Hello and welcome to another lecture on postcolonial
literature.
Now if you remember, we had ended our previous
discussion by briefly mentioning Edward Said
and his book Orientalism and we had also mentioned
how both Said and his book Orientalism are
associated with the foundation of postcolonial
studies as an academic discipline.
In today’s lecture, we are going to carry
forward with this discussion.
Now in this book Orientalism, which was first
published in 1978 and here you can see the
cover of the first edition of the book, Said’s
main argument is that European colonial domination
of the Orient was integrally associated with
how the Orient was conceptualised, researched
and talked about in Europe.
In other words, what Said is saying in this
book is that the military and economic domination
of the Orient was tied up with the discourse
about the Orient.
And it is this discourse about the Orient
that Said refers to as Orientalism.
Okay.
Now, as you can see this builds upon Foucault’s
argument that power, knowledge, and discursive
manifestation of knowledge are integrally
related with each other.
But what Said is doing here is that he is
taking this generalised concept that we find
in Foucault and he’s applying it to the
specific context of European colonial domination
of the Orient.
So let me repeat again, what is Orientalism?
Orientalism, as Said defines it, means the
European coloniser’s discourse about the
Orient which is tied up with the military
and economic domination of the Orient.
And this definition, which you can see on
the slide, is a rough and ready definition
of Orientalism.
And in today’s lecture, we will try to elaborate
on this particular definition to arrive at
a more nuanced understanding of the concept
of Orientalism.
So let us start by looking at the term Orientalism.
This term derives from the root word “orient”
and its derivatives like “oriental” or
“orientalist”, and broadly all of these
terms refer to the East or to things related
to the East.
But the question here, of course, is that
East of what?
Well, the reference point here is Europe and
the Orient signifies a land that lies East
of Europe.
Which means, more specifically, the Orient
or the East refers to the land that we now
know as the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent.
This Orient or the East is contrasted with
the Occident or the West which in turn refers
to Europe.
And together, the Orient and the Occident
or the East and the West form a conceptual
binary.
A conceptual binary that informs various texts
including a text like Rudyard Kipling’s
“The Ballad of East and West” and in “The
Ballad of East and West” he writes, very
famously, “East is East and West is West,
and never shall the twain meet”.
So in this line you can see how, East and
West, Orient and Occident, they are used as
a binary pair.
Such use of East and West or Orient and Occident
as contrasting conceptual categories also
occur regularly in more mundane conversations
where terms like East and West or Orient and
Occident are used as cryptic shorthand way
to denote not just geographical spaces but
also certain cultural values.
And cultural values that include things like
food habits, for instance, dress codes, bodily
postures, or even moral conduct.
In these instances, the Orient and the Occident
offer a kind of matrix to conceptualise the
world by dividing it into two broad mutually
exclusive categories where whatever is represented
by the Occident the exact opposite is represented
by the Orient.
So according to Said, this particular style
of thinking, this particular way of thinking
is a vital aspect of what constitutes Orientalism
or the discourse about the Orient.
But it is only one aspect.
Because along with this one, Said also talks
about two other aspects which together form
the notion of Orientalism.
And here in this slide you can see the three
broad aspects of Orientalism that Said talks
about.
So the first aspect is that Orientalism is
a way of thought or a style of thought that
is pivoted on contrasting the Orient from
the Occident.
The second is that Orientalism is an academic
discipline.
And the third is Orientalism is a corporate
institution for dealing with the Orient.
And, we will be taking up each of these three
aspects one by one in today’s lecture.
And let us begin with the first one.
According to Said, instances of Orientalism
as a binary way of thinking can be traced
as far back as say the Greek tragedies of
the 5th century BCE where the Orient was imagined
not just as a land of Asia but as the “other”
of the European “self”.
That is to say whatever Europe stood for,
the Orient, as a foil, stood for exactly the
opposite things.
If the Occident or Europe stood for masculinity,
for instance, then the Orient by contrast
assumed a feminine entity in this imaginative
geography.
If, for instance, the Occident represented
mature adulthood then by contrast the Orient
became representative of childish immaturity.
If the Occident considered itself to be at
the pinnacle of civilisation, then of course
by contrast, Orient came to represent the
depths of barbarism and moral and cultural
depravity.
So, in other words, the discourse of Orientalism
presents the Orient as this dark and unregenerate
counterpart of the Occident which is simultaneously
foreign, loathsome and yet excitingly exotic.
As I have just told you, such a discourse
which uses this binary way of thinking and
which presents Orient as a sinister yet alluring
entity for the West, for Europe, has been
prevalent in Europe for more than a millennia.
