laughing out of place

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LAUGHING OUT OF PLACEChristi Ann Merrill aa University of Michigan , USAPublished online: 25 Jun 2008.

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L A U G H I N G O U T O F P L A C E

Humour A l l i ance s and Othe r Po s t co l on i a l T r an s l a t i on s

i n I n an An t i que Land

Christi Ann Merril lUniversity of Michigan, USA

................This essay looks closely at the rhetorical tools of the postcolonial trade by

examining humourous passages from Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land � a

work which itself combines scholarship and literary non-fiction � in order to ask

how we might read writing that plays with the fixed, static binaries of

postcolonial relation we so regularly critique. I apply recent insights in cultural

translation regarding the politics of figurative location to offer a more complex

understanding of the ways we might read geographical relation in ironic first-

person accounts. I consider Neelam Srivastava’s suggestion that we read Ghosh’s

book as ‘a more complex literary genre’ against Gauri Viswanathan’s charge that

the writing is ‘politically ineffectual’. I argue that the debate reveals something

more fundamental about our own interests and strategies in engaging with issues

of postcoloniality, and thus should be part of a broader enquiry into the

ideological � as rhetorical � positionings of essayists and other cultural critics.

................

Reading Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land requires you to imagine being

with his narrator in three places at once: the India where he grew up (past

......................................................................................interventions Vol. 9(1) 106�123 (ISSN 1369-801X print/1469-929X online)

Copyright # 2007 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13698010601174229

essay genre

Ghosh

irony

non-fiction

postcolonial

translation

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tense) and visits again (present tense), the Egypt where he does his fieldwork

(twice, in the present tense) and the England where, he tells us, he is pursuing

a degree in social anthropology. Even though of the three locales England is

the most sketchily drawn, it provides in the background a connection �logistical as well as conceptual � between India and Egypt, and therefore

offers a documentable, fundable reason for this Indian ethnographer and

historian to be in Egypt at all. The rhetorical choice to render England the

(scarcely visible) place one looks from, rather than at, echoes a convention

familiar to readers of European travel accounts, ethnographies and histories.

This creates an irony which Ghosh signals in the subtitle: History in the

Guise of a Traveller’s Tale .1 The book braids two narratives together to

chart the efforts of the ‘doktor al-Hindi’ to track down a nameless twelfth-

century Indian slave who cruised the Middle East with his equally

cosmopolitan master, and his own efforts as a late-twentieth-century Indian

to form links with the Egyptians he meets that can somehow be free of the

divisive and degrading mediations of the West (Ghosh 1994 [1992]: 73). The

irony assumes a particularly postcolonial geometry when we remember that

most travelogues presuppose a stable and binary sense of home and away,

and are usually not written, as is this book, in double displacement. The

triangular configuration of Ghosh’s work � as well as his gentle comments

now and again on the process of translating from Arabic � forces readers to

become more cognizant of the role we play in engaging with such a book,

written as it is in English. What reading strategies might we employ to

engage critically and therefore meaningfully with the three-way rhetoric of

postcolonial irony on which a book such as this relies?2

While critics such as James Clifford (1997) and Robert Dixon (1996) write

enthusiastically of the nuanced displacements Ghosh’s book constructs (as

‘dwelling-in-travel’ or as self-reflexive ‘travelling in the West’, quoting

Ghosh’s own phrases), Javed Majeed and Gauri Viswanathan make clear

that while they find the complexities of the situation potently rendered, they

nevertheless consider the work ‘politically ineffectual’ for it ‘cannot get

beyond nostalgia to offer ways of dealing with what is, after all, an

intractable political problem’ (Viswanathan 1996: 9). Neelam Srivastava

defends Ghosh’s work against these charges in particular, by arguing for a

more literary reading of the book which � like the identity of the narrator �defies easy categorization: ‘Ghosh’s greatest contribution consists in

presenting us with a more complex literary genre, which straddles

ethnography and historiography, and yet remains firmly anchored to the

formal characteristics of narrative fiction’ (Srivastava 2001: 46). Like

Majeed, she cites the exhortations contained in Clifford’s earlier � widely

influential � co-edited volume Writing Culture , in particular his champion-

ing of the ‘self-reflexive ‘‘fieldwork account’’ . . . variously sophisticated and

naive, confessional and analytic’, which employs innovative textual strate-

1 On ‘pointedtitling’ and irony, see

Booth (1974: 54).

2 I wish to thankRanjan Ghosh, Kirin

Narayan and an

anonymous reader

for their perceptivesuggestions for this

essay.

LAUGHING OUT OF PLACE 107........................Christi Ann Merrill

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gies (i.e., more extensive use of the first-person singular) to show through

‘autobiography and the ironic self-portrait’ how problematic the participant-

observation approach can be (Clifford 1986: 14). In the same volume, Talal

Asad attends to the history of uneven power relations underlying such

projects of � what he, in the tradition of Edmund Leach and others, calls �cultural translation: he argues that such rhetoric assumes the non-Western

language being written about (like the native informant and the culture he is

from) is ‘weaker’ than the Western language in which the ethnographer

writes (Asad 1986: 158). Nearly two decades later Robert Young in

Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction takes up once more the trope

of cultural translation, maintaining that the problem of unevenness in such

one-on-one relations is symptomatic of larger postcolonial displacements.

