ABSTRACT
A key episode in In An Antique Land is the dismantling of the Geniza of the Synagogue of Ben Ezra in Cairo in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the dispersal of its 800-year-old collection of documents. A key date in In An Antique Land, 1498 marks the arrival of Vasco da Gama at the Malabar coast, and the subsequent erosion of the 'ancient trading culture' of the Indian Ocean by Portuguese commercial ambitions and force of arms. If a principal theme in In An Antique Land is that of loss, another is the intimation of presence, in this case a pre-colonial world of 'accommodation and compromise' which, for so it seems to Amitav Ghosh, survives still and is 'in some tiny measure, still retrievable'. Ghosh completed the field work for his doctoral thesis in social anthropology in 1981.
