How simple my school and college years were! A voracious reader, I read a great number of books, many of them by dead white men (and a few women too) and (mostly) enjoyed them for what they were. I never thought - oh, these are not my stories, this is not my reality. I could, and did, relate to the characters and their experiences, and if I didn’t, I revelled in the new worlds they opened up to me, because that is what great literature does. It never occurred to me to reflect upon the dark forces of colonialism, post-colonialism, imperialism, racism, sexism and all the other multiple isms that no doubt run rampant through those books and weave such a tangled and suffocating web over that most important question of all - who, and what, am I?
It was an age of innocence, and while there is much to be said for it, it also bred a kind of unquestioning complacence which can, and does, snuff out or misrepresent the voices of millions of people, each with their very own stories and histories. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie put it so eloquently, it's the danger of the single story, the narrowing of vision, the closing of minds, the burgeoning of stereotypes. The education my children received was so vastly different from mine. Without the smokescreen of innocence, there was so much they were exposed to at a young age, and there have been times when I have felt conflicted about it, because there is a virtue to innocence. Exposure does not always breed compassion and tolerance. It’s also important to figure out one’s own positions on issues - and this is a lifelong endeavour - without being force-fed a particular opinion or point of view. What we must learn is that the story of mankind is infinitely complex and varied encompassing the gamut from sublime beauty to hideous wickedness, and that reading and listening to people’s stories in their own voices is essential to opening our minds to an awareness and perception that we would never otherwise get. That is the vital legacy of education, and the world needs it now more urgently than ever.
I have digressed far more than I intended to. Recently, I have been reading about another ism: Orientalism, thanks to a just-published biography of Edward Said: Places of Mind, A Life of Edward Said, by Timothy Brennan. Said, an academic (he was a professor at Columbia University in New York City), wrote a book titled Orientalism, which was published in 1978. Along with his name and reputation, the idea and the term shot into prominence with his book. It had a profound influence in a world where post-colonial countries were coming into their own, a certain accepted civilisational hierarchy was being questioned, and notions of identity were awakening to a realm in which existing perceptions were in turmoil. He has attracted as much vitriol as he has adulation and while the ideas detailed in the book might seem quaint today, they were pathbreaking in their time and spawned entire fields of study and argument. Said himself was a complex character, a product of the very western-centric education that he criticised, a lover of luxury who was the poster-child for left-wing protesters, a spokesperson for the Palestinian people who admired and resented him in equal measure, a man of many worlds who felt he belonged to none. But that is true of all of us, isn’t it? Aren’t we all complex, spilling over into multiple seemingly incompatible silos that we like to erect in our attempt to create order and sense out of the messy chaos that is humankind?
So - what is Orientalism? Wikipedia offers a laughably simple definition: it is the study of Near and Far Eastern cultures, languages and peoples by Western scholars. Behind this bland sentence rages seething resentment and frustration, the anger of non-Western scholars who feel their cultures have been misunderstood and belittled, distorted through the prism of Western perceptions and judgements. Any discussions involving it are loaded with implications and dark connotations involving accusations of prejudice, colonial imperialism, a pious belief in Western cultural superiority, misguided stereotypes and romanticized ideas, with all of these being represented as the “truth” or “reality”.
Among the Orientalism-related articles I read was Linda Nochlin’s essay “The Imaginary Orient” , which discusses the impact of Orientalism on art, with particular attention to French painters of the 19th century.
Linda Nochlin looks at how paintings of the Orientalist school have fallen into the trap of the Western gaze upon the Eastern world. She examines some of the better-known paintings of this genre and explains how the various characterizations of the Orientalist genre fit into these paintings. She explores the notion of realism, and asks whose realism is being represented in the painting. In Orientalist paintings, she writes, there is no feeling of (the painter) identifying with the painting, other than as a mere spectator - the self is distanced from what is going on in the picture. She talks about the power structures inherent in the painting: West vs. the East (with the superiority of the former being revealed in obvious as well as not-so-obvious ways), Man vs. Woman (where the male’s higher position is shown through scenes of subjugation or humiliation of the female, as well as violence). The absences in the painting- of a sense of time and history, of a Western presence, of scenes of hard-working “natives” - are another feature of this genre. Ms Nochlin then analyses the “picturesque” scenes depicted in this type of art, which she interprets as a way of preserving a vanishing way of life. She also believes that this is a subtle ruse to convey the superiority of the western way of life by showing the “natives” as “Other” and “Exotic”, and to show the contrasts between their savage habits and customs and the beauty of their surroundings.
So as a fun exercise, I decided to take a close look at three Orientalist paintings and don an art critic’s hat: Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps’ “The Night Patrol at Smyrna”, Eugene Delacroix’s “ The Natchez”, and Gustav Bauernfeind’s “Jaffa, Recruiting of Turkish Soldiers in Palestine”. I wanted to see if Ms Nochlin’s analysis of “Orientalism” stood up in these paintings. More importantly, I wanted to see for myself if her arguments about this genre really made sense to me, or if they were merely a pre-formulated theory with “facts” being made to fit in with her assumptions. Do these assumptions hold good for only the Orientalist genre, or do they apply across the board to other genres as well (paintings of the West by Western artists, paintings of the West by Eastern artists (Occidentalism) and paintings of the East by Eastern artists)? There are so many ways of perceiving and interpreting art, and so much depends on the individual’s mindset and angle of view. As a person whose family comes from the East, from the “Other” side of the Orientalist debate, I was curious if my views and interpretations would echo those of Ms Nochlin.
