In an Antique Land

by Amitav Ghosh

  The shopkeeper recoiled as though he had been slapped, and his hands flew to his mouth. ‘Ya Allah!’ he muttered.

  ‘That’s what they do,’ said the Imam. ‘They burn their dead.’

  Then suddenly he spun around to face me and cried: ‘Why do you allow it? Can’t you see that it’s a primitive and backward custom? Are you savages that you permit something like that? Look at you: you’ve had some education; you should know better. How will your country ever progress if you carry on doing these things? You’ve even been to Europe; you’ve seen how advanced they are. Now tell me: have you ever seen them burning their dead?’

  A small crowd had gathered around us now, drawn by the Imam’s voice, and under the pressure of their collective gaze, I found myself becoming increasingly tongue-tied.

  ‘Yes, they do burn their dead in Europe,’ I managed to say, my voice rising despite my efforts to control it. ‘Yes, they have special electric furnaces meant just for that.’

  The Imam turned away and laughed scornfully. ‘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.’

  Suddenly something seemed to boil over in my head, dilemmas and arguments I could no longer contain within myself.

  ‘We have them too!’ I shouted back at him. ‘In my country we have all those things too; we have guns and tanks and bombs. And they’re better than anything you’ve got in Egypt—we’re a long way ahead of you.’

  ‘I tell you, he’s lying,’ cried the Imam, his voice rising in fury. ‘Our guns and bombs are much better than theirs. Ours are second only to the West’s.’

  ‘It’s you who’s lying,’ I said. ‘You know nothing about this. Ours are much better. Why, in my country we’ve even had a nuclear explosion. You won’t be able to match that even in a hundred years.’

  It was about then, I think, that Khamees appeared at my side and led me away, or else we would probably have stood there a good while longer, the Imam and I: delegates from two superseded civilizations, vying with each other to establish a prior claim to the technology of modern violence.

  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: I could have told him a great deal about it, seen at first hand, its libraries, its museums, its theatres, but it wouldn’t have mattered. We would have known, both of us, that all that was mere fluff: in the end, for millions and millions of people on the landmasses around us, the West meant only this—science and tanks and guns and bombs.

  I was crushed, as I walked away; it seemed to me that the Imam and I had participated in our own final defeat, in the dissolution of the centuries of dialogue that had linked us: we had demonstrated the irreversible triumph of the language that has usurped all the others in which people once discussed their differences. We had acknowledged that it was no longer possible to speak, as Ben Yiju or his Slave, or any one of the thousands of travellers who had crossed the Indian Ocean in the Middle Ages might have done: of things that were right, or good, or willed by God; it would have been merely absurd for either of us to use those words, for they belonged to a dismantled rung on the ascending ladder of Development. Instead, to make ourselves understood, we had both resorted, I, a student of the ‘humane’ sciences, and he, an old-fashioned village Imam, to the very terms that world leaders and statesmen use at great, global conferences, the universal, irresistible metaphysic of modern meaning; he had said to me, in effect: ‘You ought not to do what you do, because otherwise you will not have guns and tanks and bombs.’ It was the only language we had been able to discover in common.

  For a while, after Khamees and ‘Eid had led me back to their house, I could not bring myself to speak; 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.

  But Khamees and his family did not let me long remain in silence. They took me back to their house, and after ‘Eid had repeated the story of my encounter with Imam Ibrahim, Khamees turned to me, laughing, and said: ‘Do not be upset, ya doktór. Forget about all those guns and things. I’ll tell you what: I’ll come to visit you in your country, even though I’ve never been anywhere. When you leave, I’ll come with you; I’ll come all the way to India.’

  He began to scratch his head, thinking hard, and then he added: ‘But if I die there you must remember to bury me.’

