In In an Antique Land, Amitav Ghosh intertwines the story of the life of medieval Jewish trader, Abraham Ben Yiju, with an account of his own journeyings as an anthropology student in a rural Egyptian community in the early 1980s.

The tale of Ben Yiju’s life is painstakingly pieced together by Ghosh from fragments of letters ‘discovered’ by Western scholars in a Cairo synagogue in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, the stories of the agricultural communities of Lataifa and Nashawy, where the author lived while studying the local dialect of fellah (peasant) Arabic and the mores and strictures of the fellah community are born of the author’s personal experience, and are interspersed with light hearted anecdotes, often the result of the locals trying to understand Ghosh with as much, or more, puzzlement than that with which he studies them.

In narrating the story of Ben Yiju’s life, Ghosh offers glimpses into the lives of the communities of traders that lived along the twelfth century Indian Ocean trade routes. Ben Yiju’s is a continuous world stretching from Morocco to the Malabar Coast of India in which Arabs, Jews and Indians plied the trade routes of the Middle East and the Indian Ocean in relative harmony, and where business and personal relationships crossed bounds of ethnicity, religion and culture that can seem almost impermeable today.

In Lataifa and Nashawy, Ghosh describes the characters he meets and records their family connections and histories, social positions, hopes and aspirations. He returns almost a decade later in the hope of catching up with old friends to find that many of the young men who had befriended him have left to work in Iraq or other Gulf states, and the resulting influx of Gulf money has changed these small communities irreversibly.

The two stories are knitted together quite deliberately, with the author switching from one tale to the other at points where there are obvious parallels between the two. What ultimately brings the two narratives together is the undercurrent of nostalgia for a bygone, simpler and more peaceful age. While Ghosh’s nostalgia is focused on Ben Yiju’s now extinct world, the decline of that world is mirrored in the inexorable changes that seem to be affecting modern Egypt over a mere ten years.

The events with which Ghosh concludes Ben Yiju’s tale hint that even in the world of Ben Yiju, which Ghosh paints with a slightly idyllic brush, ties of family and shared identity could overcome those built on a lifetime of personal friendship and familiarity. The picture I am left with is not one where all communities lived in perfect harmony, but rather one where the borders of certain communities were more fluid, and drawn differently to how they are perceived today, and where complex notions of identity may have been less of a hindrance in choosing one’s associates, friends, and even spouses.