CHAPTER 4

RECONSTRUCTION OF HISTORY

History is generally understood as a construction of the past, the

whole significant and knowable past. The approaches to the interpretation
of the past and the modes and methods of constructing it have differed from
civilisation to civilisation. So too have the methods of constructing it. Each
civilisation’s perception of the past has depended on its peculiar conceptions
of time, space, change, progress and self or identity.

Varied traditions of constructing the past have been in existence

since the dawn of civilisation. There have been the Greco-Roman, the
Jewish, the Christian, the Chinese, the Islamic, the Hindu and the Buddhist
traditions as well as the innumerable folk traditions in different societies.
Social criticism sees these traditions as belonging to two basic categories -
the ‘historical’ and the ‘ahistorical’. The former is associated with the
empirical historiographical mainstream traditions of Europe and North
America and the latter with the mythical, non-empirical traditions of the
Asian societies.

Today, there is skepticism being expressed about history as the sole

legitimate mode of constructing the past and concomitantly the world and
its civilisations. History is increasingly being seen as different from the
past and as only one possible mode of constructing it. It is also being
 167

acknowledged that other cultures besides the dominant European and North
American ones, may have discovered alternative ways of recording the past:

... millions of people still live outside ‘history’.

They do have theories of the past; they do believe
that the past is important and shapes the present
and the future, but also recognise, confront and
live with a past different from that constructed by
historians and historical consciousness. They even
have a different way of arriving at that past.1

The various approaches to history are described below while

enumerating the distinguishing features of the ‘historical’ and the
‘ahistorical’ modes of constructing the past.

The aim of history, as we generally understand it today, has been

to bare the past completely on the basis of a neatly articulated frame of
reference. Its aim has been to unravel the secular processes that underlie
the realities of the past. These are available in ready-made or raw forms of
historical data, such as graphic records, public or private memories and a
wide variety of artifacts. These data are ordered by historians according to
the three basic themes of return (or continuity and repetition), progress (or
evolution of human life and the world), and stages (or the sequencing of
progress).2 Therefore, the most distinguishing feature of the ‘historical’
consciousness is certitude or a rejection of ambiguity. The historical, that is,
the knowable and provable past, is presumed to be the only past, standing
for all the past. The reason for this fear of ambiguity is that the modem
historical enterprise has been modelled on the modem scientific enterprise.
History in the modem sense conforms only to the spirit of modem science

Ashis Nandy, "Historys Forgotten Doubles," History and Theory: Studies in the
Philosophy of History. Vol.34, World Historians and their Critics Ser. ed. Philip
Pomper et al. (USA : Wesleyan University, 1995) 44.
2
Nandy, "History’s Forgotten Doubles" 48.
 168

and the development it aims to bring about. It borrows from science the
ideas of certitude, reliability and validity of knowledge. A study of the
western historiographical traditions would make clear the links between
science and history.

The basis of the modern, western conception of history, has been

the Greco-Roman historiographical tradition founded by Herodotus and
continued by Thucydides, Livy and Polybius. This tradition was
characterised by logical reason, precision and inclusiveness. In course of
time, this tradition was replaced by the Jewish and Christian traditions.
These traditions drew their central ideas from their sacred scriptures which
stated that Almighty God governed all peoples everywhere. Thus, during
this stage, all history was visualised as world history and as part of God’s
plan for humankind. The basic Christian interpretation of the past centred
around the concepts of Creation, Incarnation and the Day of Judgement.
This God-centred, unitary and linear conception of history was the most
influential component of the Western tradition until 1500, when, with
historians like Machiavelli and Guicciardini, history moved out of the
Biblical framework and became secular. The basic belief that underlay the
secular concept of history was that human actions were autonomous.

With the Renaissance, the Biblical and non-Biblieal traditions

merged and history became more empirical under the influence of the
scientific knowledge generated by Newtonian physics and astronomy.
Historians like Vico, Voltaire, Gibbon and Herder desacralised the past and
reaffirmed that human will and actions and not so much divine control
shaped events.

The concept of history as an empirical reconstruction of the past

that emerged at the time of the Renaissance, developed further in the
nineteenth century into the liberal vision of history, which has remained the
dominant view of history until the present. The liberal version of history is
 169

basically a compromise between the pre-Christian and the Christian

heritages. The liberal historiographical method studies and records the past
by tracing the advance of freedom in the different civilisations of the world.
It was with this liberal vision that history came to be identified with nations
and their specific identities. During this liberal, modem phase, all of the
human past has been constructed from a purely Eurocentric perspective.
The histories of the rest of the world were seen as relevant only in
connection with European history and as having joined the mainstream as
and when they were discovered, settled in and colonised. All other
information about the past that fell outside the purview of the Renaissance,
the Reformation, the European Enlightenment and the magnificent
advances that Europe made in the 19th century were seen as areas and eras
of darkness far removed from human achievement.

This exclusive liberal version of history has been, as mentioned

earlier, the dominant historical view until the latter half of the 20th
century, that is, until the two world wars and their large-scale destruction
which undermined the idea of freedom and the absolute autonomy of the
human will. The sense of being caught up in processes that over-rode
human purposes persuaded historians like Spengler and Toynbee to
reintroduce the divine will as the instrument of human affairs. However,
this was but a brief interlude in the development of the mainstream
European historiographical tradition. Soon, the Marxist-Hegelian conception
of history was to emerge as the dominant western historical view.

The Marxist-Hegelian vision of history has had as its base, the

changing relationship between man and nature. Hegel, the noted German
philosopher who had a great influence on the European mind of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century, conceived history as the process of
the self creation of man and as a movement and conflict of abstract
 170

categories of which real individuals were simply the playthings.3 Marx’s

conception of history varied from that of Hegel in that it rejected the
philosophical bases and connotations of Hegel’s idea. It saw the self-creation
of man as a process only of social development through the mastery over
nature. Marx excluded from his account of historical change any references
to forces or agencies beyond the human beings living and working in society.
He believed that it was not the consciousness of man that determined his
being but, on the contrary, his social being that determined his
consciousness and the first historical act was the production of material life
itself. Therefore, in Marxist historiography, revolution was the driving force
of history and the conflict between the social forces of production and the
relations of production-which Marx conceived as a dialectical movement or
a struggle of opposites-was the real basis of all historical development. From
this fundamental idea it may be deduced that according to Marxism, history
is a coherent, unidirectional, deterministic evolution of human societies
taken as a whole and this evolution is brought about by economic
modernisation and by the development of modem natural science. With
Marx, history came to be identified clearly with progress and modernisation
brought about by scientific knowledge and technology. This is because
technology is credited by Marxism with providing uniform production
possibilities to all societies which makes them organise themselves in
certain ways. This aspiration to economic modernisation, according to
Marxist historiography, is one of the most universal characteristics of
human societies and therefore ought to be the legitimate theme of history.

From this brief outline of the various conceptions of history down

the ages, it may be summed up that the mainstream western conception of
history has been basically as a master narrative about the progress of the
nation-state, through modernisation, that is, through systematic change and

Karl Marx, Karl Marx : Selected Writings in Social Philosophy, eds.

T.B.Bottomore and Rubel (London : Penguin Books, 1956) 18.
 171

the use of holistic theories. History, from the eighteenth century onwards,
has been associated with nationalism, capitalism, democracy, bureaucracy,
science and development, all of which are encapsulated in the modem
nation-state formation.

In the preceding section of this chapter, the historical consciousness

has been defined. In the next few paragraphs the ahistorical consciousness
is defined and its origins are traced.

If the ‘historical’ consciousness is characterised by certitude, the

‘ahistorical’ consciousness is characterised by skepticism and fuzzy
conceptual boundaries. The ‘ahistorical’ consciousness expresses itself in
myths, legends and epics and draws from the transcendental theories about
the past that have been formulated largely by eastern civilisations. The
distinguishing features of the ‘ahistorical’ consciousness are diversity, open-
endedness and self-destruction or self-transformation.

The open-endedness of the Asian ‘histories’ particularly the Indian,

derives from a unique conception of time, as cyclical and nonlinear. The
sequencing of the past, the present and the future is not treated as
something given or preformatted. Time in much of South Asian and Indian
culture is an open-ended entity. The Indian itihasas and puranas are set in
the timeless dimension of the ever present. The narrators of these Indian
myths and legends often narrate from a vantage point sometime in the past,
present or future. This mobility permits them to narrate with a vision of the
eternal. Thus in the ahistorical all times exist only in present times and can
be decoded only in terms of the contemporaneous. It is also important to
note that ‘ahistorical’ constructions of the past are often oral constructions
another reason for their flexibility of vision.

Another important feature of the ‘ahistorical’ consciousness is its

moral dimension. Myths are basically morality tales and mythologisation is
 172

also moralisation, in the sense that mythologising does not separate the
remembered past from its ethical meaning in the present.4 The certitude of
the historical consciousness, which denies the present the opportunity to
redefine itself, is absent in the ‘ahistorical’ or mythical consciousness. The
mythical consciousness, because of its non-empiricist and transcendental
base, facilitates constant renewal of vision or perception and reaffirmation
of the moral self. As mentioned earlier, the ‘ahistorical’ is associated
primarily with the mythical and other open-ended modes that Asian
societies have used for the purpose of organising their experiences of the
past.

Asian historiographical traditions, be they Chinese, Islamic, Hindu

or Buddhist, have been based on a belief in the overriding influence of the
supernatural in human affairs. This accounts for their moral and ethical
basis. Since the 1970s and 80s there has been a radical rethinking on the
concept of the modem, empiricist history and on the categorisation of the
constructions of the past as ‘historical’ and ‘ahistorical’. The predominantly
Western idea of history, with its links with the modern nation-state, the
secular world-view, the Baconian concept of scientific rationality and
nineteenth century theories of progress, is associated with imperial Western
democracies, communism and with global capitalism and technology which
necessitate market-oriented forms of decision-making. The objections to
modem historiography that is based on scientific progress have been as
follows. Firstly, it is felt that the idea of modernism cannot be a uniform
one, as there are a variety of paths to modernity and all societies cannot
resemble Europe or the United States in their development. Secondly,
economic development cannot be the sole theme of history. Thirdly, the idea
of economic and social progress on which modem historical conceptions are
dependent, legitimises coercion and intervention in society. A striking
instance of such intervention can be seen in the purges that Joseph Stalin

4
Nandy, "History’s Forgotten Doubles" 74.
 173

ordered in Russia during the early years of communist rule, when twenty
million of his compatriots were sent to death for the purpose of national
development and for encouraging the onward march of history. Another is
the massacre of Chinese students by their government for making a pro­
democracy protest at the Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989. The
declaration of Emergency in India in 1975 is yet another example of the
interventionist tendency of the modern, historical perspective. These
examples illustrate that liberal historical visions that draw from the
European Enlightenment, as well as orthodox Marxist historiography have
the drawback of becoming theories of the future, that need not have
anything to do with the morality of individuals and communities. The
dangers underlying the modem conception of history are pointed out by
Richard Pipes. Pipes categorically states :

. . . history may be meaningless . . . Perhaps the

time has come, after two world wars, Hitler,
Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, to abandon the
whole notion of history, writ large as a
metaphysical process that leads to a goal of which
people are only dimly aware . . . the will of
history replaces the hand of God, and revolution
serves as the final judgement. . . . countless
ordinary individuals who materialise in
contemporary documents desiring nothing more
than to live ordinary lives being dragged against
their will to serve as building material for
fantastic structures designed by men who know
no peace.5

Fourthly, modem history is criticised as an imperial category that

establishes complete hegemony and assumes the authority to marginalise
and banish races and cultures, other than the European and North
American, from the realm of history. Those who live outside history are

5 Quoted in Nandy, "History's Forgotten Doubles" 56-57.

 174

rejected as ‘ahistorical’, as not having a proper historical consciousness as

defined by the European Enlightenment. These ‘ahistorical’ peoples are
evaluated as being prehistoric, primitive and prescientific, and modem
history has as its primary objective, the bringing of the ahistorical into
history, either through political and cultural intervention such as
colonialism or through suppression by pushing them outside history. An
example of the latter could be apartheid, which was in existence in South
Africa until recently. This intervention or suppression is done under the
pretext of civilising the ahistoric peoples. In his book Orientalism. Edward
Said explains how the concept of Africa as a Dark Continent is a European
construct made through the western discourse of otherness. Africa was made
out to be the primitive other of Europe and had to be defined distinctively
in negative terms.6 Another example of the racist bias of western
historiography is the use of the label terra incognita for the African
continent, which implies that Africa is a void. Nineteenth century
colonialism which was a western enterprise, associated blackness with
nothingness, and the void that was Africa, according to western historical
perception had to be filled, preferably by Europe. Using this imperialistic
logic, Europe justified its intervention into Africa, as historic and as the
inauguration of empirical knowledge in Africa. The Dark Continent was
thus an ideological construct of the historical-minded Victorian explorers,
missionaries and scientists. Like Africa, India too was estimated as having
no history at all because it revealed no change and development. Besides
being Eurocentric and hegemonic, such an evaluation also reveals that the
modem historical view neglected the cultural aspects of economic
organisation and progress, which are vital to mankind’s development.