Night Patrol at Smyrna, by Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps
To me Decamps’ “Night Patrol at Smyrna” , by virtue of its title, had a sense of history. This is no ordinary “picturesque” daily-life scene. To a Western eye, the painting might seem exotic and certainly not something which would be seen in the West (the buildings, the clothes and turbans worn by the men). I personally did not feel it, but you could say that a sense of superiority and a certain condescension have been implied in the painting. Surely no Western night patrol would be this disorderly. Where are the clean, straight lines of soldiers marching in disciplined formation? The leader appears to have no control over his disorganized and grimy “soldiers” running barefoot, pell-mell through the dusty streets. Tch, tch, a good dose of Western control would whip them into shape and make them into a “proper” Patrol. Then again, is this a “real” night patrol? Is this how they really went about matters? Or is this how the painter imagined they would be, so satisfy his audience’s notions of what a Turkish army is about? I don’t know.
The Natchez, by Eugene Delacroix
Delacroix’s “The Natchez” is pure fantasy, since he never set foot in America (the setting of the painting), never laid eyes upon a Native American. He was inspired by Chateaubriand’s book “Atala”, the subtitle of which, significantly, is “The Love of Two Savages in the Desert” (emphasis is mine). The plight of the Native Americans is treated with sympathy and pathos. They are portrayed as exotic (these touches are provided with ethnographic details like the young woman’s necklace and bracelet, the feathers on the young man’s head), pure and untouched by “civilization”. This painting is an open canvas for Delacroix to project all his fantasies about the New World, with the exotic setting (Delacroix’s imagined version of the banks of the Mississippi) and the “simple” nature of the Natchez tribals (their scant clothing, the primitive boat, the crude weapons). I felt this painting qualifies as “Orientalist” in several respects. On the one hand, there is sympathy for the plight of the young couple, on the other hand, their savage and wild nature is implied - these are Noble Savages. There is certainly a sense of watching the scene from afar - not identifying with, or being part of any of what is going on. This is suffering that we stand by and watch without being part of it. The “reality” portrayed is that of the artist, and nobody else. There is a complete absence of a sense of history - this scene could have taken place in any century, which, perhaps, is another indirect way of showing a lack of progress and civilization in the lives of these Natives.
Gustav Bauernfeind, Jaffa, Recruiting of Turkish Soldiers in Palestine
The third painting, Bauernfeind’s “Jaffa, Recruiting of Turkish Soldiers in Palestine” like that of Decamps, has a sense of history. Also like the Decamps painting, what struck me was the lack of orderliness in the scene depicted - people are milling around any way they please, not at all what a “proper” recruiting scene should look like. This is because it is the poorest and most desperate of Turkish society, those who have been unable to pay their way out of avoiding being recruited, who are shown in this scene. This lack of orderliness, the battered state of the seawall, and the looming Western battleship at the horizon, imply pity, and maybe contempt, for the natives, and the superiority of the West. As with the other two paintings, I have no idea how “realistic” this depiction is, how much of it is a fantasy of the painter.
All the three paintings I studied had at least some of the elements of “Orientalism.” However, having seen many paintings of the West by Western artists, and of the East by Eastern artists, I can confidently say that many of these ideas exist in those paintings as well - violence towards women, showing women in humiliating and compromised situations, superiority of one group of people over another, “picturesque” depictions of scenery and daily life, absence of a sense of history, ridiculous fantasies. Thus I feel it is narrow-minded and wrong to ascribe these qualities to only Orientalist pictures, since they are common to a lot of art.
I do have to be true to the name of this blog and add in a bit about South India. Many European artists made their way to India during the high days of colonialism; among the best known were the British uncle-and-nephew duo, Thomas and William Daniell. They set out from England in 1786 to make their fortune in India and in the course of their seven years there, travelled widely through the country, making on-site sketches all the while. From 1788 to 1791 they toured southern India. When they returned to London in 1794, they worked on turning their sketches and drawings into watercolours and oil paintings. Many were published in a book called Oriental Scenery. Before I share one of these paintings, of the magnificent Brihadeeshwara Temple that was completed by the great Chola king Rajaraja in the year 1010 in Thanjavur, I have to confess that any knowledge, such as it is, that I have have about this or any other paintings, is pitifully shallow, all gleaned from dipping into the odd sentence here and there from the vast ocean that is the Internet. I will not presume to comment on this painting other than to remark upon the scant number of people in the picture, and the blurring and homogenization of the incredible sculptural details of the vimana. Apparently, "Indian Picturesque", the aesthetic created by British painters in India, served not only to depict this fantastic and exotic land to its viewers, but also to represent the British Empire as a force for progress.
The Great Pagoda, Tanjore, by Thomas Daniell, 1798
I'd like to wind up with these words of Said's: “I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this to the idea of a solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much significance. These currents… at their best… require no reconciling, no harmonising. They… may be out of place, but at least they are always in motion… A form of freedom, I’d like to think, even if I am far from being totally convinced that it is.”