  MANGALORE

  1

  SEEN FROM THE sea, on a clear day, Mangalore can take a newcomer’s breath away It sits upon the tip of a long finger of steeply rising land; a ridge of hills which extends out of a towering knuckle of peaks in the far distance. Two rivers meet around the elliptical curve of the fingertip to form a great palm-fringed lagoon, lying tranquil under a quicksilver sky. Between the lagoon and the sea, holding back the waves, are two thin elbows of sand. They strain towards each other, but stop just short of touching, and through the gap between them flows a narrow channel, joining the lagoon to the open sea.

  The boats that pass through that channel today are mainly small fishing craft; the lagoon’s ancient functions as a harbour have now been delegated to a modern, artificially-dredged port a little to the north of the city. But it was the lagoon that first granted Mangalore its charter as a port, and it is from there that Ben Yiju would have had his first glimpse of the city he was to live in for close on two decades.

  The geographical location is all that remains of the Mangalore that Ben Yiju saw: the city was sacked several times in the sixteenth century and afterwards, and today almost no trace of its medieval incarnation remains. The area that is now known as ‘the old port’ lies forgotten below the city’s bustling business centres and market-places, at the bottom of a steep slope. It still bears the Persian name Bandar, ‘port’, but today its few moments of life are provided by a ferry that connects it to the fishing-villages on the sand-spit across the lagoon. Otherwise its docks are largely untenanted and its wharfs empty, except for a handful of barges and river-boats.

  When Ben Yiju arrived in Mangalore there was probably a stretch of sand where the docks stand now: the ships that plied the Indian Ocean appear to have been designed to be beached rather than docked—the better to profit from the fine sands that lined those waters. The merchants of the city, including the large community of expatriate Middle Easterners, would have had their offices and godowns close to the Bandar, probably on the hillside above, from where they could keep an eye on incoming ships.

  The expatriate merchant community of Mangalore was a large one, by all accounts. The Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta, who visited the city some two hundred years after Ben Yiju, reports that it was the practice of most merchants from the Yemen and Persia to disembark there; the Sumatrans, on the other hand, along with others from the eastern reaches of the Indian Ocean, seem to have preferred other cities, such as Calicut and ‘Fandarîna’, a little further to the south. At the time of Ibn Battuta’s visit the Muslims of Mangalore (and by implication) the foreign merchants, together formed a community of about 4,000 people, ‘living in a suburb alongside the town.’

  The settlement of foreigners at Mangalore was by no means the largest or the most cosmopolitan on the coast: Calicut, a couple of hundred miles to the south, appears to have housed an even larger and more diverse merchant community. There were thirteen ‘Chinese’ vessels in the harbour when Ibn Battuta’s ship docked there, and he reports that the city regularly had visitors from ‘China, Sumatra, Ceylon, the Maldives, Yemen, and Fars [Iran] …’ A Portuguese sailor, Duarte Barbosa, who visited the city early in the sixteenth century, noted that the city’s merchants included ‘Arabs, Persians, Guzarates, Khorasanys, and Decanys’, who were known co
llectively as pardesis, or foreigners. The pardesi merchants were not all itinerant traders; many of them were expatriates who had settled in Malabar for considerable lengths of time. ‘[They] possess in this place wives and children,’ noted Barbosa, ‘and ships for sailing to all parts with all kinds of goods.’

  The lifestyle of these merchants was so sumptuous that even sophisticated travellers and courtiers, accustomed to the refinements of great royal courts, were taken by surprise upon being admitted into their circle. The Persian ambassador ‘Abd al-Razzaq al-Samarqandi, for instance, was greatly impressed by their style of living when he passed through Malabar in 1442AD. ‘They dress themselves in magnificent apparel,’ he wrote, ‘after the manner of the Arabs, and manifest luxury in every particular …’ Duarte Barbosa was to echo those observations a few decades later: ‘They have large houses and many servants: they are very luxurious in eating, drinking and sleeping …’

  There is nothing now anywhere within sight of the Bandar to lend credence to the great mansions and residences that Ibn Battuta and Duarte Barbosa spoke of. Now the roads and lanes around the wharfs fall quiet after sunset; shipping offices shut their doors, coffee-shops pull down their shutters, and only a few passengers waiting to cross to the sand-spit remain. The imagination baulks at the thought that the Bandar once drew merchants and mariners from distant corners of the world.