Owing to the four objections against modem history described

above, contemporary critics and historians, both in the East and the West,

Quoted in Om P.Juneja, "History and/Fiction," Postcolonial Novel: Narratives

of Colonial Consciousness (New Delhi: Creative Books, 1995) 59.
 175

feel that the story of economic development cannot be privileged over other
stories about mankind nor can it be identified with its history. The other
stories of mankind such as those of the indigenous peoples crushed by
modernisation, the stories about women and about family life, each with a
trajectory of its own, need to be written and accepted as history.

The fifth reason for the rejection of the modem concept of history
is its impersonality and lack of self-reflexivity or self criticism. History,
today, has become no more than a monolithic collection of facts and their
hegemonic interpretation. It believes in the invincibility of facts since
modem historians pledge by scientific objectivity and empiricism. They do
not accept that these facts can be demystified or unmasked and that
historical facts like scientific facts are only contingent. They believe that
history cannot be relativised or contextualised beyond a point. The
misapprehension about the infallibility of historical truth is pointed out by
Levi-Strauss :

. . .a historical fact is what really took place, but

where did anything take place? Each episode in a
revolution or war resolves into a multiple of
individual psychological movements".7

Strauss further argues that historical facts are not given facts as it is the
historian or the agent of history who constitutes them by abstraction. The
constitution of historical facts has always been a matter of selection and
point of view. Therefore, the idea is gaining ground that a wholly objective
historical record is a fallacy. There can be no perfectly true past but only
competing constructions of it with various levels and kinds of empirical
support. In this regard, it should be pointed out that even psychoanalysis
which is believed to have introduced subjectivity into history can only be
regarded as a technology of analysis, which uses scientific methods of

7
Quoted in Juneja, "History and/Fiction," 58-59.
 176

analysis and thereby removes the ambiguity that human subjectivity

introduces into history.

The sixth and final reason for the skepticism about modern history
is that the modern historical consciousness has devalued and delegitimised
alternative concepts such as transcendence and religion because of its belief
only in empiricism and the fixity of facts. Modem history has banished the
sacred from human consciousness and thereby from human development
itself. Transcendence, to the historical consciousness, is mere insanity, a
complex unscientific phenomenon and worse still, a mere political ploy to
hoodwink governments which are committed to human progress. Thus, by
rejecting transcendence and the sacred, modem history has rejected the
inner life of man and its story. The historical consciousness establishes such
hegemony over the known universe that it not merely presents itself as the
best available entry into the past but exhausts the idea of the past itself and
concretises itself into it.8

To sum up, the contemporary view of history is as a monolithic,

steam-rolling authority which prevents any radical social criticism and
which is no longer negotiable but aggressive. Therefore a radical rethinking
on modem history is being done in contemporary times.

The ongoing enquiry into modem history is also part of the

postmodernist criticism of western epistemological traditions and their
holistic theories. The postmodern concept of history has been built upon the
linguistic and psychoanalytic theories that have emerged in the latter half
of the twentieth century. The discourse theories of Roland Barthes and
Michael Foucault have shaped the postmodernist conception of
historiography as a hermeneutic exercise. The theories of Paul Feyeraband
and Louis Althusser fight objectivsm and scienticism in history. The

8
Nandy, "History's Forgotten Doubles" 54.
 177

postmodernist view of history also draws from the new theories of science
such as quantum mechanics which present new perceptions of time. It has
been shaped by older modes of knowledge acquisition such as Zen and yoga.
These old knowledge systems as well as the frontier sciences such as
quantum mechanics have revealed that the historical concept of time is only
one kind of time and that there are more plural constructions of time such
as those made by the mythical consciousness.

The radical interrogation of the concept of history at the present

time is of tremendous relevance to the Indian postcolonial enterprise of
interrogating the exploitative ideas formulated by the West. History is seen
as a tool used by the colonisers. Its function "was to erect that past as a
pedestal on which the triumphs and glories of the colonisers and their
instrument, the colonial state, could be displayed to best advantage. Indian
history, assimilated thereby to the history of Great Britain, would
henceforth be used as a comprehensive measure of difference between the
peoples of these two countries."9

As, has been pointed out in the earlier chapters, the culture of
science entered India in the middle of the nineteenth century as part of the
British colonial regime. Colonialism itself was justified by the colonisers
using the language of science and historical progress. The predominantly
colonial view of India was as a civilisation having no history. James Mill in
his History of British India, stated that, "no historical composition existed
in the literature of the Hindus" and the Hindus were "perfectly destitute of
historical records"10. Another colonial estimate reads thus :

Unfortunately the Hindus do not pay much

attention to the historical order of things . . . and

9 Guha, "Dominance without Hegemony and its Historiography" 211.

10 Quoted in Nandy, "History’s Forgotten Doubles" 58.

 178

when they are pressed for information and are at

a loss not knowing what to say, they invariably
take to telling lies.11

The Enlightenment - inspired ideas quoted above were internalised

by the Indian elite as well the Indian masses who though disenfranchised
and oppressed in the name of history, attributed their plight to their
inability to organise their past and to their inadequate knowledge of it.
Thus, by the end of the nineteenth century Indian intellectuals were
convinced that the art and genius of writing history was unknown to
Indians and that Indian myths and legends, which Indians had traditionally
considered as constructions of the past, could no longer be considered as
historical compositions. An example that could be cited of this change in
Indian perceptions, is the attitude of the Bengali bhadralok or intellectuals
who began to consider Bengalis as people who had forgotten their selves,
that is, as a people who did not have a historical identity. These Bengali
intellectuals, whose responses were typical of the responses of the Indian
elite in the other regions of the country, rejected the traditional repositories
of Bengal’s past and identity, such as its myths and folktales. They
considered Bengal as truly orphaned without a proper history. Therefore
they felt the need for a different kind of construction of the past, the kind
that would not humiliate them when compared with their ‘historically
minded’ rulers.12 Thus reclaiming the Indian past became one of the goals
of the colonised people. Historiography was one of the principal instruments
to be used for this purpose. The Indian past was constructed in modem
Indian history as a national past that had been violated and appropriated
by colonial discourse. This nineteenth century intellectual response has
constituted the mainstream Indian historical consciousness until the present

Quoted in Nandy, "History’s Forgotten Doubles" 58.

Guha, "Dominance without Hegemony and its Historiography" 309.

 179

and the efforts to historicise the Indian past begun by the historians of that
time continue to this day.

The information so far presented shows that, in India, ‘history’ is

a modem concept and that much of modern Indian history has been written
using a Eurocentric perspective where Europe remains the sovereign power.
History also exists as a discipline, as a form of social consciousness and as
a knowledge-system firmly embedded in institutional practices that invoke
the nation-state in every concept. It has, in short, become a tool for
negotiating the modem world. The historidsing of the Indian past using
western perspectives has been carried out to the extent of commodifying it.

However, in the post-Independence era in India which corresponds

with the postmodern era in Europe and America, the Enlightenment’s
conception of an objective history is no longer being seen as a reliable, or
reasonable way of constructing the past. A section of contemporary Indian
intellectuals rejects the imposition of the term ‘history’ on all constructions
of the past and the reduction of all myths to history. Modern Indian history
written using western models is seen as contraband history and
reconstructions of the past are seen as part mythic and part historic. The
idea of a dichotomy between history and myths is seen as being artificial.
Shail Mayaram states that history and myths are not exclusive modes of
representation and that no civilisation is ahistorical, since in a sense, every
individual is historical and uses his or her memory to organise the past.13

These alternative conceptions of history that are gaining ground

today, can be traced to a few Indian historians of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, like Girindrasekhar Bose who made use of
psychoanalysis to write a commentary on the Indian epics and the Puranas,
entitled Purana Pravesa. Bose was the first non-western psychologist to

13
Quoted in Nandy, "History’s Forgotten Doubles" 45.
 180

reread the Puran as. after recognising that the modem West had lost access
to certain forms of consciousness that were essential for a more open and
creative reading of the ancient Indian texts. Bose’s commentary was among
the earliest Indian critiques of modem history. Underlying his recognition
of puranas or epics as history was the implication that Europeans lacked
access to the Indian tradition of constructing the past and therefore had no
right to negate it arbitrarily.

Besides Indian historians, Indian novelists have attempted to

reconstruct the Indian past from indigenous perspectives. One of the chief
aims of the literary reconstruction of the Indian past has been to contest
"the positionality of history as the ‘master narrative’ to demystify and
dis/mantle it to situate the historical in the political, social, cultural and
economic life of a community".14

It is in the national and international contexts described so far that

Ghosh radically reviews the concept of history. The first novel that is
studied is In An Antique Land. Ghosh reconstructs the concept of history
through his own reconstruction of subaltern history.

One may begin with a short summary of the subaltern past that is
recreated in the novel. The central story that Ghosh unearths from the
bygone days is that of Abraham Ben Yiju and Bomma. It may be recalled
from Chapter 3, that Ben Yiju was a twelfth century Jewish merchant
originally from Tunisia who had migrated to Egypt and who had made
Mangalore, in India, his home, for seventeen years. During this time he had
married Ashu Nair, an Indian slave girl and had children by her. Bomma
it may be recalled, was his slave who hailed from one of the matrilineal
communities of Tulunad. The extraordinary bond of trust that existed
between the Jewish merchant and his Indian slave provides the basis for

14
Juneja, "History and/Fiction" 58.
 181

Ghosh’s reconstruction of the past and gives him the impetus to retrieve the
many other subaltern pasts intertwined with their story. They are the
stories of the peaceful Indian Ocean trade sustained by the pacifist beliefs
of the Gujarati Jains and Vanias and the Sufi mystics; of the destruction of
this amazing cultural co-operation by imperialism and, the consequent
appropriation and dispersal of the subaltern past; of slavery, as practised in
the twelfth century, inspired by traditions of personal devotion; and of the
matrilineal communities that lived along the Malabar coast of India. All
these subaltern histories that Ghosh retrieves and reconstructs serve as
counter-constructions to the grand narratives of the West, that have
dominated world history until the present.

Ghosh’s reconstruction of the subaltern past can be analysed by

highlighting the important aspects. The most notable aspect is that he
chooses to focus on the lives of ordinary people, the truly subaltern, whose
identities like their past, have been fragmented or suppressed by hegemonic
forces. Ghosh admits at the outset of the novel that the discovery of the
history of Ben Yiju and Bomma comes at a time, when

.. .the only people for whom we can even begin to

imagine perfectly human, individual existences
are the literate and the consequential, the wazirs
and the sultans, the chroniclers and the priests -
the people who had the power to inscribe
themselves physically upon time.15

The next most striking feature of Ghosh’s reconstruction is his

bringing to the fore, the refined traditions and the truly cosmopolitan nature
of the subaltern societies of the past, which have generally been dismissed
in western histories, as primitive and undeveloped. Ghosh lays great

Amitav Ghosh, In An Antique Land (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal Publisher, 1992)
16-17. All quotations from In An Antique Land are referenced henceforth by page
number only and all page references in this chapter are to this edition.
 182

emphasis on the rich diversity of the merchants who were involved in the
Indian Ocean trade and the breadth of their experience and education which
they had acquired despite their modest backgrounds. Even small traders
like Ben Yiju were scholars of some repute. The Jewish doctors of Ben Yiju’s
time, Ghosh notes, were well-read in the medical writings of their times.
One of the finest minds of the Middle Ages, the great scholar and
philosopher, Musa Ibn Maimun had belonged to the congregation of the
Synagogue of Ben Ezra to which Ben Yiju also belonged. In fact, in
comparison with the travels made by the Indian Ocean traders, the journeys
of Marco Polo and other explorers, glorified by western history appear
unimpressive.

