In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler's Tale
by:
Amitav Ghosh (author)
In an Antique Land is a subversive history in the guise of a traveller's tale. When the author stumbles across a slave narrative in the margins of an ancient text, his curiosity is piqued. What follows is a ten year search, which brings author and slave together across 800 hundred years of...
show more
In an Antique Land is a subversive history in the guise of a traveller's tale. When the author stumbles across a slave narrative in the margins of an ancient text, his curiosity is piqued. What follows is a ten year search, which brings author and slave together across 800 hundred years of colonial history. Bursting with anecdote and exuberant detail, it offers a magical, intimate biography of the private life of a country, Egypt, from the Crusades to Operation Desert Storm.
show less
Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780679727835 (0679727833)
ASIN: 679727833
Publish date: March 29th 1994
Publisher: Vintage
Pages no: 400
Edition language: English
Category:
Non Fiction,
Travel,
Autobiography,
Memoir,
History,
Academic,
School,
Cultural,
Africa,
India,
Asian Literature,
Indian Literature,
Anthropology,
Egypt
WHY: Tells the story of two Indians in Egypt. The first is a twelfth-century slave; the second is the author, who stumbled upon the slave in the margins of letters that were written by the slave's master. His curiosity piqued - even ill-defined, the slave's presence in the records of medieval histor...
Ghosh, a then-young Indian living in Egypt while conducting research on the Indian slave of a Jewish master, interweaves the story of his own experiences with those of the slave that can be known or inferred, placing both in historical and cultural context. Because some of his experiences parallel h...