.
Abu-‘Ali’s house was so placed that it commanded a good view of the road and, being the man he was, Abu-‘Ali was diligent in exploiting the strategic potential of its location. He spent much of his time on a small veranda at the front of his house, lying on a divan and keeping a careful eye on the traffic. At the busier times of the day, he would lie on his side, with one arm resting voluptuously on the gigantic swell of his hip, watching the passing trucks through a pair of silver-tipped sunglasses; in the afternoons, once he had eaten his lunch, he would roll on his back and doze, his eyes half-shut, like an engorged python stealing a rest after its monthly meal.
