69 pages • 2 hours read
Amitav GhoshIn an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler's Tale
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1992A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Epilogue Summary
Soon after arriving in New York, Ghosh called Nabeel, who was shocked to hear from him in America. They gave each other updates and Ghosh said that he was going to India soon. He would try to visit Baghdad on the way. However, he never managed to do this. Instead, he set himself on going back to Egypt in 1990, by which time he felt sure Nabeel would be back. Bomma’s story, Ghosh says, ends in Philadelphia, where a scrap in the Annenberg Research Institute shows a set of accounts written by Ben Yiju. It appears to have come from Fustat, and it mentions a sum of money owed to Bomma—proof that he was a part of the business in Egypt. Ghosh muses on the humor that he thinks Bomma might have found in the last record of his life being in Philadelphia, so removed from his life.
Ghosh left Calicut for Cairo three weeks after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. While the coalition army was being prepared, Ghosh was travelling and reading about the flood of Egyptian workers leaving Iraq. He had heard that Jabir had been trying to travel there until the invasion itself, and that Mabrouk was still in Iraq, which worried Shaikh Musa.
When Ghosh arrived in Nashawy and went to Nabeel’s house, he found that it was still not fully finished. Isma’il, who had managed to leave Iraq, asked him why he had not visited like he had promised. He also said that Nabeel had wanted to stay to earn enough money for building the house, and passed on worrying stories about Iraqi civilians attacking Egyptians. Thinking about Nabeel alone in Iraq made Ghosh sad, as he remembered Nabeel’s question about if he felt lonely making tea for one.
Later, Ali’s family, Ghosh, and Isma’il watched the TV together, which showed the refugees leaving Iraq. Ghosh says that no one could be picked out in the crowds: “Nabeel had vanished into the anonymity of History” (353).
Epilogue Analysis
In the Epilogue of In an Antique Land, Ghosh focuses on Bomma and Nabeel as two people who were anonymous in the broad sweep of history, but who were important within their own context. Thus, the focus of the Epilogue is on Personal Histories within Historical Narratives. Ghosh’s commentary on the absurdity of the final record of Bomma’s existence being in a world so far removed from his own experience brings forward the difference between historical studies and lived understanding. Ghosh compares his own reconstruction of Bomma as the “toddy-loving fisherman form Tuluand” (349) to the placement of his records to point out a flaw in the usual historical process.
At the same time, Ghosh includes his worry over whether Nabeel escaped from Iraq following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait to emphasize the significance of individuals outside of the broad historical narrative. His statement that Nabeel “vanished into the anonymity of History” (353) shows the inability of a broad historical narrative to encapsulate the “true” people behind it. Nabeel is unable to be perceived as an individual person within the story of Egyptian refugees fleeing Iraq.
Ghosh thus launches two critiques of the historical process in the Epilogue. First, through Bomma, he argues that the process of studying history outside of trying to understand the lived experience of the individual leads to a division between the source and its context. This makes the study itself somewhat incomplete. Second, he argues that removing the “personal” side of history in favor of examining the grand narrative dehumanizes the people who live within a time period. His own book, and the techniques he uses within, are therefore his attempt to counter these flaws.
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