[Reader-list] nobody to speak up for Ram Guha on Said

[mahmood farooqui]

Hey, is noone going to defend Ram Guha? Where are the
people who found his provocation 'brilliant?' COme on,
someone....

wrote:

> 
> 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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> 
> 
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