Exploring History Through a Traveler's Tale in In an Antique Land

subhadip majumdar: "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..."

---Amitav Ghosh

Thus begins a magical story of two Indians in Egypt, Bomma, a 12th C slave brought there by his Jewish master, and Amitav Ghosh who digs out his story, exposing ties that have bound together India and Egypt, Hindus and Muslims and Jews, from the Crusades to present Egypt!

A masterpiece again from the Man who is my favorite novelist, of our times!

India on Jun 11, 2022

Damyant Luthra: The description of socioeconomic scenario in Egypt for that time has real depth. Their thinking, their concerns, their relationships with family, village folks, and with their neighbouring countries is wonderfully described. A delightful book.

India on Mar 24, 2022

S. Epstein: This author can do no wrong. A brilliant insightful writer that can tell a tale. Warm, witty, charming and possibly the best book I have ever read about the field studies of an anthropologist. This is among my favorite of Ghosh's works and this says a lot as he is my favorite writer on this planet.

United States on Aug 03, 2019

Nancy W. Kranz: I read this in conjunction with a course on Jewish communities under Islam from Mohammad to the end of the Middle Ages. This was most interesting, especially as regards source information from the Cairo Ben Ezra synagogue gineza. Without proper background, the reader may have a less rewarding experience.

United States on Mar 01, 2016

I. Black: In the early 1980s Amitav Ghosh was living in rural Egypt, engaged in field world for his social anthropology doctorate. In this book Ghosh plaits together three different stories: that of his time living in two Egyptian villages, his return to the villages eight years later and the life of 12th century North African Jewish merchant Ben Yiju and his Indian `slave' (actually more of a business associate) Bomma. Ghosh discovered the Ben Yiju story by examining documents from the massive haul found in the Geniza (synagogue document repository) of the Palestinian synagogue in the Egyptian town of Fustat. The documents were acquired by Cambridge University, where Ghosh tracked them down.

Ghosh parallels his own sojourns in Egypt, the Malabar coast and return to Egypt, with those of Ben Yiju, who spent some twenty years in Mangalore, marrying a freed Indian slave, before returning to North Africa. Gradually pictures are built up of Egypt and India, ancient and modern. The fascinating revelations about Jewish life in medieval Egypt and the Maghreb , the close relationship between the Muslims and Jews, destroyed only in the last century, are intertwined with Ghosh's own story, a...

United Kingdom on Oct 24, 2012

Draz Mohammad Waguih: This book was first published in 1994 . The author had spend time in Egypt in the early eighties doing fieldwork for a D.Phil thesis while a graduate student in Oxford.Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956 and raised and educated in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Iran, Egypt, India, and the United Kingdom, He presented his thesis in Oxford in 1991 entitled ``Kinship in Relation to the Economic and Social Organization of an Egyptian Village Community''. In An Antique Land is effectively a rewriting of the ethno- graphic material of the thesis, but with a completely revolutionized focus.
Amitav Ghosh was able in this book to present to the reader a completely different text than the traditional ethnographic texts. He is a real master of story telling and character creation. The Egyptian village that he studied comes to life and his informants become real life persons with their feelings, beliefs, passions and hopes. As an Indian he is able to communicate with a society that has so much in common with his own and does not have the misunderstandings that sometimes slants the writings of Western anthropologists. As an Egyptian I found in this book the empathy that I find in my own heart...

United States on Sep 09, 2012

reader 451: What do Egypt and India have in common? They are both predominantly rural, poor countries where ordinary people hanker after the trappings of modernity yet live immersed in the myths and practices of age-old traditions. But they also share a rich history of trade and migration, especially belonging to the Middle Ages. Such are the two strands from which Amitav Ghosh has woven In an Antique Land.

Gosh, otherwise a novelist, spent a number of years in rural Egypt in the 1980s on a historical research trip. Since his training was in anthropology, he also made meticulous notes of his everyday environment. The result is a volume that is both travel and history writing, and both sociological and private testimony. Gosh gives us Egyptian village life in moving detail: its family clans, its festivals, its preoccupations with money, jobs, marriage. The writer was there, took the time to learn the dialect, befriended his hosts and took a genuine interest in their lives. And if he was a Hindu, this only made him an attraction among a friendly and curious public. His book shines with simple but quirky anecdotes, and with dialogues more telling than any long rendition. Meanwhile, in...

United Kingdom on Aug 16, 2012

Daniel Myers: This book takes its title from the first line of Shelley's poem "Ozymandias": "I met a traveller from an antique land". None of the other reviewers, for whatever reason, have mentioned this extremely piquant fact. The reason for its piquancy is that Ghosh here explores the same theme as Shelley does in his poem: The passing of all things earthly.

Though it is more evident in Shelley's poem, the dual narratives in the book, one set in Aden, Malabar and other entrepots of a millennium past, one amongst the "fellahs" of Egypt in the decade leading up to the Persian Gulf War in 1990, point the reader to contemplate the ever-shifting sands of history and temporality, the ever-changing relationships of religion to religion, country to country, person to person.

The passage on Malabar, once a great trading centre, is exquisite:

"There is nothing now anywhere in 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...

United States on May 09, 2010

harri181: Amitav Ghosh is an author par excellence...The Glass House and Hungry Tide (if one sees the BBC Documentary on Ganges, it would go hand in hand with Hungry Tide):his command and portrayal in English is simply superb. Whatever prompted him to go to Egypt and write this in depth historical portrayal alongwith an interesting account of Egyptian village life ..this would surely be interesting to know...This book needed time and one needed to be attentive..its certainly not the kind of absorbing reading as with Glass Palace or Hungry Tide....but was nevertheless interesting for me to take it on a long distance flight...this would appeal to anyone interested in the connections between Jewish History, India and Egypt...there was a thriving Jewish community in Kochi and Calcutta & I am sure there will be one once again as the face of Indian economy changes...but its certainly not a book for a short bus journey...

United Kingdom on Aug 18, 2007

Jonathan Groner: Although I was immediately fascinated by the historical and literary detective story of the 12th century Jewish merchant and his Indian servant, I did not fully understand Ghosh's mission in writing this book until nearly at the end. Then it became clear to me. This book is an elegy for a way of life that is forever lost. In the 12th century, Jews, Muslims, and Hindus worked in tandem as traders and merchants, with the only reprisals being angry remonstrances rather than armed violence. What we call sophisticated Western civilization has changed all of that.

Just as Portuguese and Dutch invasions of the Indian Ocean ended the medieval way of cooperation, the quiet life of the Egyptian villages in which Ghosh lived also ended -- within our lifetimes. As televisions and refrigerators came to those villages, so did anger, strife, and urbanization. There was money to be made during the Iran-Iraq war if you were a young Egyptian man, but you would never return to your village.

This book was slow-moving in places but ultimately unforgettable.

United States on Mar 27, 2006