I n 1978, the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism revolutionised academic discourse regarding the West and the Rest. The Rest received a rejuvenating shot in its so long limp arm and at last the empire began to write back with new-found abandon, courage and confidence. The erstwhile British colonies shed their cultural cringe, voiced their protest, scripted their unofficial histories and became vocal members of a participatory democracy, uninhibited in their claims and clamour directed towards identity and cultural politics.The homogeneity of the western concept of Asia was now identified as Other Asias and West Asia, South Asia, South-east Asia along with Africa claimed recognition and inclusiveness within the global theatre of power differentials. In Edward Said’s Orientalism, which is regarded as the foundational text of post-colonial studies, Said had stated, “As a discipline representing institutionalised Western knowledge of the Orient, Orientalism thus comes to exert a three-way force, on the Orient, on the Orientalist, and on the Western ‘consumer’ of Orientalism” (p 67).

The author of The Rulers Gaze, Arvind Sharma, formerly of the IAS, is the Bricks Professor of Comparative Religion at McGill University, Canada. His publications include Gandhi: A Spiritual Biography andHinduism and Its Sense of History and Decolonizing Indian Studies. One of his forthcoming books is Our Civilization and how to read the Manusmriti.
The Rulers Gaze makes an earnest attempt to interrogate and reject colonial history as represented by the documentarians of British India such as Vincent Smith among many others. Sharma painstakingly emphasises in great detail the collage of facts, fabrication, truth, untruth and half-truth that Western scholars of Indology have put together as an ethnic mosaic of essentialist discourse about Indian history and religion, focusing on the Vedas, Upanishads and the epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Sharma’s arguments rest on his reliance on oral traditions, the blend of sruti (heard) and smriti(memory), as well as on myth, mystique, mystery, faith and belief, which are all integral to the understanding of Hinduism. It is necessary to add that the contributions of Indian materialist philosophers such as Carvaka, however, are very often elided in the discourse of Indian philosophy.

The complex tapestry that is created involves the threads of involuntary explicit memory, involuntary conscious memory, involuntary aware memory, autobiographical memory, embroidering a collective unconscious, which leans towards the mythical and which Freud described as “archaic remnants”. Sharma compares and contrasts the western Orientalism of William Jones and other early Indologists with Thomas Babington Macaulay and all 19th century Orientalists in whose discourse a paradigm shift in their attitude towards India, becomes obvious.

In close reference to the Saidian discourse regarding Orientalism, Sharma asserts that Western Orientalism distorted the traditions and legacy of the pre-colonial era, referring directly to the culture and traditions of ancient India. In order to re-read British colonial history and its representation of Hinduism, Sharma not only states that his approach in doing so is “from a Saidian perspective” but at times points out the limitations of the Saidian approach in the Indian context. In fact the wide scholarship and the neutral tone of presenting data garnered through an admirable assemblage of supportive material proves Sharma’s meticulous engagement in exposing the British agenda of manipulating ancient Indian history. Sharma remarks, “Thus if British Rule over India is a historical fact, the greater antiquity of Indian civilization over the modern Western is also a chronological fact” (sic p 326). Possibly, it is this mindset that Edward Said may have warned against as he concluded his path-breaking text, Culture and Imperialism, published in 1994, almost 16 years after the publication of Orientalism, “above all not constantly reiterating how ‘our’ culture or country is number one… ”(p 408). Incidentally, Said’sCulture and Imperialismis not listed in Sharma’s exhaustive notes and bibliography of more than 80 pages.

Sharma’s perspective in his historiography, which can be sub-titled “Discovery of India” and the perspectives of Edward Said as manifest in the foundational text of postcolonial studies, Orientalism(1978) are interesting. About four decades after the publication of Said’s Orientalism, the recent publication of Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy and Shashi Tharoor’s An Era of Darkness ~The British Empire in India, unmask the indiscriminate oppression and exploitation as deadly tools of British imperialist policies.

