ABSTRACT
Anthropology and history meet in Amitav Ghosh’s book In an Antique Land (1992), where he describes his fieldwork in an Egyptian village and his parallel fascination with the Geniza Documents, a priceless collection discovered in the storeroom of an Old Cairo synagogue. His tale of a person of Indian origin living in late-twentieth-century Egypt becomes a counterpoint to the story of a slave from twelfth-century Karnataka who became the agent in Mangalore for a Jewish merchant based in Aden, Yemen, and Egypt. The author’s involvement in the distant past conjures a vision of the IndianOcean as it oncewas: the greatest trading zone in theworld, where ships and peoples from all shores traveled freely tomarket raw materials and precious items at open ports. And as the book progresses we begin to feel the sadness of this scholar who finds himself a stranger in the strange land of contemporary Egypt, where citizens have no experience of travelers from India, where the state locks people and consciousness within national ideologies and specific flows of capital and labor.We come to realize that aworld has been lost here, and that the loss began with the voyages of European traders and imperialists who reached out to the Indian Ocean in the late-fifteenth century and made new rules that re-channeled regions and macro-regions within a global capitalist mode. The ports of the ocean littoral became nodes of colonialism and then achieved freedom only as components of the nation-state. Within this new dispensation, Egyptians and Indians (or persons of Indian origin via the United States) would rarely find opportunities for direct contact across the sea.
