The Arrogance of Orientalism
May 7th, 2008 by Ashok
The following post was mailed to the Epic India group in response to Meenakshi Srinivasan (Blokesablogin)’s provocative and brilliant series of articles on the question of Hindu identity (scroll down to read the articles). Thanks to fellow Epic Indian Sundar Balasubramaniam for the excellent post that follows, including the links and quotation from Lord Macaulay that reveals the naked arrogance of the Orientalists who wrote virtually all the modern history of the sub-continent and perpetrated their biased views upon generations:
It never struck me before so sharply that how deep the colonization had an
effect upon our country until now.
It lead me on to bump into these links:
http://www.hindu.com/mag/2007/02/04/stories/2007020400030300.htm
http://www.geocities.com/bororissa/mac.html
An excerpt from Macaulay’s Minute on Indian Education:
*I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic.–But I have done what I
could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed both here and at home with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is, indeed, fully admitted by those members of the Committee who support the Oriental plan of education.
**
**It will hardly be disputed, I suppose, that the department of literature in which the Eastern writers stand highest is poetry. And I certainly never met with any Orientalist who ventured to maintain that the Arabic and Sanscrit poetry could be compared to that of the great European nations. But when we pass from works of imagination to works in which facts are recorded, and general principles investigated, the superiority of the Europeans becomes absolutely immeasurable. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say, that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England. In every branch of physical or moral philosophy, the relative position of the two nations is nearly the same.*
After reading this, I would like to simply add a note:
As I quoted in my review of Ashok’s Ramayana series, the Vedas are without
beginning and without end. Just as the law of gravitation existed before its
discovery, and would exist if all humanity forgot it, so is it with the
spiritual truths.
-Sundar
