Amitav Ghosh - In an Antique Land - History in the Guise of a Traveler's Tale

A small crowd had gathered around us now, drawn by the Imam’s voice, and under the pressure of their collective gaze, I found myself becoming increasingly tongue-tied.

‘Yes, they do burn their dead in Europe,’ I managed to say, my voice rising despite my efforts to control it. ‘Yes, they have special electric furnaces meant just for that.’

The Imam turned away and laughed scornfully. ‘He’s lying,’ he said to the crowd. ‘They don’t burn their dead in the West. They’re not an ignorant people. They’re advanced, they’re educated, they have science, they have guns and tanks and bombs.’

Suddenly something seemed to boil over in my head, dilemmas and arguments I could no longer contain within myself.

‘We have them too!’ I shouted back at him. ‘In my country we have all those things too; we have guns and tanks and bombs. And they’re better than anything you’ve got in Egypt — we’re a long way ahead of you.’

‘I tell you, he’s lying,’ cried the Imam, his voice rising in fury. ‘Our guns and bombs are much better than theirs. Ours are second only to the West’s.’

‘It’s you who’s lying,’ I said. ‘You know nothing about this. Ours are much better. Why, in my country we’ve even had a nuclear explosion. You won’t be able to match that even in a hundred years.’

It was about then, I think, that Khamees appeared at my side and led me away, or else we would probably have stood there a good while longer, the Imam and I: delegates from two superseded civilizations, vying with each other to establish a prior claim to the technology of modern violence.

At that moment, despite the vast gap that lay between us, we understood each other perfectly. We were both travelling, he and I: we were travelling in the West. The only difference was that I had actually been there, in person: I could have told him a great deal about it, seen at first hand, its libraries, its museums, its theatres, but it wouldn’t have mattered. We would have known, both of us, that all that was mere fluff: in the end, for millions and millions of people on the landmasses around us, the West meant only this — science and tanks and guns and bombs.

I was crushed, as I walked away; it seemed to me that the Imam and I had participated in our own final defeat, in the dissolution of the centuries of dialogue that had linked us: we had demonstrated the irreversible triumph of the language that has usurped all the others in which people once discussed their differences. 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; it would have been merely absurd for either of us to use those words, for they belonged to a dismantled rung on the ascending ladder of Development. Instead, to make ourselves understood, we had both resorted, I, a student of the ‘humane’ sciences, and he, an old-fashioned village Imam, to the very terms that world leaders and statesmen use at great, global conferences, the universal, irresistible metaphysic of modern meaning; he had said to me, in effect: ‘You ought not to do what you do, because otherwise you will not have guns and tanks and bombs.’ It was the only language we had been able to discover in common.

For a while, after Khamees and ‘Eid had led me back to their house, I could not bring myself to speak; I felt myself a conspirator in the betrayal of the history that had led me to Nashawy; a witness to the extermination of a world of accommodations that I had believed to be still alive, and, in some tiny measure, still retrievable.

But Khamees and his family did not let me long remain in silence. They took me back to their house, and after ‘Eid had repeated the story of my encounter with Imam Ibrahim, Khamees turned to me, laughing, and said: ‘Do not be upset, ya doktór. Forget about all those guns and things. I’ll tell you what: I’ll come to visit you in your country, even though I’ve never been anywhere. When you leave, I’ll come with you; I’ll come all the way to India.’

He began to scratch his head, thinking hard, and then he added: ‘But if I die there you must remember to bury me.’

1

SEEN FROM THE sea, on a clear day, Mangalore can take a newcomer’s breath away It sits upon the tip of a long finger of steeply rising land; a ridge of hills which extends out of a towering knuckle of peaks in the far distance. Two rivers meet around the elliptical curve of the fingertip to form a great palm-fringed lagoon, lying tranquil under a quicksilver sky. Between the lagoon and the sea, holding back the waves, are two thin elbows of sand. They strain towards each other, but stop just short of touching, and through the gap between them flows a narrow channel, joining the lagoon to the open sea.

The boats that pass through that channel today are mainly small fishing craft; the lagoon’s ancient functions as a harbour have now been delegated to a modern, artificially-dredged port a little to the north of the city. But it was the lagoon that first granted Mangalore its charter as a port, and it is from there that Ben Yiju would have had his first glimpse of the city he was to live in for close on two decades.

The geographical location is all that remains of the Mangalore that Ben Yiju saw: the city was sacked several times in the sixteenth century and afterwards, and today almost no trace of its medieval incarnation remains. The area that is now known as ‘the old port’ lies forgotten below the city’s bustling business centres and market-places, at the bottom of a steep slope. It still bears the Persian name Bandar, ‘port’, but today its few moments of life are provided by a ferry that connects it to the fishing-villages on the sand-spit across the lagoon. Otherwise its docks are largely untenanted and its wharfs empty, except for a handful of barges and river-boats.

When Ben Yiju arrived in Mangalore there was probably a stretch of sand where the docks stand now: the ships that plied the Indian Ocean appear to have been designed to be beached rather than docked — the better to profit from the fine sands that lined those waters. The merchants of the city, including the large community of expatriate Middle Easterners, would have had their offices and godowns close to the Bandar, probably on the hillside above, from where they could keep an eye on incoming ships.

The expatriate merchant community of Mangalore was a large one, by all accounts. The Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta, who visited the city some two hundred years after Ben Yiju, reports that it was the practice of most merchants from the Yemen and Persia to disembark there; the Sumatrans, on the other hand, along with others from the eastern reaches of the Indian Ocean, seem to have preferred other cities, such as Calicut and ‘Fandarîna’, a little further to the south. At the time of Ibn Battuta’s visit the Muslims of Mangalore (and by implication) the foreign merchants, together formed a community of about 4,000 people, ‘living in a suburb alongside the town.’

The settlement of foreigners at Mangalore was by no means the largest or the most cosmopolitan on the coast: Calicut, a couple of hundred miles to the south, appears to have housed an even larger and more diverse merchant community. There were thirteen ‘Chinese’ vessels in the harbour when Ibn Battuta’s ship docked there, and he reports that the city regularly had visitors from ‘China, Sumatra, Ceylon, the Maldives, Yemen, and Fars [Iran] …’ A Portuguese sailor, Duarte Barbosa, who visited the city early in the sixteenth century, noted that the city’s merchants included ‘Arabs, Persians, Guzarates, Khorasanys, and Decanys’, who were known collectively as pardesis, or foreigners. The pardesi merchants were not all itinerant traders; many of them were expatriates who had settled in Malabar for considerable lengths of time. ‘[They] possess in this place wives and children,’ noted Barbosa, ‘and ships for sailing to all parts with all kinds of goods.’