India in 1900

February 08, 2015

India in 1900

The excitement of India

”Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” (Rudyard Kipling, The Ballad of East and West)

In his much quoted verse above Rudyard Kipling revealed something of the nucleus of the long-lived tradition of Orientalist thought. According to J. J. Clarke, the ambivalence of the West towards the East is age-old. The ”rich cultures,” ”superior civilizations” and ”ancient wisdom” of the Orient have inspired many Westerners, but on the other hand, the threats of its ”monstrous mysteries” and ”absurd religions” hailing from its ”stagnant past” have abhorred at least as many. For many, the Orient has been a dominion of hordes and despots or spiritual mystics and exotic sensuality. Exaggeration and imagination together with a range of both positive and negative stereotypes connected to popular prejudices have been essential to these views. Encountering the East has been significant for the self-image of the West producing identities ranging from decadent European modernity to concepts of cultural, racial and moral superiority.

For example, John Stuart Mill claimed liberty and representative government could not be applied to India because Indians were civilizationally – if not racially – inferior.

Fascination and Orientalism

Commercial photographers also fed the European fascination with the exotic splendors of Indian princely life.
Since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978, much academic discourse has begun to use the term "Orientalism" to refer to a general patronizing Western attitude towards Middle Eastern, Asian and North African societies. In Said's analysis, the West essentializes these societies as static and undeveloped—thereby fabricating a view of Oriental culture that can be studied, depicted, and reproduced. Implicit in this fabrication, writes Said, is the idea that Western society is developed, rational, flexible, and superior
The dichotomies like ‘good-evil’, ‘faithful-unfaithful’, ‘civilised-uncivilised’ have often been attracted in order not only to explain the differences between ‘West’ and ‘East’ as categories, but also to predict the way their relationship was going to evolve. The Westerners considered themselves as an embodiment of the good, hence the East always represented the evil that either needed to be purged, or else eradicated. This helps to justify the ontological view of the eternity of conflict between the West and the East, as well as to allow for a continuous evocation of the fear of threat and of the spirit of the Crusades in the Western society.
It is extremely important to bear in mind that the clash of the West and the East, for all its tangible forms, is implanted in a number of presumed civilisational differences. As Edward Said remarks in the Preface to the fifth edition of Orientalism, this clash of civilisations is ‘unending, implacable, irremediable’
The Orient has often been symbolic of three things: barbarism, belligerence and, strikingly, charm. While beauty or belligerence more or less excluded the possibility of prejudice, barbarism certainly did not. The first to openly announce their pretence on being cultivated, as opposed to barbaric, were the ancient Greeks. This is important to bear in mind, as in time the concept of ‘otherness’ will come to dwell on the cultural dominance or inferiority.
Orientalism as an ideology coincides with the beginning of the colonial era, but it was by no means spurred by it, and consequently, did not end with decolonisation.