Interestingly, the very form of Young’s work � which plays with pronouns

and otherwise uses literary devices to interrogate the very questions of

subjectivity he raises � makes clear that not just the answers we might seek

to these contemporary questions of translation but the very manner in which

we ask them forms the basis of our globalized community. Young opens his

book by asking his reader: ‘Have you ever felt that the moment you said the

word ‘‘I’’, that ‘‘I’’ was someone else, not you? That in some obscure way,

you were not the subject of your own sentence?’ (2003: 1). Srivastava’s

article suggests a way to think more carefully about such questions,

indicating that Ghosh’s self-conscious engagement with first-person genres

might teach us to reconfigure the terms of cross-cultural interpretation if

only we had a more nuanced critical vocabulary for analysing such

translated language. The implication is that Ghosh’s writing too forces us

to rethink the terms of such uneven exchange not only in content but in

form. How?

Srivastava outlines the differences between Ghosh’s (unpublished) 1981

doctoral thesis, ‘Kinship in relation to the economic and social organization

of an Egyptian village’, and In an Antique Land , a book published in

London in 1992 by Granta Books. She contends that the book contains ‘a

completely revolutionary focus’ that evinces a ‘radical condition of

displacement’, for ‘here traditional ethnography is transformed by an

emphasis on the intersubjective and narrative aspects of the cultural account’

(Srivastava 2001: 45, 62). Her point is underscored by the fact that Ghosh’s

essay ‘The Imam and the Indian’, which anticipated the book, was published

in the innovative and certainly prestigious literary journal Granta in 1986 �significantly the same year that Writing Culture was published. Like many of

the contributions to that journal, Ghosh’s essay combines political and

cultural critique with narrative technique to find a new form for investigat-

ing the global ironies of our day � a form Clifford too celebrates as an

example not only of ‘traveling theory’ but of ‘cultural translation’ (1997). In

so doing, Clifford joins a host of other incisive and politically engaged

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scholars � Homi Bhabha, Judith Butler, Dipesh Chakrabarty, to name a few

� who invoke the phrase ‘cultural translation’ when they mean to discuss in

messier, more elaborate detail precisely the kinds of inequalities in difference

Asad had railed against in his 1986 article (see Bhabha 1994: 212�35; Butler

2000: 20�1; Butler 2003: 204�6; Chakrabarty 2000: 17). Young contends

that ‘nothing comes closer to the central activity and political dynamic of

postcolonialism than the concept of translation’, for ‘postcolonial theory is

not so much about static ideas or practices, as about the relations between

different peoples and their cultures . . . about a changing world, a world that

has been changed by struggle, and which its practitioners intend to change

further’ (Young 2003: 138, 7). Scholars such as Lydia Liu, Vicente Rafael,

Naoki Sakai and Tejaswini Niranjana who bring such notions of ‘cultural

translation’ into conversation with colonial projects of linguistic translation

attend closely to the ways such rhetoric helps us understand these cultural

crossings. Liu writes approvingly that ‘Asad’s critique of the notion of

cultural translation has major implications for comparative scholarship and

for cross-cultural studies’ since it teaches us � pace Foucault � that ‘we must

confront forms of institutional practices and the knowledge/power relation-

ships that authorize certain ways of knowing while discouraging others’ (Liu

1995: 3). Her solution � which she employs to great effect in Translingual

Practice � is to examine in detail ‘the ground of perceived linguistic

equivalence’ such comparisons are based upon (ibid.). The debate over

Ghosh’s writing forces us to investigate the strategies we employ to read this

‘ground of perceived linguistic equivalence’ in a multiply displaced, self-

reflexive and therefore ironic first-person account that attempts to inter-

rogate the ‘I’ that is the subject of Ghosh’s book. How might we apply Liu’s

linguistically-minded reworking of Asad’s critique of cultural translation to a

text such as Ghosh’s for which no putative original exists for comparison?

That is, how do we read texts of cultural translation critically? After all,

Majeed and Viswanathan’s bitter question remains a tang on the tongue:

shall we pronounce such formal experiments politically ineffectual? Srivas-

tava’s suggestion that we would do better to read Ghosh’s work in literary

terms begins to interrogate the multiple and competing generic expectations

that are crossed reading his work in English. Extracts of the slave narrative

strand of In An Antique Land appeared as a discrete piece in 1992 � the

same year as the book � in the radical and influential scholarly journal

Subaltern Studies , which aims (following Gramsci’s cue) to recover the

experiences of those previously marginal to history (Ghosh 1992). In

practice, the collective’s very project has been as contentious as it has been

important, leading to similar questions of subjectivity in the writing of

history that the Writing Culture discussion provoked contemporaneously

with regards to ethnography. It is perhaps not coincidental that similar

questions of subjectivity underlie Majeed’s and Viswanathan’s critiques of


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Ghosh’s work. While Dixon approvingly cites Rosalind O’Hanlon’s charge

that the Subaltern Studies Collective approach risks ‘making an absence into

presences’ by ‘recuperating the subaltern as ‘‘a conscious human subject-

agent . . . in the classic manner of liberal humanism’’’, he also asserts that

‘unlike some contributors to Subaltern Studies , Ghosh develops a style of

writing that is sufficiently nuanced and elusive to sustain the ‘‘theoretical

fiction’’ of a recovery of presence without actually falling back into

essentialism’ (O’Hanlon 1988: 196; cited in Dixon 1996: 14, 16). Dixon’s

comment points to an avenue worthy of exploration, for it too suggests that

to judge a work of cultural criticism we must attend to the literary qualities

of the writing itself. While such a project has interested ethnographers such

as Clifford, it has not been pursued sufficiently by postcolonial critics with

training in literary criticism who are similarly committed to interrogating

cultural translation. I believe the wide-ranging reactions to Ghosh’s work in

particular underscore a more general crisis in criticism: we are still unsure

how to evaluate subjectivity as a rhetorical performance when in the hands

of the cultural critic himself. The remainder of this paper will thus be

dedicated to understanding in more detail how reading particular scenes in

Ghosh’s book as ‘ironic self-portrait’ makes us aware of the ways we may

map our own subjectivities as English-speaking readers into the triangle of

alliances formed imaginatively through the text.

