Negotiating the Modern

Orientalism and Indianness in the Anglophone World

Amit Ray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781135866051
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book explicates long-standing literary celebrations of 'India' and 'Indian-ness' by charting a cultural history of Indianness in the Anglophone world, locating moments (in intellectual, religious and cultural history) where India and Indianness are offered up as solutions to modern moral, ethical and political questions in the 'West.' Beginning in the early 1800s, South Asians actively seek to occupy and modify spaces created by the scholarly discourses of Orientalism: the study of the East ('Orient') via Western ('European') epistemological frameworks. Tracing the varying fortunes of Orientalist scholars from the inception of British rule, this study charts the work of key Indologists in the colonial era. The rhetorical constructions of East and West deployed by both colonizer and colonized, as well as attempts to synthesize or transcend such constructions, became crucial to conceptions of the 'modern.' Eventually, Indian desire for political sovereignty together with the deeply racialized formations of imperialism produced a shift in the dialogic relationship between South Asia and Europe that had been initiated and sustained by orientalists. This impetus pushed scholarly discourse about India in Europe, North America and elsewhere, out of what had been a direct role in politics and theology and into high 'Literary' culture.

Chapter One

After Empire: British Orientalism in Decline

INTRODUCTION: ORIENTALISM AND SOUTH ASIA

The systematic study of India by Europeans commenced during the eighteenth century, paralleling a steady rise in European influence on the Asian subcontinent. Orientalism, in its earliest South Asian incarnation, was a scholarly enterprise, reflecting the assumptions of the Enlightenment-era textualists who assumed that human beings “civilized” enough to write would codify those traits, rituals, and laws that defined their societies. This textually based codification of the Orient would come to supplement the body of travelers’ accounts, illustrations and items brought back from Asia that, collectively then, began to comprise a European “understanding” of the East.

In studying the texts that were, at least to certain indigenous social groups, a compendium of Indian antiquity, the Orientalists would embark on an era of comparatist “discovery” and “debate.” Yet, the very same texts that were bringing knowledge of various non-European pasts were also increasingly being used to describe an Oriental that was counter-posed to the modernizing European. Comparison provided contrast, delineating the provenance of the European “mind” versus its Oriental counterpart. Adding to such essentialist characterizations, derived mostly from such textually-oriented scholarship, was the concrete technological and scientific advancements that had been rapidly transforming Western Europe. The dramatic rise of the concept of reason in the eighteenth century brought with it a presentist re-orientation of cosmology, theology and humanism facilitated by the beginnings of the scientific revolution. Concurrent with this major realignment in the society and thought of Western Europe came much of the justifying rationale for European expansion and colonization.

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Orientalists provided Europe’s access to the Orient. As such, their work would do quite a bit to affect how Europe engaged with that distant Orient and, conversely, how various indigenous populations could respond to their European colonial rulers.

Edward Said’s Orientalism examines Europe’s colonization of the Middle East and Asia from the standpoint of a primarily British and French “high” cultural tradition. Concerned mostly with the texts and ideas of “experts” on the “Orient” during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Said examines a host of prominent British and French scholars, writers, and artists whose relationships to the Orient were, he argues, part of a systemic arrangement of power; an arrangement that had a profound impact on knowledge, representation, and the arts in ways which continued through to the time of the book’s writing and publication. Said’s entire oeuvre would support the case for Orientalism’s continuing impact upon European and, primarily, American perceptions of the Orient.

Said’s work has fostered a tremendous amount of debate that has continued relatively unabated since his work came out in 1978. For many of the projects that have since examined something called “colonial discourse,” including this one, Orientalism has been seen as providing a point of departure. As Ali Behdad points out in Belated Travellers, “departure” in this case is polysemic, indicating both a starting point and a point of divergence. While Orientalism has regularly been criticized for certain inconsistencies and oversights, scholars have continued to make it a sounding board for their own work. In this sense, Orientalism has had a monumental impact on work in the Humanities and Social Sciences in the Anglo-American academy and elsewhere.

