Modern Mind

carpet and entertaining a group of men, dark-skinned Arabs festooned in rifles and swords, lounging against a wall of tiles decorated with arabesques and Arabic script. A detail from Jean-Léon Gérôme’s
Snake Charmer
(1870), it illustrates Said’s argument exactly. For this is an imaginary Orient, a stereotypical Orient full of caricature and oversimplification. Said’s argument is that the intellectual history of Oriental studies, as practised in the West, has been corrupted by political power, that the very notion of ‘the Orient’ as a single entity is absurd and belittling of a huge region that contains many cultures, many religions, many ethnic groupings. In this way the world comes to be made up of two unequal halves, shaped by the unequal exchange rooted in political (imperial) power. There is, he says, an imaginative demonology of ‘the mysterious Orient’ in which the ‘Orientals’ are invariably lazy, deceitful, and irrational. Said shows that de Sacy was trying to put ‘Oriental studies’ on a par with Latin and Hellenistic studies, which helped produce the idea that the Orient was as homogeneous as classical Greece or Rome. In
Madame Bovary,
Emma pines for what, in her drab and harried bourgeois life, she does not have – ‘Oriental clichés: harems, princesses, princes, slaves, veils, dancing girls and boys, sherbets, ointments, and so on.’ 46 In Joseph Conrad’s
Victory,
he makes the heroine, Alma, irresistibly attractive to men – by the mid-nineteenth century, the name evoked dancers who were also prostitutes. But, Said reminds us,
Alemah
in Arabic means ‘learned woman’; it was the name used in Egyptian society for women who were accomplished reciters of poetry. Even in recent times, says Said, especially since the Arab-Israeli wars, the situation has hardly improved. He quotes a 1972 issue of the
American Journal of Psychiatry
in which an essay entitled ‘The Arab World’ was published by a retired member of the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Intelligence. In four pages, the author provides a psychological portrait of more than 100 million people, across 1,300 years, using exactly four sources: two books, and two newspaper articles. 47 Said stresses the sheer preposterousness of such an exercise, calls for a greater understanding of ‘Oriental’ literatures (which he shows to be sadly lacking in Oriental departments in Western universities)and allies himself with Clifford Geertz’s approach to anthropology and international study, in particular his notion of ‘thick description.’ 48 As with the views of Martin Bernal on the African origins of classical civilisation discussed in the next chapter, Said’s arguments have been fiercely contested by distinguished orientalists such as Albert Hourani.
    As a critic, an Indian, and a woman, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has become one of the more prominent postcolonial writers, perhaps most influential as one of the editors of the celebrated journal
Subaltern Studies.
This word,
subaltern,
neatly ironical, refers to that low rank of the army, especially the Imperial Army of Britain, which was subordinate to the officer class – so low, in fact, that if a subaltern wanted to speak, he (always a he) had to ask permission. Subaltern studies is a variety of historiography that is frankly revisionist, seeking to provide an alternative history of India, a new voice somewhat analogous to the British Marxist historians, retelling the story ‘from the bottom up.’ Gayatri Spivak, who like Rushdie, Desai, and so many other Indian intellectuals, divides her time between India and the West, combines an essentially feminist view of the world with neo-Marxist flavouring derived from Derrida and Foucault. 49 The chief achievement of this group has been, first, gaining access to the raw material of the Raj, without which no revision would have been possible, and second, confronting what many have regarded as the failure of Indian culture to hitherto produce a rival system to the British one. 50 In historiography, for example, subaltern scholars have revisited a number of so-called mutinies against the British when, according to the imperial accounts, ‘bands’ of ‘fanatics’ rose up and were defeated. 51 These are now explained in terms of contemporaneous religious beliefs, marriage/sexual practices, and the economic needs of empire. Five volumes of
Subaltern Studies
were published in the 1980s, to great acclaim among scholars,