Amitav Ghosh's Ethnographic Fictions: Intertextual Links between In An Antique Land and His Doctoral Thesis

The languages of Indian Ocean studies: Models, methods and sources

“…For previous discussions of methodology, seeBurton (2013),Green (2018), the editors' introduction to Simpson andKresse (2008), andWorden (2017).2 Nonetheless, Braudel and Goitein's impact was not uniform: Abu-Lughod drew far more on Braudel, while Ghosh built on the findings of Goitein. For critical assessments of Ghosh's Indian Ocean writings, see American Historical Review (2016),Desai (2004), andSrivastava (2001).3 For the most recent synthetic interpretation of the Ben Ezra geniza documents, seeRustow (2020). With regard to the Indian Ocean specifically, seeLambourn (2018).4 For this reason, epigraphic studies are of much greater importance to the medieval Indian Ocean than to the Mediterranean.…”

“…2 2 Nonetheless, Braudel and Goitein's impact was not uniform: Abu‐Lughod drew far more on Braudel, while Ghosh built on the findings of Goitein. For critical assessments of Ghosh's Indian Ocean writings, see American Historical Review (2016), Desai (2004), and Srivastava (2001). …”

Representing the representers: Non-Western depictions of Orientalists and Orientalism in Turkish, Mexican, and Bengali writing

“…In its situating of an anthropologist as the narrative’s chief protagonist and its privileging of a medieval, multicultural past over a politically modern, monocultural present, some have found elements which compromise Ghosh’s anti-Eurocentric approach. To write about In an Antique Land , consequently, is to tread carefully between these two general sets of positions: one group of scholars (Chambers, 2006; Srivastava, 2001; Quayson, 2003) who see the book as radical, subversive, and wholly questioning the entire Western apparatus of Empire and History — and another (Majeed, 1995; Viswanathan, 1995; to a lesser degree Smith, 2007) who on the contrary see a text which, far from subverting any Western/Orientalist tradition, actually colludes with it on the profoundest of levels. 7…”

“…Once the reader understands the pure/fallen dichotomy which underpins so much of Ghosh’s book, then the real function of the Orientalists we find in it becomes much clearer: that of preserving/recovering a lost spirit of humanity. One of Ghosh’s commentators, Neelam Srivastava, writes of the “humanism which forms one of the ethical underpinnings of In an Antique Land ” (Srivastava, 2001: 60). This is certainly true — but it is a buried humanism, whose primary consequence is an Orientalism which is forever entrusted with the mission to preserve and recover this older spirit of mankind.…”

“…Less forcefully, Eric D. Smith suggests that “Ghosh in fact constructs a medieval and a modern Egypt that are, despite their several differences, equally consigned to an absolute past” (2007: 452). On the other side, Neelam Srivastava argues for an “espousal of syncretism [in In an Antique Land ] which is neither nostalgic nor blandly 'multi-culturalist'” (Srivastava, 2001: 62), Ato Quayson sees a book whose narrative “is constantly undermined by various inversions of the ethnographic gaze” (Quayson, 2003: 12), and Claire Chambers a text which “is constantly at pains to show imperialism’s legacy” (Chambers, 2006: 16). Tabish Khair, in interview, has also praised Ghosh’s book as a “conscious and very successful effort to avoid […] notions of discovery or teleologies of progress” (Khair and Johnson, 2009: 17).…”