In an Antique Land : Recognition to Unrecognized

Abstract

In an Antique Land is a fascinating fiction engineered by AmitavGhosh blends a historical story with his own personal experiences as a graduate student in the Egyptian village La?a?ifa, published in 1992. In 1980s while pursuing graduation in cultural anthropology at the University of Alexandria, Ghosh learned about the discovery of ancient manuscripts, some of them dating back twelfth century A.D. in a Cairo Synagogue. The manuscript includes letters from a Jewish trader who owned an Indian slave. The script was both baffling and interesting at the same time. Ghosh became first interested, then obsessed, with this minor historical mystery and in his search for answers found himself drawn into the daily lives of two other persons, the Jewish merchant and his Indian slave in medieval Egypt. The fiction has two accounts, the first is the author’s textualised persona ‘Amitab’ as pronounced by Egyptian when he had been in Egypt for his ethnographic fieldwork conducted in an Egyptian village thirty years ago and the second, a historical account of twelfth-century Indian Ocean trade networks of Jewish merchant, Abraham Ben Yiju and his probably Indian slave, ‘Bomma’. The purpose of my paper is to unravel the unknown history of twelfth century.