Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination

If one were to think of a contemporary text that has appealed to a variety of critics for its vision of travel, migration, and the lived experience of cosmopolitanism, Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land would surely emerge as a contender.1 On its first American appearance in 1993, Clifford Geertz celebrated its historical vision of a “multicultural bazaar,” and his favorable reading was echoed with only minor caveats by numerous reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times Book Review, the American Scholar, and similar brokers in the creation of metropolitan tastes.² Indeed, the book was much anticipated by its readership, excerpts of it having already been published in the literary journal Granta, with portions, in a more scholarly tone, appearing in an issue of Subaltern Studies, a journal on the radar of most scholars of postcolonial cultural studies.³ One such early reader was James Clifford, whose much cited essay “Traveling Cultures” drew upon the excerpt in Granta. Clifford’s reinvocation of In an Antique Land and its celebration of the “transit lounge” of culture in the opening pages of his collection of essays Routes has virtually sealed the already formidable canonical status of Ghosh’s text in the domain of contemporary U.S. cultural theory.⁴

In an Antique Land is one of the few literary texts that is centrally concerned with the twelfth-century Indian Ocean trade between Egypt and India conducted by Jewish and Muslim traders and their slaves. Re-creating a history of this trade partly from documents discovered in the Cairo Geniza and partly through speculation, Ghosh’s text traverses the conventional genres of fiction, nonfiction, life narrative, and travelogue, all of which will be genres of interest in the chapters to come. With its expansive spatial and temporal frame, Ghosh’s text is a particularly appropriate point of departure for our readings of Indian Ocean exchanges. Its focus on a Jewish trader in twelfth-century Cairo and on contemporary Egyptians who are marked both by a continental African identity as well as a pan-Islamic consciousness speaks to Achille Mbembe’s call for a wider and more capacious understanding of African identities than those that rely on an inherited discourse of race. Moreover, by focusing on a temporality that is, in part, prior to the advent of European colonialism in Africa, Ghosh’s text invites us to ask broader questions about the nature of intercultural exchanges and specifically of the ways in which they are mediated by the political institutions in which they take place. The text’s interest in the religious syncretisms of the past and their disruption with the advent of modernity will be echoed in our reading of Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack, and, like Vassanji, Ghosh also grapples with issues of cross-racial romance and its vexed nature in the form of concubinage. Since commerce is at the heart of this Indian Ocean narrative, it resonates directly with the later experiences of the likes of Nanji Kalidas Mehta and Manubhai Madhvani. Yet, because the text also narrates Ghosh’s own presence in Egypt in the 1980s as an Indian ethnographer, it enables us to thematize what for many observers is an unconventional role for an Indian in Africa—that of a scholar.⁵ Finally, and perhaps most significantly, by introducing the Indian slaves Bomma and Ashu into the twelfth-century frame, Ghosh’s text helps subvert the stereotypical image of the Indian in Africa as always having been in a position of privilege.

Written as a “history in the guise of a traveler’s tale,” In an Antique Land is at once a travelogue, a detective story, a romance with a lost world, and an anthropologist’s attempt to write a dialogic ethnography.6 It is not a text, I will argue, that is immune from some of the slippages of what we now commonly recognize as the Orientalist imaginary, but its participation in that discursive economy is calculated, ironic, or, as Ali Behdad might put it, self-consciously belated.⁷ One way of describing the book is to suggest that the two main narratives interwoven here are those of anthropology and history. The anthropological narrative is that of Ghosh going to two villages in the Nile Delta in Egypt, the first time for almost a year in 1980–81 to conduct fieldwork related to his doctoral dissertation and then again briefly in 1988 and 1990. These later visits were arguably those of a writer less invested in the formal profession of academic anthropology and more those of someone seeking to reconnect with a community of friends left behind. They are also the visits of a writer who has, in the intervening years, found a renewed interest in the historical connections between the two lands of Egypt, the subject of his study, and India, which is, as immigration documents often say, his “country of origin.” It is at this juncture, then, that the historical narrative enters the frame. For, in addition to being an ethnographic memoir, In an Antique Land is also the story of Abraham Ben Yiju, a Jewish merchant who was active in the India trade in the twelfth century. In its simplest form, it is the story of a man originally from Ifriqiya who went as a trader to Mangalore on the Malabar Coast sometime before A.D. 1132 and lived there for nearly two decades.⁸ He seems to have had a female slave named Ashu whom he manumitted in 1132. It is likely that he married Ashu and had two children with her. As far as his business interests are concerned, he is known to have had a factory in the area that worked with bronze goods, and we also know that his overseas trade was primarily handled by a slave whose name and identity are subject to debate. There is evidence that in 1149 Ben Yiju went to Aden, a major gateway on the trade route between India and Egypt, and that at some point thereafter he moved to the city of Fustat, known today as Old Cairo.⁹

If the anthropological narrative is based on Ghosh’s own fieldwork, the historical one is based on an extraordinary triumph of chance over will, of luck over intent. Medieval Jews believed that it was sacrilegious to destroy any piece of paper that might have the name of God inscribed upon it. Rather than allowing such papers to be destroyed naturally by the elements or by accidental fires, Jewish communities in a variety of places deposited such documents in a special chamber in the synagogue called the geniza. Soon, what was meant to be a practice related to documents of a religious nature was extended to almost all documents written in the Hebrew script, which came to be considered holy in itself.10 Secular documents like trade records, everyday correspondence, deeds of manumission, and the like were all literally thrown into the geniza for proper, religiously sanctioned burial at a later date. Through what might have been an act of sheer negligence, one such geniza was never properly emptied, discarded documents collecting in it over a period of several centuries.¹¹ It is the discovery of this storehouse of documents—the Cairo Geniza—that enables the reconstruction of the story of Ben Yiju, since Ghosh’s twelfth-century tale is based mainly on documents found in this, shall we say, dustbin of history.¹²

For much of our knowledge of the world of Ben Yiju and the Cairo Geniza we are indebted to the formidable work of S. D. Goitein. Born in April 1900 in a small village in Bavaria, Goitein pursued his studies at Frankfurt University where at the age of twenty-three he completed a dissertation entitled “Prayer in the Qur’an.” Moving to Palestine thereafter, he became, in 1925, the first instructor of Islamic studies at the newly opened Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Research on the traditions of the Yemenite Jews that Goitein initiated at this post continued to resonate in his later work on the Cairo Geniza. In 1957 he moved to the United States to fill the chair in Arabic studies at the University of Pennsylvania and in 1971 was appointed as a long-term fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. It was in the United States that he concentrated on studying the materials from the Cairo Geniza and by the time of his death in 1985 he had completed numerous studies on the life and times of the people associated with it.¹³ His crowning achievement was the six-volume study A Mediterranean Society (which, by my rough calculations, exceeds three thousand pages), but he also wrote a book entitled Jews and Arabs: Their Contacts Through the Ages (1955) and edited a volume, Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders, both of which are of immediate interest to readers of Ghosh.

After presenting a reading of the critical or “belated” Orientalism of the text, particularly of its representations of Islam in contemporary Egypt, I turn in the second half of the chapter to read Ghosh’s book in the light of scholarship such as Goitein’s. Unlike a typical travelogue, the last few pages of In an Antique Land are dedicated to an extensive documentation of sources, and, as such, I take them to be an invitation to readers on Ghosh’s part to read the scholarly literature on this period. Goitein’s work makes the most prominent appearance in these pages, but it is supplemented by the work of several other scholars. Through such a reading, I hope to draw attention to the political as well as aesthetic tensions in Ghosh’s imaginative reconstruction of this older world and especially to his attempts to link it with our own contemporaneity. It should be clear by the end of this exercise that the point is not to decry Ghosh’s fidelity to the historical record but rather to understand the dynamics of what might be called the production of history in a nostalgic mode.14 I will suggest that the all-too-common structural affinity of such nostalgia with discourses of purity and authenticity is challenged in Ghosh’s narrative, where cultural, racial, and economic hybridity, mixture, and exchange appear as privileged terms. A central part of my project is to track, in both the historical and the anthropological accounts, the political stakes involved in foregrounding these alleged mixings and to question what other processes they may elide.

