Author Recounts Novel-Writing Experience

“I was a creature out of place,” said the renowned author and anthropologist Amitav Ghosh, recalling his first visit to Egypt in the early 1980s. Ghosh was an anthropology student at Oxford University at the time and an aspiring novelist, conducting fieldwork in a small Egyptian town with the dual hopes of completing a thesis and inspiring a work of fiction. The eventual blooming of this inspiration, a novel titled In an Antique Land , was the subject of Ghosh’s recent lecture on campus.

After the book’s completion, Ghosh was forced to acknowledge the controversy and strife brewing around literature dealing with the interaction of religion, especially in the wake of the outrage that met Salmon Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Hoping to avoid a similar fate, Ghosh changed the title of his book from An Infidel in Egypt to In an Antique Land . “It not only was not controversial; it attracted hardly any attention, sinking without a trace,” he said. “Yet, here I am, 15 years later, speaking about its writing.”

The book, Ghosh noted, provides a window into contemporary social ills, divisions and strife, and also helps paint a new picture of the region’s past, one which he hopes will promote healing. “If writers cannot [summon such a history] in their imaginations, how are politicians supposed to do it in the real world?” he asked.

[thanks YA]