In this chapter, I will begin with the end, so to speak. The phenomenon of Orientalism as it relates to South Asia begins with the work of eighteenthcentury scholars (as I will detail in the chapter that follows this one). Nearly two hundred years later, as an academic set of disciplines, Orientalism virtually disappeared in the Anglo-European Academy. I will chart the decline of academic Orientalism in the years following World War II. In beginning with the end, then, my aim is twofold. First, to ponder why Edward Said’s scathing criticism of Orientalism occurs at a time when academic Orientalism has seen a precipitous decline. Said’s use of Orientalism is, of course, not limited only to the scholarship of Orientalists (and I will discuss this matter further in the following pages). That being said, what is gained by exhuming a dying academic and textualist tradition by arguing for its systematic and influential distortions of an Asia imagined for Western consumption? And secondly, in asking this question of the “academic tradition” that is a key component of Said’s use of “Orientalism,” I seek to provide a rationale for my own project. How is the presence of the East in Europe, through the lenses of Orientalists and Orientalism, a productive force for certain indigenous groups? And how do such groups utilize Orientalist tropes, concepts (not to mention publications and “art”), to engage with colonialism’s modernizing impetus upon the colonized: politically, economically, socially, and culturally? And, conversely, what do dominant cultures internalize and reproduce out of Orientalist knowledge that provides a means for analysis and critique of their rapidly modernizing societies? How do various “Orients” become internalized by a dominant culture? Since much recent scholarship on British India has been impacted by the Orientalism debate, I focus upon a standard criticism of Saidean Orientalism in order to show how it relates to representations of India, and of South Asian studies, in the Anglo-American academic and cultural worlds.

In his “Introduction” Said lays out three distinct definitions of Orientalism: first as an academic tradition; secondly as a “style of thought based upon ontological and epistemological differences between” Orient and Occident; thirdly, in noting the steady movement between the academic and imaginative spheres, as a “discourse” (2, 3). It is this last usage, then, that allows Said to connect Orientalism as a scholarly practice with a rather powerful and broad-ranging critique of the intimate relationship between knowledge and imperialist power: “without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormous systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively” (3).

In making such sizable and functional claims, then, Said has provoked numerous responses. Critics of Orientalism have commented upon these varied definitions for “Orientalism.” Even Said concedes that the term is less preferred than it once was. He explains this lack of currency is a result of the term’s vagueness and generality, as well as its connotation of a “highhanded executive attitude of nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century colonialism” (2). In using a term that already has pejorative connotations, Said reconstitutes the concept of Orientalism to provide a genealogy of a phenomenon that, as a form of academic study, is dying out. Yet, in the tradition of Foucauldian genealogical analysis, the retrieval of the past is meant to intervene in the present. As an intervention that bears on the present, the range in definitions allows for Said to bridge his analysis of this dying academic tradition to intrude upon a present political moment within the academic’s own present. By examining Orientalism as a discourse, Said links the systematic distortions of the Orient during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an imperialist set of representations of the Orient, as still functioning in a contemporary American context. Yet, in bringing to bear an analysis of far-reaching and long-standing traditions of scholarship and art into perspective, how does Saidean Orientalism span so many varied circumstances East and West?

It is the sheer scale of Said’s claims that has drawn the most criticism. Both admirers and detractors of the work have cited its failure to differentiate between variant cultural circumstances and historical moments. In covering some 250 years of history, and a host of distinct languages and cultures in Europe, Asia, and North America the Saidean concept of Orientalism seems to move through history and geography unscathed. Thus, in this now-standard criticism, Orientalism becomes a monolithic, ahistorical essentialism that serves to re-enforce the very divisions between East and West of which it is so critical.

Recent influential criticisms of Orientalism, such as those of anthropologist James Clifford, historian John MacKenzie, and literary theorists Lisa Lowe and Ali Behdad have all addressed this particular aspect of Said’s work. While acknowledging the masterful sweep of Orientalism, with its easy familiarity of English and French “high” culture, all concur that the very scale of Said’s project weakens it. In addition, they all see a certain incompatibility between the theoretical framework of Orientalism and the types of claims being put forth. For Clifford, Said’s reliance on Foucault’s concept of discourse in order to assert the systematicity of Orientalism is methodologically inconsistent. In a rather scathing critique, Clifford notes the incommensurability of Foucault’s theoretical methods when applied to what is essentially an argument for a structure of Orientalism, of its “sheer knitted-together strength” (quoting Said, Clifford 257).

