SOURCE: A review of In an Antique Land, in World Literature Today, Vol. 68, No. 2, Spring, 1994, p. 430.

In the following positive review, King states that In an Antique Land is a skillful mixture of history, travelogue, fiction, and anthropology.

Amitav Ghosh's novels The Circle of Reason and The Shadow Lines are somewhat difficult to place on the current literary map; they have an unusual perspective and cover unexpected territory. In an Antique Land fills in some of the picture of how Ghosh sees the world and, besides the interest of the book itself as social anthropology and what it tells us about Ghosh, might be a starting place for future critical discussion of his fiction.

Ghosh is a New Delhi and Oxford-trained social anthropologist, and In an Antique Land is a complex book which uses for its narrative his attempts to trace the lives of a twelfth-century Indian slave...