With my limited knowledge on orientalism by reading so many books about it, it confuses our identity as an Indian then helps us even to understand an outsider’s perspective with clarity. Of course our own understanding about our identity is imposed on us by outsiders. But the way we try to construct or deconstruct our identity through many processes finally complicates it more than gives any clarity. And politicians, particularly regional politicians, while trying to project the Indian identity, prefer to keep their local identity merely for political reasons rather than with deep conviction. While nationalism challenges secularism, regionalism challenges nationalism. Anyhow an honest confession of Peter van der Veer can help us to understand the predicament of Outsiders and Insiders. [See Secular Song 506]:
Written by academics working mainly in North America, written in English, and laden with the terminology of western academic theory, this volume itself may not have escaped the traps and dilemmas of orientalism. To some extent, the contributors to this volume, constituting India as its subject, are open to the charge of the very same topological distinctions through which orientalism constructed its objects and colonial power constituted its domain. Indeed, all the contributors speak of “India” and “Hindus” and “Muslims,” while they make considerable efforts to show the extent to which these categories have been constructed by colonialism and orientalism. The term “India” in the postcolonial period refers to a nation-state that has been constituted through the dialectics of orientalism/colonialism and nationalism. By deconstructing the categories, we certainly do not dissolve political realities. It is precisely the postcolonial predicament that both orientalism and its critique play a role in the arena in which these realities are challenged. The deconstruction of secularism, nationalism, and communalism cannot be separated from an arena in which the nature of the postcolonial state is the subject of violent confrontations.—Peter van der Veer, ‘Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament’, in, Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, edc. Orentalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, Philadelphi, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993, pp. 1-19,p. 17
Mathigiri, 8-4-2019
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