Subject: Re: Question re. locals writing about travelers
Date: Sat, 21 Dec 2002 19:29:29 +0100


Well, James Clifford in his beautiful 'Routes' gets back pretty often to
Amitav Ghosh; there's a book of his ('In an antique land') which deals with
the time he spent in a small Egyptian village doing anthropological
research, and variously interacting with the people there, their culture and
so on. I have not yet read it, but it seems quite interesting. I'm pasting
down here a synopsis I got from Amazon.
Giacomo Conserva, Parma, Italy

____________________________________________________________________________
   In an Antique Land
Amitav Ghosh
Synopsis
In the 1980s Amitav Ghosh moved into a converted chicken coop. It was on the
roof of a house in Lataifa, a tiny village in Egypt. During the day he
poured over medieval letters sent to India from Cairo by Arab merchants. In
the evenings he shut out the bellowing of his fat landlord by turning up the
volume of his transistor radio and wrote stories based on what he had seen
in the village. The story of Khamees the Rat, the notorious impotent
(already twice married); of Zaghloul the weaver determined to travel to
India on a donkey; of one-eyed Mohammad, so obsessed with a girl that he
spent nights kneeling outside her window to listen to the sound of her
breathing; of Amm 'Taha, part-time witch, always ready to cast a spell for a
little extra money; and, of course, the story of Amitav Ghosh himself, known
in the village as the Indian doctor, the uncircumcised, cow-worshipping
kaffir who would not convert to Islam. This book is the story of Amitav
Ghosh's decade of intimacy with the village community. Mixing conversation
and research, imagination and scholarship, it is also a charged, eccentric
history of the special relationship between two countires, Egypt and India,
through nearly ten centuries of parochialism and sympathy, bigotry and
affection.





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