I Met Two Narrators from an Antique Land : A Narratological Reading of Amitav Ghosh’s Travelogue

The present essay addresses the question whether In an Antique Land (1992) should be read as a novel or rather as a non-fiction. Ghosh’s third book deploys several novelistic strategies in its elaboration of authentic material. Moreover, it constructs different characters that are named “Amitav Ghosh” but remain rather distinct from one another in their attitudes and capacities. We shall therefore distinguish between Amitab, the young and clumsy Bengali field-worker in Lataifa, and Dr Ghosh, the smart cosmopolitan historian and expert of philology who traces the origins of Bomma. Deploying an eminently modernist poetics, Ghosh’s narrative conflates ethnography, Bildungsroman, philology, and a survey of the political situation in the Middle East.