Majeed too speaks of Ghosh’s work establishing ‘triangular relationships’,

but he imagines the points of the triangle being between ‘historical

reconstruction, ethnography, and literary text’ (1995: 45). He scarcely

touches on the latter, mentions ethnography only in passing, and focuses

instead on the historical strand of the narrative to write evocatively of the

‘uprooting of the bodies of archival material’ that mention the slave of MS

H.6. This ‘transplantation’ of documents to Western metropolises, he

observes, represents for Ghosh the ‘cultural decline and the imposition

of . . .‘‘the map of modern knowledge’’ brought into being by European

expansion’ (ibid.: 46; Ghosh 1994 [1992]: 341�2). The ‘medieval’ as a

category thus becomes for Majeed ‘a space into which the artist tries to

escape from the consequences of modernity’ without benefit of ambivalent

awareness or self-reflexivity; and therefore ‘the very creation of that space is

itself a testimony to the inescapability of those consequences’ (1995: 48).

Here the triangular figure of exchange is mapped along a temporal grid of

linear modernity, like the Hegelian model Tejaswini Niranjana in particular

has discussed as symptomatic of the colonial translation project. Do we

agree that Ghosh’s narrative assumes the terms of such a triangle to be this

stable, even static? After all, Niranjana suggests that postcolonial translation

projects make possible an ‘effective history’ that interrogates ‘how the

translation/re-translation worked/works, why the text was/is translated, and

who did/does the translating’ (Niranjana 1992: 37). Such a strategy shows

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how dynamic readings of seemingly linear histories might be, especially

when the subjectivity of the translator is interrogated. Can we read Ghosh’s

text as effective history? Gauri Viswanathan seems not to commit to such a

reading, for, like Majeed, she decries the book’s representations of the past

as a time of ‘undivided community, not riven by ethnic, religious, or even

linguistic divisions’, and particularly ‘its engagement with the romance of

syncretism, as a solution to sectarianism, nationalism, ethnocentrism, and

religious intolerance’, which, she writes, ‘evokes a nostalgia that is itself

unsettling’ (1999: 1, 2). Neither she nor Majeed seems to entertain the

possibility that such feelings of inescapable consequences and unsettling

nostalgia might be a purposeful effect of such a narrative, or that such a

simple-minded linear landscape might be complicated by temporal triangu-

lations set into dynamic motion by our engagement with the narrative.

As readers we accompany Ghosh’s narrator on his journey to the original

Geniza in search of these archival materials and are astounded to find them

completely missing: all have been sold to various collections in the West.

Ghosh’s account must then reconcile itself to charting a different kind of

travel, one in which, as Majeed puts it, ‘the aim of the ethnographer-

historian is to recover and reconstruct a ‘‘lost’’ history in order to counteract

the crippling effects of that loss, although that loss is itself at once the origin

and creation of the historical imagination’ (1995: 47). He points out

insightfully that Ghosh’s text is thus ‘reliant simultaneously on the loss

and recovery of historical narratives . . . both absent and present’ and so ‘this

dynamic of absence and presence . . . forms the fabric of the modern moment

in Ghosh’s text’ (ibid.: 47). Majeed recognizes the irony of a closing scene in

which the Indian historian must travel to archives in the US, financed by the

popular if not so very venerable American magazine ‘TV Guide’, in order to

find tattered bits of manuscript offering proof of the slave’s return from

India to Egypt; nevertheless, he concludes that in the text overall ‘there is

little sense of a divided self which might release an ironic self-knowledge

about the mystification of the past’ since such historical ironies have ‘no

purchase on modernity and its exclusive identities’ (ibid.: 53). What is

Majeed’s understanding of irony which serves as a basis for such a

judgement? Linda Hutcheon for one argues at some length in her 1994

monograph Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony that irony as a

reading mode is as complex and historically determined as Liu characterizes

translation, and � like translation � has much to teach us about the ways we

negotiate difference in the globalized world. Because Majeed chooses not to

explore the concept of irony in any detail, and instead leaves it as a self-

evident category by which to judge Ghosh’s work, we are left to explore for

ourselves the ways Ghosh’s text constructs or does not construct a sense of a

divided self. We might look to Wayne Booth’s work The Rhetoric of Irony ,

useful to us not only because it insists on exactly the kinds of binarity a


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reader like Majeed seems to require and reject at once, but because Booth

describes the working of such a mechanism by relying on the trope of

linguistic ground we saw employed by Liu. Writing in 1974, Booth does not

use a phrase such as ‘split subjectivity’ but he does attend closely to the

formal, literary means by which a reader might decide to create an imaginary

alliance with an ‘implied author’ to the exclusion of a narrator whose world

view he rejects. ‘From Aristotle until the nineteenth century’, Booth

announces:

treatises on rhetoric as the art of persuasion always included an account of the

intellectual ‘locations’ that could provide such points of agreement. Once found,

these locations � what the Greeks call topoi , the Latins loci , and the English

places � were used almost literally as platforms on which speaker and listener

could securely stand while conducting an argument; there were, of course,

‘common places’, yielding points useful in arguments on any and every subject,

and ‘special places’ useful only for certain subjects or kinds of arguments. (Booth

