During the winter break, please read Amitav Ghosh's memoir, In an Antique Land. Here's a map and a short briefing on the background to the book.

This novel by Amitav Ghosh explores the past's connections to the present, and in particular the connections between Egypt in the 12th and 20th centuries. As the book's subtitle indicates, this is "history in the guise of a traveler's tale," and in fact the novel traces the travels and experiences of a 12th century Indian slave, and a 20th century Indian anthropologist in Egypt. What connects both individuals is not just coincidence however; their experiences reflect important historical links between the Middle East and India, which affected areas far beyond, then and today.

Egypt in the 12th century was the center of events of global significance. Seat of the fabled Islamic empire of the Fatimids, site of conflict between East and West during the Crusades, and the hub of trade connecting Europe and Asia. The Fatimid dynasty established itself in Egypt in 969 and ruled until 1171. During that time, the Fatimids built the city of Cairo, their capital, contributed to the development of Islamic civilization, and exploited the geographic location of their empire which included parts of North Africa, Sicily, Egypt, Palestine and the Syrian coast, and the western coast of the Arabian peninsula. These territories connected the Mediterranean and Red Seas, the latter of which fed into the Indian Ocean and was thus a highway to India and Asia. The strategic location of Fatimid territories, and the waterways between them, in fact, led the Fatimids to build on local trade in the Mediterranean between Europe and North Africa, and in the Red Sea between Arabia and Africa, by connecting these trading areas with India and Asia, through the Red Sea. What emerged was an Indian Ocean trading zone that facilitated contact and exchange of goods and ideas between Europe, the Middle East and Asia to this day.

The trade that flourished as a result of Fatimid encouragement involved many people, not least of whom were Arab Jews from North Africa and Egypt. Their participation in Indian Ocean trade is recorded in the Geniza documents, a corpus of letters and other such material preserved by the Jewish community that survived in Egypt. As a result, they were later discovered and studied by scholars. It is in these letters that Amitav Ghosh finds mention of an Indian slave of one such Jewish merchant from 12th century Egypt, and through this slave's experience uncovers a complex and sophisticated world.

Jews like Muslims in the Islamic world, had slaves, although slavery's position in Islam was very different from that in the West. Slaves were generally either domestic or military, and were acquired therefore, not for their labor but for their skills. For this reason, their position as slaves was not characterized by lack of freedom; on the contrary it consisted of close relationships of artificial kinship in the case of domestic slaves, or elite status in the case of military slaves. Ben Yiju's Indian slave not only carried out business for him in India, but clearly also had a close familial relationship with his master.

The relationship between an Arab Jew and an Indian illustrates the type of the bonds created by trade in the Indian Ocean world from the 12th century on. In the 20th century the connections between countries within that world like Egypt and India, also took on a political aspect. Both countries had been colonized by England in the 19th cnetury, and as a result both had allied after independence in the Non-Aligned Movement (which supported an independent stance vis a vis superpowers, like the US and the USSR, after WWII). In addition, both countries had strong agricultural economies and had attempted to make the transition to industrialization (which India admittedly made more successfully than Egypt). And the trade of both countries relied heavily on the passage of ships through Egypt's Suez Canal, which facilitated the movement of ships from the Mediterranean to the Red Seas and the Indian Ocean, after it was built in 1869.

By the 1980s, when Ghosh visited Egypt, further changes had occurred in Egypt: modernization, and labor migration. Modernization affected the agricultural economy of Egypt by mechanizing the production of crops, and enhancing productivity with new irrigation and fertilization technologies. Labor migration from the Egyptian countryside to work in the oil-rich Arabian peninsula and Iraq also affected the material conditions and social life of villages in Egypt. Both these changes impact the relationships between villagers in Lataifa (where Ghosh did his fieldwork), and between them and Ghosh, as you will see.

There are also differences between Ghosh and his Egyptian friends brought on by class, race, and religion. As far as the villagers are concerned Ghosh is different from them by virtue of his education and class, his race, and his Hindu religion. As Muslims, the villagers are confirmed monotheists, and as a result, unable to really understand the pantheistic tradition of Hinduism. This results in many poignant exhanges between Ghosh and his friends in the Egyptian countryside, but ultimately in understanding and acceptance and friendship.

Understanding "others" is but one theme of this novel. In this case, the "other" is not Western, but equally Eastern. Attempting to further understand the "other" is what drove Ghosh to explore past relationships between India and Egypt, and as a result we have a wonderful tale of historical investigation, and the many surprises it can uncover. As he discovers, the "other" can be someone from a similar part of the world. And apparent differences often belie shared historical experience, as for example exist between Egypt and India from the time of Indian Ocean trade. In other words, Ghosh's In An Antique Land reminds us that the world is not just divided into a modern West and traditional East. It also reminds us that the East is not just an unchanging, isolated and traditional part of the world; rather it was and continues to be fascinatingly dynamic and integrally linked to the changes affecting all of us, and eminently understandable as a result.