One of the lasting legacies of the poststructural turn in the social sciences has been a detailed attention to the processes of writing. Representations, Paul Rabinow has noted, are “social facts,” both in the sense that they enter the realm of the worldly, often affecting in no small measure the range of speakable “truths” about their referents, but also conversely in the sense that the only purchase we have on “social facts” themselves are through their representations.¹⁵ It is this insight that has led a number of commentators to study the use of language, literary tropes, and narrative devices in ethnographic as well as historical texts. How is the “other”—cultural or historical—being constructed in the text? How is the author or the reader positioned in this scene of alterity? What is the relationship between the “author” and the bearer(s) of “authority” in this scenario? To what extent is an attempt being made to listen to the voice of the “other,” and how is this voice made audible within the text? These questions have continued to resonate with different emphases in the disciplinary metacommentaries that have been provided for anthropology by the scholars associated with the seminal Writing Culture volume (particularly James Clifford, George Marcus, and Michael M. J. Fischer) and in history by scholars such as Hayden White and Michel de Certeau.¹⁶

What makes a text such as In an Antique Land so rich for such questioning is its insistently hybrid form, eschewing the generic demands of a classical ethnography or a realist historical treatise. Yet if there is here a reluctance to adopt the social scientist’s discursive order, there is also a desire to hold on to some of the social scientist’s authority. As a professional anthropologist turned author, Ghosh is clearly banking on the credibility of his disciplinary degree even when he knows that his greatest personal success is through his poetic vocation and his writing. Ironically, the stories he tells themselves speak to such career mobility. If the most depressing of these is that of the many university-educated Egyptian youth who, faced with severe unemployment in their own homeland, have to leave to seek unpleasant manual labor in Iraq, then perhaps the most personally meaningful to Ghosh is the story of Ben Yiju himself, who aspires to be a poet and continues to write poetry and practice calligraphy even while he is materially sustained by the Indian Ocean trade. For both Ben Yiju and Ghosh, and as I will later argue for Indian men of commerce such as Nanji Kalidas Mehta, it is the literary that ultimately sustains. A novelist with an already established record of literary success, Ghosh turns back in this hybrid text to reclaim the authority of the social scientist even as he seeks to demystify the fundamental methodological presuppositions of the social sciences.

“In the ten years that had passed since I first came across Goitein’s brief reference to Abraham Ben Yiju and his Slave,” writes Ghosh, “my path had crossed theirs again and again, sometimes by design and sometimes inadvertently, in North Africa, Egypt and the Malabar, until it became clear that I could no longer resist the logic of those coincidences” (99). Ghosh’s travels are as much movements through a historical ethnoscape as they are attempts at doctoral ethnographic research. Presented as a travelogue, they foreground the fact that, in scholarly research as in everyday life, the processes of getting there are as exciting and important as “being there.”17 It is the processual nature of the undertaking, with an explicitly autobiographical narrator relating his search, his minidiscoveries, and his dead ends that help characterize In an Antique Land as a mystery or a detective narrative. Consider here the case of what we might as well label the “Scholar of Footnote 78.” Footnote 78 of the Subaltern Studies article acknowledges the help of Dr. B. A. Viveka Rai in the author’s understanding of Tulu religious history. “I am deeply grateful to Dr. Rai for this and innumerable other comments and suggestions, for his generosity with his time and his erudition, and for a great many kindnesses.”¹⁸ An otherwise unspectacular acknowledgment, read in the light of In an Antique Land, the footnote speaks volumes on the pursuit and framing of historical knowledge. For in this latter text two entire chapters are devoted to Ghosh’s much anticipated meeting with Professor Rai in Mangalore, Ghosh having come up with a working hypothesis on the slave’s identity and now eagerly awaiting a confirmation or a redirection from Professor Rai. We witness the exchange between the professor and the young researcher, we are taken through the professor’s weighing of evidence hand in hand with Ghosh himself, and we are even party to the viewing of the film of Koti and Chennaya made several years ago by friends of Professor Rai. It is through this film that Ghosh himself begins to learn about the Tulu pantheon and its distance from high Sanskritic religion and works toward a new hypothesis surrounding Bomma’s identity. The “Scholar of Footnote 78” thus becomes a major agent in the narrative unfolding of the text and allows Ghosh not only to demonstrate the lived experience of research but also to comment implicitly on the writing of history itself. Along with a critique of the conventions of writing history, the story of the search is stylistically rich, allowing Ghosh to weave an intricate narrative that moves between the historical and the contemporary. Thus the “dreams of Cairo” that Ghosh has in his earlier days in Lataifa allow him to shift between the modern and the medieval, just as the story of the forthcoming marriage between ‘Eid and the Badawy girl segues into the story of Ben Yiju and Ashu.

While the mystery surrounding Bomma’s identity drives the historical plot, the contemporary narrative is guided by the more everyday negotiations that ethnographers must undertake when they initiate their work in the field. In this light the passages about Abu Ali, Ghosh’s landlord and self-appointed surrogate guardian, are some of the most memorable in the text. But even beyond the dramatic exchanges between Abu Ali and his houseguest involving such issues as the appropriate amount of rent, Ghosh finds that he must learn to live with the villager’s doubts about his abilities: his young friends begin to doubt his knowledge of human sexuality, the women in the village question his abilities to bargain in the marketplace, and almost everyone challenges his religious beliefs.

During his stay in Egypt, Ghosh is repeatedly confronted by the villagers, who question him about Hindu customs, particularly the lack of circumcision among Hindu men, cremation, and the worship of cows—practices that seem shocking to them. As other critics have noted, the traditional roles of ethnographer and observed subject are reversed here, with the villagers doing the questioning and the ethnographer becoming the subject of scrutiny.19 Much of the time, the incredulous questioning is narratively constructed as a site of humor, both on the part of the villagers, who, when not outraged by the beliefs themselves, use them to poke fun at the foreigner, but also on the part of the readers, for whom the villagers’ scandalous horror itself provides a scene of amusement.²⁰ Yet, while Ghosh the narrator skillfully brings out the comedy of intercultural (mis)understanding, Ghosh the ethnographer is increasingly disturbed by it. At one point in the narrative, fed up over yet another round of questioning about cremation and circumcision, when Ghosh decides to walk out his friend Nabeel follows him. “They were only asking questions,” he said, “just like you do; they didn’t mean any harm. Why do you let this talk of cows and burning and circumcision worry you so much? These are just customs; it’s natural that people should be curious. These are not things to be upset about” (204).

What Nabeel recognizes here is the fact that the villagers’ questioning is, ironically, their way of embracing the young ethnographer and making him feel an accepted part of their world. So when the divorcee Busaina urges Ghosh to marry a good Muslim girl from the village and to settle down among them, this has more to do with a performative welcoming of Ghosh than any desire to assimilate him into a religious community.21 Indeed, even the most explicit attempt at conversion, that of Ustaz Mustafa, is kept in check by Mustafa’s own recognition that if Ghosh were to convert he would be going against the wishes of his father: “he had a son himself and it went against his deepest instincts to urge a man to turn against his father. And so, as the rival moralities of religion and kinship gradually played themselves to a standstill within him, Ustaz Mustafa and I came to an understanding” (52). Yet, though the connections of kinship and community ultimately trump religion itself, Ghosh nevertheless remains uncomfortable with what he experiences as the intrinsically religious framework of his reception in the village. There is a residual Orientalism at work here insofar as Ghosh approaches the community with a preconceived notion of the integral and fundamental role of religion in it. At one point in the narrative, in what he reads as a lapse in his own ethnographic duties, Ghosh declines to accompany Ustaz Mustafa on his visit to the mosque or to the family grave for the reading of the Qur’an. “A part of me had wanted to go—” writes Ghosh, “not merely that part which told me that it was, in a sense, my duty, part of my job. But when the moment had come, I’d known that I wouldn’t be able to do it: I had been too afraid, and for the life of me I could not understand why” (49). Bothered by his own discomfort, Ghosh experiences here the intrinsic tension between the twin demands of his chosen vocation—seeking the native’s point of view, but doing so without “going native.”