1974: 34)

Where do such locations exist in postcolonial criticism? If for the sake of

argument we agree with Booth � taking into account Hutcheon’s sophisti-

cated protests � that irony is ‘saying one thing and meaning the opposite’,

then we might join him in applying the metaphor of location to such a

definition, imagining that ‘the reader is asked simply to move from one

platform, on which the speaker pretends to stand, to another one, on which

he really stands � one that is somehow ‘‘opposite’’, across the street, as it

were’ (ibid.: 34�5). We might set aside the troublesome and ultimately

unreliable distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘pretend’ positions from

which the implied author is said to speak, and focus instead on the ways that

Booth offers us valuable critical language for reading a politics of location

into the narrative technique a writer such as Ghosh employs. Such an

approach allows us to explain more rigorously the triangular relationships at

play in this narrative. Liu, for example, identifies those interpretive moves

that are attentive to the politics of location as crucial to any project which

seeks to engage critically in the study of translation; in a footnote she

commends the efforts of theorists such as Chandra Mohanty and Lata Mani,

for example, to articulate a ‘politics of location’ that works to complicate

Said’s ‘traveling theory’ (Liu 1995: 385�6). Her objection is that such theory

‘is generally interpreted as if theory (read Western theory) were a hero from

a European picaresque who initiates the trip, encounters obstacles en route,

and always ends up being accommodated one way or another by the host

country’ (ibid.: 21). If we attempt to read Ghosh’s narrator as playing at

being just such a hero, then we might begin by questioning the very triangles

of locatedness the book introduces through its structure; this would then

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force us to conclude that his many disappointing encounters � finding the

manuscripts he searches for not in the Geniza but in the Reader’s Digest

archive, for example � signal a split that comments ironically on the

triangular relations of mastery his very rhetoric employs. Majeed, however,

does not arrive at such a reading because he does not acknowledge a gap

between the knowing but anguished author and the flummoxed narrator as

anti-hero.3 While Majeed admits that he notices a hint here or there ‘of how

post-colonial identities are in collusion with the powerful effects of European

colonialism’, in the final analysis he finds ‘Ghosh’s evasion of these

relationships of collusion between a post-colonial Indian identity and

European colonial rule’ a major flaw.

How are we to reconcile these charges with James Clifford’s celebration of

the book’s ability to ‘trace old and new maps and histories of people in

transit, variously empowered and compelled’ (1997: 2)? Clifford holds out

Ghosh’s work as exemplary of a new kind of writing, one which is

‘concerned with human difference articulated in displacement’, one which

shows that ‘[e]veryone’s on the move, and has been for centuries: dwelling-

in-travel’ (ibid.). I would like to suggest here that the displacements Clifford

perceives in the text are written with the same ironic hand that Majeed reads

as collusions. At issue is the movement (or lack thereof) between the various

points of the triangles imagined by each reader.

We should begin by noting that Clifford’s loose and somewhat abstract

use of the word ‘translation’ for what he calls ‘imperfect equivalences’ finds

particular relevance in scenes � appearing with discomfiting although

hilarious regularity throughout the book � in which the narrator is asked

to account for the differences between his culture and the Egyptian

fellaheen’s:

‘But tell me this � of course you have circumcision where you come from, just like

we do? Isn’t that so, mush kida?’

I had long been dreading this line of questioning, knowing exactly where it

would lead.

‘Some people do,’ I said. ‘And some people don’t.’

‘You mean,’ he said in rising disbelief, ‘there are people in your country who

are not circumcised?’

In Arabic the word ‘circumcise’ derives from a root that means ‘to purify’: to

say of someone that they are ‘uncircumcised’ is more or less to call them impure.

‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘yes, many people in my country are ‘‘impure’’.’ I had no

alternative; I was trapped by language. (Ghosh 1994 [1992]: 61�2)

At this point in the narrative we have already witnessed the narrator being

bombarded with aggressively narrow-minded questions about Hindu cow

worship and cremation, and now, as we watch, the circumcision discussion

3 See in particular

the third chapter, ‘Isit ironic?’, in Booth

(1974: 47�86).


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moves from the general to the increasingly specific, until it zeroes in on our

narrator’s own (uncircumcised) person:

‘But not you . . .’ He could not bring himself to finish the sentence.

‘Yes,’ I said. My face was hot with embarrassment and my throat had gone dry:

‘Yes, me too.’

He gasped and his incredulous eyes skimmed over the front of my trousers. (ibid.:

62)

A different sort of ‘discovery’ propels the drama of this traveller’s tale.4

Rather than the ‘monarch-of-all-I-survey’ stance Mary Louise Pratt fleers so

adroitly in her 1992 monograph Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and

Transculturation , Ghosh’s text offers a narrator who is looked at as much

as he looks out, cringing as he is undressed in the eyes of his informants.5

Where in conventional travel accounts, according to Pratt, ‘discover-

y . . . consisted of a gesture of converting local knowledges (discourses) into

European national and continental knowledges associated with European

forms and relations of power’, here Ghosh offers two ‘local knowledges’ in

conflict with one another and thus forces his readers to rethink the terms

such conversions (as translations) are predicated upon (Pratt 1996: 202).