  For many hundreds of years, however, large numbers of foreign visitors congregated in the cities of this region, and it was Middle Eastern travellers who gave this part of the coast the Arabic name ‘Malabâr’. In their usage, the name was applied loosely to the southern third of the west coast, an area that shares many aspects of a common culture. But Malabar is also divided into several smaller sub-regions, among which the district around Mangalore is perhaps the most distinctive. Being the northernmost frontier of the Malabar region, it forms a kind of double-headed causeway, between the south and the north on the one hand, and between the seaboard and the interior on the other. With its southerly neighbours it shares certain distinctive cultural institutions, as well as legacies bequeathed by a parallel history—forms of personal law based on principles of matrilineal descent, for instance, are common to many groups throughout the area. But in other respects its affiliations lie with the adjoining districts of the north and the east, and with the state of Karnataka, of which it is a part. Its speech, for example, while forming a distinct language in its own right, is also closely akin to Kannada, the majority language of the state.

  The language of Mangalore is called Tuu, and it is one of the five siblings of the Dravidian family of languages: it is rich in folk traditions and oral literature, but it does not possess a script of its own and is usually transcribed in Kannada. It is this language that has given the area around Mangalore its name, Tuunâ: like so many other parts of the the subcontinent, it forms a cultural area which is distinctive and singular, while being at the same time closely enmeshed with its neighbours in an intricate network of differences.

  Tulunad is not large—it is contained today within a single district—yet it has had a distinct identity since antiquity. Writing in Alexandria in the second century AD, the Greek geographer Ptolemy referred to it as ‘Olokhoira’—a term which is thought to have been derived from ‘Aupa’, the name of Tulunad’s long-lived ruling dynasty. For several hundreds of years, until the beginning of the fifteenth century, Tulunad’s Alupa rulers succeeded in preserving a measure of autonomy for their small kingdom by picking allies judiciously among the various dynasties that followed each other to power in the hinterlands. It was during their rule that Mangalore became one of the principal ports of the Indian Ocean, and it was in the reign of the king Kavi Aupendra that Ben Yiju came to the city.

  Ben Yiju, like so many other Middle Eastern merchants, was drawn to Mangalore because of the economic opportunities it offered as one of the premier ports of an extremely wealthy hinterland: a region that was well endowed with industrial crafts, apart from being one of the richest spice-producing territories of the medieval world. Later the area‘s wealth was to attract the much less welcome attention of the European maritime and colonial powers and it was in the course of the struggles that ensued that Mangalore came to lose virtually every trace of its extraordinary past.

  But appropriately, Mangalore does not treat its lost history as a matter of crippling melancholy: it has always been a busy, bustling kind of place, and today it is again a thriving, relatively prosperous city. Its ancient connections with the Arab world have bequeathed it a more useful legacy than a mere collection of artefacts: thousands of its residents are now employed in the Persian Gulf, and its suburbs are awash with evidence of the extravagant spending of its expatriates.

  In this, as in many other intangible ways, Mangalore remains perfectly true to its medieval heritage.

  2

  THE MORNING AFTER I arrived in Mangalore, one day in the summer of 1990, I found myself sitting in a coffee-shop, waiting eagerly to make the acquaintance of a scholar whose name I had heard mentioned several times on the way to the coast. I had been told on excellent authority, that this, if anyone, was the person who might be able to help me with the riddle of the Slave of MS H.6: his name was Professor B. A. Viveka Rai and he was one of the worlds foremost experts on Tulu folklore and philology. For me a great deal depended on this meeting, for my unravelling of the Slaves history had been blocked by an intractable etymological puzzle: the mystery of his name.

  My introduction to the puzzle had come from Goitein’s translation of the letter that Khalaf ibn Ishaq wrote to Ben Yiju in 1139: at the end of the letter Khalaf happened to mention the Slaves name while sending him ‘plentiful greetings’. In the translated version of the letter, the name was spelt ‘Bama’ and it was accompanied by a footnote which explained that Goitein had been informed by a specialist on Indian history that ‘Bama’ was ‘Vernacular for Brahma.’

