Matters of the Spirit. Navigating between the Secular and the Religious in Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land

This essay explores the strategies employed by Amitav Ghosh to navigate between secular and religious worldviews, with a particular focus on In an Antique Land (1992). I argue that this early work is an especially useful resource to elaborate alternative responses to the received conflict between the secular and the religious, which Ghosh tries to replace with the opposition between the violent ideology that he defines as “supremacism” and the dialogical stance that he calls “culture of compromise.” This shift allows Ghosh’s narrative—an account of his experience as a fieldworker in Egypt—to imagine a common ground between religious and secular perspectives, where a shared intellectual effort of creativity and dissent can survive to oppose various kinds of supremacist ideologies and practices. I make use of several insights from Ghosh’s essays—in particular “The Fundamentalist Challenge” (1995)—and frame Ghosh’s work within the debate on the heterogeneous and controversial concept of “postsecularism.” My reading of In an Antique Land, moreover, provides the opportunity to comment on the limits and merits of Ghosh’s overall ethic and aesthetic project.