After all, later in the book we come to learn that the difference between

Hindu and Muslim circumcision practice holds a particular charge for

someone like our narrator who grew up in the communal violence of South

Asia, where cities went up in flames ‘because of a cow found dead in a

temple or a pig in a mosque’, where people were ‘killed for wearing a lungi

or a dhoti . . . women disembowelled for wearing veils or vermilion . . . men

dismembered for the state of their foreskins’ (Ghosh 1994 [1992]: 210). Such

scenes challenge the utopic vision of community, and thus of common

ground (as linguistic equivalence), promised by the rhetoric of liberal

humanism. Unlike the travel writers that preceded him, this English language

writer cannot fully avail himself of the European relations of power the genre

assumes. He finds himself a representative of India more than of England to

the people he meets, and so his well-meaning efforts at Western-style

ethnographic ‘translation’ are perceived by the fellaheen as potential steps

towards a more fundamental conversion from an Indian way of life to an

Egyptian one. (Early on in the book one of the more educated men he meets

in the village offers to bring the narrator with him the next time he recites the

Qur’an, so that, he explains, ‘you will see then how much better Islam is than

this ‘‘Hinduki’’ of yours’ (ibid.: 51). The travel from one point of the triangle

to another crosses lines of differences marked not so much spatially � even

geographically, nationalistically � as culturally, a distinction performed in

Ghosh’s book through religious symbolism. And in case there is any question

about his motives, Ustaza Mustafa adds, ‘I am hoping . . . that you will

4 In Imperial Eyes:Travel Writing andTransculturation ,

Mary Louise Pratt

demonstrates thattraditionally travel-

as-discovery

narratives rely on

arrogant rhetoricalpositionings, a device

she sums up tidily in

the irresistiblephrase: ‘the

monarch-of-all-I-

survey’: ‘The

monarch-of-all-I-survey scene, then,

would seem to

involve particularly

explicit interactionbetween esthetics

and ideology, in

what one might call a

rhetoric ofpresence. . .the

esthetic qualities of

the landscapeconstitute the social

and material value of

the discovery to the

explorers’ homeculture, at the same

time as its esthetic

deficiencies suggest a

need for social andmaterial intervention

by the home culture’

(1992: 205).

5 Note too Gillian

Brown’s observation

that in ‘confessional’writing personal

details gain currency

‘not in their intimatenature’ so much as in

the way ‘that they get

moved from the

private to the publicsphere’ to become

converted from ‘the

personal into the

representative ortypical’ (1996: 102�3).

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convert and become a Muslim’ (ibid.).) Ghosh’s prose makes us wonder if

perhaps the problems he encounters lie with the expectation that translation,

like conversion, should be experienced as neat, one-way movement from one

uniform domain into a second.6 Certainly Naoki Sakai and Lydia Liu remind

us that translational encounters are never so simple.

Viswanathan pursues such questions at some length in a 1998 monograph

Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief , and offers particularly

startling insights on the pervasive and yet contradictory links made between

national and religious identity. She points out that ‘conversion ranks among

the most destabilizing activities in modern society’ for it has the potential to

cross ‘fixed boundaries between communities and identities’ and to restore

‘belief from the margins of secular society to a more worldly function’;

however, she laments perceptively, ‘in the context of majority-minority

relations, conversion is typically regarded as an assimilative act � a form of

incorporation into a dominant culture of belief’ (Viswanathan 1998: xv).

Such thinking, she asserts, exposes the underlying tension ‘between religion’s

claims to universalism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the demand that

religion be kept separate from the rational articulations of modernity’, a

conflict she sees (working from the historical research of Talal Asad)

‘resolved on the ground of individual subjectivity � as the lone space for the

continued practice of and assent to belief’ (ibid.). Again, we might ask how

we are to read such ground critically. Viswanathan does not, like Sakai and

Liu, interrogate the translational history of a concept like ‘individual

subjectivity’ but leaves it to be a self-evident category.7 In the preface to

the book she announces that she is searching for ‘an alternative politics of

identity’ that would protect the one ‘surviving � indeed, permissible � form

of religion in modernity’, that is, ‘the right to individual belief . . . without

reducing to sentiment or affect the subjectivity upon which belief is formed’

(ibid.). And while in her case studies she praises accounts that expose the

‘underlying tension between the transgressive and the assimilative’ and

writes approvingly of a ‘new form of subjectivity’ in which ‘agency is now

defined in terms outside those provided by liberal humanism’ (ibid.: 87,

110), in her essay ‘Beyond Orientalism: syncretism and the politics of

knowledge’, which anticipated the book, she does not seem to find common

cause in Ghosh’s writing. She reads in Ghosh’s complex interrogations of

cultural conflict a simple-minded appeal to a syncreticism which tries to

‘surmount problems of racial, religious, and cultural division’ by creating

‘what appears to be liberal, open and tolerant solutions’ that are ‘ultimately

trapped by their inability to confront difference at the level of immediate,

intersubjective encounters’ (Viswanathan 1996: 7). The substance of her

critique is important and far-reaching, and yet, like Majeed’s, her reading

does not entertain the possibility that Ghosh’s text has achieved a

certain distance using literary devices, analogous to the one she proposes

6 I would like tothank Paula

Richman for

encouraging me to

pursue this analogybetween translation

and conversion.

7 See, in particular,‘The discourse of

individualism’ in Liu

(1995: 77�99), and

‘Subject and/orshutai and the

inscription of

cultural difference’ in

Sakai (1997: 117�52).


