Now Zaghloul had a question to ask, and as soon as he found an opportunity he said, in a breathless rush: ‘And in his
country do they have ghosts like we do?’
‘Allah!’ Ustaz Sabry exclaimed. ‘You could ask him about so
many useful and important things—religion or politics—and instead you ask him about ghosts! What will he think of you?’ ‘I don’t know about all that, ’ Zaghoul said stubbornly. ‘What I want to know is whether they have ghosts in his country like we do.’1

1Amitav Ghosh’s generically-mixed text In an Antique Land takes its title from a line in P. B. Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’. At the heart of that poem is an inscription that seems ironically deflated by its desolated surroundings, yet it is precisely the survival of the trace of writing that bestows meaning upon the ruin; a meaning that owes its poignancy to its near destruction. The ruin is a warning of hubris, but also an indisputable trace of greatness.2 Ghosh’s text is interested in the traces of history and in the obliteration—or nearobliteration—of the past. Much like Shelley’s poem it is the continuing existence of the material trace, as much of its legacy, that makes the historical significant. The book is a hybrid of two separate, though related, strands. The first is a novelisation of the time Ghosh spent in Egypt in the early 1980s as a student anthropologist. Although the villages of Lataifa and Nashawy and the fellaheen who live there are identified as fictional, the links to the thesis are clear.3 Interspersed with this portrait of the artist as a young anthropologist is the history of the twelfth-century Jewish-Arab merchant Abraham Ben Yiju and his Indian slave, Bomma. Elements of this narrative thread too have been published in another form: ‘The Slave of MS. H.6’ appeared in the seventh volume of Subaltern Studies in 1992, the same year as the publication of In an Antique Land.4

2In An Antique Land is a text akin to those of the Subaltern Studies tradition in that it highlights what Ghosh calls ‘those barely discernable traces that ordinary people leave upon the world’ (Ghosh 1992: 17). It is also an important work of critical ethnology or the ‘new anthropology’ in that it usefully problematises the act of writing about other cultures.5 While each of these characterisations seems valid to an extent, it is in the alignment of these two different types of narrative, and the types of intervention into various discursive systems that each makes possible, that another, important function of the text emerges—that of necromancy. Like Zaghloul, quoted at the opening of this essay, the text wants to deal with the ‘useful and important’ matters of religion and politics, but it is always crucially concerned with the ghostly; ghosts continually intrude into its recounting of contemporary Egyptian realities and the spectral presence of stories that cannot be adequately represented within the formal boundaries of history and anthropology resonates throughout the book. Ghosh prefaces his recent collection of essays with a reflection on ghosts: he suggests that the ghost of Mahatma Gandhi is, for his generation of Indians, ‘a ghost who was proof against all attempts at exorcism. His ideas had to be contended with, precisely because they were so at variance with the disorder and violence of the world we lived in.’6 Ghosts make their presence known through their incongruities with the present. The necromancer, however, only summons ghosts for their knowledge of the future; so does Ghosh conjure the restless spirits of the past to invoke the possibility of a future that challenges the necessity of the contemporary order.

3Researching the lives of Ben-Yiju and Bomma requires Ghosh to map a complex network of travels around the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, and the Persian Gulf. In doing so, he is able to invoke an astonishing pre-colonial cosmopolitanism that offers a stark contrast to contemporary modes of division both across this region and globally. Throughout the narrative, the ghosts of Ben Yiju, Bomma and their contemporaries offer a world view in stark contrast to present-day destructive nationalisms. At the end of the section entitled ‘Mangalore’, Ghosh documents the intrusion of the Portuguese into the Indian Ocean trade in the early sixteenth century and laments the passing of a spirit of transnational co-operation that was ‘devoured by that unquenchable, demonic thirst that has raged ever since, for almost five hundred years’ (Ghosh 1992: 288). He turns to the story of the Jewish-Arab trader and his Indian slave to evoke an alternative history and to conjure the ghosts of that history in a way that might make possible a contemporary cosmopolitan spirit of accommodation.

4James Clifford famously picked up on Ghosh’s comparison of the Egyptian village to an airport transit lounge and, despite Clifford’s enthusiasm for the trope, the image has overtones of the most blinkered type of contemporary cosmopolitanism.7 Craig Calhoun, for example, has deeply questioned what he calls ‘the class consciousness of frequent travellers’, suggesting that ‘would-be cosmopolitans’ may not display sufficient awareness of ‘the extent to which cosmopolitan appreciation of global diversity is based on privileges of wealth and perhaps especially citizenship in certain states’ and that ‘a soft cosmopolitanism that doesn’t challenge capitalism or Western hegemony may be an ideological diversion’.8 Ghosh’s invocation of historical precedence is surely intended to suggest that the urge to cosmopolitics is not a new one; but this is not all that is achieved by In An Antique Land. The location from which a cosmopolitan worldview is initialised is made central to the text. The account of Bomma from Subaltern Studies serves to introduce this unexpected trace as history. Its reframing in In an Antique Land is able simultaneously to carry out other work in critiquing the location of knowledge.