Through various bits of information, Ghosh builds up the subaltern

past as one worth being proud of. The well-cultivated tastes of the people
and the quality of the goods that they made use of, is revealed in Ben Yiju’s
keen interest in writing and the fine quality of the paper that he used. The
paper is so durable that it had survived for eight hundred years despite the
heat and humidity it must have been subjected to during its transit between
India and Egypt. Another detail that indicates the sophistication of the
subaltern peoples is that the goods that were traded were restricted to those
needed for everyday life and for peaceful living. This apolitical and
harmonious character of the subaltern societies and of the transnational
trade of the twelfth century is also evident in the regular business and
correspondence between Khalaf ibn Ishaq and Ben Yiju. Despite the
imminent attack of the Crusades, the merchants had carried on their trade
unperturbed. Ghosh makes note of the peaceful nature of the subaltern past:

Within this tornado of grand designs and

historical destinies Khalaf ibn Ishaq’s letter
seems to open a trapdoor into a vast network of
foxholes where real life continues uninterrupted
(13).
 183

Ghosh’s focus on the lives of ordinary people is noteworthy.

According to Partha Chatterjee the true history of India lay not in the
battles of kings and the rise and fall of empires but in this everyday world
of popular life whose innate flexibility untouched by conflicts in the domain
of the state, allowed for the co-existence of all religious beliefs.16

The remarkably non-violent and non-competitive nature of the

trade is also testified by the extraordinary bonds of trust that had existed
between the merchants. The exchange of huge sums of money with no
written receipts and bonds speaks volumes for the amity between the
merchants hailing from various parts of Asia and Africa. Such bonds can
also be interpreted as reflecting the moral consciousness of the people of
modem societies. This moral basis of subaltern life is given special
recognition by Ghosh who records the defeat of the transnational fleet of the
rulers of the East, at the hands of the Portuguese forces, not as western
histories do, as "a lack of failure, one that invited the intervention of Europe
with its increasing proficiency in war" but as the outcome of an eclectic view
of life. He accords the vanquished, "the dignity of nuances of choice and
preference" (287).

Ghosh thus brings to light the alternative civilisations of the past

which had rare, pacifist histories to tell the world. He counters the
Eurocentric interpretation that eastern civilisations had lacked development.
He projects ancient Egypt as a prosperous land and as the nerve centre of
the twelfth century Asian and African trade. His reconstruction of the image
of Egypt counters the prejudiced descriptions of the country by western
historians using derogatory terms such as Egyptian darkness, Egyptian days
and Egyptian bondage.

Partha Chatterjee, "Claims on the Past : The Genealogy of Modem

Historiography in Bengal" 46.
 184

The next notable feature of Ghosh’s reconstruction of the subaltern

past is his disproving of the idea of an objective history. Ghosh’s stories
about the past have been retrieved from the documents stored in the Geniza
in the Synagogue of Ben Ezra. It must be explained here that it was the
practice of the members of the Synagogue, during the twelfth century, to
deposit their writings in a vault called the Geniza, in order to prevent the
accidental destruction of any written form of God’s name, which was used
in almost all types of written communication.

Ghosh provides a history of the Geniza to illustrate the manner in

which subaltern pasts had been appropriated and dispersed. Ghosh informs
the reader that during the eighteenth century a wave of Egyptomania in
Europe had brought scholars to the Geniza which contained rare documents
about Egypt’s past. Egypt was being seen at that time as a potential bridge
to the territories of the East and as a land of historical wealth. Egyptian art
objects began appearing in European homes and as part of this European
craze for Egyptian artifacts, the invaluable documents of the Geniza were
recklessly appropriated and dispersed all over the European continent. They
found their way ultimately to the libraries in major European cities such as
Paris, Frankfurt, London, Vienna and Budapest. The Bodleian library at
Oxford was one among the largest acquirers of the invaluable Geniza
manuscripts.

The manner in which the Geniza documents had been acquired

exposes the devious and dishonourable methods by which western history
had obtained its sources. The European scholars who visited the Geniza
were ironically of Jewish origin and gained access to the materials by
bribing the Synagogue’s corrupt beadles. The earliest such visitor to the
Synagogue was Simon Van Geldern who visited the Geniza in 1752. The
second and very significant visit was made, in 1864, by Jacob Saphir who
spent two exhausting days at the Synagogue and spread the word that the
Geniza could be a treasure trove of documents. With the Geniza’s existence
 185

becoming known, "events began to unfold quietly around it, in a sly allegory
on the intercourse between power and the writing of history" (82). Saphir
was followed by Abraham Firkowiteh, a Crimean Jew who excelled at
procuring the documents by swindling the Synagogue officials. Firkowitch’s
secretive methods make Ghosh point out the irony of a Jewish collector
stealing manuscripts from his fellow Jews in Palestine. But Ghosh
understands that to men like Firkowiteh this anomaly would not have
registered at all since, "he was merely practicing on his co-religionists the
methods that western scholarship used, as a normal part of its functioning,
throughout the colonised world" (84).

If Firkowiteh had to swindle synagogue officials, Elkan Adler, a

Jewish Briton, who visited the Geniza in 1888, was able to take away
documents using the power and influences of his brother who was the Chief
Rabbi of the British Empire. He was also helped by the aristocratic Cattaoui
family to of Egypt who appeared be no more than aborigines to Adler, but
who, like the elite of most colonised nations, were only too eager to cater to
the needs of western scholars. They even personally conducted Adler to the
synagogue to take away sackfuls of documents.

Adler’s condescension to the people of Cairo was matched by that

of Schechter who felt that he had to put up with the demands for baksheesh
made by the impoverished Jews. As with his predecessor Adler, Schechter’s
attitudes evoke irony. Schechter himself hailed from a family of
impoverished Rumanian Hasidim but was so accultured to the imperialistic
values of the time that he had the attitudes of a colonial official. Schechter
removed thirty boxes and sacks of the Geniza documents. It is in this
Schechter collection of over one hundred and forty thousand fragments that
a few dozen documents containing the story of Ben Yiju and Bomma, are
found. It may be added that Schechter’s second visit to the Geniza was
recommended by the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge through a letter that
was "no mere piece of embossed stationery; it was the backroom equivalent
 186

of an imperial edict" (91). So impressed were the Chief Rabbi of Cairo and
the head of the Cattaoui family with this edict that they both decided to gift
away the entire Geniza material which was their city’s unique heritage to
Schechter for no payment at all.

While reconstructing this history of the appropriation and dispersal

of the Geniza material, Ghosh deliberately underscores the interplay of
power and money and the use of underhand and secretive methods, in order
to demystify the idea that western history is an objective and empirical
construct. His observation of the role of the Egyptian elite, who permitted
the appropriation of the material knowing fully well that "the balance of
power - the ships and the guns - lay overwhelmingly with England" (92), is
intended to emphasise that vested interests underlie the making of the
so-called objective of histories of the West. Ghosh also points out quite
objectively that the Islamic high culture of Egypt was responsible for the
loss of the Geniza documents since it had never really acknowledged the
parallel history of the minority Jewish community and had possibly been
indifferent to its destruction.

The history of the Geniza materials reveals one more instance of

irony to Ghosh. His search for the ending to the story of Ben Yiju and
Bornma leads him to the Annenberg Research Institute, a centre for social
and historical research sponsored by one of America’s most poplar television
magazines. Ghosh observes that those very forces such as capitalism and the
western academy which had nearly destroyed the subaltern past by
dispersing the evidences of its existence were now protecting it.

Another history of appropriation and suppression is unearthed by

Ghosh when he visits the Magavira fisher settlement in Mangalore. As has
already been explained in Chapter 3, the Magavira community had for long
been relegated to the margins of Indian society and had willingly permitted
the appropriation and distortion of its Bhuta cult by the mainstream
 187

Brahminic and Sanskritic history, which had been framed using the
hierarchical ideology of caste. The fisherfolk who had earlier worshipped
Bhutas and who had been inspired by egalitarian devotional movements like
that of the Vachanakara saint-poets had submitted their past to the
fundamentalists and allowed it to be appropriated into the history of those
who had once oppressed them.

The main ideas that has been presented up to this stage, in the
discussion of Ghosh’s reconstruction of history, is that Ghosh rewrites
subaltern pasts for two purposes. One is to highlight the existence of well-
developed eastern civilisations and the other is to disprove the idea that
modem history, as written primarily by the West, is objective. The next few
paragraphs continue to focus on Ghosh’s second objective.

Ghosh’s own experiences as a historian further disprove the idea

that history is purely objective and scientific. Ghosh’s reconstruction of the
subaltern pasts is a mixture of facts gleaned from journals and the Geniza
documents and of imaginative description. The existence of Bomma is first
made known to Ghosh in a short article published in 1942 by the scholar
E.Strauss. The slave of MS H.6, as Ghosh refers to Bomma at the beginning,
makes his first appearance on the stage of modem history in this manner.
The second reference to Bomma is in a collection entitled Letters of
Medieval Jewish Traders translated and edited by Professor S.D.Goitein of
Princeton University. Ghosh’s search for the story of the subaltern which is
'like the windblown trail of a paper chase" (100) begins in 1988, with the
study of the voluminous seventy-page bibliography of Goitein’s writing
containing over six hundred entries in Hebrew, German, English and
French. Another source of information is Goitein’s proposed work The India
Book containing letters and other manuscripts referring to the Indian Ocean
trade. Since access to Goitein’s papers on the India trade is restricted,
Ghosh is forced to go directly to the Geniza documents and decipher the
letters written by Ben Yiju and his fellow travellers. This involves being
 188

well-versed in the rare hybrid language known as Judaeo-Arabie which is

a colloquial dialect of medeival Arabic and is written in the Hebrew script.

Ghosh’s retrieval of facts about Bomma and Ben Yiju is

painstakingly done. He personally deciphers the twelfth century
manuscripts, by taking copies of the documents published and comparing
them with the actual folio pages, which are worn-out, smudged bits of paper.
Ghosh’s scholarly efforts are evident in the scrupulous documentation of the
references and facts presented in the novel and in the explanation of words
and terms used in the reconstruction of the subaltern pasts. There are over
three hundred entries in the thirty-six page notes, at the end of In an
Antique land, which mention specifically the catalogue numbers of the
documents cited. That Ghosh intends to and believes in being accurate in
his presentation of the subaltern past is seen in his mentioning of dates
wherever possible. He is able to fix 17 October 1132 as the date on which
Ben Yiju publicly granted freedom to Ashu in Mangalore. However, as most
of the sources for reconstructing the subaltern have been either dispersed,
destroyed or lost, Ghosh necessarily has to imaginatively recreate from the
fragments of information available to him. He stresses the importance of
personal, subjective involvement in the writing of history even while he
attempts to be as accurate as possible. Even at the outset, he realises that
his personal mastery over the Arabic dialect spoken around Lataifa helps
him to read the twelfth century Arabic manuscripts of Ben Yiju. During his
hours of rigorous research there are times when the magnifying glass would
drop out of his hand in sheer astonishment since certain words and turns
of phrase would bring to his mind the voice of Sheikh Musa, the elderly
fellah he befriends in Lataifa. The language that Ben Yiju had used was
very similar to that which Shaikh Musa uses today.

Other instances of Ghosh’s imaginative involvement in his

reconstruction can be found in his interpretation of the personalities of Ben
Yiju and his fellow traders from their handwriting. Ben Yiju’s style is crisp
 189

and straightforward, written in the prose of "a bluff, harried trader, with no
frills and fewer wasted words". This style is different from Madmun’s which
is "a terrible hand, a busy, trader’s scrawl, forged in the bustle of the
market place" (156). Ghosh is able to see a "freshness and urgency about
them "and he imagines that Madmun may have snatched the letters away
to add a few final instructions even while the ships that were to carry them
waited in the harbour below (156).

It is Ghosh’s imagination that recreates with greater precision than

mere dates, the life in Egypt and India in the twelfth century. He
reconstructs the kind of relationships and practices that had existed in those
times. The reasons for Ben Yiju’s abrupt departure from Aden for India, are
located in the choice of words that he had used in his letters. These words
"spin out a giddying spiral of meanings" for Ghosh to choose from and
Ghosh selects the possible reason that Ben Yiju had committed a crime and
had fled to India to escape a blood feud as the most plausible one (161).