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representing with logic. She could do more to help us find a critical language

for our own intersubjective encounters as scholars negotiating such ques-

tions, instead of relying on a discourse which claims to be stable and neutral,

even masterful. This debate then prompts us to ask: is there a place in

scholarly discourse for first-person account?

In an article ‘Critical impersonations’ Gillian Brown points out that the

inclusion of personal experience in one’s writing is ‘a fitting and powerful

technique for promulgating views about cultural forms of identity’, for,

through the writing, ‘identity appears a matter beyond the self’s mastery’

(1996: 106�7).8 ‘Drawing attention to individual experience’, she explains,

‘the critic underscores the particularity as well as partiality of any critical

view. From this perspective, the invocation of personal experience is a

confession of critical limits, of one’s bias or ignorance or historical horizon’

(ibid.: 107). Viswanathan, however, writes of the ‘psychological ambiva-

lence’ she sees in Ghosh’s text, as if such complexities were unintentional.

She achieves this perspective by assuming (like Majeed) that the author and

narrator are one and the same and that her own vantage point is invisibly

neutral, even transcendent:

the narrator of Ghosh’s work wills himself to deny that differences exist, yet at the

same time he is subliminally aware of their continuous presence, as is evident in his

resentment of the Egyptian villagers’ questions about cremation, cow worship, and

circumcision in Hindu society. Their incredulous probings force him to deal with

an archetypal past (of history, culture, in short, of difference) that insists on

pushing itself into the present of the ethnographic moment, which the narrator

would like to believe is associated with a timeless syncretism. While springing from

a deep anger at the rise of state-sponsored violence and very humanist in its

articulation, Ghosh’s anti-nationalism cannot fully mask the fact that his desire for

some prior syncretic condition supplants an originary, almost ‘primordial’ fear.

(Viswanathan 1996: 7)

The timelessness she perceives assumes that the spatial and temporal triangle

Ghosh has constructed in the narrative structure is not dynamic but static.

Such a reading misses the ironies implicit in these dynamic translations

Ghosh recounts. For a reader alert to irony begins to see the complexity with

which this ‘‘‘primordial’’ fear’ expresses itself in the prose as the trouser-

wary conversation between Ghosh and his young Egyptian friend Jabir

continues: the topic quickly moves from circumcision to the shaving of

armpit hair and . . . the hair ‘there’ (‘he said, pointing a finger at my crotch’).

The narrator is forced to admit that no, he doesn’t shave his hair there. Soon

enough the realization begins to dawn on Jabir:

8 I wish to thankYopie Prins for

suggesting this

reference.

interventions � 9:1 116.........................

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‘But then,’ he cried, ‘doesn’t the hair grow longer and longer until . . .’

Inadvertently his eyes dropped and he stole a quick look at my ankles. I am

convinced, to this day, that he fully expected to see the ends of two long, curly

braids peeping out from the ends of my trousers. (Ghosh 1994 [1992]: 62)

Here and elsewhere, Ghosh relies on humour to show � in Viswanathan’s

words � the inability of ‘liberal, open and tolerant solutions . . . to confront

difference at the level of immediate, intersubjective encounters’. In the final

paragraph of this short scene, readers are introduced to the present-tense

narrator (‘I am convinced’) looking back at his former self (the one who

acted so earnestly in these ethnographic scenes, in the past tense) with

concern as much as bemusement. We might assume at first that Ghosh’s

narrator is laughing good-naturedly at his Egyptian friend for believing

pubic hair would grow to the ground if left unattended; and while that may

be true, it is also true that the dramatic focus of the scene is on the narrator

as he was then � a well-meaning student of culture who suddenly finds

himself marked bodily by difference, isolated from others, without faith that

the institutions of Western liberalism would protect him from what he fears

most primordially. Indirectly, then, the target of the humour is also the

complex network of cultural institutions in which readers of travel accounts

are asked to have faith.

The humour of the scene cuts most deeply when we as readers can

recognize this same ‘primordial fear’ in ourselves. In his classic monograph

on humour, Freud observes that humour requires there to be an interaction

not just between two people, but among a triangle of alliances: one side that

makes the witty remark, another that serves as the target and ‘a third person

in whom the purpose of the wit to produce pleasure is fulfilled’ (1960

[1905]: 118). In this scenario we may imagine the narrator in the first of

these three terms (as the one who makes the witty remark), Jabir as the

second (the target) and ourselves the readers as the third. But when we pay

particular attention to the nature of pleasure that is produced in ourselves,

we are forced to acknowledge that Jabir is not the sole target of our humour,

that we derive most of our pleasure from laughing at the narrator as he was

then (which is, I would argue, a response that the writing invites).

Approaching the text this way helps us to see the gap between the present-

tense narrator of English and the ‘doktor al-Hindi’ who interacted with Jabir

and others in Arabic in the past. Writing history, then, becomes not just a

matter of reconciling the absence of missing manuscripts in the present, but

one of negotiating the parts of one’s divided self at the same time. Freud’s

triangular paradigm teaches us that if we judge such scenes to be

unambivalent and overly nostalgic then we are not giving due attention to

our role in the third term, as interpreters.9

9 Freud observes: ‘it

is not the person who

makes the joke wholaughs at it and who

therefore enjoys its

pleasurable effect,

but the inactivelistener’ (1960

[1905]: 118�9).