5Among the many stories that Ghosh recounts in his exploration of the history of Abraham Ben Yiju’s world, two especially capture the particular disruptive potential of the figure of the ghost. In the first, the weaver Zaghloul tells the narrator the story of Sidi Abu-Kanaka, the local saint revered by the people of Nashawy. Much renowned in his lifetime, on the Sidi’s death the villagers built him a special grave in their cemetery. Years later the government decided to build an irrigation canal to serve the region. Initially much welcomed by the fellaheen, the canal grew to be contentious when it became apparent that its route would run through the cemetery. Despite protests, the building work went ahead as planned. However, as the engineers dug through the graveyard, they came to a grave that their spades were unable to disturb. This grave, as hard as rock, was impervious to everything they used on it. Eventually, the engineers begged the descendents of Sidi Adu-Kanaka to allow them to open the grave, on doing so they found the body of the saint undecayed, and giving off a beautiful perfumed smell. The canal was forced to bypass the cemetery (Ghosh 1992: 138-139). Later in the text, the narrator recounts a 1990 visit to Mangalore in East India, where he was following the trail of Ben-Yiju. He stops to investigate a Bhuta shrine (part of the local spirit-cult disapproved of by canonical Hinduism). The Pujari who tends the shrine tells him of an incident in the past where the government had decreed that a road be built that cut through the shrine. Despite fierce opposition from the locals, the engineers went ahead with the excavation. However, as soon as the bulldozers tried to approach the shrine, they were immobilised and nothing could be done to continue with the demolition. The road was forced to bypass the shrine (Ghosh 1992: 265).

6The repetitions involved in these stories are significant to the haunting of In an Antique Land in a number of ways. The saints who exercise power from beyond the grave are emblematic of the many revenants that cannot be laid to rest. The repetition itself marks and invokes the cycle of haunting as, even within the narrative, tropes continually return and refuse to be exorcised by the sceptical refutation of them as superstition or folklore. But in this instance, it is also particularly significant that the ghosts act as bulwarks against the encroachment of modernity as represented by the canal in Egypt and the road in India. Javed Majeed questions the value of Ghosh’s investment in tombs in In an Antique Land, suggesting that the ‘association with death’ underlines that such discoveries have ‘no purchase on modernity and its exclusive identities’.9 However, it is precisely because of this incongruity of the hauntings within the march of the modern that Ghosh wishes to conjure these spirits.

7The alignment of the discursive procedures of anthropology and history enforces a rupture with the totalising knowledge that each might seek to elaborate. Majeed reads this meeting of modes as predicated upon a ‘discontinuity’ that is ‘fabricated’ in order to establish a space for the writer to substitute his own ‘pre-given’ continuity between the medieval and modern elements of the narrative (Majeed 1995: 47). However, this view is challenged by Ato Quayson, who suggests that the need for Ghosh to establish more than one kind of ‘author-function’ in the text is driven by

the perception of a relational void. This relational void is discursively related to the difficulties involved in imaginatively invoking the ‘world of accommodations’ between medieval and late-twentieth-century India and Egypt. The discontinuity, then, far from being a fabrication, is a felt experience of the imagined loss of a world of intricate relations between Egypt and India.10

8This felt experience is key to the motivation behind Ghosh’s conflation. His evocation of continuity relies on the presence of the ghostly: that which cannot be present, but which nonetheless is. Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan see the book as ‘fulfil[ling] a “counter-orientalist” narrative’ in that its presentation of information is ‘framed within the context of a recuperative historical narrative’ that serves to authorise Ghosh’s intellectual labours by locating his researches in their ‘point of origin at the confluence between interrelated Eastern cultures’.11 However, origin becomes conceptually unimportant in the text, despite the appeal to history. The force of the ghostly is not to be found in the circumstances of the ghost’s beginning, but rather in its present incarnation and the implications of its disruption to the process of elucidating a vision of the future. The writer as necromancer gestures to the haunted space between past events and present realities, the ‘relational void’, but it is in order to challenge a contemporary restriction of interpretation.

