REVIEW ARTICLE 91 Amitav Ghosh's own interrogative discourse of history and ethnography? Moreover, who shall be interrogating whom ? Like any other anthropologist, what Chosh had first to do was to master the language of those in whose midst he would be settling. Ghosh apparently took to Arabic quite readily, but that is not all. Ben Yiju's letters and some other documents from that time were written in what today would surely be construed by many as an unimaginable monstrosity, that is Judaeo-Arabic. As one might surmise from the name, Judaeo-Arabic was a colloquial dialect of medieval Arabic, written in the Hebrew script. Unlike dialects of Arabic, Judaeo-Arabic was a written language; unlike written (or classical) Arabic, it had the vocabulary and grammar of the spoken language. If, as it has been said, language is nothing but a dialect backed up by an army and a navy, then we may think of Judaeo-Arabic as a language equipped with military hardware that was to become obsolete. As Ghosh details in his work, Judaeo-Arabic is known to only a handful of scholars around the world, and his intrusion into that most private and elite world could not but have caused tremors. Yet it is altogether fitting that Judaeo-Arabic should have interested Ghosh, for it represented a syncreticism and hybridity that seems largely unavailable today. It is only in that liminal space of hybridity that we can attain Narasimha-like luminosity,1 a luminosity at once of those who have knowledge and use it for the good and of those who can live gracefully with difference. So we have these dim traces: documents from the twelfth century reminding us of the hybridity of language and dialect, the written and the spoken word, Hebrew and Arabic, Muslims and Jews. The scholar must be a detective at times, and having ascertained that in a village called Lataifa, a couple of hours journey to the south-east of Alexandria, a dialect is spoken which bears a 'startlingly close* resemblance to the usages of the North African Arabic in which Ben Yiju was conversant, Ghosh proceeded to install himself in that village (p. 104). 'I knew nothing then about the Slave of MS. H.6*, says Ghosh, 'except that he had given me a right to be there, a sense of entitlement* (p. 19). Less complacent than others in his profession, Ghosh felt that he had to earn the right to be there, and Ghosh's disclosure here is a telling one. Are we—or should we be—such respecters of boundaries that we need to have a right to be somewhere? Ghosh was then an anthropologist, and we scarcely need to be reminded that the anthropologist has seldom bothered with the rights of others, those whom he cast into objects of his study; rather, he assumed the right of inquiry as his very own, as his to arrogate to himself necessarily if the natives were not to be bereft of knowledge about themselves. In order for Ghosh to effect a departure from this nefarious tradition, he has to persuade us that he had earned, in that inequitable condition of power and knowledge, the prerogatives of tht