Ghosh also recreates through the imagination the long journeys

that the Jewish and Arab merchants undertook between Egypt and India.
Their journeys would have begun with a four hundred mile voyage down the
Nile which would have lasted eighteen days. The merchants would have
gathered at a town in the north of Luxor, and would have recommenced
their journey of seventeen days through the desert along a well-marked trail
of wells, on large roomy caravans, spending their time reading or playing
chess.

Ben Yiju’s relationship with Ashu is another example of Ghosh’s

creative reconstruction of the past. The fact that Ben Yiju celebrated Ashu’s
manumission with fanfare is interpreted by Ghosh as an indication of their
forthcoming wedding. Again, the absence of any mention of Ashu in the
correspondence between Madmun and Ben Yiju is seen as an indication of
Ben Yiju having married Ashu. Ghosh also makes the deduction that the
 190

most important consideration between Ben Yiju and Ashu could have been
love, though the Geniza documents offer no certain proof about it.

Another instance of Ghosh’s creativity can be seen in the deductions

that he makes from a single line on a tiny scrap of paper about the Kardar
or middle man in Ben Yiju’s business dealings. It is Ghosh’s idea that
Ashu’s brother Nair had probably influenced Ben Yiju to extend loans to the
Kardar, who had never returned them. This must have incurred the
displeasure of Ben Yiju’s Mend Khalaf. Ghosh also suggests that owing to
the matrilineal system followed in the Malabar coast, the bond between
Ashu and Nair would have been more important than the tie between Ben
Yiju and Ashu, since it was the maternal uncle and not the father who was
entitled to the guardianship of a couple’s children. The free financial
assistance extended to Nair’s Mend the Kardar, could have therefore been
Ben Yiju’s compensation to Nair for forgoing the rights over Ashu’s children.

The portrait of Bomma is another product of Ghosh’s imagination.

A letter from Madmun to Ben Yiju describing a piratical raid on Aden in
1135 indicates that Bomma could have actually been present on his very
first appearance in Cairo, at the time of the raid. Bomma who had been sent
on a business trip by Ben Yiju and who had been entrusted with a huge sum
of ninety-three dinars had indulged in drinking bouts and had presented
himself often at Madmun’s office and demanded money. Bomma’s expedition
though not ‘historic’ like the piratic attacks, had still made a deep
impression on historians and had been mentioned in a chronicle written a
century and a half later. Ghosh allows his imagination to soar and pictures
a drunken Bomma standing on the shores and cheering the Adenese soldiers
who were warding off the pirates.

The indispensability of the imagination is revealed to Ghosh when

he personally visits the Synagogue of Ben Ezra in Cairo. He notices that
 191

though the location of the Synagogue remains the same, its appearance has
changed. While its physical existence ensures that it is a historical fact, its
renovation and the change in its facade makes the original synagogue as it
existed in Ben Yiju’s time only a product of the imagination and memory.
It is purely through a personal faith in its existence that Ghosh as historian
is able to reiterate :

The fact is that you are standing upon the very

site which held the greatest single collection of
medieval documents ever discovered (59). ^

A similar interplay of fact and imagination is evoked when Ghosh

visits Mangalore’s old port and its environs where merchants like Ben Yiju
had stayed. Ghosh admits that the "imagination baulks at the thought that
the Bandar once drew merchants and mariners from distant comers of the
world" (243).

What Ghosh illustrates by his use of the imagination while writing

subaltern history is that a more complete and dynamic reconstruction of the
past is possible through a subjective and creative involvement with it.
Interpretation and chance are an inevitable and integral part of the
recording of history. While arriving at Bomma’s name, Ghosh concedes that
his derivation could be speculative. It would be relevant to quote here,
Ranajit Guha’s opinions on historic objectivity. Guha states that the primary
task of the historian today is to dispel the myth of ideological neutrality
which is central to liberal historiography. It is not possible, he says, to write
or speak about the past without the use of concepts and presuppositions
derived from one’s experience and understanding of the present, that is,
from those ideas by which the writer or speaker interprets his own times to
himself and to others.17

17
Guha, "Dominance without Hegemony and its Historiography" 214.
 192

It may be useful to recapitulate at this juncture the ideas so far put

forth on Ghosh’s reconstruction of the category of histoiy. Besides the
retrieval of the subaltern past and the demystifying of western historical
notions of objectivity and factuality, Ghosh illustrates the vitality that
imagination and subjectivity infuse into history.

The next important aspect of Ghosh’s conception of history that is

to be highlighted is his reconstruction of it, as a cross-cultural product.
While retracing the subaltern past, Ghosh notes those features that reveal
interculturality. The history of the Indian Ocean trade,Ghosh implies, can
be fully understood only in the context of the Bhuta-cult, the Vachanakara
saint poets and their egalitarian devotional movement, the pacifism of the
Gujarati Vanias and the eclectic religious beliefs of Sufism that were
dominant in the Middle East.

Ghosh frequently draws our attention to the etymology of those

words which are the product of the cultural interaction during the Indian
Ocean trade. This indicates his notion of history as that created through
interaction. The very word ‘Geniza’ or chamber has its roots in the Persian
word ‘ganj’ or store house.. Crystallised sugar or ‘misri’ as it is known in
many parts of North India has its roots in Masr or Egypt from where this
commodity was imported for centuries before it was locally produced.
Bomma’s subaltern identity itself is located only by solving the etymological
puzzle of his name. Ghosh progresses from Bama, as used by Khalaf ibn
Ishaq, to the characters B-M-H and since *h’ in Judaeo-Arabic is an open
vowel, he concludes that the slave of Ben Yiju was called B-M-A. But on a
closer phonemic and phonetic study, coupled with a cultural enquiry, he
arrives at the actual name Bomma, which was a common name in Tulunad
in the Middle Ages. Ghosh has to traverse a wide spectrum of Tulu culture
and history, aided by one Professor Viveka Rai, to arrive at this derivation,
Bomma.
 193

Ghosh’s view of history as that created through cultural interaction

also surfaces in his keen observation of family traditions, ancestry and local
legends, during his stay in the Egyptian villages of Lataifa and Nashawy.
This perspective, where history is seen as originating in cultural interaction
and as being plural and intertwined, is one that is currently predominant.
Until recently the primary historiographical perspective in modem societies
has been one that sees civilisations as separate and unable to communicate
with one another because of certain irreducible differences. Today it is
acknowledged widely that civilisations did interact with one another :

Civilised and uncivilised peoples communicated

across relatively long distances from very early
times and altered their behaviour from time to
time in response to encounters with attractive or
threatening novelties from afar . . . seems more
and more obvious.18

The above observation indicates that lending and borrowing between

civilisations were crucial shaping factors on the development of societies and
therefore cannot be ignored by historians today.

Historians today are reviewing world history and are attempting

to rewrite it in the light of early global interaction. The long distance trade
that existed before the beginning of recorded history is being acknowledged
as a possible catalyst to major events in the past. It is also being
acknowledged that religious and artistic encounters played an autonomous
and equal part along with economics and technology, in defining the course
of history. This recognition of the historical importance of transcivilisational
encounters which is on the increase today is expected to become the
mainstream of future work in world history. It is within the inclusive

William H.McNeill, "The Changing Shape of World History" History and Theory
: Studies in the Philosophy of History. Vol.34, World Historians and their Critics
Ser. eds. Philip Pomper et al. (USA : Wesleyan University, 1995) 13.
 194

framework which takes cognizance of all aspects of human activity that

Ghosh makes his reconstruction of subaltern history.

Ghosh’s ideas on history as revealed in his reconstruction of

subaltern history have been presented in the foregoing paragraphs. His
observations of contemporary Egyptian and Indian societies provide clues to
a closer understanding of his views on history. Ghosh discovers to his
dismay that in the Egyptian village communities among whom he stays, it
is the modern, historical perspective that is taking root. He notices
differences in perception between the rural and the urban folk. The
Egyptian fellaheen like Sheikh Musa, Khamees and Zaghloul believe in
legends and in the miracles performed by saints like the Sidis. Their
perceptions of the past comprise purely the miraculous events associated
with the Sidis. They have not as yet been influenced by the historical
consciousness. But among the younger generation like Nabeel, Ismail and
Ustaz Sabry who are educated, it is the western idea of history as the story
of development, progress and change that is accepted. Their modem
historical consciousness which seeks only rational and logical explanations
rejects the stories about saints and miracles.

The younger generation’s modem, historical perspective has so

pervasive an influence and has assumed such legitimacy that even some of
the older generation like Imam Ibrahim have converted to their way of
thinking. Ghosh’s argument with the Imam reveals how the historical
consciousness has replaced the moral consciousness. At the end of the
argument Ghosh sadly remarks :

We had acknowledged that it was no longer

possible to speak, as Ben Yiju or his slave, or any
one of the thousands of travellers who had
crossed the Indian Ocean in the Middle Ages
might have done : of things that were right, or
good, or willed by God (237).
 195

In fact, belief in right and wrong and in the will of God, "belonged
to a dismantled rung on the ascending order of Development" (237). So the
Imam, a man of religion and Ghosh, a student of the "humane sciences," end
up using the same secular terms, "the universal irrevertible metaphysics of
modem meaning" that statesmen use at global conferences. Ghosh is told by
the Imam, that unless one modernises oneself one would not have guns,
tanks and bombs. At the end of that very revealing argument Ghosh feels
like a "conspirator in the betrayal of the history" that had led him to
Nashawy. He has unfortunately become a "witness to the extermination of
a world of accommodations" the world of Ben Yiju and Bomma which he had
believed to be "still alive and in some tiny measure still retrievable" (237).

Another incident that throws light on the changing perceptions of

history in Egyptian society, is Ghosh being interrogated in Damanhour,
about his visit to the mowlid of Sidi Abu Kanaka. Ghosh’s interrogator
evaluates Egypt’s medeival culture and past, with its belief in saints and
miracles, as retrogressive. The meeting with the officer, who is a
representative of the modem nation state, awakens Ghosh to the bare
reality that "those small, indistinguishable, intertwined histories, Indian
and Egyptian, Muslim and Jewish, Hindu and Muslim" (339) had long been
destroyed and that there remained little in Egypt to prove their existence.
What underlies this incident is the fact that for most colonised people the
nation is a modem construct. What Sudipta Kaviraj says of India is true of
Egypt too. She says, "The nation in India. . .. is a thing without a past. It
is radically modem".19 Partha Chatteijee also links fundamentalist notions
of history to the Indian nation-state :

Fundamentalist claims become possible only

within the modem forms of historiography, a
historiography which is necessarily constructed
around the complex identity of a people-nation-

19
Kaviraj, "The Imaginary Institution of India" 13.
 196

state. To the extent that the genealogy of modem

historiography in India is deeply implicated in the
encounter with British colonialism, these
historical claims of political Hinduism are also a
product of contestations with the forms of colonial
knowledge. . . A single ‘national’ history is
demanded in order to legitimate the centralised
apparatus of the nation-state.20

The attitudinal changes to the past and to histoiy, emerging in

Egyptian society, have their parallels in Indian society. The Magavira fisher
community referred to earlier, has rejected its eclectic past and has allowed
Hindu zealots to appropriate and modify it. With a transformed social and
economic standing the community was "laying claim to the future, in the
best tradition of liberation by discovering a History to replace the past"
(273). The Magaviras hope to remove the social stigma arising from their
marginalisation by reconstructing their past to suit the fundamentalist and
majoritarian stream. As Kaviraj explains: "To give itself a history is the
most fundamental act of self-identification of a community".21 Like the
Magavira, the fellaheen of Egypt under the pressures of the modern
historical outlook would like to put behind them their "shamefully
anachronistic" ways of living. Khamees, Busaina and Zaghloul are acutely
conscious of the fact that there are other places and other countries than
their own which had moved ahead in time and their adobe houses and
eattledrawn ploughs were ghosts which had to be exorcised. This ‘historical’
outlook bewilders Ghosh for whom "the absoluteness of time and the
discreteness of epochs" are difficult to imagine (201). On his walk back to
Lataifa with Nabeel and Ismail’s younger brothers, he experiences an eerie
feeling as though he were walking with ghosts and as though "the hurricane

Chatterjee, "Claims on the Past: The Genealogy of Modern Historiography in

Bengal" 2.
21
Kaviraj, "The Imaginary Institution of India" 16.
 197

of change" that had swept the villages had allowed a brief moment in time
to escape (324). To Ghosh, even temporal borders are mere shadow lines.