9Ghosh concludes his prologue, which introduces Bomma, by informing the reader that he first came across ‘the Slave of MS H.6’ in a footnote to a book he was reading in an Oxford library in 1978. His researches into the topic took place years later, long after his time with the fellaheen. Nonetheless, the skeletal knowledge he possesses of this man gives him what he considers a right to be in Lataifa, a ‘sense of entitlement’ (Ghosh 1992: 19). Ghosh’s position as a ‘cosmopolitan celebrity’ is not something he finds unproblematic.12 Neither does he fail to grasp the particular privilege of his position as a doctoral student at Oxford and the structural authority this gives him as a commentator on the rural Egyptian communities he surveys. The framing that takes place in this book is concerned to expose the existence of this authority and attempting to establish an alternative system of relations through which knowledge might be articulated. Much of the material he gathers on Ben Yiju and Bomma is taken from documents that originally found their home in the Cairo Geniza, a storehouse of written fragments that once was a part of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo. Ghosh carefully details the nineteenth- and twentieth-century dispersal of the Geniza manuscripts into the libraries of Europe and North America and is explicit in his comparison of this archival work to the more obviously insidious practises of the colonial era: ‘Egypt had become the scholarly counterpart of those great landmasses that were then being claimed and explored by European settlers’ (Ghosh 1992: 82). Shirley Chew has highlighted ‘the close, almost cherishing attentiveness Ghosh brings to the materiality of the Geniza fragments’ and that this works in part to effect parody of the ‘scholar-researcher’s performative act’.13 However, while this deliberate strategy of alienation from the role of the scholar is extremely significant to Ghosh’s project, the insistence on proximity we find in this cherishing of the materiality of these documents is of key importance throughout Ghosh’s book. This is not, however, in order to demonstrate the veracity of his vision, but rather to draw attention to the location from which his account is articulated.

10As the participant-observer of anthropological methodology, and an emissary from Oxford, Ghosh’s narrator lives within the communities of Lataifa and Nashawy, but is supposedly separate from them.14 Yet while Oxford acts to legitimate his position, Calcutta undermines it. The fellaheen refer to him as ‘Doktor al-Hindi’: the honorific of the first half of the title is fatally destabilised by the location implied by the second. As an Indian, the young narrator is infantilised by his hosts as well as being seen as the representative of ‘barbaric’ practises. The only time when his knowledge is actually respected in this community is when a water-pump manufactured in India is delivered. After he has been called upon to offer his ‘expert’ opinion on the pump, he reflects on his position:

I stayed up a long time that night, marvelling at the respect the water pump had earned me; I tried to imagine where I would have stood... if mine had been a country that exported machines that were even bigger, better and impressive—cars and tractors perhaps, not to speak of ships and planes and tanks. I began to wonder how Lataifa would have looked if I had had the privilege of floating through it, protected by the delegated power of technology, of looking out untroubled through a sheet of clear glass.
(Ghosh 1992: 74)

11This moment of seeming longing for the space of disinterested knowledge that is accessible only to the people of the advanced industrial nations of the West is in fact crucial as a device to show Ghosh’s wilful disavowal of the blindness of such objectivity. The unheimlich moments he is forced to endure because of his lack of that clear glass screen are in fact the most productive—it is when he experiences the discomfort of proximity that he becomes freed, to a degree, from his complicity with global networks of domination. It is the urge to preserve analytic capital afforded by such disjunction that motivates the necromantic historical narrative. Bomma’s incongruous presence in twelfth-century Egypt is a disruptive moment not solely because of his poor fit within the narratives the reader expects of the past, but more importantly because such an intrusion into assumed certainties authorises and entitles Ghosh’s own attempts at disruption of the hegemonic Western discourses of modernity found within the scholarly endeavours of history and anthropology. Bomma does not fit neatly into a traditional Orientalist narrative; he performs the role of the dangerous supplement which adds to without adding up.15 The summoning of the ghost enables a deliberate possession, in which our narrator disavows his privilege to become instead marginal. The comfort of totalising narratives is refused and authority is foregone in favour of affinity.

12In Specters of Marx, Derrida continually returns to Marsellus’s cry before the ghost of Old Hamlet—‘Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio’. Derrida points out how inappropriate this plea is:

What seems almost impossible is to speak always of the specter, to speak to the specter, to speak with it... and the thing seems even more difficult for a reader, an expert, a professor, an interpreter, in short, for what Marcellus calls a ‘scholar’.... The reasons for this are essential. As theoreticians or witnesses, spectators, observers, and intellectuals, scholars believe that looking is sufficient. Therefore, they are not always in the most competent position to do what is necessary: speak to the specter.... There has never been a scholar who really, and as a scholar, deals with ghosts.16

13For Ghosh to deal with ghosts, he has, to a degree, to shed the trappings of the scholar and reject a tainted empiricism.

