Caught Straddling a Border": A Novelistic Reading of Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land

Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land has been noted for its mercurial defiance of generic classification. Reviews and critical commentaries variously praise or condemn the book as a traveler's tale, an (auto)ethnography, an alternative history, a polemic against modernization, the personal record of an anthropologist's research, and, perhaps less obviously, a novel. Inasmuch as the book is generically conflicted, it is likewise ideologically conflicted, formally embodying many of the very diremptions and modern disconnections that it ostensibly confronts. Anxieties over nationalism, cultural difference, modernization, historiography, and Third World subalternity not only act as the passive objects of Ghosh's narrative but also insinuate themselves into the very style, structure, and linguistic sensibility of the book in a manner that Bakhtin would recognize as "novelistic." Thus, I want to suggest that the alternative history or traveler's account that Ghosh's character believes himself to be narrating—a "History in the guise of a traveler's tale" reads the flyleaf—is in fact a novel in the Bakhtinian sense, in which the contradictions and internal conflicts of Ghosh's agenda, that of recovering a postcolonial historical sensibility and mapping out a new nationalist paradigm within a modernizing world, reveal themselves and, on occasion, counterpose (or dialogize) the very logic of that project.

In an Antique Land is constructed upon a dichotomy between a somewhat idyllic medieval Middle East—re-constructed through fragments of an ancient archive, the Geniza, now stored at Cambridge and a handful of other western institutions—and the contemporary Middle East, which Ghosh encounters firsthand while conducting his doctoral research in Egypt. These two worlds are manifest in the alternating adjacent narratives of the book. The primary narrative—the bulk of the text—concerns Ghosh's conversations with those whom he befriends in Egypt as well as his polemical observations about nationalism, religion, and modernity in the Middle East. The secondary narrative is intimately tied to the first through several thematic and geographic parallels. Thus, when Ghosh discovers that Nabeel and Isma'il have left home to pursue their dreams of material possession in Nashawy, the narrative immediately shifts to Ghosh's imaginative reconstruction of the lives of Ben Yiju and his slave, Bomma, in Nashawy. Similarly, Ghosh's arrival in Mangalore is prefaced by a briefly detailed history of the city leading up to the era of Ben Yiju.

There emerges, then, an interesting if problematic dialectic between the two epochs and their narrative reconstructions. Ghosh appears to filter his experience of the contemporary Middle East through its idealized antecedent in such a way that the two inform one another. Hence, the very structure and content of the Ben Yiju narrative are anchored in and primarily dependent upon Ghosh's travels and chance encounters in the contemporary narrative. More importantly, however, the medieval narrative serves as a place of refuge for the embattled narrator when the contemporary Middle East refuses to cooperate with his anthropologist's expectations and he finds himself on the wrong end of the authoritative gaze. Gauri Viswanathan suggests that "the frustration of being unable to explain either himself or his culture causes the narrator to veer off" into the project of Bomma and Ben Yiju (20–21). For example, despite his wish to leave Lataifa for Cairo, Ghosh realizes that he cannot seek help from his new friend, Shaikh Musa, because to do so would offend the honor of Abu-'Ali, a notorious opportunist with whose family Ghosh is living at the time:

It became clear to me then that there were complexities in Shaik Musa's relationship with Abu-'Ali that I did not understand and probably never would; that it would be deeply embarrassing for him if I were to ask him to help me find some other house, or family, to live in.

I realized then that my deliverance from Abu-'Ali would not come as easily as the dreams that took me to Cairo.

(54)

It is precisely the discovery of these complexities, present, palpable, and not easily surmountable through...