REVIEW ARTICLE 97 brutal for the vast majority of the millions who across history have been its victims. To dwell on this point, however, would be to obfuscate the more significant thrust of Ghosh's endeavour, which is to suggest to us that the pre-modern age may in fact have been more modern than the modern itself. The categories of pre-modern and modern, and thus the post-modern too, are perhaps quite antiquated, and we post-moderns may find that we have not been the first to understand what a true cosmopolitanism means. In any case, though Ghosh may be offering us illusions, one can scarcely begrudge him his extraordinary endeavour or dream, and indeed his book compels assent. It is as a meditation on history that we may want to think of In an Antique Land, though finally Ghosh's book too, in emulation as it were of the in-between world of which he sings, defies categorization. Honourable and dignified as the quest is to uncover the identity of the slave of MS H.6, whom we eventually get to know as Bomma, what is regained can all too easily be lost. Consider, for example, the fate of Nabeel, a young student at the agricultural training college whom Ghosh had met in Nashawy. Nabeel has a particularly memorable place in at least two narratives, one which raises arresting questions about the status of Chosh as an ethnographer in a foreign land, and the other a narrative about the status of history. Ghosh and his friends had been sitting in his room one afternoon; Ghosh was spooning tea into the kettle when Nabeel suddenly spoke up: '"It must make you think of all the people you left at home", he said to me, "when you put that kettle on the stove with just enough water for yourself."' It was, as Ghosh says, a remark that he could not put out of his mind, 'for it was the first time that anyone in Lataifa or Nashawy had attempted an enterprise similar to mine—to enter my imagination and look at my situation as it might appear to me* (p. 152). We need not confuse this with the task that ethnography set for itself in the age of colonialism, about which the by now ail-too familiar thesis of Orientalism has a great deal to say. The more poignant observation, it would appear, is that Nabeel utters a thought which renders him distinct, which marks him off from the others, and so his disappearance—for alas! that is what happens—from the pages of history, his complete absorption into anonymity, alerts us to the eventual fate of the subaltern. Nabeel becomes one of those Egyptians who joins the expatriate community in Iraq, where the pay for most jobs is higher. Saddam Hussein moves into Kuwait; and there begins another, yet another, exodus from that timeless and ancient land, this one too accompanied by pestilence, plague, sorrow, suffering. Gathered together in the house of Ismail, a dozen of them watched this exodus on the TV set. 'There was nothing to be seen except crowds: Nabeel had vanished into the anonymity of History': and so ends In an Antique Land (p. 353). Is not Nabeel that subaltern whose identity some historian or ethnographer will be tracking down some five hundred