AMITAV GHOSH, as a budding young anthropologist, attracted curiosity in rural Egypt. But the now-renowned author, in that era before the internet or cellphones, also found unexpected kinship with the locals, thanks to the reach of Hindi movies. And, yes, there was cultural misunderstanding as well, with cows—and Kirloskar—playing a role. This extract is from an affectionately reflective essay called “Confessions of a Xenophile.”
Next to my own country, India, there is no place in the world that has been more important to my development as a writer than Egypt. It is now [many] years since I first landed in Cairo on April 19, 1980: I was then twenty-four years old, and I had come to explore what was to me a new—but not entirely unknown world. The immediate pretext for my journey was research: a short while earlier, I had won a scholarship that took me from Delhi University to Oxford to study social anthropology. My dream was of writing fiction, but like many an aspiring novelist, I felt I lacked the necessary richness of experience. The writers I admired—V.S. Naipaul, James Baldwin, and others—had gone out into the world and watched it go by: I wanted no less for myself. The scholarship was a godsend because it allowed me to choose where I wanted to go, and in my case that was Egypt.
Through the good offices of Dr Aly Issa, an eminent anthropologist from Alexandria, I was soon installed in a small village in the Governorate of Beheira, near the town of Damanhour: in my book In an Antique Land, I give this village the name ‘Lataifa.’ My home there consisted of a recently vacated chicken coop on the roof of a mud hut; at the time there was no electricity in the village, although there was, as I recall, a supply of piped water. Lataifa and I were undeniably a shock to each other. There was the question of language to begin with: I spoke very little Arabic, and what I knew was of a laboriously classical variety. Thus, even simple operations such as asking for water could cause great outbursts of laughter. In the process, however, my hosts and I discovered one medium of communication where we were on equal terms: this was the language of aflaam al-Hindeyya—that is to say, Hindi film songs. When all other efforts at communication broke down, we would burst into song—this was no small accomplishment on my part as I am a terrible singer. But many of the younger people in the village sang very well and knew innumerable Hindi songs. Indian filmi music thus became a shared language and opened many barriers and earned me many invitations to meals.
The Hindi films that were best known in Lataifa were of the ’50s and ’60s vintage—films that featured such stars as Raj Kapoor, Nargis, Padmini, Manoj Kumar, and Babita. The ‘good-hearted vamp’ and ‘cabaret dancer’ Helen was another popular figure. Everyone in the village had a few favorite scenes, and I would often be asked detailed questions about these episodes. This was a great trial to me, as I was by no means an expert on the films of that era. Often children would be called out to perform, which they would do with the greatest gusto. There were even minor specializations, some boys being regarded as particularly good performers of Raj Kapoor numbers, while others were experts in reciting dialogues and soliloquies. The performances were almost always by boys, as I remember, and it was quite the sight to see young jallabeyya-clad fellaheen attempting to imitate the dance numbers of scantily dressed actresses like Helen.
Even more astonishing were the recitations, for it would happen sometimes that children would reel off large chunks of Hindi dialogue without knowing a word of the language. Hindi films also provided me with a certain name recognition, for although the megastar Amitabh Bachchan was not as well-known in the Middle East then as he is now, there were plenty of people who knew of him. It was thus not as difficult as it might have been to introduce myself.
Yet while I had reason to be grateful to Hindi films in some respects, there were others in which they made my life exceedingly difficult. One of these was the matter of cows. I must admit that until I went to live in Lataifa, I had no idea that cows played such an important part in Indian films: from the recurrence of this animal in everyday conversation, one might well have imagined that Bollywood is a veterinary enterprise, and that cows, rather than Raj Kapoor and his ilk, were the true stars of Hindi films. Every day, several times daily, I would have to deal with barrages of questions on the matter of cows: Did I worship cows? (Inta bita’abud bi bagara? Literally, ‘Are you a devotee of the cow?’) At what time of day did I conduct my devotions? Could they please witness my prostrations? Was there not a risk of being splattered with dung? Had I ever considered transferring my allegiance to the camel? And so on.
Although these interrogations were often wearisome, there was also something touching about the attitudes of my friends. When we were out walking in the fields, they would slow their pace if we passed a cow: it took me a while to understand that they were allowing me time to perform my secret oblations. In the ploughing season, it often happened that we would go past a field where a team of oxen was being driven on with a stick or a whip: on many such occasions, my friends would run ahead to berate the poor ploughman, telling him to stop beating his animals for fear of hurting the sentiments of ‘Doktor Amitaab.’ In vain would I try to persuade them that cows were frequently beaten in India: they wouldn’t believe me, for had they not seen otherwise in Hindi films? The other principal association that rural Egypt had with India was the matter of water pumps, which were, of course, very important in rural communities. In those days, Egypt imported so many water pumps from India that in some areas these machines were known as ‘makana Hindi’—or simply as ‘Kirloskar,’ the name of a major pump-manufacturing company. Purchasing a water pump was a great event, and the machine would be brought back on a pick-up truck with much fanfare, with strings of old shoes strung around the spout to ward off the evil eye. Long before the machine made its entry into the village, a posse of children would be sent to summon me: as an Indian, I was expected to be an expert on these machines, and the proud new owners would wait anxiously for me to pronounce on the virtues and failings of their new acquisition.
It so happens that I am one of those people who is hard put to tell a spanner from a hammer or a sprocket from a gasket. At first, I protested vigorously, disclaiming all knowledge of machinery. But once again no one believed me; they thought I was withholding vital information or playing some kind of deep and devious game. Often people would look crestfallen, imagining, no doubt, that I had detected a fatal flaw in their machine and was refusing to divulge the details. This would not do, of course, and in order to set everyone’s fears at rest, I became, willy-nilly, an oracle of water pumps. I developed a little routine wherein I would subject the machine to a minute inspection, occasionally tapping it with my knuckles or poking it with my fingers. Unsurprisingly, no machine failed my inspection: at the end of it I would invariably pronounce the water pump to be a ‘makana mumtaaza’—a most excellent Kirloskar, a truly distinguished member of its species.
Yet even as I was disclaiming my relationship to those water pumps, I could not but recognize that there was a certain commonality between myself and those machines. In a way, my presence in that village could be attributed to the same historical circumstances that introduced Indian pumps and Hindi films to rural Egypt. Broadly speaking, those circumstances could be described as the spirit of decolonization that held sway over much of the world in the decades after the Second World War.
Excerpted from a lecture delivered at the Arab Writers’ League Conference in Cairo.The full version appears in Amitav Ghosh’s Wild Fictions: Essays on Literature, Empire and the Environment, published by the University of Chicago Press. Ghosh’s latest novel, Ghost-Eye, will be released next month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.