Amitav Ghosh’s in an antique Land : a
post modernist’s rendezvous with history
Name:- Krishna K. Patel
Roll No. :- 16
Batch :- 2018 – 2020
Enrolment no. :- 2069108420190035
Course :- MA English
Paper :- 11 The Post Colonial Literature
Submitted to :- Smt. S. B. Gardi
Department of English MKBU
Amitav Ghosh’s in an antique land: A
post modernist’s rendezvous with history
After diving deep into In An Antique
Land of Amitav Ghosh, we encounter the author himself an avowed anthropologist
of today, renegotiating his rendezvous with the far off yesterdays in the
mysterious but mesmerizing land of Egypt. The cinematographic description of
the romance of the researcher casts a hypnotizing spell over the reader as he
follows the old quester hero following the lure of a fragmented text into
distant times and places. We witness the exciting adventure of the researcher
traversing and transgressing the barriers of time and space. To him, yesterday
are never lost, just as tomorrow are always imbedded.
It is in this post modernist context
of destabilizing and transforming fixed ideas of history that Amitav Ghosh
dares to have a determined quest for artistics coherence in a fragmented world
of some ordinary and unheroic characters belonging to differing religious
beliefs and varying cultural colonies languishing in alienated moods. The
narratology doesn’t conform to a historical or chronological ordering of
events. Like a roving ambassador, the novelist perceives in depth the events of
the world and enables his characters to envision the multi layered, complex
patterns of time and space in which past, presents and future coalesce into
one.
The ensuing post modernist analysis is not
limited to Amitav Ghosh only rather a whole new group of writes of post
colonial era found no distinction between traditional orala cultural history
and a scientific objective history. One such potential voice, Salman Rushdie
draws our attention towards the shfting focus from the colonial national and
political discourse of the 1930s to the marked interactions of historical and
individual forces of 1960s and onwards. In The Midnight;s Children, Rushdie
asserts that there are so many stones to tell….an excess of intervened lives,
events, miracles, places, rumours, so dense a commingling of the improbable and
the mundane.
True to the kindred points of his
predecessors and contemporary novelists like Manohar Malgonkar, Rohinton.
Mistry and Amitav Ghosh, a traveler cum researcher, too, believes in the
subversion of history skillfully, exhibited in his novels like The Circle of
Reason, The shadow lines. The Culcutta Chromosome and the proposed work In An
Antique Land. The scholarly Indira Bhatt makes a through survey of Ghosh’s
multi faceted experience in colonial and postcolonial perspective. She
observes, The naxalities movement, the Bangladeshi exodus the riots in Dhaka
and Culcutta the 1984 riots in Delhi, historical facts about malarias research,
the condition of slaves in Egypt, the immigrant ghettos etc. that fill his
novel.
In every crude terms, if the post
modernist greets the absurd or meaningless confusion of contemporary existence
with a certain numbed or flippant
indifference favouring self consciously depthless works of fabulation,
pastiche, bricolage or aleatory disconnection then an attempt for a comparative
study of Asian and African, Indian and Egyptian, Jewish and Islamic cultures –
all interwoven into the narrative framework a novels is undoubtedly welcomed by
the same postmodernist who places this novel as a universally recognized
historic form of literary art.
So far as the structure of the novel
is concerned IAAL is divided into six parts. The first part is the prologue,
the second is Lataifa with twelve chapter,the third Nashwy containing
seventeenth chapters, the fourth partMangalore extends up to ten chapters, the
fifth part Going Back has seven chapters and the last one is the Epilogue. The
panoramic view of the vast geographical regions and cultural varieties of Egypt, Aden, Mangalore, Tunisia
and in modern times between India and the U.S.A. arrest the attention of the
readers with their soothing and scintillating exuberance. The time span covers
from the middle ages up to the 20th century with the narrator’s own
emergence time and again over the broad bosomed breast of eight hundred years
of history is similar to the view of a tiny boat surfacing on the wild and
wayward waves os an endless sea.
Repudiating the canonical forms of
history , In An Antique Land is the story of a Jewish merchant, Ben Yiju,
originally from Tunisia who came to India around A.D. 1130 as a trader, and had
spent seventeen years there. A man of many accomplishments, a distinguished
calligrapher, scholar and poet, Ben Yiju had returned to Egypt having amassed
great wealth in India. Ben Yiju married a Nair woman, acquired an Indian slave
Bomma, a native of Tulunad and settled in Mangalore with other expatriate
Muslim Arab traders to overcome the feeling of rootlessness and alienation.