Rather than editing out his own anxieties in the field, Ghosh leaves them in for the reader’s scrutiny, and it is this choice, I argue, that gives In an Antique Land the character of a “belated” Orientalism. This is a text that makes explicit its own Orientalist presuppositions even as it attempts to overcome them. We will see this move again in Ghosh’s handling of Islam as well as his discussion of women, but we should first note that his construction of the community as fundamentally religious leads to a curious forgetting on Ghosh’s part: when the villagers repeatedly equate his “Indianness” with his “Hinduness,” not once does he share with them the fact that in India, too, there are Muslims, that it is indeed an error to conflate the Indian nation with a particular religious ideology. Nor does Ghosh, despite his attempts at bringing together the historical experiences of Egypt and India, ever point out, either to the villagers or to his readers, the ironies surrounding the discussions of cow worship. For cow worship, as scholars of Ancient Egypt would tell us, was not only a part of the religion of the ancient Egyptians, but bore a remarkable resemblance to the Hindu pantheon.22 By allowing the villagers to persist in their reading of India as essentially Hindu, and of themselves as essentially the descendants of Arab Muslims with no ties to Pharaonic Egypt, Ghosh loses the opportunity to discuss with them issues such as multireligious national communities and their own hybridized histories.²³ To what might we attribute this silence? Is it simply the result of the ethnographic tendency to be a gatherer rather than a disseminator of information? Or is it, instead, something more particular to Ghosh’s estimations of the worldview of the fellaheen, as might be suggested from the various moments in the text when he almost wants to speak up, but doesn’t? (For instance, his comment, “I sometimes wish I had told Nabeel a story” (204), or, later, referring to the investigating police officer at the tomb of Abu-Hasira, “He seemed so reasonable and intelligent, that for an instant I even thought of telling him the story of Bomma and Ben Yiju” [339]).

While Ghosh the ethnographer is reluctant to address such issues with the villagers, Ghosh the writer is much invested in both the issues of multireligious communities as well as those of religious hybridities and syncretic practices. Indeed, the central thesis of the book is that there once was a community, in the very settings of Ghosh’s contemporary travels in Egypt and the Malabar Coast, that was not only cosmopolitan and tolerant of religious differences but also marked by a significant degree of religious syncretism. The lifeblood of this community was the Indian Ocean trade which flourished unchecked and in harmony until the European arrival toward the end of the fifteenth century. Ben Yiju, for instance, while a member of a religious minority in the Fatimid Egypt of his time, was also alien among the ruling classes of the Malabar Coast. But, suggests Ghosh, despite this, and contrary to our own conceptions of the religious persecutions of the medieval world, Ben Yiju would have found himself, both in Egypt and in India, in societies that were relatively tolerant of religious minorities. Indeed, in Ghosh’s portrayal of the medieval world a great majority of the religious persecutions are carried out by the Christian crusaders from Europe, with both Muslims and Jews being the victims of an aggressive religious ideology. While Ghosh does indeed refer to the Islamic Almohad persecutions of both Jews and Christians in 1145 and 1146 in Ifriqiya, Fez, and Marrakesh, they are framed in large part as a response to earlier attacks on Ifriqiya by the crusader King Roger II of Sicily. Ben Yiju’s return to Aden and then to Egypt is likewise prompted by the disasters wrought upon his family by the continued conflicts of the Crusades. Similarly, Ben Yiju’s stay in India is marked by a remarkably cosmopolitan aura, with Muslims, Jews, and Hindus interacting together in matters of trade and, in his own case, in matters of marriage as well.²⁴ Outside the orbit of Western Christendom, Ghosh’s medieval world indeed comes across as the “multicultural bazaar” that Clifford Geertz celebrates.

The modern loss of this religiously plural world is impressed upon the ethnographer not only in the incessant questioning by the villagers about Hindu practices but also, and perhaps most significantly, in an unpleasant argument he has with the imam of Nashawy. The discussion begins, as often happens in the text, with a denunciation, this time by the imam, of the practices of Ghosh’s Hindu community.25 Having heard these rebukes in various contexts, and frustrated with his own efforts at getting the imam to share knowledge of traditional remedies and herbal medicines, Ghosh explodes at the imam’s suggestion that he comes from a primitive, backward culture. The imam’s measure of civilization and modernity is the West, and this to him is especially manifest in its technological superiority. “They’re advanced,” he says of the West, “they’re educated, they have science, they have guns, they have bombs” (235). In the shouting match that ensues, Ghosh and the imam both assert the superiority of their own country’s destructive weapons. The fact that this heated exchange is prefigured in the text by earlier friction between the men speaks as well to a certain link between conceptions of modernity and those of masculinity. Ghosh has, not too long before this episode, raised the imam’s ire by asking his son Yasir, in the manner of small talk, whether he has any siblings other than a sister. The innocently posed question is felt, however, by the imam and his family, as a personal offense verging on an assault on the imam’s vigor. Yasir responds, “It is all the same, my father has given me one sister and there is no reproach if he has not been blessed with any sons other than I” (195). If we remember that the imam has also suffered a public disgrace in that his first wife has walked out on him and set up her own separate household, we note that there are subtle undertones of the imam’s emasculation, with their Freudian echoes in the rhetoric of guns, bombs, and injections. The borders drawn between “delegates from two superseded civilizations, vying with each other to establish a prior claim to the technology of modern violence” (236), are, at the same time, marked by male anxieties. And, furthermore, the imam’s sense of emasculation and his hostility toward Ghosh find their parallel in Ghosh’s sense of inadequacy and his simultaneous anger toward and envy of the West. In at least one version of the story, tellingly excised from the version that became In an Antique Land, but included in the earlier version in Granta, Ghosh counters with a distinct techno-envy: “For a moment then I was desperately envious. The Imam would not have said any of these things to me had I been a Westerner. He would not have dared. Whether I wanted to or not, I would have had around me the protective aura of an inherited expertise in the technology of violence.”²⁶

This same ability to present a complex social phenomenon in all its multidimensionality, while personally being uneasy with aspects of it, is evident in Ghosh’s treatment of Islam. Distasteful as he finds the imam’s pandering to the West, Ghosh also recognizes in it the falsity of prevalent stereotypes of traditionalist religious leaders. After all, while he is seen as old-fashioned by the youth of the village, the imam is not the repository of unchanging tradition, but rather one who seeks the power of medical science. He is, for instance, quick to discard the traditional herbal remedies for the more efficient injections that he has acquired from the West. Unlike the inventions of the anti-Western and “fundamentalist” imams by the secular and not-so-secular West, here we are in the presence of one who is in awe of Western-style modernity.

That this embrace of Western modernity by the imam has resulted in no great following among his constituency is an irony emphasized by Ghosh. The loss of the imam’s credibility among the youth is dramatized by the rise to popularity of a young schoolteacher, Ustaz Sabry. Read with a certain amount of skepticism by the older generation, Sabry is admired by the younger villagers for his inspiring Friday sermons at the mosque and his learned, almost scholastic knowledge of Islam. University-educated, and with a greater sense of the global politics of modern Islam, Ustaz Sabry is the voice of a different kind of modernity—one that is self-consciously Islamist and not a mere copy of the West. This Islamist modernity is at once critical of any residual religious syncretisms of an older generation and, too, of any emulation of a secular one. Thus, for instance, in the various informal gatherings that take place at Sabry’s home, there are extensive discussions of the need to stop believing in ghosts or worshipping at the shrines of saints—these practices being seen as vestiges of a pre-Islamic past. There are discussions of the moral corruption of Communism, which Ustaz Sabry, based on some prior conversations with a German Communist, often ironically tends to conflate with the West as a whole. The problem with Communism for Sabry and his followers is not its egalitarian, anticapitalist impulse, but rather its insistence on grounding it on a nonreligious foundation. Indeed, the setting up of a consumer’s cooperative in Nashawy is meant to help avoid the greed of the capitalist. But such efforts, along with the increasing restrictions on religious syncretism, are meant to help the community “succeed in rooting out all exploitation and unbelief from the village” so that “people would see for themselves where the pure path of Islam lay” (147, 148).

