India has a history of imperial domination, majorly by Britain. Hence, this realm of domination strikes a very personal cord with most of us.

In 1978, Edward Said had published his book ‘Orientalism’ and though it’s been 43 years, the principles of the book still hold water. Orientalism was often referred to as a system of ‘exoticizing’ the Easterners, the orients. However, this depiction is just one of the myriad attitudes towards the orients. Said’s book says that this ‘exoticization’ is not naïve or innocent, but politically motivated because it comes from the relationship of imperial domination. Said referred to orientalism as ‘a corporate institution’, an enterprise extending over 2 centuries spearheaded by the British and the French.

From the late 18th century, this entire enterprise flourished and fostered a group of academia such as writers, philosophers and political theorists who produced a body of writing comprising an academic discourse on orientalism. However, all of them began with the fundamental assumption that there existed a stark difference between the orients and the orientalists. When one begins with such an unfounded assumption, it follows that one’s yardstick of judgement cannot be entirely unbiased and that their representation would be coloured. These orientalist writers, in their discourse, ‘authorised’ certain views and opinions about the orients. Interestingly, their works were interdependent as the authors referenced and cited each other frequently thus establishing a ‘network’ of their perceptions. Whether they colluded or connived with each other is a matter of surmise, but this was definitely one way of establishing colonial domination.

A more illustrative specimen of this view of the orientalists manifests if we consider Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘The Ballad of the East and West’. The very first line of that poem says- ‘The East is East and the West is West and never the twain shall meet.’

This compels us to raise a pivotal question:

How authentic is this representation?

Said had also mentioned that this academic discourse was not completely veracious for it also held some completely imaginative kind of discourse that entered the academic field of orientalism.

This majorly constituted the stereotypes and ‘clichés’ about the orients such as oriental splendour, despotism, tyranny and their inability to comprehend democratic principles. It is important to consider how this discourse was crafted, significantly because these very imaginative stereotypes coined and propagated through their discourse was very shrewdly used by the orientalists to justify the ‘white man’s burden’, which often served as a justification for colonialism, or more specifically, European colonialism.

If one ever happens to read a well-known anglicist McCaulay’s ‘Minute of Education’ 1835, one would realise how heavily conceited and gargantuanly unfounded his claims were, which he propagated through ‘power speech’. The main contents of the entire citation was how pompously McCaulay had declared the oriental languages of Sanskrit and Arabic as archaic and unimportant, going on to say that ‘even a single shelf at a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia,’

Academic discourse was commonly used to build up a castle of lies that established colonial domination and weakened the oriental culture. After all, saying that ‘when passing from works of imagination to works in which facts are recorded, the superiority of the Europeans becomes immeasurable to such an extent that it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the historical information collected from all the books written in Sanskrit is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgements used in preparatory schools in England,’ is quite a claim!