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To move beyond such binary understandings of history, as Niranjana and

others would have us do, we need to complicate the nineteenth-century

understanding of irony we find in Hayden White’s weighty Metahistory , for

example, where irony works ‘to affirm tacitly the negative of what is on the

literal level affirmed positively, or the reverse’ (1973: 37�8). Rather, I would

advance Linda Hutcheon’s suggestions in Irony’s Edge: The Theory and

Politics of Irony that irony be seen as ‘relational, inclusive, and differential’:

relational in that ‘it operates not only between meaning (said, unsaid) but

between people (ironists, interpreters, targets)’; inclusive � rather than

exclusive � because it accommodates both the said and the unsaid; and

differential in that it brings together two or more signifieds, ‘different, but

not necessarily opposite’ (1994: 58, 64). Such an understanding, she writes,

‘would involve an oscillating yet simultaneous perception of plural and

different meanings’ (ibid.: 66). This is the narrative technique by which the

writing of history might become � in Niranjana’s phrase � ‘effective’. With a

dynamic, rather than fixed, notion of irony, our role in relation to Ghosh’s

text becomes necessarily more complex, as Hutcheon makes clear:

In interpreting irony . . . it is not the two ‘poles’ themselves that are important; it is

the idea of a kind of rapid perceptual or hermeneutic movement between them that

makes this image a possibly suggestive and productive one for thinking about

irony . . . it does allow a way to think about ironic meaning as something in flux,

and not fixed. It also implies a kind of simultaneous perception of more than one

meaning . . . in order to create a third composite (ironic) one. (ibid.: 60)

Perhaps not coincidentally, in her book on conversion Viswanathan

identifies the need for a dynamic perspective: ‘If discourse beyond the level

of argumentation is to materialize, it cannot be grounded in a unitary world-

view or religion but rather in the ability to move between world-views’

(1998: 175). Such world views can be imagined not as static points on a

triangle but as constantly displaced themselves. The solution to this

‘intractable political problem’ then requires that the reader takes responsi-

bility for what Hutcheon terms the ‘evaluative edge’ she brings to a text

(1994: 89). After all, writes Hutcheon,

[w]e all belong to many overlapping (and sometimes even conflicting) communities

or collectives . . . This overlapping is the condition that makes irony possible, even

though the sharing will inevitably always be partial, incomplete, fragmentary;

nevertheless, something does manage to get shared � enough, that is, to make irony

happen. (ibid.: 92)

In fact, she adds, offering an optimistically agential approach to the

triangular alliances that threaten to trap us, ‘ironic discourse . . . is . . . made

interventions � 9:1 118.........................

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possible by . . . those different worlds to which each of us differently belongs’

(ibid.: 89). How would such a notion of irony help us understand the multi-

directional translations in Ghosh’s text?

In one of the most self-revealing and yet revelatory scenes in In an Antique

Land (an encounter around which the 1986 Granta essay revolves), Ghosh’s

narrator finds himself inexplicably rebuked by a respected imam he had

looked forward to interviewing, when he crosses paths with him by chance in

the market. The shopkeeper present tries at first to bring the two together,

appealing to the imam’s sense of hospitality and his learning: ‘‘‘You know

the Indian doktor, don’t you?’’ he said. ‘‘He’s come all the way from India to

be a student at the University of Alexandria’’’ (Ghosh 1994 [1992]: 234).

The imam immediately dismisses ‘this student business’, adding: ‘He doesn’t

even write in Arabic.’ Despite the shopkeeper’s gentle attempts, it is clear the

imam is incensed at the very notion of an easy equivalence between himself

and this Indian. We might even deduce that the ground of equivalence

established in this translational encounter, like Ghosh’s with us, is being

overtly interrogated within the text. Because before long, the narrator tells

us, the imam’s mouth starts twitching with anger, his eyes shine ‘with a

startling brightness’ and he begins taunting the narrator: ‘‘‘Tell me’’, he said,

‘‘why do you worship cows?’’’ (ibid.).

The narration makes clear that the imam is not seeking answers to his

questions, that both the Indian doctor and the shopkeeper are merely props

in the imam’s confused display of rage. He turns back to the shopkeeper and

speaks of the narrator as if he were not present, as part of a third-person,

distant plural: ‘That’s what they do in his country . . . They worship cows.’ In

this ironic traveller’s tale we have an ethnographer who is relaying to us

sentences spoken by a native informant that, to paraphrase Young, make

each one who passes them along feel he is not the subject of his own

sentence. The narrator can hardly gather a reply before the imam adds, ‘And

shall I tell you what else they do?’, answering his own question in what

Ghosh terms ‘a dramatic hiss’: ‘They burn their dead’ (pp. 234�5). At this

point the shopkeeper is unable to defend his Indian friend any longer, and

can only gasp ‘Ya Allah!’ Meanwhile we sit as invisible English-language

spectators, watching this drama unfold in Arabic from a translated distance:

suddenly [the imam] spun around to face me and cried, ‘Why do you allow it?

Can’t you see that it’s a primitive and backward custom? Are you savages that you

permit something like that? Look at you: you’ve had some education; you should

know better. How will your country ever progress if you carry on doing these

things? You’ve even been to Europe; you’ve seen how advanced they are. Now tell

me: have you ever seen them burning their dead?’ (p. 235)


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Whatever our political inclinations, like the narrator � and, we suspect, the

implied author � we become unwitting arbiters in this battle of competing

humiliations that pretends the points of these triangles are stable and static

even when they clearly are not. And like the narrator, the imam’s rhetoric

forces us to take simplistic sides even if like to think we see the situation in

greater complexity. Unlike us, however, the narrator is there in the moment,

called upon to defend himself. He becomes tongue-tied, especially before the

gathering crowd. He finally manages to eke out, ‘Yes, they do burn their

dead in Europe’, but this only seems to fuel the imam’s ire:

The Imam turned away and laughed scornfully. ‘He’s lying,’ he said to the crowd.