  At the time, captivated as I was by the letter’s contents, I had not given the name any further thought. Years later, when I began working directly with the Geniza material, I discovered that the name occurred in some half-dozen documents, written by various different people—Madmun, Khalaf, and of course Ben Yiju himself. The name was always spelt in exactly the same way, with three characters: B-M-H. But of these, the last, ‘H’, was actually not a consonant at all, but rather an open vowel that is known in Arabic as the ‘teh marbûta’. The three characters of the Slave’s name were therefore, properly speaking, B-M-A. Clearly there was another vowel between the first and second characters, but it was never specified in the documents, for in Judæo-Arabic, as in written Arabic and Hebrew, short vowels are not usually indicated in handwritten texts. The vowel could have been ‘u’, ‘o’ or any other—one guess was about as good as another. In spelling the name as ‘Bama’, Goitein had taken it to be ‘a’, on the plausible assumption, as his footnote explained, that the word was derived from ‘Brahma’.

  My first doubts about the exact nature of the relationship between the letters ‘B-M-A’ and the word ‘Brahma’ arose while reading some medieval accounts of India written by Arab travellers and geographers. The word ‘Brahma’ and its cognates occurred often in those texts and it soon became clear to me that it had been well-known amongst educated people in the Middle East and North Africa since long before Ben Yiju’s time. Indeed, it seemed possible that there had been an accepted way of spelling the word in Arabic through much of the Middle Ages.

  Against that background it began to seem increasingly improbable that Ben Yiju and his friends would spell the Slave’s name as B-M-A if it were actually ‘Brahma’. If other Arabic-speakers, many of whom had never even visited India, could spell the term accurately, then surely Ben Yiju, who lived so many years in Mangalore, would have been able to do just as well, or better.

  Clearly then, the Slave’s name was not ‘Brahma’. But it might of course have been a diminutive or a shortened form of that word. Yet if that were so, I began to suspect, the wor
d would probably have had a slightly different shape: as a diminutive ‘Bama’ did not have a very convincing sound to my ear. I could think offhand of several other forms, from various Indian languages, which sounded a great deal more persuasive.

  At this point I realized that finding an acceptable solution to the puzzle of the Slave’s name was a crucial step in determining his identity—indeed, it was the one clue that could provide some indication of where he was born and what his background and social circumstances were. But the moment that door swung open, a fresh host of problems appeared. The first among them was that there was no indication anywhere about what language the Slave was named in: after all the B-M-A of the documents could have had its origins in any one of several different languages.

  Such information as I was able to find about slavery in the region of the Indian Ocean during the Middle Ages only served to complicate the matter further. The slave trade in Ben Yiju’s time was a wide-ranging transcontinental phenomenon, with substantial numbers of slaves being brought into the region from distant parts of the world: from as far away as Central Asia, the Russian steppes, the Transcaucasus and Europe. Mangalore, as a major port, would certainly have been a way station for many of the slave-traders, and it was entirely conceivable that the Slave of MS H.6 had been brought there from the Middle East. Indeed, an obscure reference in one of Ben Yiju’s letters suggested that he himself may have had occasional dealings with certain slave-traders from the Yemeni town of Zabid.

  At the same time, there were good reasons to believe that the Slave of MS H.6 was in fact from the region of Mangalore rather than the Middle East: the spelling of his name for one. The slaves who were traded in the markets of Egypt were usually given Arabic names of a distinctive kind—Lu’lu (‘Pearl’), for instance, and Jawhar (‘Jewel’)—names that served to locate them on the margins of human society. But the Slave’s name, whatever it was, did not bear any resemblance to the usual run of Middle-Eastern slave-names, and indeed it did not appear to be of Arabic, or even Semitic origin. While the evidence was not conclusive by any means, it was certainly strong enough to suggest that Goitein was right in assuming that the Slave’s origins lay in India.