An important aspect of the turn toward this university-generated Islam is a geopolitical critique of Western aggression. We hear a college student praising Sabry for the politically inspirational qualities of his sermons. Unlike those of the imam, who “doesn’t seem to know about the things that are happening around us in Afghanistan, Lebanon and Israel” (141), Sabry’s sermons make everyone feel that “they should do something about all that’s happening in the world around us” (141). And in a passage that surely resonates with more meaning in a post-9/11 world than when Ghosh first wrote it, we learn that “it was Ustaz Sabry, for instance, who had first thought of raising money for the Afghans; in a speech at the mosque, he had talked of how Muslims were being slaughtered by Communists in Afghanistan, and the men of the village were so moved that they raised quite an impressive sum of money for the mujahideen” (146). By 1988, when Ghosh returns on his second visit, he is surprised to learn about the religious turn in his friend Jabir, who though still a young boy during the fieldwork year, has now returned from college. In his college years, Jabir tells him, he grew a beard in a distinctively Muslim style and spent many evenings with fellow students and teachers reading and discussing the Qur’an. “I was not involved in politics or anything,” he said, “and I didn’t join any groups or societies. But I learnt to recognize what is wrong and what is true” (308). Yet despite his avowed separation from political activism, his family, and particularly his mother, prevail upon him to shave his beard. “They were afraid,” he said, “There’s been trouble between the government and certain Islamic groups, and they were worried that something might happen to me” (309). If, at an earlier moment in his fieldwork, Ghosh has refrained from sharing with the villagers the story of his own childhood trauma of witnessing religious riots between Hindus and Muslims in Dhaka, claiming, with, some paternalism, that he “could not have expected them to understand an Indian’s terror of symbols” (210), then surely in the years that have intervened it is a lesson that his interlocutors have learned.

Sympathetic to its critique of the West, the secularist Ghosh seems nevertheless disturbed by the rise of a religiously mantled modernity. But this unease does not blind him to the fact that its rise is rooted in the material conditions of the villagers, their despair over severe unemployment and the inability of the state bureaucracy to address their needs. At quite a remove from the racist images of a religion of fanatics who are unable to shed their so-called medieval lifestyles, this Islam attempts to find meaning and community in a global modernity gone awry.28 Perhaps the most moving passages in In an Antique Land are those that portray this breakdown of hopes and aspirations, the quest for upward mobility accompanied by the reification of relations that can now only be gauged through the acquisition of commodities. On his return to Lataifa and Nashawy in 1988, Ghosh begins to see the signs of “new money.” Young men who have left their families in search of jobs in Iraq send back money and commodities. New homes are being built in the villages, and the relatives left behind are rightfully proud of their new possessions. And yet this migrant labor has meant that families are separated, that the hostile working conditions and the negative treatment of these Egyptian migrants in Iraq are not talked about.²⁹ The young men still left behind are desperately trying to enter this “transit lounge of culture” and interpret the inability to enter it as a public announcement of failure. Relations between people have also altered, as Ghosh notices when his friend Jabir shuts the door of his room on his own family members. “I was astonished: in all the time I had spent in Lataifa and Nashawy, I had never seen anyone shut a door upon people in their own house” (305–6). As though to metaphorize the increasingly frozen nature of relations between people, Ghosh notes that, as refrigerators become commonly available in the villages, meat too is frozen, so that the traditional practices of sharing freshly slaughtered meat during the Eid festivities slowly disappear.

By 1988 things in the villages have changed so much that no more do the villagers feel the need to summon the Indian ethnographer to examine a diesel pump—the “Hinduki” machine—that, on his first visit, had unwittingly become a centerpiece for establishing his own authority. This technological advance is not without its own difficulties, however. In a telling symbol of the contradictions of modernity, Ghosh’s night arrival on his return in 1988 is in the midst of an entirely dark village. The kerosene lamps that once lit Nashawy have been put away since the village has now been wired for electricity. Arriving in the middle of a power cut, the village seems to the ethnographer to be ominously suspended between a lost past and a future that is yet to be determined. Though reminiscent of the conventional anthropological mistrust of modernity, these observations are not in fact rooted in any dream or desire for the “unchanging native.” Rather, they are, on Ghosh’s part, the result of an acute awareness of and empathy with the indigenous desire to better their lot, while at the same time being subject to what he calls at another point the “tornados of grand designs and historical destinies” (15). What connects the contemporary narratives of the villagers to the historical narratives of Ben Yiju and his associates is precisely those negotiations that they must undertake in order to forge their own individual trajectories. The Crusades, on the one hand, and the Iranian revolution and the Gulf War, on the other, are the bookends within which global connectivity must be assessed.

There are at least two ways in which one can interpret the lives of commoners such as the villagers of Lataifa and Nashawy or the traders of Ben Yiju’s times. One is to celebrate their will and determination, despite the odds, to make meaningful lives for themselves and their kin. The other is to bemoan their entrapment in the quagmires of history, which often work to limit their possibilities, to stall their will, to destroy their dreams. The former, we might say, is the domain of nostalgia, and the latter that of melancholia. The former remains optimistic about the possible future recovery of a fragile dream, while the latter is resigned to a mourning of its irretrievable loss. What makes In an Antique Land such a meaningful text for our own times is its insistence on a nostalgic optimism, even as it recognizes the encroachment of an inevitable melancholia. The writing of nostalgia, as Nicholas Dames has persuasively argued, is intricately tied to the pursuit of pleasure—“what is pleasurable to recall will be recalled, while the unworthy or the painful will erase itself.”30 Nostalgia is, in effect, a necessary forgetting of trauma and a celebration of recuperable memories that are oriented toward a desirable future. In this sense, the writing of history in the nostalgic mode is “always only the necessary prehistory of the present,” promoting a vision of a future that is no longer burdened by the unpleasant aspects of the past and that allows the telling of “a life lived as a coherent tale, summarizable, pointed, and finally moralizable.”³¹

Because of its insistence on dwelling on the pleasurable, nostalgic writing can recuperate even the most tragic situations into narratives of survival and determination. But, no matter how nostalgic, the melancholic always remains in the wings ready to make a sobering entry. Referring to Ben Yiju toward the end of his life, at one point Ghosh writes, “The letter he wrote on this occasion was a long one, like the last, but his mood and his circumstances were greatly changed and the nostalgic exuberance that had seized him upon his return to Aden had now yielded to a resigned and broken-hearted melancholy” (313, my emphasis). In the writing of Ben Yiju’s life, Ghosh has himself created, up to this point in the narrative, a nostalgic vision. Despite the clear sense of alienation and loneliness that Ben Yiju feels on the Malabar Coast, Ghosh has nevertheless foregrounded the positive, the vibrant cosmopolitanism around him, the deep connections between members of different religious faiths, even the virtues of non-regulated interoceanic trade. But there is a strong awareness in the text that here, as elsewhere, there always remains the possibility that at some point the deferral of conflict might break down and with it might arrive not only a “broken-hearted melancholy” but also, significantly, a breakdown of the earlier order. A sure sign of such a breakdown is Ben Yiju’s refusal to let his daughter marry a foreigner, which, in the light of his own marriage with the Indian Ashu, makes it seem “almost as though he were seeking to disown a part of his own past” (316). The great cosmopolitan connections that are drawn in the chronotopes of nostalgia are reversed in those of melancholia.³² Melancholia cripples while nostalgia redeems, and, to underscore this lesson, the narrator approvingly notes about contemporary Mangalore, “But appropriately, Mangalore does not treat its lost history as a crippling melancholy: it has always been a busy, bustling kind of place, and today it is again a thriving, relatively prosperous city” (245).

In the remainder of this chapter I propose to investigate Ghosh’s production of history in the nostalgic mode. Since the writing of nostalgia is as much about the forgetting as the remembrance of the past, I will attempt to foreground what it is that the text “forgets” in its desire to weave a nostalgic narrative. In the final analysis, like most commentators on Ghosh’s text, and like the students in my classes who consistently enjoy studying it, I find the text’s nostalgia not only appealing aesthetically but also inspiring politically. But, as a critic who has taken on Ghosh’s challenge to read the historical scholarship on Ben Yiju’s times, I find that the book deserves a more sustained scrutiny.

