Reclaiming the root
Most of the people from the Orient and Asia do not know the tremendously prosperous history of the
eastern side of the globe
Hisham M Nazer
Although we find Edward W. Said talking against most of the west relentlessly in his book Orientalism, but his fundamental concern was to incite us into questioning our own strength and into knowing our own history. It is perhaps all about a reality-check for brutal enlightenment through unhesitant accusation.
Probably Said hoped that people of the east, by the virtue of their better understanding and enlightenment, might one day, wonder: what if the western conceptions of the [east] is actually true and thereby prepare to embark on a journey that aims at exploring the forgotten glory of the eastern world that can only be known through the pages of history and through extensive research.
If orientalism is not an airy European fantasy about the [east], but a created body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been a considerable material investment, Said also means to suggest that we too need to invest our scholarship into unlearning the falsehood, so that we can counter any power that wants to dominate us with invisible chain of modern politics.
Now those who have studied Orientalism to some extent know the reason behind the project of historical orientalism that had more economic interest than cultural, but one might ask: what is the origin of this orientalizing attitude?
Perhaps, from the ancient perspective, it is the history of the western world as a world-conquering power. Or, from the contemporary perspective, it is the confidence developed from global democracy that allows entrance to foreign nations on a pseudo-philosophical pretext.
I would like to remind my reader what Conrad wrote in his novel Heart of Darkness: They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute forcenothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.
Although this sounds so convincing to those who are reading Conrad for the first time, the reality is actually quite the contrary. It is in fact the weak who maims the strong to become powerful.
We have found even Plato saying this that when a state loses its focus from the Good it gets desperate to survive, and in that desperation it attempts to conquer a chunk of the neighboring state by violent measures. It is therefore an internal defect that awakens this will to dominate.
William Jones, an Anglo-Welsh philologist, wrote: The Sanskrit language, whatever its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure, more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs, and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.
Moreover, if my memory assists me rightly, then the Mesopotamian civilization (modern day Iraq) was the first civilization on earth; the first book of the world is a Buddhist text the Diamond Sūtra (Sanskrit: Vajracchedikā Prajāpāramitā Sūtra); the first religious text is an ancient Indian collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns the Rigveda, and the first and the oldest University of the world is Takshashila, founded in ancient greater India.
Race, document, religion and scholarship are the pillars of any modern civilization, and history tells us that neither Englad, nor France nor Germany, and obviously not America was the vanguard of the world as we know it now, rather it were those nations that western super-powers Asianize and Orientalize that wrote the prelude to this new world.
But most of the people from the Orient and Asia do not know the tremendously prosperous history of the eastern side of the globe. The abstract power that operates through abstract media has erased the colonial history from the mind of this D-Generation (Digital Generation) and has instilled a deep sense of appreciation for western benisons, an automatic trust in anything western and a peculiar scorn or apologetic mindset for things eastern.
We are simply so much amazed by the western gods and gadgets that we have even forgotten to look around and to look inside to meet the real us: the ancient easterners who have history, and who have future as well.
Stuart Hall is dead, and his idea of critical decoding is lost. For that on the other hand Shakespeares Macbeth is still alive! The witches are alive! The dunce dances and easily gets excited for whatever comes his way, like Macbeth the so called chivalric captain did when the witches came with their advertisement of future in front of him, that he will be the thane of Cawdor, he will be the king of Scotland.
It is almost impossible to resist, or even identify, temptations of such proportion; even so for a prudent person, yet more when the one who experiences such a magnificent show of the future is intellectually inexperienced, because individual ego always construes a thing in the light of its own understanding, and the ability to go beyond this cerebral limitation and appreciate the intriguing infection of criticality has neatly and subtly been immunized by the appropriated but unchecked dissemination of powerful and deliberately discursive codes (media democracy being one of the currents that legally smuggles some of these codes into different countries).
And the ugly witches are always there, with their manipulative magic, with their stunning art of words that sways reason and rationality, with their apparently appealing power to demonstrate something beautiful for the spectator.
Today media plays the role of the witches, and we all are Macbeths, with our selfish desires, with our uncontrollable ambitions, being exposed to such potent words spoken through the forces of Supernature.
The Supernature is Superpower. Hecate is hegemony. And the east, as we know it through the political representation of the west, is a fiction, which even many eastern people mistake for a fact.
The writer is Lecturer, Department of English Varendra University, Rajshahi
