India which was less orientalist than what contemporary Europeans perceived
and wrote” (Rubies 2002: 286). Then again, within Hinduism, Brahmans might
be said to have an Orientalist attitude to the lower castes. Original Orientalism
was precisely the attempt to understand the Oriental Other. This attempt was
not completely successful, but it was all the attempt at understanding there was.
Orientalism can be faulted for undue concentration on classical texts, but this
was only mirroring the crucial role of study of ancient Greek and Latin, the
Ancients, in the intellectual life of the west.
First and foremost a literary critic, turning again and again in his Orientalism
to the modern European novel as his favorite medium and source, Said sweep-
ingly dismisses Orientalists in the strict sense in exactly the same way as he says
that the west dismisses the east, as inferior others. Said has not altogether
unfairly been dismissed as “a literary critic rummaging through history to find
scraps of evidence to support his personal and political purposes” (Kopf 1991:
21) by Kopf, author of a pioneering historical study of British Orientalism in
India (Kopf 1969).
Said’s work is continued with reference to India by the anthropologist turned
historian-Sanskritist, Ronald Inden, in his Imagining India (1992), a book whose
success has been scarcely less than that of Said’s. Indeed, its intellectual basis is
perhaps stronger than that ofOrientalism; Inden’s thesis is that Orientalists have
deprived Indians of “agency” “by imagining an India kept eternally ancient by
various Essences attributed to it, most notably that of caste.” Inden contends
that Indologists present the texts they study as “distorted portrayals of reality,”
as “manifestations of an ‘alien’ mentality” (1992: 1, 39).
Early in the book he gives as an example of some remarks on Vedic ritual by
Louis Renou (1896–1966), the great French Sanskritist. These remarks are
taken from Renou’s masterly survey of the main problems in the study of Indian
religion, as he saw them in 1950. Renou says in the quoted passage that Vedic
ritual is overburdened with system, that there was “an advancing scholasticism”
(1992: 39). Two paragraphs later in Renou’s text, the following sentences are
quoted by Inden: “Ritual has a strong attraction for the Indian mind, which
tends to see everything in terms of the formulae and methods of procedure, even
when such adjuncts no longer seem really necessary for its religious experience”
(1992: 39). Inden believes that this is to transform “the thoughts and actions of
ancient Indians into a distortion of reality.” Renou might have shown that the
Vedic priests “were part of a coherent and rational whole” based on different pre-
suppositions than his own; but Renou, like many Indologists, holds that there is
a single external reality to which Western science has privileged access. Implicit
in the text of Renou and other Indologists, is the “metaphor of the Other as a
dreamer, as a... mad man.” Like Freud on dreams, Indologists attribute con-
densation and displacement to the Indian mind. For Renou, says Inden, “the
priestly mind takes up rituals which are not meant to be enacted while the
priestly hand performs rituals that have no religious rationale.” “Renou, we have
seen [!], attributed the same dreaming irrationality to the Indian mind that Hegel
did” (1992: 42).
orientalism and hinduism 47