The fact that the world of the Cairo Geniza exhibited a significant degree of religious syncretism is of great interest to Ghosh. The most literal form of this syncretism, he suggests, may well be seen in the language of the geniza documents themselves. Ben Yiju “and his friends were all orthodox, observant Jews, strongly aware of their distinctive religious identity,” writes Ghosh. “But they were also part of the Arabic-speaking world, and the everyday language of their religious life was one they shared with the Muslims of that region: when they invoked the name of God in their writings it was usually as Allah, and more often than not their invocations were in Arabic forms, such as insha allah and al-hamdul-illah” (261). In addition, the close proximity of the religions meant that Judaism in Egypt would soon see the influence of Islamic Sufism and the practice of worshiping at the shrines of saints would become common to both the Jewish and the Islamic communities. Ghosh contends that such syncretic practices were, over time, policed, and with the advent of modernity their histories were erased. In such a context, any residual syncretism evident today is to Ghosh a privileged site of political resistance itself—and particularly of political resistance to the repressive state. For instance, Ghosh celebrates the folk narratives that he hears in Egypt about the saint Abu-Kanaka, whose grave is said to have resisted any efforts by the government to build a canal through it, and also the story of the Bhuta shrine in Mangalore, which has similarly put in check the construction of a road from the city of Mangalore to its new port. Ghosh sees in these narratives a popular critique of the ideologies and practices of state-sponsored “development.”

Perhaps the most significant episode in the text in which the modern fate of syncretism is put to a test is the encounter Ghosh has in Egypt on his second visit in 1988. On his way back out of the country he decides to visit the tomb of the saint Sidi Abu-Hasira. Abu-Hasira, Ghosh has learned from the villagers, was a Jew from the Maghreb who came to Egypt and converted to Islam. He was recognized by the people as a man of extraordinary benevolent powers, a good man, endowed with the blessings of baraka. He developed a large following among the locals and he still had Jewish followers from Israel who attended the annual Mowlid in his honor in Damanhour. As it turns out, the Mowlid takes place during Ghosh’s visit, but, although his friends in Nashawy and Lataifa persuade him to attend, he never quite makes it to the festival itself. Instead, he attempts a quick detour to the shrine on his way to the train station from which he plans to depart. What he sees there surprises him—the tomb itself is much bigger than similar tombs he has seen before. “It was,” Ghosh notes, “a sleek, concrete structure of a kind that one might expect to see in the newer and more expensive parts of Alexandria and Cairo: in that poor quarter of Damanhour, it was not merely incongruous—its presence seemed almost an act of defiance” (333). While the sight of the tomb itself is dissonant, his expectations of a quick and quiet visit are shaken by the approach of armed police officers who quickly begin to interrogate him. Recognizing Ghosh as a foreigner, one of the officers demands an explanation for his visit to the tomb. The Mowlid is already over, the tourists are all gone, and therefore the presence of a foreigner at the tomb is, according to the officer, itself a cause for suspicion. But what baffles the officer most is the fact that Ghosh is neither an Israeli devotee on a pilgrimage nor a follower of any of the monotheistic religions with which he is familiar. “Neither Jewish, nor Muslim, nor Christian—there had to be something odd afoot” (334–35). The potentially dangerous visitor is escorted to the local police station for further interrogation. In this setting, to Ghosh reminiscent of the colonial buildings built by the British in India, and probably a testimony to the British occupation of Egypt—the two men face each other across what Ghosh sees as the resolutely modern, all too contemporary, colonially implicated divisions between peoples who once experienced a connected history. “You’re Indian—what connection could you have with the tomb of a Jewish holy man, here in Egypt?” he is asked. He cannot find an immediate answer, but the book he eventually writes will attempt to provide one.

It is the nostalgic impulse in Ghosh that chooses to read the survival of earlier religious syncretisms as potential spaces of modern “defiance” and “revenge.” Such a reading, politically appealing as it is, nevertheless depends on a dismissal of the religious revisionism of the communities themselves. At one point during his visit to the temple, Ghosh notes, “It was not really a Bhuta-shrine any more, they explained proudly: it had become a real Hindu temple, and the main place in it was now reserved for Vishnu, the most Brahmanical of Gods” (273–74). The incorporation of the bhuta into the temple is experienced by the community, then, not as a gesture of religious syncretism but rather as an antisyncretic practice. The fact that this historically lower-caste community has appropriated for itself the symbols of high Brahmanical tradition in an attempt at upward mobility, and the fact that the temple prominently displays posters of a fundamentalist Hindu organization “notorious for its anti-Muslim rhetoric” (273), suggests that the Muslim trader here has been, contrary to Ghosh’s enabling reading, disciplined, tamed, and co-opted into a resolutely Hindu cosmology. Likewise, in the case of the shrine of Abu-Hasira, Ghosh’s representation of the police officers as ultimately blind to the richness of popular religion and its history may well betray a certain overzealousness on behalf of the political possibilities of religious syncretism. Let us remember that when the villagers in Lataifa and Nashawy encourage him to go to the Mowlid, they seemingly do so not out of any sense of religious conviction. “The Mowlid was a wonderful spectacle, I was told; there would be lights everywhere, stalls with pistols and airguns, swings and carousels; the streets would be lined with kebab-shops and vendor’s carts and thronged with crowds of sightseers. The tourists alone were a good reason to go, they said, it was not often that one got to see foreigners in a place like Damanhour” (330). To the villagers the Mowlid is clearly a recreational activity, and perhaps also, as in the case of Moshin the taxi driver, an opportunity to make some money. To read the shrine as an act of defiance against “the enforcers of History” is to participate in the well-established and indeed often well-meaning anthropological discourse of “survivals” at the risk of erasing historically contingent and continually renegotiated cultural practices.33

The examples of the Magariva temple and the shrine of Abu-Hasira suggest at least two things about the nature of religious syncretism: one, that what at first appears to be religious syncretism may in fact be marked by antisyncretic tendencies and, two, that a practice that may seem to be syncretic, insofar as it engages the interests of more than one religious community, may in fact be experienced by the two communities in entirely different and possibly even nonreligious ways.34 These insights into the limits of syncretism, it should be noted, are applicable not only to the modern world but also to the medieval context that Ghosh celebrates. To take just a couple of examples that Goitein’s work provides for us, we can point to the religious reforms that Abraham Maimonides (son of the celebrated philosopher Moses Maimonides) attempted to introduce among Egyptian Jewry. Clearly influenced by Muslim practices around him, Maimonides, by virtue of his position as the nagid or the head of the Egyptian Jewry, insisted on introducing the practice of worship by prostration. But, rather than presenting this reform, along with the corollary emulation of the more solemn and intense character of Muslim worship, as matters of syncretism, he underlined instead their pure, authentic origins. These rites, Maimonides claimed, had originally been Jewish but had been forgotten through history. It was hoary, if buried, Jewish custom that he claimed to resuscitate and not any borrowing from Islam. Maimonides’ followers were, however, unconvinced, and Goitein tells us that they even brought the case against what they saw as the clear Islamicization of Judaism before, ironically enough, the Islamic head of state.³⁵ Another dramatic example of the fissures between the syncretic and the antisyncretic is vividly presented in a letter that Goitein includes in one of the later volumes of his magnum opus.³⁶ The story in question is of Basir the bell maker, a Jewish family man who had taken of late to worshiping with the Sufis. Frustrated with his turn to asceticism, Basir’s wife wrote a letter to the nagid, asking for an intervention on her behalf. I quote from the letter: “The maidservant, the wife of Basir, the bell maker, kisses the ground and submits that she has on her neck three children because her husband has become completely infatuated with [life on] the mountain with al-Kurani, in vain and to no purpose, a place where there is no Torah, no prayer and no mention of God’s name in truth. He goes up the mountain and mingles with the mendicants, although these have only the semblance and not the essence of religion. The maidservant is afraid that there may be some bad man who may induce her husband to forsake the Jewish faith, taking with him the three children.”³⁷ In case the letter is not sufficiently self-explanatory, Goitein’s gloss on it speaks eloquently to the limits of the syncretic in this world. Thus, he suggests, supererogatory worship is acceptable as long as it does not interfere with the core religious practices of one’s faith.³⁸ The syncretic may be tolerated, but it must not be allowed to erode the power of the pure.³⁹

