Three must-read books - Part I Orientalism

I have had the good fortune to have found three extraordinary works in the last few weeks, two of which I am still in the process of reading /re-reading. I thought I would share some general reflections on each text over three blog posts.

One of these, Edward Said's landmark, Orientalism, is a text that I am familiar with, but it reads like a work encountered for the first time, sparkling as it does with insight, its essential brilliance undiminished by time. If anything, it appears more relevant than ever, six years after the invasion of Iraq, at a historical moment when when, in our global ecumene, Orientalist nonsense contaminates commonsensical understandings of history, culture, and society in East and West. There have been a number of recent attempts to rehabilitate the Orientalists and Orientalism, usually in opposition to Said's arguments in the book. Some scholars have also advanced the idea that Said's text has outlived its value, its insights having been thoroughly refined, critiqued, refuted, corrected, and absorbed, and assimilated within disciplines. Neither of these strands of argument or inquiry, however, succeed in pigeonholing the book in their attempt to put it in its rightful place, as it were. Orientalism remains, to draw on a phrase that Said uses elsewhere for the Subaltern Studies collective, fiercely insurrectionary, and, like the best scholarship, unassimilable within conventional narratives about disciplinary knowledge.

The Preface to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition is worth reading as an essay by itself. Written shortly after the invasion of Iraq by the US, and shortly before Said's death, it represents the clear voice of an intellectual speaking the naked truth to power. Said takes to task those academics who supported the war on Iraq describing them as "intellectual lackeys." He demonstrates that the East is still a career, and suggests, that the Orient is constantly renewed as a career. He insists that suffering-- the suffering of all humans-- needs must translate into the dominant epistemological frameworks in which we carry out our inquiry. As Said puts it: "We allow justly that the Holocaust has permanently altered the consciousness of our time: Why do we not accord the same epistemological mutation in what imperialism has done, and what Orientalism continues to do?"

Two of Said's other fundamental insights from the original text (and not just the Preface) may be acknowledged here. First, his point that in practically all the literature produced by Europeans about the Orient during the broad time-frame of the colonial encounter, there is not a single sympathetic or convincing portrait of a non-European or 'native'. In many works, there are sympathetic and compelling portraits of Westerners trying to understand the 'natives' but never a compelling account of the 'native' figure as he or she experiences colonialism. There is no dearth of examples that come to mind, whether one thinks of the Aziz figure or of Orwell's Burmese crowds as he shoots an elephant, or of all the mediocre works by India hands as they travelled through the country. The same insight may also, I think, be applied to much Indian historiography, especially that produced in well-established Western centers associated with the production of knowledge about India: there are never any Indian voices to be found other than in the voices of colonial administrators or records. Where traces of such voices are found, they are ignored. Or such voices exist as abstractions, for example, the 'Indian mindset', the 'rebellious soldiers', the Hindu and Muslim, the baniya, the collaborator (the work of the Subaltern Studies School was a response to precisely this dominant impulse in history-writing about South Asia).

The other point-- which many critics of Said strangely seem to miss even though he practically spells it out in billboard sized letters-- is that Said does not discount the scholarly achievements of Orientalists like Jones. But Said's argument is that such deep learning was only possible in the context of the cataclysmic violence and rupture that was colonialism.

There is, however, one unresolved tension that permeates the text, and which rears its head in the preface as well. That tension pertains to Said's insistence on the need and value for humanism as a philosophy of life and letters. The question Said does not consider is whether that humanistic tradition itself were complicit with Orientalism? A somewhat similar (though not exactly identical) critique of historian Gyan Prakash's work is to be found in an essay by David Washbrook and Rosalind O'Hanlon, where they question whether Prakash can work in a post-structuralist framework while still retaining some conception of the liberal humanist subject as the horizon of justice. (Humanism seems to be in vogue again as we speak. Marxist Terry Eagleton now describes himself as a tragic humanist).

A few days after picking up Orientalism, some 15-odd years after I first read it, I decided to try a little experiment of undertaking an Orientalism-hunting expedition in the popular media. Fifteen minutes of skimming television and the internet bore rich rewards.

On one television channel, I found the film The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, which combines two strands of Orientalism: the variety that takes Chinese culture as its object of curiosity and derision, and the variety that takes Egyptian culture as its object of fascination and condescension.

On the Charlie Rose show, I caught snippets of a conversation between CBS war correspondent, Lara Logan, and Charlie Rose. For all of Logan's holier-than-thou lecturing about the responsibility of journalists to bring the truth of suffering into the clear light of day and the like, she spoke about Afghans in the most cliched and essentialist terms. Afghans, according to her, understand the language of fear and violence. Thus, General McChrystal, Logan argued, needed to tell ordinary Afghans that unless the latter stood up to the Taliban, the US forces would not guarantee their safety. Logan's relationship with a federal defense contractor working in Iraq might be a textbook example of the complicity between power, profit, and knowledge/ representation that Said described in Orientalism.

And online, on the website of the Guardian, I discovered this bizarre, rambling article about travel-writing by William Dalrymple, which might be viewed as a case of Orientalism on steroids. Interestingly, Dalrymple accuses Said for being responsible for the fact that "travel writing has undergone an assault in academia." It is a nonsensical claim; up there with the best of Dalrymple's grousing against the Subaltern Studies scholars and Amitav Ghosh. My hunch is that Dalrymple attacks Said preemptively because he recognizes that his forthcoming book, and the claims he makes in the Guardian article, might be viewed shining examples of Orientalism. I have not read Dalrymple's book. But every one of Dalrymple's claims in the article can be found to belong to the legacies and strategies of Orientalist representations of the East by Westerners. The idea that Orientalists and European travellers in non-European lands were lonely, vulnerable souls whose peregrinations were unconnected to the gravely unequal relationships between Europeans and non-Europeans; that they were deeply in love with the East; that the East was essentially religious and spiritual (Dalrymple's book is about " India's diverse religious and mystical traditions" including a tantric feeder of skulls); and the simplistic analytic dichotomy between tradition and modernity applied to a non-Western culture, which is utterly ignorant of all the superb, insightful scholarship about the complexities of Indian colonial and postcolonial modernity.

After Said's Orientalism, all of this seems obvious. Before, it was invisible. That is the hallmark of a great work of scholarship.