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

Even Khalaf ibn Ishaq, the closest of Ben Yiju’s friends, reacted sharply on this occasion. ‘As for the delay [in the delivery of the kârdâr’s cardamom],’ he wrote to Ben Yiju, ‘may God curse him. I have spoken to some people about the matter, and they said to me that the cardamom was yours, and we had no share in it. It is a matter between you and the kârdâr: deal with this thing individually with him, separately from us.’ Clearly Khalaf had a suspicion that there was something in Ben Yiju’s relationship with the kardar that did not quite meet the eye, and he was evidently resentful of the way Ben Yiju had involved him in a set of private arrangements. He and Yusuf continued to press Ben Yiju for several years, but to no avail: there is no indication that they ever recouped their losses in this affair.

The clue that gives away the nature of Ben Yiju’s connection with the kardar lies in a throwaway line on a tiny scrap of paper: it suggests that the kardar was a close relative of Ashu’s brother, the man whom Ben Yiju referred to as ‘Nair’.

Nair is mentioned only twice in all of Ben Yiju’s papers, and in both cases the references consist of little more than the name and a couple of brief words. Yet, if there was anyone who was located at the precise juncture where Ben Yiju’s instilled responses could be expected to run into conflict with Ashu’s, it was none other than her brother, Nair. By the matrilineal reckoning of the Nairs the bond between brother and sister was far more important than the tie between husband and wife; in their practice it was a woman’s brother and not her husband who was entitled to the guardianship of her children. Thus, by the customs of Ashu’s community it would have been Nair who held the reins of authority over her progeny; it would have been he — not Ben Yiju — who played Laius to their Oedipus.

It was not without reason therefore that Khalaf suspected that the relationship between Ben Yiju and the kardar extended beyond their business dealings: it could well be that Ben Yiju had given him the advance principally because Ashu or Nair had asked him to make a loan to their relative. It is even possible that the reason why the money was never returned was that her family saw it as their compensation for forgoing their rights over her children. But of course the simplest of solutions is also the most likely: that the kardar had effected a clever swindle by exploiting a family connection.

Fortunately for Ben Yiju, his social and professional life in Mangalore extended far beyond his family. The names that are sprinkled through his papers speak of a startlingly diverse network of associations: entered into a file, the list would yield nothing to the Rolodex of an international businessman today.

Some of Ben Yiju’s closest business connections, for instance, lay with a group of merchants whom he and his friends in Aden referred to as the ‘Bâniyân of Mangalore’—Hindu Gujaratis of the ‘Vania’ or trading caste. Long active in the Indian Ocean trade, Gujarati merchants had plied the trade routes for centuries, all the way from Aden to Malacca, and they exerted a powerful influence on the flow of certain goods and commodities. They evidently played a significant role in the economy of Malabar in Ben Yiju’s time, and were probably instrumental in the management of its international trade. Madmun, for one, was on cordial terms with several members of the Gujarati trading community of Mangalore, whom he kept informed of trends in the markets of the Middle East. He, in turn, appears to have handed on those connections to Ben Yiju when he set up his business in Mangalore. Over the years, Ben Yiju often served as a courier for Madmun, delivering letters as well as messages and greetings to the ‘Bâniyân of Manjalûr’, and on occasion he even brokered joint entrepreneurial ventures between them and Madmun.

In matters of business, Ben Yiju’s networks appear to have been wholly indifferent to many of those boundaries that are today thought to mark social, religious and geographical divisions. Madmun, for instance, is known once to have proposed a joint venture between himself and three traders in Mangalore, each of different social or geographical origins — one a Muslim, one a Gujarati Vania, and the third a member of the landowning caste of Tulunad. Equally, the ships that Ben Yiju and his friends used for transporting their goods were owned by a wide variety of people. Among the many nâkhudas or ship-owners who are mentioned in Ben Yiju’s papers, there is one Pattani-Swami, probably the head of a merchant guild or caste, a man called Nambiar, evidently from Kerala, and many others, including of course ‘Abd al-Qasim Ramisht of Siraf. The ties forged by trade were so close that Madmun’s kinsman, the nakhuda Mahruz (in a letter written for him by Ben Yiju), once remarked of a ship-owner called ‘Tinbu’, probably of Tamil extraction, that, ‘between him and me there are bonds of inseparable friendship and brotherhood.’

Ben Yiju’s closest affiliations in Mangalore would of course have lain with the community with which he shared his spoken language and his taste in food and clothing: the expatriate Muslim Arabs who were resident in the city — indeed, for most purposes he would have counted himself as one of them. Muslim traders figure frequently in his papers, as do the names of the Arab sailors and ships’ captains who carried his letters and brought him news from other parts of the world.

Ben Yiju’s business interests also brought him into contact with a large number of agents and retailers, and those relationships seem to have often overlapped with the kinship networks of his household. In addition, Ben Yiju was also closely connected with a group of metalworkers specializing in certain bronze objects and utensils which were much in demand in Aden. The names of these craftsmen, who appear to have been Brahmins from Tamilnad, often figure in Ben Yiju’s household accounts, and it is possible that their workshop was attached to his warehouse.

The vast network of relationships that Ben Yiju fitted himself into in Mangalore was clearly not a set of random associations: on the contrary, it appears to have had a life of its own, the links being transmitted between generations of merchants, just as they were from Madmun to Ben Yiju. Membership in the network evidently involved binding understandings of a kind that permitted individuals to commit large sums of money to joint undertakings, even in circumstances where there was no legal redress — understandings that clearly presuppose free and direct communications between the participants, despite their cultural, religious and linguistic differences.

But here lies a mystery into which Ben Yiju’s papers offer no insight at all: the question of what language the merchants used in their dealings with each other. Madmun’s letters, for instance, leave no doubt that he wrote regularly to his friends amongst the ‘Bâniyân’ of Mangalore. But what neither Madmun nor Ben Yiju ever reveal is what language they used in communicating with their Indian associates.

As far as their letters are concerned, the most likely solution is that they conducted their correspondence largely in Arabic, making liberal use of scribes and translators. But that still leaves a host of other questions unanswered: what language did Ben Yiju speak with Ashu, for instance? Or for that matter, how did he communicate with Bomma, or with the merchants from various regions in India and beyond, with whom, given the nature of his occupation, he must have had to do business? On the evidence of his papers there is no reason to suppose that he ever acquired fluency in Tulu or any other south Indian language: such Indian words that found their way into his writings were all of northern derivation. Indeed, learning any one language would not have solved Ben Yiju’s problems of communication, for the Indians he dealt with evidently came from several different linguistic regions.