SOURCE: “A Passage to India,” in New Republic, Vol. 209, Nos. 8–9, August 23–30, 1993, pp. 38–41.

In the following review of In an Antique Land, Geertz praises Ghosh's ability to capture the social interactions and dynamics of the people, past and present, of the Persian Gulf.

The world, by now, is fairly well cut up into distinct pieces, stretches of space with borders around them and inhabitants within them. People move about a good deal, and some may change their residence and become inhabitants of some other piece. Nor are the pieces themselves entirely fixed; they can merge, divide, swallow one another up, or, like the Soviet Union, just disappear. But all of this occurs against the background of the peculiar idea that all individuals, however drifting, belong somewhere, to some bounded territory housing some population, even if they may have to be deported or walled in before they will live there...