Many other passing observations that Ghosh makes in In An

Antique Land reveal his skepticism about the modem historical perception
of civilisations and epochs as discrete. Ghosh believes that the legacy of the
past is transience and that most regions of the world had never been a
"rooted kind of place". Even in the present there are Egyptians working in
the Gulf countries, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, who have "passports so
thick they opened out like ink-blackened concertinas" (174). The villages
that Ghosh visits, contrary to the popular belief of being static or resistant
to change, have the "busy restlessness of an airport’s transit lounge" (173).
These observations and deductions made by Ghosh can be interpreted as his
unmasking of modem historiography’s presumptions about change and
development. The pictures of rural Egypt that Ghosh presents, refute the
idea of past, traditional and rural cultures as being static. They show that
these cultures have been and are more actively engaged in stepping beyond
their boundaries to engage with other cultures, which is the hallmark of
truly evolved societies.

The final observation in the novel sums up the fate of those

belonging to modem, historical civilisations. Searching for Nabeel’s face
among the thousands of workers fleeing Iraq, Ghosh sadly observes that
Nabeel has become one among the statistics in history. He has vanished into
the "anonymity of History" - the history of war and progress which is the
only history the world seems to believe in (353).

Ghosh’s project of retrieving and reconstructing the subaltern past

is continued in The Calcutta Chromosome. The novel is set in two days,
August 20, 1995, Mosquito Day and August 21, the day after. It may be
recalled that it narrates the search made by Murugan, a researcher at Life
Watch, for what he calls the Calcutta chromosome, discovered by Mangala,
 198

an illiterate Indian village woman, who Murugan believes, had been a

contemporary of Ronald Ross and had engineered his discovery of the
malarial parasite. This presentation of the subaltern again disproves the
notion that the non-western societies had no sense of development nor a
tradition of science like the western ones. It also disproves the idea of
woman as an irrational being and as a marginal figure in history. Through
Mangala in The Calcutta Chromosome. Ghosh re-presents not merely the
subaltern history of the colonised but the subaltern history of women, who
have been marginalised since time immemorial.

Ghosh reconstructs history in The Calcutta Chromosome by

disturbing its very base, that is western science. He does this by casting
doubts on the authenticity of the ‘historical’ fact that Ronald Ross, the
British scientist had discovered the malarial parasite. According to
Murugan, Ross had been inexperienced as well as uninterested in malarial
research at the outset of his career. He had not received the kind of support
from the British government that his contemporaries like Laveran, Koch,
Danilowsky and Romanowsky and W.G.Macallum had received from their
countries. He cannot therefore accept the idea that Ross "the lone genius
streaks across the field and runs away with the World Cup" (49).22

Murugan’s skepticism about Ross’s genius lead him on to

reconstruct the history of malarial research. He narrates it to Antar.
According to Murugan’s story Ross had turned to malarial research in 1885,
prompted by Patrick Manson’s discovery of the elephantiasis parasite. It is
Murugan’s thesis that Ross’s every move had been kept track of by Mangala
who had planted volunteers and assistants in the laboratories that he had
worked in. It had been one assistant called Lutehman, a follower of

Amitav Ghosh, The Calcutta Chromosome. A Novel of Fevers. Delirium and

Discovery (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal Publisher, 1996) 49. All quotations from this
novel are referenced henceforth by page number only and all page references in
this chapter are to this edition.
 199

Mangala, who had suggested to Ross the crucial idea that the malarial
vector might be one particular species of mosquito and it was this idea that
had made Ross discover that the anopheles mosquito was the carrier of
malarial germs . Later, in early 1898, in Cunningham’s lab in Calcutta
where Mangala actually worked, Ross had finally zeroed in on the malarial
parasite.

Murugan’s ideas about the Other Mind which had manoeuvred

Ross’s discovery are obtained from the recorded experiences of three of
Ross’s contemporaries - J.W.D Grigson, E.M.Farley and D.D.Cunningham.
It was Grigson who had discovered that Lutehman’s actual origins were
from the northern districts of India and that his actual name was Laakhan.
It was Farley, who had come to Cunningham’s labs in Calcutta in 1893, and
had seen Mangala display rare knowledge about the malarial parasite. He
had observed Mangala providing information on malaria, which was in fact,
discovered by Ross much later.

It is quite clear that Ghosh is not merely reconstructing the

subaltern past but is doing so by deconstructing western history particularly
that of the Empire. Western history had presented the colonial stereotype
as a male figure who is rational, scientific-minded and hard-working. Ghosh
disputes this through the description of Ross made by Murugan. To
Murugan, Ross is the

. . . real, hunting’, fishin’, shootin’ colonial type,

like in the movies; plays tennis and polo and goes
pig-sticking; good-looking, grey, thick moustache,
chubby pink cheeks, likes a night out on the town
every now and again; drinks whisky for breakfast
some mornings; wasn’t sure what he wanted to do
with his life for the longest time so thought he’d
like to write novels (44).
 200

The image of the coloniser on a civilising mission in a primitive land is

demystified completely. Ross is made out as having tried his hand at writing
novels and poetry until his father had pressed him to do something useful.
Murugan confidently states : "Medicine is the last thing on his mind, but he
gets into the Indian Medical Service anyway" (45) Murugan’s observations
about the lifestyle of the colonial officers in India are made in the same
tone. Ross’s bungalow in Secunderabad is described as being

.. .straight out of one of those BBC rent-a-serials

sprawling colonial bungalows: white-washed
walls, mile-high ceilings, cool, dark interiors,
elephants parked in the driveway, turbanned
servants salaaming the sahibs . . . (75).

The sahibs’ comfortable life-styles are in stark contrast with those of their
servants who have to live in small rooms with their entire families. The
sahibs themselves are dismissed by Murugan as "dickheads who’d
believe you if you told them that Plasmodium was Julius Caesar’s
middle-name" (75).

Besides demystifying the Victorian virtues of hard work that the

colonisers projected, Murugan also makes fun of the Victorian prudishness
that underlay the Britisher’s self-righteous appraisal of the Indians as
licentious people. In spite of seeing the malarial parasites multiplying under
his microscope Ross with his Victorian attitudes had not been able to figure
it out. Murugan’s satirical observation is that "just because you take a boy
out of Victoria’s England doesn’t mean you have got her out of the boy"
(99-100).

Ross is also portrayed as having been indifferent to his Indian

subordinates like any other colonial official. Such apathy breaks the
carefully projected western image of the colonisers as caring masters. Ross,
it is implied, did not even know the names of his orderlies nor their faces,
 201

because "he doesn’t think he needs to. As for who they are, where they’re
from and all that stuff, forget it, he’s not interested" (58). Through such a
portrayal of Ross, Ghosh seems to be taking a laugh at colonialism and its
supposed history of progress. Talking about the malarial threat in the
nineteenth century, Murugan remarks that malaria was a tough proposition
even for the imperial and invincible colonisers. The nineteenth century was
the time, when

. . . old Mother Europe was settling all the Last

Unknowns: Africa, Asia, Australia, the Americas,
even uncolonised parts of herself. Forests, deserts,
oceans, war-like nature - that stuffs easy to deal
with when you’ve got dynamite and the Gatling
gun; chicken - feed compared to malaria (47).

Besides deconstructing colonial history Ghosh as in In An Antique

Land, deconstructs western historiography itself. Murugan’s reconstruction
of the history of malarial research is grounded in such ‘historical’ sources as
Ross’s memoirs, Grigson’s diaries, The Colonial Services Gazette, Eugene
L.Opie’s private papers and MacCallum’s findings. But his theories about
the Other Mind and the Calcutta chromosome which Mangala is supposed
to have discovered, are formulated by imaginatively interpreting secret
messages and intriguing happenings and coincidences in the past and the
present. The rationalistic and logocentric basis of western historiography,
exemplified in Ross’s diary-keeping, is contrasted by Murugan with
Mangala’s silence and her indirect methods of communication. Ross is
presented as writing everything down, since he had decided that

. . .he’s going to re-write the history books. He

wants everyone to know the story like he’s going
to tell it; he’s not about to leave any of it up for
grabs, not a single minute if he can help it (44).
 202

Mangala on the other hand communicates, if at all, only through stories.

The writer Phulboni’s "The Laakhan Stories" are supposed to be "a message
to someone; to remind them of something - some kind of shared secret" (94).

The rigidity of historical facts is rejected by Mangala’s cult which

firmly believes that everything that can be known need not be known. They
believe that there is no end to a story because "to know something is to
change it" and, "to make something known would be one way of effecting a
change" (179). This implies that, when one gets to the end of a story there’s
always a whole new story. Therefore Mangala’s group records the past and
the present by simply prompting people to make connections. They do not
put together nor put down a story that is unchangeable and fixed. It may be
pointed out that as a rational construct, history believes in knowing
everything and telling everything. But Mangala’s group deliberately
operates in secrecy and silence. They want to leave some threads in their
story hanging so that they can be discovered at the appropriate moment by
some appropriate person. According to Murugan, this group has continued
planting carefully selected clues during the last century and have been
drawing the attention of a few chosen people to them. Such manipulation of
events particularly as made by Mangala to push Ross to the discovery of the
malarial mosquito does not subscribe to the conception of history as linear
and rational. The peculiar incidents that mark Murugan’s experiences in
Calcutta on 20 and 21 of August 1995 strengthen this idea. During these
two days, strange events take place. Urmila whom Murugan befriends is
sold fish wrapped in a century-old newspaper that contains vital information
for Murugan’s research. Murugan discovers to his amazement that
Mrs.Aratounian had predicted his stay at her house even a year ago and
had included his baggage in the list of disposable goods that she had
prepared a year before his visit to Calcutta. Added to these preordained
events are Phulboni’s eerie experience at the deserted station at Renupur
where he is visited by people long dead. These incidents in the novel
question the notion of experiences and of history as rational and empirical.
 203

Mangala and her team do not believe in writing the end of their story, since
it is in this way that they hope to trigger the quantum leap into the next
story. They do not split knowledge from discovery because both have to be
fused into one single moment of life.

As in In an Antique Land discussed earlier, in The Calcutta

Chromosome too Ghosh suggests that the idea of history as the only past is
a fallacy and it is upon this fallacy that modem systems of development
have been based. While describing the Investigation Officers of the
International Water Council, which is a part of Life Watch where Murugan
had worked, Ghosh notes that the council has faith only in "the endless
detritus of twentieth-century officialdom", such as paper clips, file covers,
diskettes and the truth of these things. The officers of the council see
themselves as

. . . making History with their vast water-control

experiments : they wanted to record every minute
detail of what they had done, what they would do.
Instead of having an historian sift through their
dirt, looking for meanings, they wanted to do it
themselves : they wanted to load their dirt with
their own meanings (6).

The implication of this description is that, modem rationalistic and scientific

systems such as bureaucracies rigidify and limit events by converting them
to history, which they perceive as a category of absolute knowledge. People
like Mangala, on the other hand, believe in the contingency of knowledge.
As Murugan tells Antar, it may not be the most natural thing to want to
turn the page and be curious about what happened next (50). Therefore
history itself is rejected by Mangala and her group.

Another concept in western historiography which Ghosh rebuts is

the idea that history develops along linear, rational and predictable lines.
 204

Mangala’s theory of interpersonal transference challenges this. With

Mangala’s Calcutta chromosome, one can "begin all over again, another
body, another beginning ... no mistakes, a fresh start". The Calcutta
chromosome is "a technology that lets you improve on yourself in your next
incarnation" (91-92).

It is also possible that Ghosh is not merely questioning western

historiography but anthropology itself. Mangala’s experiments tamper with
the biological development of mam. The idea of physical regeneration or
transmigration using a non-sexually reproduced chromosome such as the
Calcutta chromosome goes against the conventional ideas propounded by
biological history. Biologists, we are told, are under so much of pressure to
bring their findings into line with politics, because

. . . right-wing politicians sit on them to find

genes for everything, from poverty to terrorism, so
they’ll have an alibi for castrating the poor or
nuking the Middle East. The left goes ballistic if
they say anything at all about the biological
expression of human traits (207).