To return, then, to the modern world and to the tomb of Abu-Hasira, we must ask: Who here is resisting whom? Just who are the so-called enforcers of History? In Ghosh’s economy of popular syncretism, it is clear that the police officers are meant to represent the repressive apparatus of the modern nation-state. It is in defiance of these state actors, these “enforcers of History,” that the shrine stands as a testimony to popular will. Notice that in this account it is the shrine itself that does the resisting. Much as in the case of the statue of the bhuta in the temple, it is the spirits of the past—whether those of Abu-Hasira or Bobbariya—that “revenge” themselves on the present. The nostalgia axiomatic of popular religiosity puts under erasure the agency of contemporary worshipers. In so doing it risks a misrecognition both of the role of the state and of the popular will, which, as the following news report from December 2000 suggests, actually ended up playing roles exactly opposite to those that Ghosh’s In an Antique Land casts for them. I quote the report here in full:

While the curt, almost clinical quality of this report as well as its reference to a conflict that has by now claimed many more lives (on both sides)—is foreboding, the fact worthy of note is that here the enforcers of History are allegedly the people themselves and not the state. Furthermore, this incorporation of the Mowlid of Abu-Hasira into a popular politics is quite explicit in articulating itself as resisting both the foreign pilgrims and the indigenous nation-state. That is why “protests” are necessary in the first place. The extra security at the tomb that Ghosh experienced about ten years before these later protests is better understood as both a response to, and a further provocation of, the struggle between an increasingly Islamicized populace and a decreasingly credible state. Those of us who have followed Ghosh’s own presentation of Ustaz Sabry and his version of an Islamist modernity would be right to look for him and his friends among the protesters. It may not be a version of modernity that those of us who style ourselves as secular intellectuals may want to follow. But it seems necessary to be able to account for it and to recognize that the “popular” may not always generate forms of resistance that are palatable to a secular disposition, just as state repression, intolerable as it may be, in fact could end up upholding a multireligious, noncommunitarian society.

In a seminal article, “Islam and the Jews: Myth, Counter-Myth, History,” Mark Cohen suggests that discussions of the historical relationship between Jews and Muslims have become increasingly politically charged today.42 The question “How have Jews fared in the Islamic world in medieval and modern times?” has sparked a great deal of debate, with some answers positing an interfaith utopia and others suggesting that Islamic treatment of Jews throughout history has been relentlessly persecutory. The “myth” of interfaith utopia, suggests Cohen, was first propagated by Jewish writers in the nineteenth century who, themselves frustrated by the anti-Semitism of the European world, turned to an alternative space of history in which Judaism was treated with respect and Jews were accepted as friends. This version of an interfaith utopia, suggests Cohen, was later appropriated by those who were sympathetic to the plight of modern Palestinians and critical of Zionism and the State of Israel. In turn, there arose a “countermyth” that presented Jewish-Islamic history as one of continued conflict and emphasized the persecution of Jews by Muslims. This “countermyth” was explicitly rooted in a desire to argue for the legitimacy of the State of Israel and the cause of Zionism. Bemoaning the excesses of both myths, Cohen argues for a more balanced account that he calls history itself. Such a history would show that the fate of Jews in Islamic lands was contingent upon several factors, including the state of the economy at any given time, the personal disposition of the individual ruler in question, the vulnerability of the Islamic state in light of attacks from outside, and other factors that are of more material significance than religious doctrines and ideologies themselves.

To suggest this, then, is to suggest, along with Bernard Lewis, that the problem with a generalizable claim about Jews under Muslim rule is, in the absence of either historical, geographical, or what I will call performative specificity, that either version—both Cohen’s “myth” and “countermyth”—can be persuasively argued.43 It is always possible to compare the worst historical moments in one cultural frame with the best moments in another or to ignore the divergences between the doctrines and the actual practices of two religions so that one appears to be more favorable than the other. It makes more sense, therefore, to be nominalist in one’s evaluation of the historical record, and it is such a nominalism that underwrites the scholarly work of Cohen, Lewis, and Goitein as well. Based on their work, much of what we know about the world of Ben Yiju does indeed suggest that Jewish traders in Cairo in the twelfth century experienced life under one of the most tolerant Islamic regimes. Goitein suggests that, while they were certainly not regarded as equals by their Muslim neighbors, Jews were allowed to practice their own faith, to live in religiously mixed neighborhoods (rather than ghettos), to pursue occupations of their own choosing, and to abide by a juridical code derived from and executed by their own religious authorities.⁴⁴ Practices that were prevalent at other times and places in Islamic and Christian history—such as the requirement that Jews wear specially marked clothes—were, according to Goitein, much more relaxed or nonexistent during Ben Yiju’s times, and interfaith business relations were the norm rather than the exception. While none of this tolerance prevented occasional suspicion of those who were not believers of one’s own religion, such suspicion seems to have affected both Jews and Muslims. Jews did, however, have to pay a special poll tax in exchange for their protected status as a religious minority, but, ironically, it may have been precisely this tax and its economic importance to Muslim rulers that underwrote the religious tolerance of the state. Indeed, economic calculations were also at work when later, in 1198, an overzealous ruler established himself in Yemen and forced the mass conversion of local Jews. We learn, however, from a letter in the Cairo Geniza that, when foreign Jewish traders called at the port of Aden, the ruler declared, “‘No foreigner should be molested.’ He ordered that everyone should pay a third of the poll tax. We disbursed this and he dismissed us graciously, thank God.”⁴⁵ In his annotations to the letter, Goitein points out that the imposition of the one-third poll tax was itself unlawful, since non-Muslims were supposed to be taxed only in their domicile. But the incident shows not only that the traders were content to buy their freedom for this amount, but, more significantly, that the ruler recognized the economic importance of the traders and that no amount of religious conviction would let him forgo the material benefits they provided. Persecuting the traders would have been tantamount to eating the goose that laid the golden eggs, and thus the traders were perhaps economically exploited but otherwise left alone.⁴⁶

Religious tolerance is seen as intimately related to the economic interests of the state, and this vision deeply informs the work of both Goitein and Ghosh. The most explicit admission of this orientation occurs in the preface to the second volume of Goitein’s A Mediterranean Society. Here, in an autobiographical aside on his ongoing research on the geniza documents, Goitein writes,

I believe I would have missed many aspects of the Geniza documents had I not been granted the opportunity of observing the American scene for many years. Authoritarian Germany, where I spent my childhood and youth, and the Jewish society in Palestine and later Israel, with its socialist, welfare and protectionist tendencies, which I saw most of my working life, were utterly different from the Geniza society, which was loosely organized and competitive in every respect. This vigorous free-enterprise society of the United States, which is not without petty jealousies and cheap public honors, its endless fund-raising campaigns and all that goes with them, its general involvement in public affairs and deep concern (or lip-service as the case may be) for the underdog—all proved to be extremely instructive. We do not wear turbans here; but, while reading many a Geniza document one feels quite at home.⁴⁷

This romance with free-market economics and the minimalist state is an undercurrent throughout much of Goitein’s work.⁴⁹ He writes at one point that, “in many respects, the area resembled a free-trade community. The treatment of foreigners, as a rule, was remarkably liberal.” And again, “the machinery of the state was relatively loose in those days, that is, the technique of making life unbearable was not yet as perfected as it is in our own days.” But to talk of a minimalist state is by no means to talk of a weak one. The power of the state is still necessary to ensure the smooth functioning of the free-market economy. The state as protector of private property, including of course its own interests, is not to be undermined. “Officially appointed spies and the secret police saw to it that visitors from foreign countries did not evade their customs duties and did not engage in any activity detrimental to the state. Quarrels between individuals and community strife often invoked the intervention of the governments or their local officials. Thus, it was not so much the looseness of the machinery of the state as positive factors that contributed to the amazing degree of the freedom of movement and to the comparatively close unity of the Mediterranean world.”⁵⁰