14Of course, Derrida rejects the relevance of the scholar only to bring this figure back in the shape of Marx himself; neither is Ghosh’s disavowal of authority total. Instead it is placed in abeyance; the empirical is ironised and continually plays second fiddle to the intersubjective. As with the extensive unheralded notes that succeed the text of In An Antique Land, Ghosh reverses the structure of so much Western commentary in which its structuring logics are hidden in plain sight, and instead places such an emphasis on the apparatus of knowledge so as to dispel any blind faith we may retain in the transparency of its representations.

15The future-orientated invocation of the ghostly is clear when Ghosh moves to identifying the curious immateriality of life in the Egyptian villages, once subject to a global understanding. While the young narrator is enjoying local wedding celebrations, he is taken away from the party to undergo an ‘interrogation’ at the hands of village elders. Their questions confuse him: ‘ “Are most of your houses still built of mud-brick as they are here?” and “Do your people cook on gas stoves or do they still burn straw as we do?”’ (Ghosh 1992: 200), and his confusion is largely due to the use of the word ‘still’. Eventually he comes to realise that

the fellaheen saw the material circumstances of their world in exactly the same way that a university economist would: as a situation that was shamefully anachronistic, a warp upon time; I understood that their relationships with the objects of their everyday lives was [sic] never innocent of the knowledge that there were other places, other countries which did not have mud-walled houses and horse-drawn ploughs, so that those objects, those horses and ploughs, were insubstantial things, ghosts displaced in time, waiting to be exorcised and laid to rest. (Ghosh 1992: 200-201)

16That which should be material becomes ghostly when viewed through a global prism. Ghosh, then, wants to dislocate that view of the ‘university economist’, to revalue the ghostly and make a stance against the weighted logic of the empirical. The ontic seems irredeemably implicated with the hard divisions of modernity manifest in the economic disparities between the over- and under-developed countries. To work outside of these divisions, in order to formulate an alternative to their stultifying logic, requires a rejection of knowledge-bound reality and the embrace of a mode of interpersonal relation that articulates otherwise.

17A similar sense of the complicated relation that the ‘native’ culture has to the circulation of its representation in the global consumption of knowledge can be found in Ghosh’s 1990 story ‘An Egyptian in Baghdad’. Much of the material in this tale was later incorporated into In an Antique Land, but among that which was left out is the description of an evening in Luxor:

In the evenings, when the cool breeze blows in from the Nile, the people of Luxor gather on the promenade along the riverfront. The steamers are brilliantly lit. They are a bit like glass cases at an aquarium: they seem to display entire cross-sections of an ecological niche. The strollers lean over the railings and watch: there’s a honeymooning couple, peering nervously from behind the curtains of their cabin, people sitting at the bar, a trim old lady pumping away at a cycling machine, the waiters watching television. The best time to watch the steamers is dinnertime. The tourists file up the stairs, out of the bars, and into the dining room. They sit at their tables, and then the lights are dimmed. Suddenly ‘folkloristic troupes’ appear, dressed in embroidered fustans, and break into dance. The tourists put down their silverware and watch the dancers. The strollers lean forward and watch the tourists. Egyptians watching foreigners watching Egyptians dance.
What if the strollers burst into dance? I ask myself. What then?
(Ghosh 2005: 221)

18The gaze of the visitors from the West upon the display of a truncated ‘culture’ is mirrored in, and authenticated by, the gaze of the locals upon the tourists. The ‘strollers’ seem to remain passive in an acceptance of the legitimated point of view possessed by the tourists, and it is this imported understanding of the spectacle which seems at first to prevail. Ghosh’s vision of the unwatched watchers breaking into a dance that mimicked, and thus made ridiculous, the exoticised display serves in many ways to reinforce that this act of counter-hegemony to the Western gaze does not take place and the reductive vision of a timeless and incorporeal Egypt seems preserved. However, the existence of the third angle of perception, that of the narrator as he contemplates the possibility of disruption, actually opens up a space of counter-hegemonic potential within the story. An alternative future is imagined, and while his location in this story as observer cannot allow him to explore the actual, rather than imagined, agency of Luxor’s evening walkers, the proposed rejection of the dynamic of the Western gaze suggests a future that does not have to bow to the materiality of the status quo. As for the Egyptian official who is unable to understand why an Indian would possibly want to visit the tomb of a Jewish holy man in Egypt, because ‘the partitioning of the past’ has been carried out with such success that ‘the mowlid of Sidi Abu-Hasira was an anomaly within the categories of knowledge represented by those divisions’ (Ghosh 1992: 340), the seeming fixity of the current order is too easily granted an immutability through time. However, Ghosh as a writer, as a historian, anthropologist and necromancer, is able to demonstrate in the act of intervening through representation the contingency and fragility of these constructions.