Sharma argues that instead of, by now the clichéd maxim, that knowledge is power, Said’s Orientalism gestured towards an inversion of the maxim — power is knowledge, as power can manipulate knowledge. This would imply that power can define, distort or misrepresent knowledge, and the British rulers systematically used the findings of Western Orientalists that invariably critiqued the native culture and tradition as the inferior Other and simultaneously showcased the superiority of the culture of the colonisers.

Sharma foregrounds the British overt and covert agenda in the discourse regarding the Black Hole of Calcutta, the abolition of sati and underscores that “Sati was sexualised” by the British (p102). In order to illustrate this assertion Sharma refers to the sculpture that depicts Lord Bentinck who abolished sati in 1829, rescuing a semi-nude, young Indian woman from the funeral pyre. He refers also to the thugees, the misinterpretations of Hindu scriptural texts such as the Vedas and the Upanishads, the caste system and underscores the richness of India’s ancient cultural heritage. Sharma offers some very striking interpretations of Alexander’s invasion and its impact on India, the roles of the Mughal rulers and the sepoy uprising. His arguments can be undoubtedly riveting for historians and cultural studies experts. In this connection one may recall Jawaharlal Nehru’s comments in his Discovery of India, “The burden of the past, the burden of both good and ill, is over-powering, and sometimes suffocating, more especially for those of us who belong to very ancient civilizations like those of India and China.

As Nietzsche says, “Not only the wisdom of centuries, also their madness, breaketh out in us. Dangerous is it to be an heir.”(Introduction). Also, interestingly, in his book Religion and Society, Indian philosopher S Radhakrishnan had stated, “If we are wedded overmuch to the rules of the past, if the living faith of the dead becomes the dead faith of the vining, the civilization will die… The price of social freedom is not only eternal vigilance but also perpetual renewal…If we rest content with what our fathers have done, decay will set in” (p 117).

In the chapter titled “Freedom from domination in the Future” in Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said introduced himself as “a secular intellectual and critic” (p 369). Said referred to one of his lecture sessions at Cairo University, Egypt, where he spoke for an hour on nationalism, independence, and liberation as alternative cultural practices to imperialism. During the question-answer session Said stated that he was asked about “the theocratic alternative” which he had overlooked due to his “anticlerical and secular zeal” (p 370).

Perhaps, Edward Said would have disagreed with Arvind Sharma but agreed with Nehru who had observed, “Religion, as I saw it practised, and accepted even by thinking minds, whether it was Hinduism or Islam or Buddhism or Christianity, did not attract me. It seemed to be closely associated with superstitious practices and dogmatic beliefs, and behind it lay a method of approach to life’s problems, which was certainly not that of science. There was an element of magic about it, an uncritical credulousness, a reliance on the supernatural” (Discovery of India).

The seven chapters of The Rulers Gaze are remarkably informative and scholarly as a historiographic narrative that range from the anomalous nature of British rule over India, its depiction of Indian society, the status of the Sudras, Greek, European, British and Muslim accounts of India and finally an evaluation of the limitations and extensions of Saidian Orientalism. As noted earlier in the review, Sharma maintains a steady scholarly tenor in his critique and assessment of British rule over India where he states Saidian “Orientalist constructions” played a role in the Partition and India’s cultural history.

It may be of interest to note that 15 years after the publication of Orientalism in 1998, in an afterword published in 1994, Said remarked, “After all, Orientalism is a study based on the re-thinking of what had for centuries been believed to be an unbridgeable chasm separating the East from West”(p 352). Hostility, war and imperial control and the cultural differences had to be assessed in perspective Said had asserted and Sharma closely refers to the Saidian arguments as he endeavours to “exorcise the ghost” of Saidian Orientalism , “so that the spirit of the culture can speak for itself"(p 330).

In conclusion, Sharma interrogates the religious pluralism and secular culture of India as interventions of British Orientalism and states, “Religious identities need not be exclusive in Indian culture, as they have been in the West, so Indian solutions to religious friction and tensions are themselves religious, while in the West, on account of the exclusive nature of religious identities, the solution found for religious friction was secular in nature” (p 329).

The Rulers Gaze may be an intriguing read for students and researchers of colonial historiography and those interested in post-colonial studies, identity politics, cultural studies and religious studies.

(The reviewer is professor, department of English, Calcutta University)