implicit in modernity – Edward Said’s Orientalism. Once the study of “oriental”
or near eastern and Asian languages and literatures, orientalism is now taken
to mean the western domination and exploitation of the east, the west viewing
the east as alien, as “the other.” All study of Hinduism in the west is taken to be
an instance of Orientalism in the new sense. It was the literary critic Said, a
Palestinian Christian, who brought about this revolution. His first book a study
of Joseph Conrad, in OrientalismSaid introduced and popularized the ideas of
Foucault. Although partly inspired by Raymond Schwab’s La Renaissance
Orientale(1950), which makes India the centerpiece of an expected cultural
rebirth of Europe through the study of the Orient, Sanskrit performing the role
of Greek in the first Renaissance, Said is principally concerned with the Arab
world and its treatment by the west. European novels remain his primary area
of expertise, and not for a moment does he take on-board Schwab’s thesis
that the East has influenced the West. Said makes use of Foucault’s notion of
discourse, of a manner of thinking that is adopted willy-nilly by a generation or
more of writers, while at the same time having as his preferred procedure
the literary analysis of individual works of literature. The two methods sit
ill together: “Said denounces with Foucaultian vitriol what he loves with
Auerbachian passion” (Ahmad 1992: 168). Nevertheless, following Foucault,
Said suggests that the effect of Orientalist discourse is “to formulate the Orient,
to give it shape, identity, definition with full recognition of its place in memory,
its importance to imperial strategy, and its ‘natural’ role as an appendage to
Europe” (Said 1978: 86).
A significant and malign maneuver on Said’s part is to extend the term
Orientalist from students of Oriental languages to all those who deal with the
Orient, whether or not they use texts in the original languages. His final option
for the meaning of Orientalism of course turns it on its head; as taken up by the
sociologist Bryan Turner, Orientalism means ignorance of the Orient: “From the
seventeenth century onwards, orientalism had constituted a profound sense of
otherness with respect to alien cultures”(Turner 1994: 183). This perverse
sleight-of-hand magics away into thin air the editions, translations, and
dictionaries of the true and original Orientalists who devoted their lives to
understanding the meaning of instances of Oriental culture and civilization.
In the words of Gyan Prakash, “The towering...images ofmen like William
(‘Oriental’) Jones have cracked and come tumbling down” (Prakash 1995: 200).
So well established is Said that Joan-Pau Rubies, a young scholar, recently
wrote that “ ‘Orientalism’ has traditionally been defined as a western imperial-
ist attitude in which the colonized subjects are perceived according to purely
western ideological concerns” (Rubies 2002: 287). Said’s brilliant success has
swept away all that preceded it, and his redefinition of Orientalism has become
“traditional”! The choice of the term Orientalism is unfortunate on several
counts. In the first place, why limit it to the west? As Rubies remarks, “If we
define orientalism as a manipulative historical gaze based on a crude separation
between us and other, and which denies the representation of this otherany
intrinsic voice, then there was very little in the Muslim discourse about Hindu
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