Question

Provide examples of Orientalism that you have seen in your life. Explain why you think it is an example of Orientalism. This can be from your life experience, or from the media, and so on.
500-600 words

use these links for readings and use quote from it

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fG238UAv7TJQupEnnw6t02JNxqvV3UF5/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hfYbbw62i5wJiBkBIdpQws4vjk5LNBSX/view?usp=sharing

Answer 1

Orientalism is the study of Near and Far Eastern societies and cultures, languages, and peoples by Western scholars. It can also refer to the imitation or depiction of aspects of Eastern cultures in the West by writers, designers, and artist

INDIAN CULTURE : Easily example of orientation associate Indian culture with temples, great architecture, great music & dance, with mysticism, with women clad in saris, with snakes and sadhus pasting of sandel wood paste on fore heads, we have to go back to the time when colonial officers, missionaries, Western travellers, ethnographers & other scholars portraited India through photographs, paintings, lithographs, diaries, novels, & other genres of writing.

Orientalists as representatives of an academic discipline have been accused of being intertwined with and even of having supported British colonialism in India. ... It was, as van der Veer has it, a ”combination of Hindu spirituality and nationalism, informed by orientalism.”

East India Company's use of orientalist knowledge & the Sanskrit scholars for strengthening state power in Bengal in the late 18th century; the uses of orientalist methodologies in education for the civilising mission in the 19th century; and, the adaptation, by Indian Sanskrit scholars, of some of orientalism's discursive constructs in the production of newly inflected Hindu identities. the strengthening of the characterisation of Benaras( Varansi) as a ‘sacred Hindu city' and as central to an understanding of Indian civilisation was intimately connected with both the authorisation of the early orientalist scholarship, and the establishment of cultural and political legitimacy for the Company's government.

The core issue is that orientalism in India is best understood not as a static modus operandi but as a shifting set of policy positions & localised practices, which were constantly adapted to changing circumstances in the colonial context & respect of evolutions in metropolitan British thought.

Dodson depicts to ideational genealogies, adaptations, innovations, & valuations made of knowledge and representation in particularised local contexts, and their relationships to the fashioning of forms of power. He examined why certain forms of knowledge gained social currency locally and could be converted into forms of power.

A closer link between intellectual & social history, he traces how people in the colonial context used their education and institutional standings as well as the strategies for producing forms of authority for knowledge, in the furtherance of different social, cultural, & political projects. This was because Indian traditions & cultures & languages differ in every radius of ten kms.

The questions of historical agency in the colonial sphere become more open-ended and responsive, accounting for processes of social and cultural change, rather than remaining content with invocations of a breaking out from dominant representational systems.

I THINK INDIAN CULTURES ARE ONE OF THE BEST EXAMPLES ORIENTALISM WHICH WE HAVE SEEN IN LIFE .