Despite Ghosh’s own critique of the West, particularly its imperialist history, In an Antique Land shares with Goitein’s work an uncanny disposition in favor of free-market economics and the market-oriented state. Its overwhelming acceptance of the proposition that multiculturalism would follow if only the market were left to work on its own draws ultimately on a liberal imagination. As I will argue in the chapters that follow, such an imagination, with its preference for unhindered commerce and limited state intervention, is also central to many of the twentieth-century Indian travelers and traders in East Africa. So, for instance, one of the key complaints of the Parsi traveler Sorabji Darookhanawala is that the colonial state in Kenya, rather than fostering economic growth and trade, suppresses it in the interests of protecting the highlands as a whites-only area. Darookhanawala argues for more trade and suggests that, because of their long commercial presence in East Africa, Indians might be better positioned to complete what he sees as the incomplete project of modernity undertaken by the British colonial state. Nanji Kalidas Mehta, likewise, turns in his autobiography to figuring commerce between Indians and Africans as a romance, an allegedly noncoercive exchange that is distinct from the political coercion of the colonial state. For their part, J. K. Chande and Al Noor Kassum, both Tanzanian Asians who were recruited by President Nyerere to help in the project of nation building after independence, have to balance their allegiance to the political liberalism and idealism of their leader, on the one hand, and the realities of a socialist state economic policy that is set to curtail private ownership and free trade, on the other. This unease with state socialism and corollary sympathies not only for commerce but also for more democratic forms of governance is also a fundamental marker of M. G. Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack.

In the liberal imagination the critical role of the state in guarding the interests of market flows ensures, as did the commerce clause in the early jurisprudence of the United States, that tolerance itself becomes an interest of the state.51 Yet it goes without saying that nothing can be tolerated that might threaten the economic interests of the state. The episode in Ghosh’s narrative that best speaks to this is the account of the raid on Aden by pirates from the island of Kish (Qais).⁵² The heroes of this event are the Adenese soldiers who protect not only their own territory from the incursions of the attackers but also, and more importantly in Ghosh’s reckoning, the incoming ships of the wealthy merchant Ramishr of Siraf. Order is restored, trade and private property protected, and the “villains of the piece” (257), the pirates from Qais, are soundly defeated and forced to retreat. This version of the story is entirely consistent with the sympathies of the trader Madmun, whose letter to his business friend and partner Ben Yiju provides Ghosh with much of the eyewitness flavor of the event. But Ghosh makes use of poetic license to go further, imagining a drunken Bomma (who, we have been told by Madmun, has just demanded more money than the allowance allocated to him by Ben Yiju) cheering the Adenese soldiers into battle. To imagine someone who was legally a slave, rebelling against what he perceived to be an inadequate allowance from his master, as nevertheless simultaneously being in complete sympathy with the interests of his master is to make a strong statement indeed about the role of affective relations within the institution of slavery.

There is a second aspect to this episode that is no less significant. Despite his acknowledgment that the raid was carried out by sailors who were allied to the king of Qais, Ghosh chooses to downplay the political significance of the attack. Foregrounding its piratical nature rather than its interstate political attributes allows Ghosh to read it as continuous with the numerous activities of pirates throughout the Indian Ocean. Such activities, writes Ghosh, were, even at their worst, “a nuisance rather than a serious threat to commerce, and neither (the rulers of Qais) nor any of the powers of the Indian Ocean, no matter how large or well-armed, ever tried to gain control of the seas or to take over the trade routes by force” (257). It is important for Ghosh to establish piracy as a nuisance rather than a serious threat since one of the central claims he wants to make is that it is only with the arrival of the Portuguese in 1498 that violence enters the Indian Ocean trade. It was then that the peaceful traditions of commerce were disrupted by a player who introduced armed navies to take control of the trade. “Unable to compete in the Indian Ocean trade by purely commercial means, the Europeans were bent on taking control of it by aggression, pure and distilled, by unleashing violence on a scale unprecedented on those shores. … As always, the determination of a small united band of soldiers triumphed easily over the rich confusions that accompany a culture of accommodation and compromise” (288). Yet Ghosh’s contention that intrusion by force of arms arrived only with Europeans seems somewhat questionable given the little we do know about the Indian Ocean trade in this period. For instance, we know there was a significant decrease in trade in the Persian Gulf after the Fatimid ascendancy in Egypt and the decline of the Abbasid powers in Baghdad in the early eleventh century. The Indian Ocean spice trade was now centered on Egypt and the Red Sea, resulting in the rise of Aden as a competing and increasingly prosperous center of trade.53 Nestled in the Persian Gulf, the rulers of the island of Qais, who Goitein tells us were described by the geographer Yakut as the “overlord(s) of that whole sea and as ruler(s) of Oman,” were understandably disturbed by their loss of commercial power to the newly prosperous port city in the Red Sea.⁵⁴ The raid on Aden is properly understood in the context of this history not as the opportunistic thievery of a group of pirates but rather as an alliance of political and economic forces of resistance.⁵⁵

While Ghosh’s anticolonial narrative bears emotional freight, a more layered understanding of the history of the Indian Ocean trade suggests that the balance of tolerance and intolerance is not so easily established. In addition to the ties between the state and commerce that we find between the rulers of Qais and the pirates of Aden, we note that from time to time rulers with an interest in the trade would do what they could to retain control of it. Thus, writes K. N. Chaudhuri, under the Ayyubid as well as the Mamluk rulers of Egypt (1170–1517), care was taken to prevent the excessive entry of Frankish merchants into the trade, and “it seems that the Egyptian government exercised its sovereignty and control over the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean commerce, not by constructing strong naval fleets, but by instituting a system of safe-conduct passes.”56 These safe conduct passes may well be the precursors of the cartazes later issued by the Portuguese as a form of toll for uninterrupted commerce.⁵⁷ And, although European arms played an important role in raising cross-cultural barriers in Indian Ocean commerce, cultural factors were always historically at play. “Anti-Jewish propaganda grew under the Fatimids’ successors, the Ayyubids and the Almohids,” writes Andre Wink, “reaching a climax in the thirteenth century, when Mediterranean unity had been lost entirely, and the Mamluks of Egypt imposed discriminatory laws which caused a further deterioration of the position of the Jews. Egypt, after the fall of Constantinople in 1204, virtually monopolized the Indian transit trade but the Jews were expelled from this trade and an association of Arab traders known as the karimi took over.”⁵⁸ It may be true, as Ghosh suggests, that before the arrival of the Europeans no political power in the Indian Ocean ultimately succeeded in dictating the terms of trade through sheer force, but it was not for lack of trying.⁵⁹

If Ghosh downplays the internal rivalries between various rulers on the Indian Ocean stage, it is no less interesting to note a similar dismissal on his part of any real tensions and conflict within the African frame. I refer in particular to the brief appearance in the book of the “tribes” around the port city of Aidhab in present-day Sudan. Ghosh tells us in his notes that the people in question were members of “one of the Beja tribes of Sudan and southern Egypt who are referred to frequently by medieval Arab geographers and travelers” (371). To the Arab travelers and the merchants of whom Ghosh writes these seminomadic desert peoples, characterized by their public nudity, were a “breed of no regard” (quoting Ibn Jubair, 371). The Beja’s attitude toward these travelers was one of “suspicion bordering on hostility,” and this too, Ghosh’s tone suggests, is to be seen as a nuisance rather like that posed by the Indian Ocean pirates. Once again, a closer look at history might indicate that this hostility was not necessarily the simple response of a closed primitive society, but rather the result of a longer period of contact. For instance, we learn from A. Paul’s A History of the Beja Tribes of the Sudan that contact between Arabs from the north and the indigenous Beja had, by the time of Ben Yiju’s travels, already been taking place for several centuries, with the Beja providing the northerners with slaves and camels, two important commodities in the growth of their empires and economies.60 In addition, writes Paul, the Beja resistance to the northerners increased in the tenth and eleventh centuries in reaction to the exploitative conditions by which their labor and natural resources were acquired. “The mines were worked entirely by slave labor, by methods no better than those employed by the Pharaohs and the Ptolemies, and if anything the exploitation was harsher and more thorough. Emeralds appear to have been valued more highly than gold, and the output must have been considerable since, although the caliphs attempted repeatedly to increase their direct control of the mines but had to be content with a tithe of a third, or even as little as a fifth of the output, yet the wealth of the Fatimids and of their successors was prodigious.”⁶¹ Beja suspicion, bordering on hostility, would make sense in this context.