But during the heydays of European colonialism,
this discourse enjoyed special relevance and
it mutated itself into an academic discipline.
And therefore, here we come to the second
aspect of Said’s definition of Orientalism.
According to Said, it was precisely when European
powers started militarily conquering the Orient
during the late 18th century, Orientalism
emerged in Europe as an academic discipline.
So there is an inherent connection, according
to Said, between the military conquest of
the Orient which started roughly from the
late 18th century onwards and the emergence
of Orientalism as an academic discipline in
Europe.
Till before 17th century European access,
or in fact, till before 18th century European
access to the Orient was limited but military
conquests during the latter half of the 18th
century allowed European scholars to scrutinise
the Orient more closely.
Thus, as Said points out, when in 1798 Napoleon
Bonaparte led a military expedition to Egypt,
he was accompanied not merely by an army of
soldiers but also by an army of scholars and
scientists who transformed the occupied territory
into an object of enquiry and a field of systematic
knowledge.
After the Napoleonic conquest, Egypt, at least
for Europe, seized to remain just a distant
exotic land known primarily through hearsays,
but it became one of its objects of scientific
enquiry.
And this systematic enquiry of Egypt resulted
in a multivolume Encyclopaedia called, and
here you can see in the slide:
So it was called Description de I’Egypte.
And this particular encyclopaedia contained
texts on natural histories, on descriptions
of Egyptian antiquities, for instance, but
also contained engravings and detailed maps
of that region.
So Egypt was no longer this unknown dark sinister
exotic land.
Right.
It became an object of enquiry.
It became a site of systematic knowledge.
Right.
And such an exercise to systematically know
the conquered country is also visible in the
efforts of someone like Warren Hastings, for
instance, who was the first Governor General
of India.
And the dates of Warren Hastings are 1732
to 1818.
And, therefore, again his tenure in India
was late 18th century.
So the dates more or less coincide with Napoleonic
conquest of Egypt.
Right.
And here again we see a similar approach to
transform the conquered country into a field
of systematic knowledge gathering.
So Hastings, along with two other colonial
officials William Jones and Nathaniel Halhed,
researched, compiled, and published voluminously
on various aspects related to India.
And these publications were on topics as diverse
as law, literature, astrology, botany, history,
language.
So this kind of systematic knowledge gathering
which was made possible, largely because of
the military conquest and control of the Orient,
inaugurated during the 19th century academic
fields like Egyptology, academic fields like
Indology, all of which were part of the broader
umbrella called Oriental studies.
And Oriental studies, by the end of the 19th
century, had become an integral part of the
Western academia.
So the huge amount of documents that this
academic Orientalism produced was soon acknowledged
in Europe as the most authentic way of knowing
about the Orient.
So much so that someone like the British philosopher
James Mill could justify writing a multivolume
history of India just by consulting the available
documents on India that were available in
England without ever visiting India, without
ever living there, without ever knowing a
single Indian language.
This is what Mill writes in the preface to
his history of British India justifying his
position:
“This writer,” and here Mill is referring
to himself, “has never been in India; and
has a very slight, and elementary acquaintance,
with any of the languages of the East.
Yet it appeared to me, that a sufficient stock
of information was now collected in the languages
of Europe, to enable the inquirer to ascertain
every important point, in the history of India.”
So if we think about it, the very audacity
of this claim to know all the important points
about the history of India without ever living
there or without ever knowing any Indian languages
is mind-boggling.
Yet such claims to knowledge about the Orient
was to become commonplace during the late
18th and 19th century.
And indeed, in this regard, James Mill’s
History of British India, whose first volume
was published in 1870, can be very well clubbed
together with Thomas Babington Macaulay’s
1835 Minutes upon Indian Education which,
if you remember, dismissed the whole tradition
of Indian or rather Sanskrit and Arabic literature
without knowing any of these languages.
So it is important here to note that the rise
of Orientalism as an academic discipline during
the late 18th and during the 19th century
did not mean that the earlier form of Orientalism
completely disappeared.
The style of thinking about the Orient as
a dark, backward, sinister and barbaric other
of the Occident continued to underline the
new form of academic Orientalism and it informed
whatever systematic enquiry was going on about
the Orient.
Let us take an example.
For instance, if we look at this article.
The name of the article is “The British
rule in India”.
It was published in 1853 and it was written
by Karl Marx.
We will see that in this article, Marx, in
spite of being aware of the havoc that British
colonialism wrecked in India by destroying
its traditional, economic, and social structures
considered this British rule to be a boon
in disguise.
Why?