Under mysterious circumstances Ben
Yiju went back to Egypt with his slave Bomma and the story is interwined with the
narrator’s own story of his visit to Egypt in 1980 to trace the story of Bomma.
During his research work at Oxford, Amitav discovered a letter apart from so
many other letter written by a merchant Khalaf Ibn Ishaq of Aden to Ben Yiju.
This letter bore the catalogue number MS.H.6 of the National and University
Library in Jerusalem. Now this single letter led him “to open a trapdoor into a
vast network of foxholes whose real life continues uninterrupted”.
With a sense of entitlement Ghosh
continued his probing inquiry initiated by a Hebrew journal, Zion, Letters of
Medieval Jewish Traders, translated an edited by Prof. S.D. Goitein of
Princeton University. Along with the narrator, the reader, too experiences the
journey and gets interested and absorbed in the researcher’s deep diving into
antique texts or archives to discover some remote past,to find some connection
with the present. Amitav ultimately, gets permission by Oxford to use the
Geniza library which, despitebits rich store house of past historical documentation
proves to be inadequate leading him further from U.S.A. to the two villages of
Egypt to find out the authentic facts about the lives of Ben Yiju and Bomma.
The narrator’s search, which lasted
for more than ten years, began in a small village called Lalaifa, two hours
south of Alexandria. Abu Ali, the landlord
of the novelist, Khamees the Rat, the beady eyed local wit, his adversary Imam;
Zaghloul the weaver; the quiet Nabeel and an elderly man Shaikh Musa were
contrasated characters who remained friend, philosopher and guide throughout
towards the narrator.
Packed with anecdotes and exuberant
details, the whole narration is all about the alien culture, customs, religion,
social life of the Egyptian and medieval Indian people. It lays bare the
magical, intimate insights into Egypt from the Crusades to Operation Desert
Storm. Ghosh introduces a character Ustaz sabry who shares his views with the
narrator on the consequences of war between Iran and Iraq:
‘It’s we who have been the real gainers
In the war he told me. The rich Arab
Countries were paying the Iraqis to
break
The back of the Islamic Revolution in
Iran.
For them it was a matter of survival,
of
Keeping themselves in power. And in
the
Meantime, while others were taking
Advantage of the war to make money,
it
Were the Iraqis who were dying on the
front.’
However, it is worth noticing in the
progression of the tale that Ghosh doesn’t miss the opportunity to narrate
tales of his own land also whether it be the political events. Calcutta and the
formation of east Pakistan, the stories of riots or his scholarly commentary on
the comparative study of religion e.g., Judaism, Islam, Hinduism or Sufism.
With utmost sincerity, the author presents a fusion of fiction and history with
“an objective view of the details regarding the curiosity of Egyptians about
Indian customs, burning of the dead, circumcision of sex organ etc.” One such
example of the curiosity about the worship of cows and the burning of the dead
comes palpable here:
‘You have to put a stop to it’, she
Called out after me as I hurried away
down
The lane. You should try to civilize
your
People. You should tell them to stop
Preying to cows, and burning their
dead.’
Here, Amitav records such statements
probably to prove that canonical history is imperialist in nature. N.Pandit
continus this argument that “it has created stereotypes about the orient and
these are stacked in books as objective records of truth. What history has to
offer is not a general and overall, but selective picture of the past. Amitav’s
attempt at ‘scholarly’ research on the lives of Ben Yiju and Bomma is also an
attempt at questioning orientalist history.
Amitav, while narrating about the
reasons for marrying a girl, Ashu, a slave girl by Ben Yiju, parodies the
notion of the recorded history as truth as he says: “If I hesitate to call it
love it is only because the documents offer no certain proof.
Summing up this unique experience of
Amitav’s adventurous rendezvous with history in In An Antique Land Milan
Kundera rightly observes that this modern novel accomplishes the suprerme
intellectual synthesis Amitav’s unearthing of the dead and the living, of time
and space of involvement and distance is what makes him a distinguished
anthropologist and a unique story teller who never gets bothered about even
when historians accuse anthropologists of nuancemanship, of wallowing in the
details of the obscure and unimportant and when anthropologists accuse
historians of schematicism, of being out of touch with the immediacies of
actual life.
Indubitably, Amitav subscribes to a
post modernist notion of history as a narrative and therefore the validity of
all individual histories against canonical history which is treated as a
metanarrative.
References
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