Amitav Ghosh's "In an Antique Land"

It is from these materials that Ghosh rebuilds a picture of gallant society in the region. To this, Ghosh adds his sustain observations and experiences based on brisk in, and interviewing the inhabitants of, two farm communities on the outskirts of Alexandria. We get deeper insights into the essence of the villagers due Ghosh's intimate engagement among them. As he tells us of Ustaz Sabry, "On another occasion, in a speech on superstitions and simulated beliefs he had eloquently condemned the custom that women observed, of leaving offerings at the sculpture of the dead...He and other teachers had even succeeded in uniting the villagers against a gentleman's gentleman who was known to perform exorcism rituals for women, secret Ethiopian rites called Zar" (Ghosh 146). Ghosh's plastered interactions with the villagers permits him to see issues of significance to Egyptians, from fundamentalism and religious extremism to gender issues and those of politics.

Travel is office of the author's methods, as he even travels to Mangalore to see what it was desire when Ben Yiju and Bomma were labored to relocate there. It is while living in the villages that Egyptian farmers render Abu-Lughod's friends and even extended family, probing him about his Indian heritage. Ghosh learns from these interactions that it is potential for people with expirations in culture, religion, and language to co-exist in harmony, but aspects of modern existence from imperialism and self-interest

Abu-Lughod's methods be to a greater extent akin to those of the professional ethnographer, including fieldwork and media content psychoanalysis. She remains more detached and aloof from her subjects than Ghosh who seems obsessed with Bomma but never explores wherefore and who views his subjects as extended family. Abu-Lughod's methods involve a content analysis of popular Egyptian melodramas, in contrast to Ghosh's use of immemorial documents. Abu-Lughod argues these melodramas are extremely important to an understanding of not merely home(a) identity for Egyptians but also the issues that shape and express national identity, such as politics, religious extremism, gender issues, and common existence.

Her focus is mainly on the reactions of two communities of women, one of them do up of maids employed by wealthy and mainly overseas employers in Cairo and the other consisting of rural villagers. She also travels to the offices of the producers of the melodramas, who skirmish over the values and issues presented in them. Similarly to Ghosh, Abu-Lughod (160) finds modernity remote with tradition through the vehicle of idiot box, which attempts to forge a weapons-grade bond of unity on the national level as former institutions like religion are undermined, "The urgency with which television serials are trying to shore up a national identity is surely related to the weakening of that strong whiz of the nation that had been produced a few decades ago." In addition, like Ghosh's part-travelogue approach, Abu-Lughod's is a mobile and multi-site ethnography, focusing on television as simply one aspect of the communities she is exploring.

to nationalism and the need for conquest subvert such a discourse. Ghosh's close-up and personal nature and approach with the villagers, like his landlord Abu-Ali and students like Nabeel, ironically results in the villagers observing Ghosh and observing difference themselves. They think Ghosh and his Indian people are uncivilized for their own uniqu
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