Orientalism Revisited

Rakesh Bhandari bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU
Sun Jan 23 14:57:58 PST 2000


After Justin painfully reminisced about incomparable horrors he must have suffered (hey, are these the same people who denied you tenure and drove you of the university):


> . Matter of fact, in my experiences in pomoland among the PC,
> I was often reproached for being white, male, and of European origin and
> insufficiently shameful about this fact. If you have avoided these
> experiences, I can only say that you have been fortunate.

it was to be expected that he would conclude in the idiom of an accountant keeping a cultural balance sheet:


> As far as superiority goes, I recall Gandhi's joke. Asked what he thought
> about Western Civilization, he replied, "It would be a good idea." But jokes
> aside, there are things Western culture has to offer the world, things that
> are, yes, superior, such as liberal bourgeois rights and Marxist social
> analysis. Others can take these over and make them theirs, and I hope they
> do. To some extent they have. Then these things not just ours. But they are
> no less ours for being no longer just ours and no less superior in those
> respects to the other offerings on display, such as the caste system and
> fundamentalist Hindu nationalism, to take two rivals from India.

1st, here you think you are talking about the displays of another culture but you wildly underestimate how important the (mis-)representation of the caste system or the asiatic mode of production has been to Westerners' (mis-)understanding of their own bourgeois society. Western understandings of caste, taken the their logical extreme, by Dumont, metaphorically displaces onto to India several issues that have been contested in Europe--individual liberty versus social demands, idealism vs. materialism, Church hierarchy versus the state. See the works of Ronald Inden or McKim Marriott from whom I shamelessly draw here.

If by righteous condemnation of these displays you don't study them as at one level Western representations you will not understand the history of your own culture. You will remain close minded not only to your own history but the history of peoples so mis-represented by romantic stereotypes of caste society and buried by the urge to understand another society as governed by a single dominant value: homo hierarchus.

Moreover--and here is the irony--the more you consider these displays to be exotic, and of other incommensurate condemnable cultures, the further you have gone down the slippery road of a cultural relativism in which the objective understanding you so desire becomes compromised.

For example, are castes in part not simply sets of intermarrying lineages concerned about their status, and thus comparable with the institutions of other agrarian societies. What about caste makes it a display specifically of Indian culture?

Do you agree with the dubious claim that a concern with purity and impurity, or hierarchy, or an ambiguous relation of power to authority are somehown peculiarly Indian and determinative of the specific Indian caste system? In the case of purity obsession or correlatively with the idea of castes as bounded and homogeneous, what are we to make of ritual interactions that seem to create relationships by transferring properties from one to another?

Second, to switch now to your next display Hindu nationalism, you need to inform yourself how pernicious ideas about racial essentialism, imported from *Western* ethnology or evolutionary race science, worked their way into Indians' conception of their nationalist destiny (see Susan Bayly's thoughtful pieces in Robb, ed. Race in India and recent book on comparative religion, ed. Peter van der Veer).

Moreover, fundamentalist Hindu nationalism--as well as the horrific partition itself--resulted in many ways from the colonial enumerative regime--a western technology in demographic management has Foucault has shown--in which identities of caste and especially religion were recofingured as hard and impermeable. They were given greater substance and clearer boundaries by homogenizing *Western* imperial state practices.

This is not to say that there was no caste in India before colonialism. It is to say that the relations of caste were changed materially and representationally by Western colonialism (including in particular by the colonial division between tribal and caste society), and the vision of fundamentalism itself today cannot be understood outside the march of Western, now global, modernity.

So as a Westerner, it's all yours, Justin, with the attendant responsibilities.

But I get the sense that you don't think about colonialism, imperialism, comparative analysis, or orientalism because after all the tools of the progress--liberal rights and marxist analysis--are all we need, and they are Western, dammit.

Of course I note the occasional nod to some black American genius. Oh, how white, how American. And nowhere more than in the underlying logic of binary categories with sharp boundaries--our culture and theirs.

Purity/impurity, you betcha.

Sure you will read all this as pc ravings meant to make you feel guilty about your whiteness.

Yours, Rakesh



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