AROUND this time four years ago the world of letters was sadly diminished when news broke of the death of Edward Said. It was known that he was battling for years with cancer and so the final bad news was not very unexpected, but his readers and admirers in both the hemispheres were nonetheless disconsolate. And Said was more than a man of letters. He not only established or re-established orientalism on a new foundation but made a seminal contribution towards the enrichment of postcolonial literature, also known as subaltern studies. It was not for nothing that the postcolonial countries and the Muslim world had elevated him into an icon. It is comforting to know that at least one organisation, a cultural forum of youths at Paribagh in the city, took the initiative to hold a commemorative programme on Edward Said in a very simple and informal way. Though the programme was in every way low-profile it did reveal the enthusiasm of the youths about the different aspects of the intellectual life of Said.
   Some extracts from his Orientalism considered in isolation may even create the wrong impression that the writer was an English language preacher of Islam, like his contemporary Mike Sell of North Carolina, and others. Said was a Palestinian Christian and called himself ‘a Christian wrapped in Muslim culture.’ His approach to the issue of Christian-Muslim historical relationship was epistemological and not religious.
   Said belonged to the near-extinct tribe of polymaths who could intellectually swing from one discipline to another with authority. And we are not considering his accomplishment as a pianist and critic of western classical music, as this is a field completely beyond our constricted horizon. The quintessence of Said’s philosophy is that knowledge is conditioned by state power. The remarkable enthusiasm shown by the West’s so-called orientalists for the ‘exotic’ and erotic East was rooted in colonial policy. To Disraeli the East was a career; in other words the target of colonial expansion and gold rush. According to Said, ‘Eurocentricity and racism has created a body of knowledge regarding the East that was not only false but the inverse of what the East held as its own superiority.’
   A patronising attitude towards the East is not very glorifying, but some writers did not even possess that. Take the case of the celebrated 19th century Frenchman Ernest Renan who was plain racist ‘with a notorious race prejudice against the very oriental semites whose study has made his professional name.’ The supposed quest for knowledge was an adjunct to colonial exploration. If the orientalism is indebted to the researches of Anquetil-Duperron and William James, the inspiration for it came from the explorations of Captain Cook and Bougainville. In other words, the greed for land and gold. According to Said, ‘The orient became less important than what the orientalist made of it.’ Said quotes John Stuart Mill to corroborate his observation. John Stuart Mill was not a racist and imperialist like his father Sir James Mil, the so-called Indologist, and was known as a liberal thinker. In history he leaves another unexcelled record, that of precocious learning. No adolescent had ever mastered such a vast body of knowledge as he did; Blaise Pascal before him and Christopher Caudwell after him may only be distant seconds. This John Stuart Mill who was the exponent of liberty says in his book On Liberty that the canons laid down in his book applied only to those who had made some advancement in civilisation. In other words, India (that is, the subcontinent) was not among them. Like his father he thought that the subcontinent was not fit for self-government.
   Beverley Nicolls, a noted British writer, had said in his book on India that Indian classical music is like the grunt of pigs being slain. Macaulay’s contempt for Eastern learning is too well-known – ‘A shelf in a western library is worth more than all the wisdom of the East.’ But India is not the focus of Said’s writing, more eminently it is Turkey and Egypt. About Egypt Robert Kapf said that at first these orientalists had represented Islam, had represented Egypt to Egyptians and with time the lore reached a point where the lore created the orient. Even great writers have tripped in trying to portray the orient. Said cites the case of Gustav Flaubert. Flaubert went to Egypt and found no better person to illustrate Egyptians life than a dancer. Said calls this orientalism racist, imperialist and ethnocentric. Great writers were not immune to warped thinking when it came to conceptualising or representing the East.
   It is not easy for the West to deny the greater antiquity of eastern civilisation. But western writers are loath to emphasise it. Thales of Miletus is called the first scientist of the world on the ground that he had predicted a solar eclipse that was visible in Miletus in 485BC. Most western accounts of ancient Greece omit to mention his apprenticeship in astronomy in Egypt and Babylon. Even then, how was he the first scientist; he neither knew nor explained the cause of eclipse? A mathematics teacher will not give any marks to his pupil who only by some chance stumbles upon the answer without showing the process by which she or he derived the answer. The Indian politician and philosopher Maulana Abul Kalam Azad has shown that the Miletian school of philosophy is considerably posterior to Indian philosophy. When western writers wax eloquent over Greek mathematical achievement they forget that it would take a Greek mathematician half a day to write the number 69500270 which a common Indian would have written in three seconds. Another absurd claim is that Eratosthenes in the third century BC measured the circumference of the earth and came very near to the correct figure. How could he measure the earth’s circumference when no one knew what was on the other side of the globe and no European had even seen the Pacific Ocean before Magellan in the 16th century? The fact is that Eratosthenes did make some attempts and he was lucky in that he made several errors which cancelled each other out. Amartya Sen says in his recent book The Argumentative Indian that in the second and third century BC international Buddhist councils were held involving several countries where free and forthright exchange of opinions took place. Everyone will agree that an international conference in ancient time was unthinkable in the West.
   Literary critics will always revere Said for having established that literature should not be ethnocentric or Eurocentric. Postcolonial literature does not only refer to the literature produced after freedom from colonial rule, the chronology is not important here. The new efforts at creativity in the English language to engage the West. Engage, not confront. Said is not for any clash or confrontation. He had accepted the two-state solution in the Middle East. Significantly, the postcolonial writers of South Asia write in English. The western writings will not be devalued, postcolonialism is not a cultural revolution and does not deny the continuity but it seeks to create other foci of writings; literature will not be Eurocentric. Hence the emphasis in postmodern writings in representing ‘The Other.’ In this country young poets who see themselves as ‘postmodern’ have for the first time written on themes never touched upon before – the ethnic minorities.
   Men like Said may even become more relevant in the coming years. Said said knowledge is governed by colonial interest. Now there are no colonies but, thanks to globalisation, the market is governing knowledge, as it is governing everything else. Knowledge will be circumscribed, doctored or adapted according to the needs, rather commands, of the market. It will not be important for them how culturally rich and creative the eastern countries are but how large is their market and how big is the size of consumers they can produce and how many MBAs, BBAs they can produce.