Orientalism and The Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia New Cultural Studies

Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia New Cultural Studies, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1993 is a collection of articles. Most of these articles were originally delivered at the University of Pennsylvania’s 1988-1989 Annual South Asia Seminar, as papers devoted to “Orientalism and Beyond.” The ten contributors to this book approach the predicament in a different, although overlapping ways. Edward Said in his influential book Orientalism has argued that Western knowledge about the Orient in the Post-Enlightenment period has been “a systematic discourse by which Europe was able to manage- even produce- the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively”, which created a sizable stir at the time among humanists and social scientists concerned with the non-western world.

According to Said, European and American views of the Orient created a reality in which the Oriental was forced to live. Although Said's work primarily deals with the Arab world, much of his argument has been applied to other regions of “the Orient.” Taking ideas from Said's book, Carol A. Breckenridge, Peter van der Veer, and the other contributors to this book investigate the ways colonial administrators constructed knowledge about the society and culture of India and other colonized countries of South Asia and the processes through which that knowledge has shaped past and present South Asian reality. The common theme that links the articles in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament is the suggestion that Orientalist discourse is not just restricted to the colonial past but continues even today. The contributors argue that it is still extremely difficult for both Indians and outsiders to think about India in anything but strictly Orientalist terms. The collection of articles is devoted to discussing the Said thesis in the context of the modern countries of South Asia, which include India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sir Lanka. Whether Nepal and other South Asian countries are excluded because they are not thought to be modern, or because they were not colonies, is not clear. Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament provides new and important insights into the cultural embeddedness of power in the colonial and postcolonial world. In ‘Orientalism and the Study of Indian Literatures’, Dharwadker reveals that what we might otherwise take as the common sense notion of ‘Indian literature’ owes its existence to distinctive European ideas of what constitutes literature.

In ‘The Fate of Hindustani: Colonial Knowledge and the Project of a National Language’, Lelyveld draws a fascinating portrait of how a “native” language- Hindustani- was actually a creation of “the colonial imagination that set out to create a common language” in north India, where languages changed every eight miles. In ‘British Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century: The Dialectics of Knowledge and Government’, Rocher traces much of the known unfriendly Hindu/Muslim division to 18th-century British attempts to reduce complex and fluid indigenous matters to legal texts of those two traditions. In ‘Orientalist Empiricism: Transformations of Colonial Knowledge’, Ludden attempts to show that what came to be regarded as neutral facts, such as the existence of autonomous village communities, Hinduism, and caste were creations of organizing and record-keeping for official colonial purposes. Alternative and competitive views of what constitutes basic facts were silenced. These articles add significantly to our understanding of how the western analysis has changed South Asia. They also struggle to show how we can go beyond it, but one is left with the feeling that all this worrying leaves us in a self-centered state which denies genuine, discoverable cultural differences that are out there, apart from the way Orientalism has helped create them. The effect of Orientalism on our understanding is a little like the effect of childhood experiences on adult personality. We all have them, and we are unquestionably better off for recognizing and coming to grips with them, but we can't let them stop us from getting on with the problems of living.

Certainly Orientalist history, like any history, is constructed out of our own narrow-minded concerns and interests, but that admission need not stop us from investigating and making truth claims about the past. We know the drawbacks of judging other people's lives through our own experiences. It shows us not just how colonialism constructed the Orient, but how we continue to be trapped in our “postcolonial predicament” by the political and social categories we have inherited from the colonial era.