This piece was first published in the zine put out in the summer by the Cambridge Majlis, which continues the tradition of the original Majlis, set in 1891 as a forum for discussing South Asian politics and culture, and attended by Nehru, Jinnah and Amartya Sen amongst others, with weekly debates on South Asian issues. It’s a small thing but hopefully illuminating. The nineteenth-century photos of Cairo are from the archive of the Museo Egizio in Turin, a wonderful resource which can be found here.

the end of the introduction to his travelogue In An Antique Land, the novelist Amitav Ghosh writes that although he knew, at the beginning of his journey, ‘nothing’ about the ostensible reason for his being in the Egyptian villages of Laṭaîfa and Nashâwy – nothing, that is, about an Indian slave of a twelfth century Jewish Tunisian merchant who ended up living in Mangalore, in Karnataka – the existence of this person gave him ‘a right to be there, a sense of entitlement’. It is important to Ghosh that he is following this character’s steps, although the sources cannot tell us anything which might give him a ‘properly human, individual’ life. This paradox provides a model for the treatment of all the people in his book, in Egypt and in Mangalore, even Ghosh himself, for whom Ghosh wishes to provide a sense of entitlement, a right to be wherever, or whoever, they are, despite their opacity or the impossibility of knowing them. He wants to construct a way of relating to foreign-ness which understands people by admitting they cannot be understood. Which might escape the traditional use of the opacity of others by imperialism or communalism, which calls its objects inscrutable Orientals or treacherous Muslims or simply mad, as a prelude to denying them a sense of entitlement to be where they are. Or which says that it knows them all too well, and understands what’s good for them or what’s wrong with them.

The tale of the slave fills part of the book, along with the tale of his master, Abraham ben Yiju, and that of Khalaf ibn Ishaq, another twelfth century Jewish merchant living in Aden, two of whose letters to ben Yiju contain the only mentions of the slave; other sections are taken up with accounts of the people Ghosh met in Egypt, whom he attempts to see, in some sense, on their own terms. He also tells the story of the discovery of the letters, a model for a knowing of other people Ghosh is anxious to avoid. Khalaf’s letters were deposited in the genizah, the store-house, of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat, Old Cairo, because they contained the name of God and could not be simply disposed of; unlike genizahs of other synagogues these documents were never taken out for burial, and survived until the nineteenth century. They could thus easily be stolen by European scholars, who became very annoyed at the peculiarities of the local population, at the ‘scoundrel beadles’ who, as Ghosh says, helped them sort out its contents, at the men and women who outrageously made ‘claims on my liberality’ for ‘the glory of the next meal’ at the same time as those scholars appropriated the records of their community without any recompense. The man who made those remarks, Solomon Schechter, was a scholar at Cambridge; the Taylor-Schechter Collection there is the largest group of Cairo Genizah documents in the world.

Ghosh wants to understand people in a way which does not feel like robbing them – he wants to leave them as they are. In one of the most interesting episodes Ustaz Mustafa, a puritanical Alexandria-educated teacher, suddenly asks Ghosh if he is a ‘shiyu’eyya’, a word which could mean ‘atheist’, ‘communist’ or even ‘adulterer’. Mustafa is dismissive of Ghosh’s ‘Hinduki’ faith and tries to convert him, but when he suddenly wonders if Ghosh’s father would be upset if he changed his religion, and Ghosh says he might well be, ‘the heart went out of his efforts to convert me…it went against his deepest instincts to urge a man to turn against his father’. It is not so much the redemptive arc given to Ustaz Mustafa’s story that is significant but the gently detached way it is told; we are given Mustafa’s actions and words, not his consciousness, except in the schematic terms of ‘the rival moralities of religion and kinship’ coming to a ‘standstill within him’. This external perspective seems a failure of understanding, but this very failure to assume an inquisitorial stance, or interrogate Ustaz Mustafa about what exactly he thinks of his Indian interlocutor; this lack of confidence that the matter is resolved, only that it has come to a ‘standstill’; this bespeaks a fuller understanding than the merely psychological, one which allows people to speak in their own terms, but which neither takes them entirely at face value nor probes their unknowable thoughts to make a final judgement of good and evil. This attitude then is extended backwards, into a past of Indian Ocean exchange and into the largely opaque world of ben Yiju, his slave, his wife (also from India). Ghosh looks for their traces, in the archive and in modern Mangalore, where he visits Tulu cults to catch the echo of the thought-world ben Yiju moved in – but the faintness of what remains compels him to the same careful ironic attitude of unknowing.  

That attitude is conducive to a certain political dream; of an unselfconscious pre-modern un-arrogant cosmopolitanism. It is a familiar dream in South Asia; it is beloved of some Nehruvians (and also some post-colonial critics) who think of pre-colonial India as a paradise of inter-religious tolerance, full of effortless syncretism and rich cultural exchange, before fixed and opposed religious identities were created by the British. What menaces this dream is not just the imperialism or communalism’s crude refusal to know; it is also our own need to, sometimes, know exactly what is going on, and to say that it is wicked or stupid. We need to say that the plunder of colonised countries represented by Solomon Schechter’s appropriation of the Genizah was wrong; we need also to say that characters such as Ghosh’s first host, Abu-‘Ali, who is liked by ‘nobody in Laṭaîfa…not even, possibly, his own wife and children’, and who spends all day lying idle on a divan shouting at his family and passers-by, is annoying. Allow people too much opacity and they’ll do anything; it is no accident that the first chapter starts with a bravura display of knowing about Abu-‘Ali, an inventory of his misdeeds sourced from the whole village. 

We need to do this, also, whilst remembering that the relationship between Abu-‘Ali and the good Shaikh Musa had ‘complexities…that I did not understand’; that Solomon Schechter, born an impoverished Romanian Hasid, thought he was saving crucial documents of his people; we need to not fall into the trap Ghosh does in a confrontation with the irascible Imam Ibrahim over Hindu burning of the dead – which all the villagers find abhorrent, barbaric – when he ends up shouting that India, just like the West, just like Egypt, has ‘guns and tanks and bombs’ and is thus a civilised nation. Nor should we forget that pre-modern societies could be violent and exclusionary; Ghosh sometimes does forget, particularly in his discussion of the Pacific slave trade, which if not as awful as the Atlantic trade was hardly all sunshine. But if Ghosh has any sort of solution to the problem of how to allow a measure of unknowing which does not leave you unable to say anything at all, it comes quite early on in the book, after a terrifying passage about Ghosh as a child of Indian diplomats in what was then East Pakistan, sheltering with other Hindus in the diplomatic compound during a religious riot, and then hearing about riots in Calcutta, ‘similar in every respect except that there it was Muslims who had been attacked by Hindus’. But, he says:

‘Equally, in both cities – and this must be said, it must always be said, for it is the incantation that redeems our sanity – in both Dhaka and Calcutta, there were exactly mirrored stories of Hindus and Muslims coming to each others’ rescue, so that many more people were saved than killed.’ 

In the irony of the first half of that sentence, and the relief of the second; in the awareness that our knowing and unknowing of certain people, is as much defence mechanism as respect for others; in the acknowledgement that those thousands of unknown stories of Hindus and Muslims rescuing each other are both true and a fantasy, though a necessary one; in this delicately negotiated understanding is Ghosh’s best prescription for living with other people, known and unknown.