The Calcutta chromosome can put an end to such misuse of anthropology

because it is a "biological expression of human traits that is neither
inherited from the immediate gene pool, nor transmitted into it" (207).

Ghosh’s reconstruction of history in The Calcutta Chromosome can

be summed up as a radical opposition to the western historiographical
tradition with its presumptions of objectivity and linearity. It can be
interpreted as a rejection of the concept of history itself. Ghosh casts doubts
on the factuality of western history particularly colonial history and
validates the ahistorie consciousness of the subaltern peoples by creating the
figure of Mangala, the archetypal ‘native’ described, by the coloniser West
 205

as uncivilised and presents her as an intellectual with her own traditions

of science.

The Circle of Reason which is taken up for analysis next, conveys

similar perceptions of history. Rationalistic notions about the past are
contrasted with mythical notions here. Besides this the power of narrative
as history and as a means of creating and sustaining collective
consciousness and identity is highlighted.

The distinctions between the historical and the mythical

consciousness are quite explicitly presented in The Circle of Reason.
Balaram, his rationalist friends and Alu could be said to have a historical
consciousness. One of the earliest examples of the historical perspective, in
the novel, is Gopal’s and Balram’s reformist efforts at the Presidency
College, Calcutta. Gopal tries to rationalise Indian legends by interpreting
Brahma as the Atom, the Universal Egg of Hindu mythology as the Cosmic
Neutron, the Sudarshan Chakra, the legendary wheel of fire, as ancient fire
works and Jatayu as a pterodactyl. Balaram however rejects these attempts
to rationalise the Indian myths. His historical perspective is seen in his firm
belief in the progress brought about by science and technology. To Balaram,
scientific development and revolution are the only historical forces and
therefore he sets up the Department of Reason Militant in his School of
Reason at Lalpukur. Balaram believes that men like Louis Pasteur were
inspired by a passion for the future, not the past and it was that which
made him the greatest man of his time, "for it is that passion which makes
men great".23 Balaram admires Pasteur for his historical consciousness.

Balaram’s understanding of history as an ideology of progress is

also visible in his idea of the history of mechanical man. The loom that he

Amitav Ghosh, The Circle of Reason (Great Britain : Sphere Books, 1987) 50. All
quotations from this novel are referenced henceforth by page number only and
all page references in this chapter are to this edition.
 206

glorifies is symbolic of technology that has helped man to progress, to create

history. Balaram’s historical consciousness sees history as unitary, as
encompassing the whole world, because science on which it is based is
universal. It is science that has created world history and has unified the
world into one story. He states with conviction : "Science doesn’t belong to
any country. Reason doesn’t belong to any nation. They belong to history -
to the world" (54). Balaram’s ideas originate in his acculturation to Western
epistemes. However he himself does not acknowledge this. He accuses Gopal
of being unrealistic because the latter had spent his time reading English
novels.

Alu, like his uncle, has progressive, future-oriented visions of

reality and of history. His no-money theory is historical and interventionist.
It deprives his fellow immigrants of their freedom. Hem Narain Mathur or
Dantu is another victim of the ideology of progress as postulated by modem
history, of a man who had grown old before his time, torn between certainty
and history. The other minor characters in the novel like Bhudeb Roy with
his theory of straight roads that lead to progress, Dr.Maithili Charan
Mishra in Algeria and his socialist father are also examples of the historical
consciousness. Dr.Mishra is full of appreciation for the Algerians for their
technological development even after their colonial experience marked by
concentration camps and genocide. His father the leftist politician had also
had intrusive notions of progress and history. He had played his games of
political opportunism under the guise of encouraging the "Guiding Hand of
history" that was helping the poor. As part of his criticism of the Western
rationalistic, historical consciousness, Ghosh makes caustic observations
about the Indian left-wing political parties, their indifference to the
exploitation of the Indian peasantry and their hunger for power which they
disguised in the pretentious garb of progressiveness and scientific
rationalism.
 207

In contrast with these persons with a historical consciousness, is

Dr. Uma Verma, who, despite being a scientist has some faith in the moral
consciousness. The play Chitrangada chosen by her is based on the
historical concept of life as mava or lila. While Balaram and Alu have drawn
inspiration from history, Dr. Verma has drawn inspiration from legends and
myths. Chitrangada is the story of a woman’s realisation that the external
world is a mere illusion and that the truth lay not in appearances but in
inner realities. Alu is awakened, at the end of the novel, by this moral
consciousness. It is out of the sense of moral responsibility that Dr.Verma
infuses in him that he lights Kulfi’s pyre. Besides Dr.Verma, Haj Fahmy,
the Mawali elder, has an ahistorical perspective. He believes that the
collapse of the Star in al-Ghazira was because nobody wanted it, "a house
which nobody wants cannot stand" (264). Fahmy’s reason is rejected by Abu
Fahl who gives a more rational explanation saying that the use of poor
materials by corrupt contractors had led to the fall of the shopping complex.
Alu too has a historic reason for the collapse of the building. According to
him money was the germ that destroyed the massive structure.

The very theme of the novel, the futile circularity of reason can be
interpreted as the futility of events seen and played out as mere causes and
effects. When events are seen merely as causes and effects as in the rational
conception of history, life becomes a futile process with no real evolution or
elevation taking place. The ‘circle of reason’ in this context could be
interpreted as the ‘circle of history’, and of ‘historical’ development, which
is the only kind of development aimed for in the modem world.

Besides presenting the interplay between the mythical and the

modem historical consciousness, Ghosh presents the importance of story
telling among the ahistorical inhabitants of the Ras in al-Ghazira. Story­
telling or narrativisation is an integral part of their lives. Zindi often takes
up telling stories, seated on a mat, drawing from the nardjila, with her
immigrant lodgers avidly listening to her. She recounts the stories of Abusa,
 208

Jeevanbhai Patel, Kulfi and Mast Ram. Zindi’s stories have the power of
forging the collective consciousness and the identity of the Ras community.
It is generally acknowledged today that narratives can help in negotiating
the world’s complexities and that they contribute to the maintenance of a
whole, unfractured, communal existence. The telling of a story is said to
bring into play some strong conventions invoking a community.
Communities and movements that aspire to give themselves a more
demarcated and a stabler social form often use narrativisation as a
technique of staying together and of redrawing their borders or reinforcing
them.24

By establishing a group identity, narratives play a key role in

producing history, that is, the stories recounted create a community by
functioning as its history. Jonathan Culler explains this link

. . . the creation of a nation involves the positing

of a history; to be a member of this group is
precisely to take certain stories as in some sense
your stories, your past.26

Haj Fahmy is another character in the novel who tells stories.

Through them we learn about the coming of history into al-Ghazira that is,
the arrival of the British and their oil companies. Fahmy narrates how the
Malik of al-Ghazira was overthrown by British military force and how oil
treaties were signed under the threat of ammunition and guns. An Oil Town
was set up where the Ghaziris were excluded and labour was imported from
other poor Asian countries. The expansion of the Oil Town had led to the
destruction of a special piece of land where the Mawalis held fairs and the
Ghaziris practised falconry. Fahmy’s reconstruction of the Ghaziri past after

24 Kaviraj, "The Imaginary Institution of India" 32-33.

25 Jonathan Culler, "Making History : The Power of Narrative," Narrative : A

Seminar. Ed. Sahitya Akademi (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1990) 6.
 209

the arrival of the colonial power, reveals the territorial expansion and
capitalist exploitation that motivate the march of modem history. It
reinforces the idea that when conceived purely in terms of material progress
history is intrusive. It becomes a theory of the future and promotes the
culture of material acquisition. The Star or al-Najma crowned with five
pointed arms stretching towards a starry future symbolises this.

The tales of Nury the Damanouri, the egg seller of al-Ghazira,

Sanneya the hideous and passionate old woman, Sheikh Musa, Fahm/s
ancestor who was patronised by the Malik and Shombhu Debnath in
Lalpukur are the other interesting stories in The Circle of Reason which
reveal the power of narratives to shape cultural identity. They add to
Ghosh’s reconstruction of subaltern histories particularly those of diaspora.

If in The Circle of Reason narrativisation is a means of forging

collective cultural identities, in The Shadow Lines it becomes an essential
tool for self-realisation. The novel asserts the need to narrativise. It portrays
the beneficial effects of the act of reconstructing one’s past and points out
the limitations of the historical approach to constructing the past. The novel
which is itself a construct of the past, rewrites it through memory, personal
accounts and experiences as much as through written records. It also
replaces the idea of a unitary world history with the idea of many and
private histories. The narrator of the novel who could be called its
‘historian’, reconstructs ‘historic’ public events as they present themselves
to him through his personal or private experiences and perceptions. An
analysis of the past that the narrator reconstructs and the ways in which
he reconstructs it offers further insights into history as Ghosh perceives it.

The binding narrative in this novel of multiple narratives, is that

which traces the narrator’s growth to maturity, from simple levels of
perception to complex and profound levels wherein the conventional
boundaries of self and identity dissolve and appear as mere shadow lines.
 210

The narrator’s evolution into an expansive being is shaped by his

relationships with the three important people in his life - his grand mother
Thamma, his uncle Tridib and his cousin Ila. May Price too, is a formative
influence on his life, because of her relationship with Tridib. His
reconstruction of the past is stimulated by his relationships with them.

Tridib, the young uncle as has been pointed out in the preceding
chapters is the most powerful influence on the narrator’s life and is
responsible, by his gruesome death, for the latter’s embarking on a journey
into the past. The narrator’s objective is to rediscover the reasons for
Tridib’s death. The reconstruction begins with the recounting of how Tridib
had gone to England with his mother Mayadebi and her husband in 1939,
thirteen years before the narrator’s birth. This recounting itself is a
recollection from memory of Tridib’s description of his stay in England. The
narrator’s identification with his uncle is so complete that he believes he
was eight too when he listened to that story and young Tridib must have
resembled him.

The memory of Tridib is so sharply etched on the narrator’s mind

that he can recall his appearance so easily - his thin, waspish face, his
tousled hair and his bright black eyes glinting behind gold-rimmed glasses.
The narrator also remembers Tridib’s manners, his gastric problem, his
visits, his conversations with people at the wayside addas near Gole Park
in Calcutta and most importantly the stories that Tridib had told him from
his vast repertoire of knowledge. These stories had kindled the narrator’s
imagination into wider and wider vistas of perception. Tridib had told him:

Everyone lives in a story... my grandmother, my

father, his father, Lenin, Einstein and hosts of
other names I hadn’t heard of; they all live
in stories, because stories are all there are to
 211

live in, it was just a question of which one you

chose . . .

This is one of the novel’s most important ideas on history, the idea that one
needs to reconstruct one’s past and most importantly to narrativise it so as
to grow emotionally and spiritually. This link that Ghosh makes between
narrativisation and the self is an idea currently in vogue. Narratives are
seen as related explicitly or otherwise to the self. Narratives can never be
rational since the rational is expressed on nobody’s special behalf.
Narratives are told from someone’s points of view, to take control of the
frightening diversity and formlessness of the world; they literally produce
a world in which the self finds a home.27 Because of this link with the self,
narratives are basically seen as being flexible in their conception and
interpretation of reality. According to Ron Sukenick narratives are the
products of a certain type of thinking. He describes narrative thinking as
non-logical, rhetorical, antithetical, sophistic, discontinuous, ironic, self-
contradictoiy, antisystematic, inconclusive, self-destructive and starting with
the givens of a cultural situation rather than premises about it.28

It is Tridib’s inspiring idea that perception is all in life, that stands

the narrator in good stead as he reconstructs the past, in order to resolve
the mysteries that had been haunting him. A voyage of rediscovery into the
actual circumstances of Tridib’s death necessitates a venture into the public
sphere of his nation’s history, of Partition and communal riots. As a student
in college he searches among old newspapers in the library for reports about

Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (New Delhi : Oxford University Press
Educational Edition, 1995) 182. All quotations from this novel are referenced
henceforth by page number only and all page references in this chapter are to
this edition.

Kaviraj, "The Imaginary Institution of India" 13.

Eon Sukenick "Narrative Thinking v. Conglomerate Culture," Critical Quarterly

37.4 (1995): 27.
 212

the riots in Calcutta of which he has had first hand experience. He

remembers returning home on a nearly empty school bus with terrified
friends along Calcutta’s deserted, riot-hit streets. The purpose of his search
is to prove to his class-mates that the riots were a significant historical
event, perhaps as significant as India’s war with China. In course of his
search he learns about the working of history. The narrator scans the old
newspapers from the last week of December 1963 to the end of January
1964, when the riots and their related events had taken place.

