Wake-Up Call: What Orientalists Got Right About Kashmir |
Orientalism, a hoary discipline and a corpus of texts that probed into the vitals of non-Western societies, was poignantly and trenchantly critiqued by the late great Edward Said.
The intellectual of intellectuals and scholar of scholars postulated, rightly, that Orientalism sought to denigrate non-Western societies by positing the ‘East’ as the ‘West’s’ ‘exotic other.’
Defined by a certain essentialism that held there was an irreducible essence to both the East and the West, and that the West was superior, this was brilliantly dissected, analyzed, and adumbrated by the great Edward Said.
Some attributes in the Orientalist schema about the peoples of the East were that they were ‘lazy’, ‘indolent’, ‘sensuous’, and ‘childlike’, among other things.
The great Edward Said also stated that Orientalism became entangled with power and thereby morphed into a handmaiden of imperialism and colonialism.
This corpus of study became the predicate that justified colonial intervention in non-Western societies.
So far, so good. Said, the genius, was spot on. But, for a........