Orientalism: The Elephant in the Indian History Room
Over the past few months I have worked on a podcast on the history of medicine and healthcare in India in collaboration with Suno India and the Thakur Family Foundation. Last month we released an episode focused on the idea/s of Orientalism. In this brief essay I intend to introduce Orientalism to readers. But feel free to listen to the podcast for a more detailed engagement with the subject. The episode includes excerpts from interviews with historians Pratik Chakrabarti, Sabrina Datoo, and Projit Bihari Mukharji.
Every day one comes across some or the other commentary or claim on Indian history that derives not from robust scholarly research into the past, but from a superficial, cavalier approach to the past: Orientalism. The discourse around Ayurveda & its history offers a good example. For most of us, any mention of “Indian medicine” or “traditional medicine” reflexively invokes Ayurveda in our mind. Sometimes some of us might additionally think of Unani or Siddha, but not much beyond that. We hardly think of daais/daai-mas — community-based midwives who are mostly Dalit or other “lower” caste — or the knowledge systems of Adivasi communities. Or the bone-setters & cataract-removers et al. Or women in the family who’ve always been our first-line care providers.
Basically in our mainstream imagination of India’s medical history and traditions, we have ended up almost exclusively privileging Ayurveda. Now imagine you were transported to the year 1721 and went on a lengthy tour of the subcontinent. If you asked people everywhere about what they do when they are ill, which kinds of practitioners they go to, etc., you will actually come across a tremendous diversity of ideas and practices and practitioners. Some practitioners will be Ayurvedic vaidyas, & some concepts would be derived from the larger Ayurvedic corpus — but these still would only be one part of a much broader and richer environment of medicine and healthcare. Let’s also not forget that both within the subcontinent and throughout the world, people and practitioners have always learned from each other and exchanged ideas and skills. Hence in your 1700s tour you will hardly encounter anything which can be termed as a pure, unchanged, original form of Ayurveda anyway.
Unfortunately, over the past couple of centuries and especially in recent decades, we have come to completely ignore this vibrant history. What now dominates our understanding is a flattened, narrowed down, discolored version of our wonderfully colorful past (medical & beyond). How did we come to bulldoze [word used deliberately] our history thus? How did we come to replace the realities of our past with its fairly open & wide diversity, with our current regimented outlook with its rigid boundaries? A large part of the answer lies in Orientalism.
Orientalism has many meanings and layers. For one, it has conditioned us to believe that if we want to know the history of India, the most authentic & the most important sources are old Sanskrit texts. In fact these texts have been elevated to such an extent that there’s a widespread belief that anything found in them should be taken at face value & not analysed in a critical manner. This privileging of Sanskrit language has led to a neglect of all the history which never made it to the written form, as well as of the vast amount of history documented in other languages of South Asia.
In other words, Orientalism & its writers reduced “Indian” history to textual Sanskrit history, & thence primarily to brahminical history. The lives & cultures of the vast numbers of Bahujans in the subcontinent were either ignored or seen only through privileged-caste lenses.
Another feature of Orientalism is its stereotypes: defining and describing entire populations and cultures in terms of rigid binaries. For example, the material West vs the spiritual East; the rational West vs the irrational East; the scientific West vs the superstitious East; and so on. European Orientalist writers regularly employed these stereotypes beginning especially in the 1700s. It is also intriguing to note how the colonizing British reconciled their Orientalist narrative of a “glorious” Indian past preserved in old Sanskrit texts, with their contemporaneous evaluation of India and Indians as exotic, irrational, superstitious, despotic, etc. A major approach was to claim that the ancient Indian advances were an offshoot of ancient European excellence. For example, there was a widely-held belief that Sanskrit was derived from Latin, and that the origins of Ayurveda lay in Greek and Roman medical ideas.
Unfortunately, these were not the only kind of mental gymnastics involved in Orientalism. Because, well, the Indian Orientalists began making — continuing to this day — counterclaims that resisted this kind of history, but still employed the same stereotypical, essentializing binaries. For example, they began to claim that it was Latin which actually derived from Sanskrit, and that it was Ayurveda which gave rise to sophisticated medical traditions in premodern Europe.
Clearly, Indian writers in the 1800s & early 1900s, almost all of them privileged-caste, bungled an important opportunity to replace Orientalism with a better, more rational, & more humanistic way of examining the past. (There were indeed some scholars like R.G. Bhandarkar who made impassioned appeals for using critical and logical thinking in history-writing, but appeals like these mostly fell on deaf ears.) Instead, they simply replaced European Orientalism with their own versions of it. And even after independence, Orientalist perspectives lived on, and in fact thrived intensely in brahminical, Hindu supremacist “sanghi” ecosystems. Today, books written by British and Indian privileged-caste Orientalist authors from the 1800s & early 1900s are available freely on the Internet Archive & other websites. The widespread use of these by sanghi propagandists & misinformation-peddlers has brought good old Orientalism into the digital age.
In all this Orientalist business, we have lost sight of the multi-layered realities of our history most of which have nothing to do with Sanskrit texts or with rigid binaries. We have also forgotten the basic need to look at history and its sources with a scholarly, critical mindset. Nevertheless, the good news is that the academic world fortunately has, overall, advanced beyond Orientalist perspectives. Additionally, in recent decades, Bahujan scholars have been chipping away many other blindspots that continued to exist in mainstream academia.
Still, Orientalism reigns supreme everywhere else, and especially in “popular history” including of course on social media. This essay will hopefully help folks beware of the cavalier forms of history which Orientalist perspectives produce, & encourage them to alert others too.
