[Reader-list] rejoinder to Ram Guha on Said

[mahmood farooqui]

In an article in this week’s issue of The Telegraph,
the ecological and Cricket historian Ramchandra Guha
has presented his views on Edward Said, the late
scholar and partisan of the Palestinian cause whose
book Orientalism created an entirely new field of
academics. Guha bases his article on a symposium
conducted on Said by the prestigious Chicago journal
Critical Inquiry and concludes that “reading this
symposium, one is forced to reach the conclusion that
as a scholar, Said was greater than his book,
Orientalism, and that the book itself was more
worthwhile than the theoretical school it gave rise
to.”
Typically he does not clarify how he came to reach
that conclusion and what it was in that symposium-
whose views, analyses and comments- that leads him to
this conclusion. The first two paragraphs of his
article are devoted to the way the US now hegemonises
academic production in all spheres. The next two
recount biographical details about Said’s early life.
Then there are two paras describing Orientalism while
the third mentions the detractors of Orientalism and
reprises the oldest charge against it-that it ends up
essentialising the west in much the same manner as it
[Orientalism] itself criticizes western, Orientalist
scholarship. 
The next two paragraphs are devoted to the nefarious
influences of Saidian scholarship. One that it
encourages “scholars to judge dead writers by the
canons of political correctness as they operate in the
American academy today” and second that it valorizes
“intellectuals who claim to speak on behalf of the
oppressed while being ensconced in the American
university, surely the most cosy corner of the most
protected country in the world.”
The penultimate paragraph decries Said for not being
immune to flattery. The exact words being that the
“Critical Inquiry symposium suggests that, like more
ordinary mortals, Said was not immune to flattery.”
Again, he does not elaborate how and why this is
suggested or how he reaches this conclusion. And then
the sweeping conclusion in the end paragraph goes
“Said was a very fine scholar, but not a great one.
Orientalism was a useful polemic, not an enduring work
of scholarship. And postcolonial theory is an
intellectual dead-end.” These disconcerting
conclusions come soon after his admission, that
“Orientalism is probably the most influential work of
humanistic scholarship of the last half-century.”
That Orientalism essentialises Western response is
really old hat. Every subsequent edition of the book
has carried a lengthy afterword by Said in which he
has acknowledged the various criticisms expressed
about the book and its approach. He engages with them,
partially accepts the charge of essentialisation and
defends it by showing that his purpose was rather to
excavate the complicity of the scholarship with a
certain hegemonising process that was a parcel of the
larger Imperialist project. Nowhere did he, or anybody
who read that book, maintain that western scholars who
studied the Orient were ‘bad people.’ Except Guha, who
asserts that, “contra Said, there were many
“Orientalists” who displayed an uncommon empathy with
the people they were studying.” 
William Jones and John Gilchirst and John Cunningham
may have been far more empathetic to Indians than
James Mill or Macaulay but that is not the point. The
point is that all of these writers operated in an
intellectual grid which, despite their sympathy and
scholarship, was a participant in a hegemonising
influence of the West over the others. The very
content of that knowledge, the production and
consumption of that knowledge as well as its afterlife
were all constituents of the western knowledge of the
East, the knowledge that validated, ratified and even
justified its control over the rest of the world. They
may have been very good men, but even good men’s minds
and scholarship operates in a given system of thought,
ideology and prejudice, that is a discourse, and is
imbricated in relations of power. 
Even if all that the followers of Said are doing
consists merely of “scrutinizing the writings of dead
white males for their complicity with imperialist
projects of racial, cultural and class domination,” it
is important and necessary. To take merely Indian
History writing, more than fifty years after
independence and more than a hundred and fifty years
after he wrote his ten volume history of India, James
Mill’s Manichaean vision about India being a land of
conflict between different races and of it having
slipped from its ancient glory continues to inform
historical understanding in and outside the academy to
an outstanding and astounding degree. It is the
business of historians then to show how these dead
white males have written us into being. 
As for academics posing as activists from privileged
positions, posing is not the preserve of the US
academics and privilege does not belong exclusively to
them. It is not the origin or the locale of the writer
that is important, but their views. The problem with
Guha, here and elsewhere, is that being a liberal he
ties his apron strings to western liberal thought that
springs eventually from enlightenment modernity. But
unlike other colonial thinkers of the present or the
past, say Gandhi or Tagore or Nehru or even Nandy or
Partha Chatterji or Ranajit Guha, Ramchandra Guha does
not have any personal coordinates with which to map
the interaction between the dominant West and the
colonized East. All that is left to him therefore is
to praise good intentions and gentlemanly manners.




--- Dunkin Jalki <dunkinj at cscsban.org> wrote:
> isn't that true, after all.
> his book has a heuristic value more than anything
> else... 
> in one of his article on Said S.N Balagangadhara
> ("The Future of the Present: 
> Thinking Though Orientalism" _Cultural Dynamics_
> 10(2): 101-121. 1998) writes
> "Often, writers of great books fail to appreciate
> the true depth and breadth 
> of what they themselves have written. Such is also
> the case with Said." he 
> writes further and more, a brilliant piece of
> writing on Said
> best
> -- 
> Dunkin Jalki
> CSCS
> Bangalore 11
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