Pen/Insular_Notes

It could be argued that the late Edward Said and his critique of Orientalism have become sacred cows in their own right. It seems that many of the fundamental insights of Said’s classic book, Orientalism, are valid and have rightly reached the level of orthodoxy in many universities (I sometimes wonder whether SOAS should alter its name to read the School of Orientalism and African Studies). But it’s not difficult to feel uneasy about the slack and sometimes less than discriminating application of the term. This concern is expressed very clearly in a sharp article by the Indian historian Irfan Habib that was originally published earlier this year in the journal Social Scientist and has been republished in the latest issue of International Socialism Journal.

Habib’s basic criticism of Said is that he applies the accusation of ‘Orientalist’ to far too broad a spectrum of scholars working on Asia and Africa, arguing that anything written in the ‘West’ is inherently Orientalist, Eurocentric and racist, ignoring the fact that there has been much good scholarship by Western historians that cannot be accused of any of these vices (Habib brings up the examples of Joseph Needham and Ignaz Goldziher). In the process Said himself, Habib argues, uses some rather dubious and unfounded arguments, based on highly selective and misleading quotation. Habib particularly takes him to task for his treatment of Marx – a treatment that has helped to turn the Marx = Eurocentrist equation into a modern day commonplace:

Marx as a subject of Said’s study… offers further examples of the cavalier way in which Said can stuff anyone he dislikes or wishes to belittle into his nasty basket of ‘Orientalists’. Much has already been said on this matter by Aijaz Ahmad in his essay, ‘Marx on India: a Clarification’ (In Theory, Delhi, 1994, pp221-242). He shows that Said builds his interpretation on just two passages taken from Marx’s two articles published in the New York Tribune in 1853, and seems to be unacquainted with what Marx wrote elsewhere on India. Here it must be added that while Marx necessarily relied on (the quite extensive) European reports on India, the picture that he drew out of it, of the social and economic devastation that British rule caused in India, was largely his own—and this was hardly an ‘Orientalist’ enterprise under Said’s definition. Moreover even in Marx’s second essay, apparently consulted by Said, there is a passage looking forward to the Indians overthrowing ‘the English yoke’ (K Marx and F Engels, Collected Works, vol 12, Moscow, 1979, p221). Marx also writes in the very same article of ‘the profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilisation [which] lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies where it goes naked.’ And yet, again and again in his book, Said sneers at Marx as being, at the end of the day, a pro-colonial ‘Orientalist’. So we are told, ‘This Orientalism can accommodate Aeschylus, say, and Victor Hugo, Dante and Karl Marx’ (p3). The view that ‘Indians were civilisationally, if not racially, inferior’ is indirectly ascribed to Marx on page 14. On page 102 Said goes so far as to put Marx among those writers who could use all the following ‘generalities unquestioningly’: ‘An Oriental lives in the Orient, he lives a life of Oriental ease, in a state of Oriental despotism, and sensuality, imbued with a feeling of Oriental fatalism.’ The italicised words constitute a fantastic misrepresentation of Karl Marx’s writings on Asia. But Said does not still stop here. On p231 he puts Marx among those who held that ‘an Oriental man was first an Oriental and only second a man’—a meaningless formula seemingly coined simply to belittle Marx.