Lines, Borders, and Ties: Circumventing the West in Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land
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This essay examines the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh’s nonfictional work, In an Antique Land (1992), through the figure of the “line” to show that Ghosh circumvents the West in order to imagine and represent non-Western relationships in a manner that neither foregrounds nor excludes Western influence. Based in the Indian Ocean region, his book is made up of two parallel parts: the first, a record of his doctoral field work in anthropology in two Egyptian peasant villages in the late twentieth century, and the second, his reconstruction of a story about a twelfth-century Arab Jewish travelling merchant Abraham Ben Yiju and his slaves, Bomma and Ashu. Ghosh excavates the lost lines between medieval and modern times, so starkly different in the former’s borderless cosmopolitanism against the latter’s bordered territories and partitioned knowledge— depicted by the author as a direct or indirect result of European imperialism, ongoing since the sixteenth century. Ghosh also attempts to draw new lines, so that modern Egypt and India can find ways to converse, despite their differences, and to forge ties. These plural lines allow for a nuanced reading of Ghosh’s project that highlights his creative representation of a postcolonial non-West refracted not through colonialism but through a pre-colonial Middle East well before violent contact. In doing so, I also argue against critics who have read Ghosh’s treatment of the West in the book as an erasure or exclusion, as well as those who have criticized him for a lack of self-awareness about his Western privilege.
Abstract
This essay examines the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh’s nonfictional work, In an Antique Land (1992), through the figure of the “line” to show that Ghosh circumvents the West in order to imagine and represent non-Western relationships in a manner that neither foregrounds nor excludes Western influence. Based in the Indian Ocean region, his book is made up of two parallel parts: the first, a record of his doctoral field work in anthropology in two Egyptian peasant villages in the late twentieth century, and the second, his reconstruction of a story about a twelfth-century Arab Jewish travelling merchant Abraham Ben Yiju and his slaves, Bomma and Ashu. Ghosh excavates the lost lines between medieval and modern times, so starkly different in the former’s borderless cosmopolitanism against the latter’s bordered territories and partitioned knowledge— depicted by the author as a direct or indirect result of European imperialism, ongoing since the sixteenth century. Ghosh also attempts to draw new lines, so that modern Egypt and India can find ways to converse, despite their differences, and to forge ties. These plural lines allow for a nuanced reading of Ghosh’s project that highlights his creative representation of a postcolonial non-West refracted not through colonialism but through a pre-colonial Middle East well before violent contact. In doing so, I also argue against critics who have read Ghosh’s treatment of the West in the book as an erasure or exclusion, as well as those who have criticized him for a lack of self-awareness about his Western privilege.
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