While Clifford notes that Said’s use of Foucault’s concept of “discourse” to extend into cultural constructions of the exotic is “promising” (since Foucault’s development of this term is “scrupulously ethnocentric”), Said’s application must wrest this concept from its derivations (Clifford 264). Foucault, especially in his later works, very much resists articulating a totalistic, structuralist basis for knowledge production and representation as it relates to power. Thus, while freely utilizing a method that adheres to the poststructuralist eschewal of stable “meaning” (and thus, of prediction based upon certainty), Said maintains a link to the practical task of rectifying oppressive formation(s) of the past.¹ His analysis of Orientalism describes a force that is a structurally consistent and cohesive feature of European interactions with Asia; so much so as to still affect a present that continues to rely on such (de) formations of a represented non-West.

My own project arises out of my assessment of academic Orientalism and Orientalists during the period following World War II. The tenor of certain prominent Orientalists seemed so defensive and challenged as to undercut Said’s account of Orientalism after World War II. The scholarly avenues by which Orientalism had validated itself as a source of knowledge about the “other” were clearly in decline.

ORIENTALISM THEN AND NOW

Orientalism in India began with the notion that a better understanding of native culture and tradition would provide the soundest basis for administering to the necessities of British power. As such, the project was inherently couched in terms of its “benefit to the native.” However, even at such an early stage in colonial history, this was precisely where the binary of East and West could no longer be claimed as separate spheres. William Jones’s recognition of linguistic overlap between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin implicitly connected Europe to Asia. But, paradoxically, this was precisely the moment that East and West became systematically defined in opposition to one another. As a practice of study, as a quest for knowledge, Orientalism signaled the beginnings of the cultural management of colonial domination, thereby forcing self and other together in a much more intertwined and subtle way than military subjugation.

As a number of historians such as Peter Marshall have noted, much of the impetus for England’s management of policy in India (and particularly Bengal) from the last quarter of the eighteenth century and moving through the first quarter of the nineteenth was about restoring the “civility” of the British state—Britain’s image of itself was tarnished by the profiteering and wide-scale famine that was occurring as part of its mercantile ventures, as fields devoted to food production were used for cash crops such as indigo. This domestic awareness was both idealistic and narcissistic. The British state needed to justify its own economic imperatives. However, the benefits of colonial expansion could not come at the cost of power’s excesses: if liberalism was becoming a principle tenet of rule at home, then rape, murder and theft could not occur in the colonies and concurrently be ignored by British authorities. Far too many competing interests in Great Britain and in Europe—religious, mercantile and governmental—were willing to capitalize on such inconsistencies in order to further their own interests and influence: thereby threatening the principles that were coming to structure and define English Civil Society.

As a study which attempts to look at how Orientalist discourse becomes “performed” for its Western audience, I hope to, paradoxically, reflect upon the severity of the critiques of Orientalism which Said and others have instituted. I will address the early decline of Orientalism in relation to other forms of direct colonial rule in Chapter Two. As we shall see, with the British in East India, Orientalism becomes an overburdened force very quickly, producing a variety of contradictory and competing effects over which Orientalists often have little or no control. This may seem to contradict Said’s narrative of Orientalism—especially when considering nineteenth-century forms of Orientalism and particularly with regard to the Bengal region of India, the seat of British power on the subcontinent. My efforts arise out of what has become a steady stream of meta-Orientalist studies that have provided the sorts of scholarship and criticism which Said himself calls for in Orientalism and later, much more systematically and forcefully in works such as Culture and Imperialism and in “Afterwords” to later editions of Orientalism. Many of the works within and in response to postcolonial studies have heeded this call for a more sustained investigation of how the periphery has both been excluded from and managed to enter into the dominant cultures of the metropole.²

British administrators and linguists arriving in India during the 1700s immediately made their main focus the study of “representative” texts of Hindu and Muslim “traditions”—as such, British agents of company and crown were almost completely at the mercy of their native intermediaries. And as a result, the pre-existing structures that contributed to various “scholarly” classes, as well as the interests of these classes, played an important role from the start of formal British administration.

