90 SOCIAL SCIENTIST historiography encapsulated under the term 'Subaltern Studies'. While recent work on Indian history has indeed moved us from 'The Great Man Theory of History' to classes, structures, and the idioms of cultural and political life by which the subalterns can be identified, within the newly emerging history of subalterns there has been little room for individuals. The subalterns have been endowed with agency, they may even be exemplars, in the jargon of the day, of a self-fashioning subjectivity, but they are nonetheless bunched and huddled together, and they are of concern to us in the mass. The Oriental, as the colonial historiography had it, exists only in the mass, and subaltern historiography has seemingly been able to do little better. So, when from the bowels of the earth, from this class of subalterns, there arises an individual, albeit a slave, we must pause to reflect on the dignity of a vision that thinks of no individual as not worthy of a history. If the letter that launched Ghosh's book is in Jerusalem, and if the merchant who owned the slave whose identity Ghosh was determined to 'discover' was living in Mangalore, why should Ghosh have gone to Cairo? Ben Yiju, after some twenty years in India, where he had amassed great wealth, decided to return—in a manner not uncommon with expatriates—for the last years of his life to his native land, Egypt. His papers found their way to a synagogue in Cairo. It is to Cairo that Ghosh must first repair—but to go to Cairo is to stumble upon Egypt itself, for Cairo is Egypt, it is Egypt's own metaphor for itself (p. 32). In a Neitzschean-like display of philological skill, Ghosh unravels what Cairo has meant to Egyptians and others. Egyptians call it Masr, meaning 'to civilise*, 'to settle', and 'most of the cultures and civilizations with which it has old connections have accepted its own self-definition'. 'Only Europe', and let us mark the only, 'has always insisted on knowing the country not on its own terms', and this insistence has been the characteristic insignia of a civilization that has made all other civilizations learn its own language. Far from associating Egypt with civilization, the West assimilated that nation to a hideous darkness, and sought to invest that interpretation with eschatological authority. As Exodus (10.22 ff.) tells us, darkness came down on Egypt, but this is not the only association of Egypt with darkness. Thus, to invoke that other authority, the Oxford English Dictionary, yoked to the first, 'Egyptian bondage' is the 'bondage like that of the Israelites in Egypt'; more dramatic still is 'Egyptian days; the two days in each month which were believed to be unlucky' (p. 33). The Orient is not only dark, but licentious too; so states a seventeenth-century English law: 'If any transport into England or Wales, any lewd people calling themselves Egyptians, they forfeit 40 pounds' (p. 33). In European discourse, Egypt is more than a metaphor, it is indeed a weapon as much as a word. The question is: What will Egypt, that foiyit of civilization and thus (to invoke Socrates) of interrogation, be in