The event that had set off the riots in Calcutta had been the
disappearance of the relic, the Mu-i-Mubarak, believed to be the hair of
prophet Mohammed, from the Hazratbal mosque in Srinagar, on 27th
December 1963. Huge demonstrations had been held in Srinagar, in which
Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus alike, had participated. By the 10th of January
the relie was recovered and reinstalled and this was celebrated with thanks­
giving meetings held by Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus. The only small rumble
of warning, according to the newspaper, had been heard in Khulna in East
Pakistan when a demonstration had turned violent and people had been
killed. A startling discovery made at this juncture is the indifference to
these events in a Calcutta daily which had been subscribed at the narrator’s
home. There was not the slightest reference to any trouble in East Pakistan
and not the barest mention of the events in Kashmir in this newspaper.
Determined however to prove to his friends the fact that the Calcutta riots
had indeed taken place, he renews his search in the old newspapers, with
a due from memory, of the cricket test match between India and England
in Madras in which Budhi Kunderan had hit his maiden century. The date
turns out to be a Friday, the 10th of January, 1964, and sure enough in the
same edition he sees the headline stating that twenty-nine people had been
killed in riots, not in Calcutta however, but in Khulna, in East Pakistan.
The riots that he himself had personally witnessed, had taken place on 11th
January 1964 when curfew had been imposed in Calcutta and ten people
had been killed. The startling discovery of how his memory had co-ordinated
 213

the riots in Khulna with the riots in Calcutta sets him off on to a voyage
into a "land outside space, an expanse without distances, a land of looking-
glass events" (224). He traces all the events that had taken place
simultaneously in East Pakistan and India from 27 December 1963 to the
end of January 1964, and this reveals to him the folly of separating events
besides people in the name of borders. The disappearance of a sacred relic
in Kashmir had triggered violence in East Pakistan and Calcutta. But the
Calcutta dailies that he had scanned had hardly given any attention to
these events. In fact, in about a week the papers had declared that normalcy
had been restored and that no reliable estimates of the number of people
killed in the 1964 riots were available. The narrator however refuses to
believe this and states that the number could have ranged from several
hundred to several thousand at least, not less than the number of people
killed in the China war of 1962.

The meagre attention devoted by the old newspapers offer many

insights into historical events. The predominance of events such as the
Congress Party’s conference, the impending split among the communists, the
wars and revolutions reveals on the one hand the arbitrariness of the choice
of events considered worthy of being historical and on the other the
deliberate forgetfulness that the people of the Indian subcontinent evoke
with reference to violent events in their histoiy. The indifference of some of
the Calcutta dailies to events in Kashmir and Khulna reveals a trained
objective historical perception, which divides what happens in Calcutta with
what happens in Khulna, This contrasts with the subjective perception of
the narrator whose vision cuts across distances and sees and reports events
as part of a complex of events involving people across borders.

To his dismay the narrator gets to learn that, by the end of January
1964, the riots had faded away from the pages of the newspapers and
"disappeared from the collective imagination of ‘responsible opinion’,
vanished without leaving a trace in the histories and bookshelves" and "had
 214

dropped out of memory into the crater of a volcano of silence" (230). The
narrator’s father has also been guilty of that very same "seamless silence"
that overcomes the subcontinent during events such as these. One reason
for this silence on violent events could be that the mass media in a secular
nation tend to treat violence simply as an unfortunate fall-out of the onward
march of history. Violence is seen simply as a temporary dysfunction and
therefore does not need to be explained further.29 But there is another
possible reason why the people of the subcontinent deliberately forget
disruptive events. Nandy calls this the "principle of forgetfulness". He
explains that the people of the Indian subcontinent, preferred
mythologisation to historisation. This involves a refusal to separate the
remembered past from its ethical meaning in the present. This refusal to
separate the present from the past necessitates not remembering the past,
objectively or clearly or in its entirety. Mythic societies such as the Indian
sense the power of myths and the nature of human frailties. They are more
fearful than modem societies of the amoral certitudes about the past.30
Therefore it is possible that ahistorical or mythic societies adopt
forgetfulness as a life-serving quality to help people reconcile with each
other and live in this world. To some extent modem Western social sciences
such as psychopathology permit such concessions to forgetfulness, provided
it is unwitting and adaptive. In contrast to the principled forgetfulness of
the mythic consciousness, the historical consciousness sees forgetfulness as
irrational, retrogressive, unnatural and fundamentally incompatible with
history. Remembering, according to modem history, is superior to
forgetfulness.

While Ghosh does not appreciate the silence of the Indian public as
principled forgetfulness, his view is to a certain extent like Nand/s because
the narrator understands that the journalists and historians who had

29
Gyanendra Pandey, "The Prose of Otherness" 192.
30
Nandy, "History’s Forgotten Doubles" 47.
 215

written about the riots, were, after all, men of intelligence and good
intention. They had described the riots, but once over had fallen silent
"for to look for words of any other kind would be to give them meaning, and
that is a risk we cannot take any more than we can afford to listen to
madness" (228).

The narrator reveals this mythic consciousness. In an old

newspaper he sees an "urgent contemporaneity" with its weather reports,
its daily engagements, advertisements and half-remembered films, all crying
out as though "it were all happening now, today and the feeling besides that
one may have once handled, if not that very paper, then its very likeness,
its twin, which transports one in time as nothing else can" (227).

Besides these revealing insights into history the narrator’s

reconstruction also unearths certain untold stories about the Indian past.
From the interstices of the liistorical’ reports of the riots, the narrator
retrieves the history of sanity, an untold history of the Indian subcontinent
that has existed alongside its history of division and violence. He
reconstructs its belief in the power of syncretic civilisations. From the titbits
that the narrator gleans from newspapers about the 1964 riots, he learns of
men like Maulana Masoodi, a true but unsung, unremembered hero who
saw to it that sanity prevailed in Srinagar during the demonstrations
against the theft of the sacred relic and that no private property was
damaged. He had campaigned for a collective mourning, asking the people
of Srinager to use flags in the neutral black colour instead of green, the
colour associated with the Muslim community. Another episode from the
novel that contributes to the reconstruction of this unwritten history is the
affection and concern that the rickshaw-puller Khalil has for the senile
Jeshamoshai and his willingness to risk taking the old man to Mayadebi’s
residence in Dhaka.
 216

A significant aspect about reconstructing the past that is brought

home to the narrator is the indispensability of subjective perception. While
recalling Tridib’s memories of his stay in London he realises that
non-objective sources like memories evoke a truer picture of past realities
than historical details. Tridib had told him of how his terror-stricken mother
Mayadebi has slapped him for having ventured out of their house and placed
himself at the risk of being poisoned by the Germans. Tridib had also
narrated how he had become frightened on seeing May as a baby wearing
a gas mask. These memories convey effectively the fears of the common
people during war-time in London. More poignant pictures of this trouble-
tom times are offered in the photographs that Tridib had shown him during
May’s visit to Calcutta. The photographs are of Snipe, May’s father and her
uncle Alan Tresawsen, before the London bombing during the world war.
One of the pictures shows a large, shallow pit, in the foreground, intended
to be the foundation of an air raid shelter. The narrator’s sharp eye for
detail notes the postures of defiant hilarity struck by Snipe and his friends,
the newspaper, Daily Worker sticking out of somebody’s jacket and the
elegance of Franscesca Halevy. During his own visit to London he relives
Tridib’s experiences in London during this period. He recognises the window
that Dan must have opened on that fateful September night in 1940, when
a bomb had stmck the pavement outside and killed him. He imagines Tridib
looking out of the window and watching Treswasen and his friends walk
down Lymington Road. These memories and old photographs bring home to
him as they did to Tridib earlier, the human element missing in the
innumerable reports of the war, reports which are merely "an illusion of
knowledge created by a deceptive weight of remembered detail" (67). These
reports had pushed aside the realities of the bombs, torpedoes and the
dying. These were, "mere events after all, recorded in thousands of films and
photographs and common books" (68). But the narrator and Tridib knew
that there was an infinitely more important reality, the fact that these men
knew even while living their normal lives walking down that street that
 217

evening, they knew what was coming. They knew that their world, and they
themselves would not survive the war. The narrator asks :

What is the realm of that knowledge? Nobody

knows, nobody can ever know, not even in
memory, because, there are moments in time that
are not knowable. Nobody can ever know what it
was like to be young and intelligent in the
summer of 1939 in London or Berlin (68).

Even the most vivid imagination cannot convey the affections, mistrust and
the jealousies that must have underlain the relationships between those
people like Tresawsen and his companions, who were but two years away
from their deaths. These observations by the narrator not merely demystify
history but point to the fallacy of the completeness of any kind of knowledge
about the past. The narrator’s realisation that even imagination cannot fill
in the gaps left by rational objective constructs has been triggered by
Tridib’s own realisation, that the clarity of his memory of Tresawsen and his
friends walking home was merely "the seductive clarity of ignorance" (67).

However, as in In an Antique Land, the reconstruction of the past

is attempted with as much accuracy as is possible in the given situation.
The narrator, even while reliving and recreating the past through memory,
takes pains to ground it in tangible materiality. Nivedita Bagchi describes
the space, time and material co-ordinates that are used while reconstructing
the past in The Shadow Lines.31

The ‘ahistorical’ consciousness of Tridib which views the past and

present together gets contrasted with the historical consciousness of the
grandmother and of Ila. To the grandmother the most significant events are

Nivedita Bagchi, "The Process of Validation in Relation to Materiality and

Historical Reconstruction in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines." Modem Fiction
Studies 29.1 (Spring 1993): 187-202.
 218

the freedom of her country and the defence of its identity even at the cost
of war and bloodshed. She is unsentimental about the past and believes in
the modem and bourgeois values of hard work, progress and self
dependence. The narrator comments that "she hates nostalgia, my
grandmother, she has spent years telling me that nostalgia is a weakness,
a waste of time, that it is everyone’s duty to forget the past and look ahead
and get on with building the future" (208) She is critical of Tridib because
she sees him as lacking the incentive of those who make history. The
grandmother’s limited vision of the past could be the outcome of her
diasporic life. Diaspora is the dominant cultural phenomenon of our times.
The modem world has witnessed forced movements of population because
of the partition of nations, colonialism, state oppression, wars, as well as
industrialisation and urbanisation. While the former have produced
identifiable refugees the latter have produced invisible refugees like the
grandmother who is trapped between "going to" and "coming home" to the
country of her birth. The massive uprooting in modem times, such as that
which resulted after the partition of India, has led to an unending search for
roots and angry and sometimes self-destructive assertion of nationality and
ethnicity. The latter response is what the grandmother exhibits when she
bangs her fist into the radio announcing the Indo-Pak War and has her
hands slashed. Diasporic individuals like her whose connections with their
past have been snapped develop a feeling pseudo-solidarity with their
communities.

However, despite being an unsentimental person, the grandmother

cannot help reviving the memories of her childhood in Dhaka, the games
played with her sister Mayadebi, the eccentricities of their uncle
Jethamoshai and the upside-down house. With all her relatives dead, she
feels that she has nowhere to go and nowhere to escape to. Even with her
co-immigrants whom she meets in Calcutta during her walks it is the past
that she discusses. Therefore the past is not a discrete period which can be
rejected.
 219

Ila too figures prominently in the narrator’s reconstruction of the

past. Like Tridib and the grandmother, Ila is reconstructed through
memories, of playing house in Mayadebi’s Raibajar house and meetings
with her in London. Like Tridib and the grandmother, Ila has a formative
influence on the narrator’s life. Therefore a reconstruction of the past lived
with Ila is also a voyage of self-discovery, which unravels the mysteries of
his self and his life.

Ila’s role is also important because she presents a cosmopolitan

view of history, which turns out to be as restricted as that of the
grandmother. She disdainfully rejects riots and disasters as local things
unlike "revolutions and antifascist wars" which set a political example to the
world and are recorded for eternity. Ila, ironically, despite her anti-fascist
stance, is beguiled by the West’s notion of its centrality in history. She has
only "quiet pity for the pettiness of lives . . . lived out in the silence of
voiceless events in a backward world" (104). The political events in Calcutta
during the 1960s and 70s and the courage of those who had survived it,
cannot be appreciated by Ila.