Warren Hastings’ administration of Bengal in the 1780s initiated local mediation as a basis for policy. The imperative for colonial administration became “knowing” the native so that such knowledge would provide the grounds for dispensing “local” justice. As such, Hastings’ administration had to define British interest in the region (which was, to varying degrees, in competition with other Imperial powers) in relation to local power structures. This interaction necessarily enforced a static conception of self and other. Of course, as Orientalism became institutionalized as an academic and administrative practice, it became the source of conflict for political interests in England.

When William Jones went to India, he went both as a scholar and a Judge. As such, he fit into Warren Hastings’ localized approach to governing the colony. Hastings did not want to impose alien English and Anglican culture upon the inhabitants of Bengal. Rather, he wanted to administer power through local traditions. He would go on to institute what is now broadly considered to be Indian Orientalism and Indology. For Hastings and Jones, India could only be deciphered by its traditions and this entailed unearthing texts that were somehow representative of these traditions. Jones became the catalyst for this technique of codifying “native” tradition.

Rooted in the production of knowledge, early Orientalism was a profoundly “liberal” endeavor in that it recognizes the cultures of the “other” and, in effect, manages them.³ The problem behind the Orientalist binary is the very ease by which the binary comes together and falls apart—the constant paradox of the one producing the other as a reflection of self. Inexorably, the shuttling between poles changes both categories. As Said points out, the basis for Orientalism is producing the East for Western consumption. And while this is initially an activity that excludes the “object” of study from the discourse (recall that the native is never intended as an audience for Orientalist scholarship), it eventually contributes to the production of unintended and sometimes generative contradictions

Said’s study achieves much of its success by reinforcing the binary of East and West, by establishing it for the basis of a sustained critique. Said recognizes in Orientalism a pervasive and perverse logic of continual re-inscription of the West as the source of knowledge. In Orientalism, he evokes the notion of a “Western” tradition in order to produce its counter-weight of Orientalism. This is a tricky maneuver and Said has been accused of reproducing the very sort of essentializations that he is critiquing.⁴ However, as a rhetorical strategy that underpins Orientalism, Said consistently calls attention to these shortcomings. In fact, the very nature of negotiating ideological construction is inherently contradictory in this manner. As the object of critique is negotiated, the object is given new cultural value and new explanatory purpose. Orientalism, as a scholarly practice, bespeaks perhaps the worst kind of domination—an “enlightened” one. Thus, even as a myth of associations (geographical, racial, linguistic, cultural, economic), “Western” tradition recoups itself as a site of epistemological and material power. But, as a power that begins to produce a history of itself, of its own triumphs and legacies, it fails to engage a sustained examination of its own histories of domination. What anyone seeking to introduce a progressive and radical reading of “culture” must acknowledge is a far less binary and more polyvalent history—perhaps a lesson waiting to be learned, of possible self-recognition waiting to happen (and, for the unrepentant nihilist, a future fiction to go along with previous ones). And perhaps the recent institutionalization of such inquiry in many Western academies guides us towards future knowledge, whose relationships with power create smaller inequities than the earlier forms of thought and knowledge built and maintained in service to colonialist and imperialist aims.

As stated previously, one of Said’s three definitions of Orientalism is as an “academic tradition” (2). In Orientalism, he describes the beginnings of colonial Orientalism as initially a practice of textual excavation. Eventually, these textual strategies of identification and explication move into a far reaching cultural, political and commercial system of tactical representations, “which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand” (7). Orientalism, in Said’s broadest definition, “is the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (3). This broad definition proceeds from epistemological foundations—Orientalism begins as an effort to produce knowledge of the cultures of the East. As such, it becomes important to recognize how academic institutions in the West produced the East.

In the second chapter of Orientalism, “Orientalist Structures and Restructures,” Said goes about doing just that. He notes that the number of scholars working on Orientalism steadily increases during the colonial endeavor: the study of the culture of the Orient becomes part of university curricula, scholarly and literary discourse, as well as various “scientific” societies—Orientalism contributes to a body of knowledge about the non- European world which then moves into steady circulation. Of course, this knowledge always has the pretense of being universal and cosmopolitan. Said points out a general set of criteria which governs Orientalism and which he defines as “academic tradition.” By the mid-nineteenth century, virtually every European and American university had some division...