Recognizing Hindu Orientalism

Abstract: This essay proposes Hindu Orientalism as a central category of analysis across disciplines. It begins by demonstrating how the claim to decolonize India is in fact (re/neo)colonial in many ways as it recasts Western Orientalism in the catalogue of Hindu Orientalism to (re)shape India as well as the world. To this end, it critically engages with Hallaq’s (2018) Restating Orientalism. The first part of the essay identifies three important theses in Hallaq’s text. In part two, it examines the third thesis — the comparative approach to knowledge-power matrix in a premodern, non-Western culture — to mark its comparative contraction; namely, the non-treatment of Pollock’s contention about an indigenous form of Orientalism in premodern Hindu Sanskrit culture. Contra Hallaq, the essay, then, proposes what it calls Hindu Orientalism — a practice analogous to Hallaq’s description of Israeli Orientalism. It takes the cases of Dalits, tribes and Muslims to illustrate the working of Hindu Orientalism. An important aim of the essay is to stress that contemporary Indian religious-cultural politics is predicated on a deep, long knowledge-power configuration the significance of which is not recognized yet. It concludes by highlighting the role of anthropology in de-colonizing knowledge — a concern important to Hallaq as well as to Said both of whom, however, often viewed anthropology unfavorably.