Because in Marx’s analysis, the exploitative
colonial situation, I mean, Marx’s own understanding
of this exploitative colonial situation was
underlined at the same time by the millennia-old
prejudice that the Orient represents a backward
and barbaric society.
And though as a result of the British rule
Indians were “thrown into a sea of woes”,
(these are Marx’s words) and though they
“lost their ancient forms of civilisation”
and even “hereditary means of sustenance”,
what was actually lost was ultimately, according
to Marx, barbaric and unregenerate customs
and ways of living.
So though the British colonisers inflicted
this destruction they were also, according
to Marx, ushering in a much needed social
revolution.
And at the end of the day, Marx justified
the British rule as a much needed social revolution
because he believed that the British who brought
about these changes were ultimately representatives
of a superior civilisation.
So therefore, for Marx, even the most blatant
forms of economic exploitation which characterised
colonialism, and he was more than aware of
those economic exploitations, but even those
economic exploitations became excusable because
the exploiters belonged to the Occident and
the exploited were the Orientals.
Of course, these millennia-old prejudices
about the Orient not only informed academic
writings but they also formed the basis of
literary texts that made the Orient its subject,
and therefore in Edward Said’s study of
the new form of Orientalism that emerged during
the 18th and 19th-century we find that the
names of literary writers like Lord Byron,
for instance, or Gerard de Nerval or Gustave
Flaubert occurring almost as frequently as
the names of James Mill, Thomas Macaulay and
Karl Marx.
But here, at this point, I think it is important
to ask that why was it that such prejudices,
such myths and such half-baked research conducted
by people who haven’t even seen the place
they were writing about, how were these texts
so prevalent during the late 18th and 19th
century?
Now this question is, of course, very easily
understood and explained if we go back to
the insight of Michel Foucault who, if you
remember, pointed out that the discourse that
is generated, circulated and ratified by the
institutions of the powerful is the discourse
which gains acceptance as the truth.
Similarly, after the European conquest of
the Orient in the 18th-century it was the
discourse of Orientalism which was validated
and circulated by the institutions of the
Occident and therefore the discourse of Orientalism,
with all its prejudices, with all its problematic
research methodology, it was this discourse
that gained acceptance and validity as the
truth, the authentic truth, about the Orient.
Now, these various institutions, which included
the colonial legislature and judiciary, which
included the schools, colleges and universities
set up in the colonised parts of the world
to propagate Western learning, which included
the learned societies like Institut d'Egypte
or the Asiatic society, these institutions
together, they form what Edward Said identifies
as the third aspect of Orientalism.
So these were the institutes which connected
colonial power with colonial knowledge.
On the one hand, as institutes representing
the authority of the colonising people, it
ratified the biased views and partial researchers
as the truth about the Orient, and on the
other hand it enabled the colonial power to
justify its rule over the Orient by using
the myths of Orientalism.
Thus, when the institutionally ratified discourse
identified the Occident as the seat of civilisation
and the Orient as the den of barbaric customs
and vile rituals it started making eminent
sense that European powers should have control
over the Orient not simply because it was
economically profitable to them but also because
it was the morally right thing to do.
In other words, it was precisely this institutional
framework which supported the discourse of
Orientalism that repackaged the profit making
motives of European colonialism into a civilising
enterprise.
So here it is important, I mean one point
is very important, and you should take note
of it.
And that point is that though Said’s Orientalism
beautifully unfolds the power knowledge nexus
that connects the discourse of Orientalism
with the military and economic domination
of the Orient by Europe, Said’s main purpose
in this book is not just to reveal this connection
but to disrupt it.
And the way in which Said seeks to bring about
this disruption is through what he calls contrapuntal
reading, contrapuntal reading of the texts
that use the discourse of Orientalism.
So what is this contrapuntal reading?
Well contrapuntal reading is an attempt to
read the Orientalist texts against the grain.
In other words, against the way in which its
author intends it to be read.
And how do you do it?
For instance, this is done by questioning
the inherent assumptions that underline a
particular text.
For instance, if you question the basic assumption
that Orient is civilizationally backward then
we will see that Marx’s arguments in his
essay about the British rule in India, his
arguments in favour of the British rule in
India, immediately breaks down because they
are premised on the fact that Orient is backward
and therefore the British rule in India is
ultimately beneficial for them.
So if you question that basic assumption then
that argument unravels and falls flat.
So the intention of contrapuntal reading is
to question the Europe centric values of the
coloniser’s texts and to point out and critique
the myths and prejudices that underline them.
In our next lecture we will make use of this
technique of contrapuntal reading when we
discuss Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Thank you.