19Ghosh ‘ties his wagon to imagination, and especially to stories’17 and it would seem that his grounding in the potentiality of narration is at least partly at the heart of Gauri Viswanathan’s attack on In an Antique Land. She contends:

no matter how moving Ghosh’s book might be, and no matter how appealing his humanist call for dissolving barriers between nations, peoples, and communities on the grounds that world civilizations were syncretic long before the divisions introduced by the territorial boundaries of nation-states, the work cannot get beyond nostalgia to offer ways of dealing with what is, after all, an intractable political problem.18

20While Viswanathan’s point that Ghosh’s text sidesteps the most painful aspects of contemporary religious division cannot be denied, she perhaps underestimates the potential for nostalgia as a political and ethical practice. History is not given as a simple alternative to the present in In an Antique Land, neither are the mere facts of the interactions of the past offered to deny contemporary partitions of culture and identity, but rather, nostalgia functions ‘to recover not only what should have been remembered and preserved but also relationships and communities that could have been’.19 When Ghosh describes the assembly of Rommel’s and Montgomery’s armies outside Alexandria in 1942 as marked by the ‘cosmopolitan gaiety’ that the British Eighth army brought to the city (Ghosh 1992: 15), he is deliberately offering an alternative vision that defies the violence of history, rather than makes claims for the non-existence of such bloodshed. The ghosts of alternative imaginings are conjured not as empty justifications for re-imagining historical process, but rather to inspire the continuation of ethical challenges to reductive visions of the future that assume the automatic perpetuation of the current order of things. Gaurav Desai’s nuanced account of the role of nostalgia in Ghosh’s text contrasts the mode of the nostalgic with that of the melancholic, which evinces imprisonment by the past.20 Despite Desai’s reservations over what might be elided through this strategy, we may read the rejection of melancholia as entailing also the abandonment of determinism and allowing for hope regarding a genuinely-accommodating cosmopolitanism to spring forth.

21The most famous scene in the book is perhaps the anthropologist’s encounter with the village Imam. He first goes to the Imam in order to find out more about the traditional remedies in which the religious man supposedly specialises. It is revealed that the Imam has rejected these traditional medicines and now prizes most his hypodermic syringe. In their climactic encounter the Imam turns on India and accuses it of backwardness. Ghosh defends his homeland and the argument escalates into an appraisal of their countries’ respective military might: ‘in my country... we have guns and tanks and bombs. And they’re better than anything you’ve got in Egypt—we’re a long way ahead of you’ (Ghosh 1992: 235-236). These two ‘third-world’ subjects, who are both ‘travelling in the West’, resort to a destructive competition cast within the terms of the worst aspects of modernity. Critics have read this scene, as it is no doubt intended, as showing the difficulties of intercultural conversation; Robert Dixon describes it as ‘another triumph for the West’.21 The recounting of the incident, however, does not end there, and too few critics go on to explore the subsequent events in this scene. Christi Ann Merrill, in challenging (to an extent) Viswanathan’s negative appraisal of the book’s address of the politics of religious syncretism, has skilfully explored the ‘scene of halting translation and cautious humour’ that concludes this chapter.22 Ghosh’s narrator finds solace in a discussion with the irreverent Khamees the Rat, whose refusal to invest in forms of authority allows him to offer a genuine and unconditional form of friendship and understanding:

‘Do not be upset, ya doktór. Forget all those guns and things. I’ll tell you what: I’ll come to visit you in your country, even though I’ve never been anywhere. When you leave, I’ll come with you; I’ll come all the way to India.’
He began to scratch his head, thinking hard, and then he added: ‘But if I die there, you must remember to bury me.’
(Ghosh 1992: 200)

22Despite Marx’s famous statement that in modernity ‘all that is solid melts into air’, the effects of modernity are felt in the postcolonial world as indisputably material, both on a technological and cultural level. To counter the hurtful logic of these relations, Ghosh looks for a way of defying the ontic totality of modernity’s empiricism. He finds it in the ghostly traces of accommodation and communication that can be inferred from history and continue to manifest in uncomplicated everyday friendship. Like those ghosts who rise up to protect their tombs against the particular paths of modernity, In An Antique Land stands up for an incorporeality that supplements and displaces Ghosh’s inevitable implication in the discourses of the West.