If, in the interests of portraying a harmonious twelfth-century Indian Ocean world, Beja slavery is left out of the narrative, a similar silence surrounds the more contemporary references to Zar rituals in the text. In the interests of a purer practice of Islam, Ustad Sabry and other teachers, we are told, have united villagers against a man “who was known to perform exorcism rituals for women, secret Ethiopian rites called the Zar” (146). This brief reference is supplemented by no additional commentary on Ghosh’s part in the notes. What Ghosh fails to note is that this process of purifying Islam is also, in this case, a process of de-Africanizing it. Research on the Zar suggests that it came to Egypt sometime in the eighteenth century (although this date is speculative), carried there by black slaves from Ethiopia. The ritual itself is a form of spirit possession that is common across the continent. Once again, as in the case of connections with pre-Islamic Egypt, Ghosh does not adequately foreground connections, in this case, with more contemporary black Africa. While privileging cross-oceanic syncretisms and connections, Ghosh’s text risks erasing the cross-continental ones.⁶²

If the institution of slavery was one of the conditions of possibility for this “bourgeois revolution,” its status as a lived “structure of feeling” is somewhat open to debate.⁶⁴ Eager to distance slavery in the Arab world from the plantation slavery of the Americas, scholars have repeatedly noted religious edicts in both Islam and Judaism on the humane treatment of slaves. Thus, for instance, both religions considered the manumission of a slave virtuous and an honorable deed on the part of the owner. Likewise, there were restrictions on the degree to which slaves could be worked, with specific proscriptions against their ill-treatment. The fact that some slaves were recruited into military service and indeed could rise considerably in rank has led scholars to emphasize the radical distinctions between slavery in the Middle East and that across the Atlantic.⁶⁵ Ghosh himself is alert to the distinctions and warns the reader that “the terms under which Bomma entered Ben Yiju’s service were probably entirely different from those suggested by the word ‘slavery’ today: their arrangement was probably more that of patron and client than master and slave, as that relationship is now understood” (259).⁶⁶ Ghosh goes on to note that slaves in this context could find themselves in positions with greater privilege than the poor free folk and could “generally be sure of obtaining manumission” (260).

While the cautionary note distinguishing transatlantic slavery from Arab forms is essential, it risks coming across as an apology. Ghosh’s own nostalgic narrative risks such a sanitized view of slavery, and it does so especially when it seeks to link the ideology of servitude to a religious foundation. Slavery in the world of Ben Yiju and Bomma, suggests Ghosh, is a “spiritual metaphor” (260), a man’s enslavement to God finding itself a worldly manifestation in a slave’s devotion to his master. This Sufi-inspired vision was articulated through poetry in which “it was slavery that was the paradoxical embodiment of personal freedom; the image that represented the very notion of relationship, of human bonds, as well as the possibility of their transcendence” (261). The implication here is that if we fail to see this paradox, we do so because we approach it with a post-Enlightenment, Eurocentric understanding of freedom. To authorize his claims, Ghosh refers the reader to Franz Rosenthal’s much cited book The Muslim Concept of Freedom Prior to the Nineteenth Century, but a close reading of this source suggests that, despite the philosophical and poetic links between enslavement to God and enslavement to man, human bondage remained, nevertheless, a shameful prospect. Thus, writes Rosenthal, “the idea of slavery, in metaphorical usage, stood for the most loathsome condition of mankind, to be avoided at all costs.” Furthermore, he notes, in refutation of the “privileged status” argument, that “regardless of their position and the social advantages derived from it, the unfree status of individuals was always considered a personal disgrace. And it should be noted that it is often the point of stories showing slaves in a good light that good things could be found even in the persons of lowly slaves.”67

Orlando Patterson has persuasively argued that what characterizes slavery in almost all contexts is the “social death” of the slave and the denial of the slave’s honor. In this sense, whether or not slaves could look forward to their manumission and whether or not they occupied positions of considerable power, it is still the case that they were acting not as free agents but always on behalf of their masters.⁶⁸ We might ultimately never know exactly how slaves in the Arab world incorporated the ideologies of their times, but we do know that there were slave rebellions, the most famous one occurring in Iraq in the ninth century.⁶⁹ Slaves sought their freedom and often escaped from their masters. And, while Ghosh portrays an amicable relationship between Bomma and Ben Yiju, even a quick look at the strictures on the treatment of “heathen” slaves that Abraham Maimonides laid down for his coreligionists raises an ugly side. I quote only two: “8. If the master smites the eye of the slave and diminishes its vision, or his tooth and it becomes loose, then we hold as follows: if the slave can still use them he does not become free; if not, he becomes free; 9. If his eye is dim and its vision poor, or if his tooth is loose and the master smites him and knocks out his loose tooth or blinds his dim eye, then we hold as follows: if he could use it even to the smallest degree heretofore he goes out free; if not, he does not go out free.”⁷⁰ That such strictures were necessary speaks volumes about the harsher aspects of human bondage.

Even if such violence was the exception, the systemic inequities between masters and slaves suggest that exploitation was not entirely absent from either the twelfth-century commercial world that Ghosh depicts or, despite the mythological charters later drawn up, in the Indian Ocean commerce centuries thereafter. At one point Ghosh notes that the amount of money Bomma spent shopping for his master on one of his trips to Aden would have “paid the wages of a mason or builder for more than two and a half years” (255–56). The amount of money circulating in the Indian Ocean trade was enormous compared to the costs of labor. Without involving ourselves in debates over whether or not this society could be characterized as engaging in a “slave mode of production,” we can easily establish that surplus value was being generated not only through trade but also through the manufacture of commodities. Thus, for instance, we remember that in addition to Bomma and Ashu, Ben Yiju also had a number of other Indian slaves who worked in his bronze factory on the Malabar Coast. Since the Indian Ocean slave trade was characterized by multidirectional movements, just as Africans would be captured and sold in foreign lands, Indians would also be brought over as slaves to the African continent. As we will see in later chapters, other Indians in Africa, notably in nineteenth-century Zanzibar, would themselves become slave owners and financiers of the slave trade. If we may characterize these relationships as economic exploitation, for female slaves the possibility of sexual exploitation was never far behind. Like Zanzibar and the East African coast in later centuries, India, in Ben Yiju’s time, suggests Ghosh, “bore a reputation as a place notable for the ease of its sexual relations” (228) where concubinage was thought to be the norm rather than the exception.

This story is also about two Indian slaves—one male and the other female. But it is one that speaks not to the romance of intercultural bonding but to the unjust nature of human bondage. No matter how privileged a slave might seem, this story tells us, he was always susceptible to “social death.”⁷² And no matter how romantic an alliance between the Jewish traveler Ben Yiju and the Nair woman Ashu (or, looking forward to Vassanji’s text, between the Indian Dhanji Govindji and the Swahili Taratibu) might appear to the modern imagination, these relationships were simultaneously stories of sexual exploitation and abandonment.⁷³ While the records give no clear indication of what happened to Ashu, Ghosh notes, “There are many conceivable endings to Ben Yiju’s story and if the most pleasing amongst them is one which has him returning to Ashu, in the Malabar, the most likely, on the other hand, is a version in which he dies in Egypt, soon after his daughter’s wedding, and is buried somewhere in the vicinity of Fustat” (328).

I suggested earlier that Bomma’s status as the lowest of the low is an enabling fiction for Ghosh. Bomma, Ghosh told us in his prologue, is not one of those for whom we can imagine “properly human, individual, existences” (17). He is not one of the “literate and the consequential, the wazirs and the sultans, the chroniclers and the priests—the people who had the power to inscribe themselves physically upon time” (17). If, as sympathetic readers, we can celebrate Ghosh’s nostalgic reconstruction of the character of Bomma, we must do so with the knowledge that here too the melancholic is under erasure. The abandoned concubine, defended in her time by her fellow traveler Safi, has yet to find a modern spokesperson.⁷⁴