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69 pages 2 hours read

Amitav Ghosh

In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler's Tale

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1992

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PrologueChapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue Summary

Ghosh begins by stating, “The Slave of MS H.6 first stepped upon the stage of modern history in 1942” (13), in an obscure academic article. This article contained translations of several medieval documents. One 1148 letter, with the catalogue number MS H.6, was from an Iraqi merchant named Khalaf ibn Ishaq, who was writing from the Yemeni city of Aden to his friend and business partner, Abraham Ben Yiju, who was living in Mangalore, on the South-western coast of India. That same summer, the Second Crusade was moving through the Middle East, on its way to its eventual defeat at Damascus.

Khalaf ibn Ishaq’s letter is described as a “trapdoor” (15) into the lives that continued, largely uninterrupted, during these pivotal historical events. Khalaf would surely have known about the crusade, but the letter is focused on personal news and business. The letter concludes with Khalaf asking Ben Yiju to pass on “plentiful greetings” (16) to his enslaved person. Ghosh says that this is a rare insight into the lives of people normally left out of the historical record. The usual historical protagonists are the rich and consequential individuals, but this letter— and the enslaved person it mentions—shows the lives of the ordinary.

31 years after this article, another collection of letters was published. Here too, there was a letter from Khalaf in Aden to Ben Yiju, but this was written nine years before the previously published letter, in 1139. Khalaf again ignores the political events of the age (extensive wars between Muslim principalities in the Levant) and focuses on goods that he and Ben Yiju lost in a shipwreck. Near the end of the text, he again asks for his greetings to be sent on to the enslaved man.

The translator of the letters described the enslaved person as an Indian man, while Ben Yiju was a Jewish merchant of Tunisian origins. Ben Yiju spent 17 years in India before going to Egypt and dying in Cairo. His letters were discovered in a Synagogue chamber known as a “Geniza.” Ghosh first came across these letters as a 22-year-old Oxford student. Soon after, in 1980, he was in an Egyptian village called Lataifa, learning Arabic. He knew no details about the enslaved person of MS H.6, but felt entitled to be there as the enslaved man proved that he was not the first link between India and Egypt.

Prologue Analysis

In an Antique Land’s brief Prologue establishes the two narrative strands of the book, introduces key themes, and shows how Ghosh will link his travels in Egypt to the story of Ben Yiju and Bomma, the enslaved Indian man.

First, through presenting the Geniza letters against the backdrop of the more “consequential” historical events of the time, Ghosh introduces his key theme of Personal Histories within the Historical Narrative. Ghosh focuses on the everyday concerns of Khalaf ibn Ishaq because, as Ghosh states, he wants to use the letters as a “trapdoor” (15) into the lives of ordinary and unknown individuals that the Geniza collection provides. He purposefully distances himself from the “main” historical narrative through this clear shift of focus to the people instead of the events they lived during.

He illustrates this shift in focus using a metaphorical stage-play, meant to represent history as it is often understood. Bomma, the enslaved man, is presented as the ultimately anonymous figure whose mentions in a letter are a “brief debut, in the obscurest of theatres” (13) that did not make him “a recognizable face in the cast” (13). This analogy is a way of illustrating Ghosh’s goals. Presenting history as a “story” highlights that there are usually protagonists (often national leaders) and a broad narrative. It is this approach, Ghosh argues, that is often taught in schools and is “recognizable” (13). He, instead, commits to studying different subjects, whose impact is less well-known. His commitment to uncovering the lesser-known figures of history will pervade both his historical investigations and his descriptions of contemporary Egypt.

Ghosh also begins his exploration of the theme The Complexities of Identity and, in doing so, begins to lay out how his personal narrative and the historical will align. He hints at the multicultural world of the Indian Ocean trade that he will examine by giving details of Ben Yiju’s life: A Tunisian Jewish merchant who lived in Mangalore and corresponded with the Iraqi merchant Khalaf ibn Ishaq. Ghosh links their world to the modern one by using Bomma’s existence as proof of his “right to be there [in Egypt]” (19). Bomma set a precedence for Indian people residing in Egypt; Ghosh therefore demonstrates that he will approach questions surrounding modern and historical identities with the belief that personal connections can be drawn between them. He will try to move past a view of cultures and time periods as rigid dividing lines.

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