May Price is another person who plays a crucial role in the

narrator’s reconstruction of the past. It is May’s description of how Tridib
had actually been killed which unravels to the narrator "the final
redemptive mystery" of Tridib’s death. Through May he becomes reconciled
with this excruciatingly painful part of his past. Taking Tridib’s place in
May’s arms he seems to have integrated Tridib’s awesome and haunting
presence into himself and reconciled the troubled past to the present.

The postcolonial rejection of history can be criticised as being

premature to many postcolonial societies which continue to be victimised
and deprived of an identity. Such societies may need to write histories in
order to forge an identity and find a place for themselves in the world.
Makarand Paranjape criticises the blind acceptance of the postmodernist
 220

suspicions of history and states that the death of history might be necessary
in a civilisation like Europe which suffers from an excess of history. As for
India it was the self-generated narrative of the emancipation of the country
that had helped it disavow the grand narrative of imperialism.32

In the context of these views it must be clarified that Ghosh’s

rejection of history and his projection of the dissolution of identity as an
ideal are not intended to discount the seeking of identity. Ghosh’s creation
of subaltern histories substantiates this. What Ghosh disparages are
paranoid projections of the past. His valorisation of the ahistorical and his
prescription of fluid, capacious selves need to be seen in the context of the
contemporary resurgence of totalising narratives which threaten to destroy
man’s life. Ghosh is not against reconstructing the past but against the use
of the western scientific model called history which is flawed because of its
inherent absolutism.

Thus in The Shadow Lines Ghosh makes a distinction between the

past and history and projects the idea that a true reconstruction of the past
is possible only by integrating the subjective with the objective and by
accepting the existence of multiple histories.

Ghosh’s reconstruction of history has many positive features.

Firstly, he validates the non-European view of the past. He valorises the
moral consciousness and points out that history removes the seifs moral
dimension. Ghosh’s idea is that all times exist only in the present and can
be decoded only in terms of the contemporaneous. Since there is no past that
is independent of the present the method of decoding and coding it has to
be subject to the morality of every day life and not to impersonal, absolutist,
scientific principles. Secondly, Ghosh points out that for any construction of

32 Paranjape, "Post-modernism and India : Some Preliminary Animadversions'

106.
 221

reality, be it past or present, it is necessary that the self must be seen

simultaneously as the self and the non-self or the other. Next Ghosh
recovers marginal voices and memories. He sharpens our sensitivities to the
cultural preferences of communities that choose to live outside history. He
understands and presents the subalterns as subjects of their own histories.
Most importantly, he urges the once-colonised people to retrieve those parts
of themselves which they have disowned because the West and modernism
have dismissed them as worthless or dangerous. Then, he compels the
recognition of the gaps in historical data and calls for the incorporation of
mythic elements into history. Besides this, he evokes a radical self-criticism,
a much needed exercise in contemporary times. Lastly, he reiterates the
right and capacity of individuals to self-define. Some of his characters choose
deliberately to live outside history and be free of its constricting
materialistic ideologies.

The notions of history that Ghosh presents are however not the
popular ones. Enlightenment views which presume that there is a perfect
equivalence between history and the past and that there is no past
independent of history, are well-entrenched in modern India. It is believed
that if there is a past existing independent of history, it has to be made into
history. Modernisation makes it imperative that all human experiences look
the same. This is the modem concept of equality and brotherhood, which is
different from Ghosh’s idea of eclectic cultures. The ahistoric people
therefore continue to exist only at the peripheries and remain a minority
accused of conservatism.

Ghosh’s bold criticism of the hegemony of history is remarkable

because the modem Indian historian generally writes from the site of the
university often a governmental body which has to conform to the
modernising discourse of the nation. History writing in India has been
mostly an institutional practice and has restricted itself to rationalistic
models where detailed accounts of political events are compiled. In recent
 222

years however, history writing has tended to turn away from political
history to cultural history, from a mere compilation of events to creating a
discourse. One of the catalysts for this change is the contemporary
postmodern trend of histoiy-writing in the West. Postmodernism licenses
chronic heterodoxy and permits interpretation in history. The postmodernist
approach, like the postcolonial is constructionist. Besides postmodernism,
psychoanalysis also recognises the unconscious factors at work during the
writing of history and has put forth the idea of psychohistory which is
similar to ahistory in its belief that constructions of the past can be diverse
and conflicting.

Before concluding this analysis, the link between Ghosh’s

reconstruction of history and the postcolonial novel may be briefly dwelt
upon. History has been one of the central issues in the postcolonial novel.
These novels of colonial consciousness have contested the distortions made
by imperialist historiography and have reconstituted the past in terms of
the present. The postcolonial novel either positions itself against history or
dismantles it using postmodern techniques or rewrites narratives using
indigenous narratology.33 Ghosh’s novels position themselves against
history and also rewrite narratives using indigenous techniques.

Ghosh’s reconstruction has had its predecessors. Raja Rao’s

Kanthanura positions itself against history as much as it rewrites the
i thihasanurana tradition of Sanskrit narratology. Salman Rushdie’s novels
dismantle history with the help of postmodern narrative techniques such as
magic realism, parody and allegory. In Midnight’s Children and Shame
Rushdie represents history as a postcolonial and postmodern discourse.
Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian novel also makes use of Indian myth but
for purposes of parody. African writers like Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa

33
Juneja, "History and/Fiction" 106.
 223

Thiongo too have reconstructed the past of their people inorder to record
their traumatic colonial experiences.

Before concluding this chapter it may be worthwhile to take a

glance at Ghosh’s narratives which have been so designed as to reflect his
idea of history. The common features of Ghosh’s narratives in the four
novels studied, are as follows. The most distinct feature is the fluid
presentation of time and space. All the novels exist in an equitemporal or
intertemporal zone. A fine example of the smooth traversal of these zones
is The Shadow Lines where varying times and places seem to merge in the
narrator’s imagination and locate him in an eternal here and now. The
Calcutta Chromosome also reveals a convergence of not merely the past and
the present but of the future too. The syncreticism of cultures and epochs
depicted in In an Antique Land is reflected in the confluence of the present
and the past in the novel. Owing to the transgression of time and space, the
narratives do not have a linear movement but a cyclic or spiral one. The
most obvious example of this, among Ghosh’s novels, is The Circle of
Reason. The novel’s very structure is circular to reflect the circularity of the
concept of reason which is its theme.

Ghosh’s narratives run in concentric or spirally looping or zig zag

movements and constantly make connections or reconnections. The
experience of unravelling the non-linear narratives of Ghosh, is similar "to
entering a stepwell. . . to retrieve an original tale is a dizzying and
exhilarating experience".34

The non-linearity of Ghosh’s narratives also results from the

multiple voices speaking within them. There are stories within stories or
episodes within episodes and in the process of reading, this rich confusion

34 Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, "Story of the Tongue and the Text, The Narrative
Tradition," Narrative : A Seminar. Ed. Sahitya Akademi (New Delhi : Sahitya
Akademi, 1990) 254.
 224

of multiple narratives, turns into a honeycomb-like maze. The Circle of

Reason exhibits this complexity and so too The Calcutta Chromosome where
Murugan’s story is entangled with Mangala’s, Ross’s, and those of a host of
other characters. The Shadow Lines is another remarkable achievement
where there is a fusion of multiple voices and viewpoints. So finely crafted
is the novel that it lends itself to the image of a Rubik’s cube, which reveals
different facets with each manipulation.35

To sum up, Ghosh’s narratives reveal flexibility, multiplicity and

inclusiveness, all of which qualities make them embody the idea of history
as an open-ended and fluid construct. These characteristics, it is needless
to say, bear very close affinity to traditional Indian narratives. In India,
narratives have since time immemorial been identified with history.
Narratives in the Indian tradition are of two kinds, the itihasas such as the
Ramavana and the Mahabarata and the puranas or myths such as the
Bhagavatha Puranas. Both itihasas and puranas have served as history in
Indian culture.

Coming to the features of traditional Indian narratology that are

seen in Ghosh’s novels, one may begin with the treatment of time and space.
The traditional narrative is constructed along Indo-Buddhist notions of
temporality, which are influenced by the concept of karma and conceive time
as yugas and kalpas. A yuga is a mind-boggling, 10,800,000 mortal years.
The fables of the Panchatantra are a fine example of this equitemporality.
They are set in the timeless dimension of the ever present.

The next defining feature of the traditional narrative which is found

in Ghosh’s story-telling is the prevention of closure. The narratives while

Gopal Gandhi, "A Rubik Cube of Emotions," rev. of The Shadow Lines by Amitav
Ghosh, The Book Review 12.5 (Sept.-Oct. 1988): 38-42.
 225

having an internal, unifying rhythm, do not permit the arrival at a single

or fixed interpretation. In the Indian tradition

... no story or work of art is meant to be

complete or enclosed in itself. There are no linear
climaxes and finales in performance nor a
predetermined frame of a picture: each one is
considered part of a chain no matter how definite
its contours are.36

It may be interesting to note that in certain Indian folk traditions there is

even a taboo against completing stories.

This prevention of closure, which is the typical characteristics of the

Indian narrative, is brought about by certain other features such as the
convergence of various generic styles. The narrative in the Indian tradition
does restrict itself to any one category of the visual, literary or performing
arts. Art forms continually transgress each other. It is this mobility that
permits digressions within a narrative, because digressions are seen as
integral to continuity and not as interruptions. The notion of singularity and
purity is alien to the Indian narrative and intermingling is seen as a means
of sustenance. Each tradition carries elements of the other and functions in
an intermediate zone which gives rise to multiple associations
simultaneously. In An Antique Land exhibits this generic hybridity. The
novel is a fine mix of travelogue, ethnography, fiction and autobiography.

The fact that Indian literary narratives share the characteristic of

narratives in the other art forms is obvious in certain types of Indian
painting. The murals on the walls of the Ajanta caves in India, present the
Jatakas in fluid, ambivalent time-zones. There are no distinguishing
contours between or around the stories. Parallel tales run above, below, back

36
Sheikh, "Story of the Tongue and the Text, The Narrative Tradition" 256.
 226

and forth, each tale growing out of and into the other. The viewer is forced
to see the tales as interconnections and not as isolated episodes. Similarly
the Lepakshi panels in Andhra Pradesh are painted inside a circular dome
and the viewer has to rotate himself to see the narrative unfolding itself.
Besides these two examples, it may be stated that most ancient Indian
paintings share features such as non-linearity, repetition and superimposed
perspectives with literary narratives. These features provide the reader or
viewer as many perspectives of an event as possible.

Underlying the flexibility and multiplicity of the ancient Indian

narratives is a belief in life as a process and in reality as transcendental.
The tradition narratives are products of the mythic consciousness. They see
transformation and alteration as fundamental processes of life and their
characters embody this outlook. In Ghosh’s narratives too his central
characters seek transformation. In short, the traditional Indian narrative
is basically reconstructionist in its motive and style, which is why it is the
ideal mode for reconstructing the past.

The open-endedness of the traditional narratives is also aided by

their predominantly oral form. Oral narration permits improvisation and
adaptability to the listener and his location. An example of the amazing
freedom that oral narration provides is demonstrated by the Ramavana
itself, which has multiple versions, one among them being the Malaya
version where the monogamous character of Rama is transformed into a
polygamous character. Narrative in the Indian tradition is also interpreted
as katha or an imagined story. This also denotes that in the Indian outlook
imagination is very much a part of reconstruction. Most of Ghosh’s
narratives are built up through the stories that his characters tell each
other.
 227

One may conclude this chapter on Ghosh’s reconstruction of history

by quoting what Sudipta Kaviraj describes as the task of the contemporary
historian. She compares a historian to one who renovates a building :

The task of the historian is like the work of

somebody who partially rebuilds a house. He does
not put a system in an empty space brick by
brick. There is a structure which already exists
and it cannot be wholly dismantled because he
needs to live inside it at least partially; his
criticism is to attack it brick by brick, taking a
brick away and putting another in its place. After
some time, with a large number of bricks
changed, this would constitute a structural
change in what is called history.37

Though radical in his interrogation of history, Ghosh reveals the

patience of one who replaces the existing structure idea by idea. He mixes
the historical with the mythical and the rational with the imaginative, and
reconstitutes the past.

37
Kaviraj, "The Imaginary Institution of India1* 38.