‘They don’t burn their dead in the West. They’re not an ignorant people. They’re

advanced, they’re educated, they have science, they have guns and tanks and

bombs.’ (ibid.)

This is the point at which Ghosh’s narrator splits:

Suddenly something seemed to boil over in my head, dilemmas and arguments I

could no longer contain within myself.

‘We have them too!’ I shouted back at him. ‘In my country we have all those

things too; we have guns and tanks and bombs. And they’re better than anything

you’ve got in Egypt � we’re a long way ahead of you.’ (pp. 235�6)

While he does not comment overtly on himself this linear reading of

modernity vis-a-vis ‘progress’ even while he otherwise rejects such a

narrative, the exchange shows that the teleology proves unstable ground

for them both. The imam begins yelling, ‘I tell you, he’s lying’, as childishly

as they suddenly have both become, until the narrator’s friend Khamees

approaches and gingerly leads him away (p. 236).

In the next several paragraphs that close the chapter, Ghosh mixes

narration and exposition to try to reconcile sides of this persona that have

been rendered seemingly irreconcilable. The narrator describes Khamees and

another Egyptian friend trying to comfort him immediately following the

event; at the same time he confesses to his readers thoughts he could not

share with his friends then:

I could not bring myself to speak; I felt myself a conspirator in the betrayal of the

history that had led me to Nashawy; a witness to the extermination of a world of

accommodations that I had believed to be still alive, and, in some tiny measure, still

retrievable. (p. 237)

The narration thus tries to make sense of this scene that makes no sense by

moving between two interpretive frameworks � and therefore sets of

alliances � at once: that which the narrator establishes with his Egyptian

interventions � 9:1 120.........................

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friends in Arabic immediately following the event, and that which he

establishes with his reader of English much later. It becomes clear that each

of these relationships is itself a scene of translation. It is only when the

narrator has enough distance from the imam that he can admit (in a moment

of realization Dixon and Clifford both celebrate): ‘despite the vast gap that

lay between us, we understood each other perfectly. We were both travelling,

he and I: we were travelling in the West’ (p. 236). The fact that he tells this in

English to readers who could be anywhere in the world only heightens the

poignancy of the irony that is translation:

I was crushed, as I walked away; it seemed to me that the Imam and I had

participated in our own final defeat, in the dissolution of the centuries of dialogue

that had linked us: we had demonstrated the irreversible triumph of the language

that has usurped all the others in which people once discussed their differences.

(ibid.)

Not surprisingly, it is this passage in particular that Viswanathan finds

unsettlingly nostalgic.

Ghosh’s narrator does indeed spend paragraphs sharing with the reader

those very romantic visions of syncretism Viswanathan finds so objection-

able, but at the same time the text effectively splits so that such a fixed

notion becomes only one of several interpretive points among which the

reader is invited to move. Rather than end with ‘the irreversible triumph of

the language that has usurped all the others’, the text offers a scene of halting

translation and cautious humour that Viswanathan does not mention in her

article:

But Khamees and his family did not let me long remain in silence. They took me

back to their house, and after ‘Eid had repeated the story of my encounter with

Imam Ibrahim, Khamees turned to me, laughing, and said: ‘Do not be upset, ya

doktor. Forget about all those guns and things. I’ll tell you what: I’ll come to visit

you in your country, even though I’ve never been anywhere. When you leave, I’ll

come with you; I’ll come all the way to India.’ (p. 237)

The moment challenges the implicit notion that only the English-language

framework with the reader can serve to negotiate the differences between

them, even while it suggests that it put these differences into contention with

each other in the first place. Nominally, Khamees’s comment � ‘I’ll come all

the way to India’ � makes us aware of the practical as well as conceptual

distance between the lands of Egypt and India; and yet, we cannot forget �especially as readers of English � the practical and conceptual distance

between each of these points and the third which remains unmentioned in

the narration. Given the invisible but unmistakable force that this third term


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has brought to bear on the interaction between the narrator and the imam

earlier, when Khamees laughs and tells the narrator to ‘forget about all those

guns and things’ he is suggesting that there is indeed a possibility for

understanding our differences � even if it’s an approach that is partial,

incomplete, fragmentary. The closest we will ever be is when we acknowl-

edge those differences and allow ourselves to laugh at them, and therefore at

ourselves: ‘He began to scratch his head, thinking hard, and then he added:

‘‘But if I die there you must remember to bury me.’’’

It is in these moments the reader finds herself oscillating � uncertain,

unsettled � between several world views at once, and becomes aware of her

own efforts to fix the meaning of a text that is dynamic and multiply placed.

Rather than limit the possibilities of interpretation to those that are binary

and exclusionary, I suggest that as postcolonial critics interested in cultural

translation we begin to use evaluative tools that are relational, inclusive and

differential to work that common ground of imperfect linguistic equivalence.

After all, a text’s potential for political effect lies largely in the agency of its

community of readers � who might, through subtle and certainly wry

literary strategies within the text itself, be brought to understand that this

ground is not so very common in the end.

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laughing out of place

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