Abstract
Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) must be one of the iconic books in the post-colonial world one cannot truly escape an engagement with. It has set off a debate on the nature and expression of power in the ordering of knowledge, even as it has compelled explorations into several deviations from or defiance to the equation it has established. Is Orientalism exclusively a function of power or a fuzziness and distortion that necessarily enters into one culture’s perception of another? How right and unaffected are the Oriental perceptions of the West? Or, does it mean that one’s self-image is the true image? The answers may never achieve consensus. But Orientalism as an experience or construction is bound to be a perennial poser so long as the cultural divide and power deferential in favour of the West are both an experienced and remembered fact of history. In this context Amartya Mukhopadhyay’s India in Russian Orientalism is a significant addition to our knowledge and perception of the idea, taking up for analysis and illustration the rich, but not too frequently harvested, Russian travelogues on India.
Amartya Mukhopadhyay enters into the maze of Russian Orientalism with awareness, suggested so eloquently by Ziauddin Sardar, that neither the West nor the Orient is a monolithic entity, but is rather complex, ambiguous and heterogeneous. He also draws from a critical dissection of Orientalism made by Amartya Sen, finding in it several contrasting and conflictual representations such as the ‘curatorial’, the ‘magisterial’ and the ‘exoticist’, in which the first is, unlike what Foucault diagnosed, knowledge is pursued for its own sake, the second conforms to Foucauldian mould and the third looks for an exotic world of fantastic things. The book also makes use of Madina Tlostanova’s idea that what one finds in Russia and her colonies in the nineteenth century is a ‘secondary orientalism which is the direct result of secondary eurocentrism’, because Russia herself had to carry the taint of being an oriental sort in Europe.
Afanasii Nikitin, who visited India between 1469 and 1472, has sometimes been projected as Russia’s own Marco Polo. Scholars like Lionel Tillet have contended that Russia’s interest in Nikitin is post-Stalinist, but Amartya Mukhopadhyay disagrees, pointing out to the continuity of publications on Nikitin from 1821 to 1916 and from 1948 to 1960. However, his Journal has ‘a good stock of unrealistic observations’ as on intelligent monkeys, the nakedness and easy sexuality of Indian women, including their willingness to sleep with other men for money and their particular preference for white men. Looking upon Bidar as the political centre of India, Nikitin has many ill-founded observations on the religious beliefs and practices, food habits of Hindus and Muslims alike, betraying a strong streak of Eurocentrism.
Filipp S. Efremov visited India in the latter half of the eighteenth century and the first edition of his travel accounts appeared in 1786 and the second in 1794. After entering India through Tibet and Kashmir, and passing Delhi and Lucknow before coming down to Calcutta, ‘Efremov leaves uninteresting details of journeys through mispronounced place names, of modes of travel, and distances of these places from Moscow, things which would interest none but historical geographers.’ Rafail Daniebegov, a wealthy Georgian, visited India five times at the end of the eighteenth century, spending an interrupted period of eighteen years. Though his association with India was long and he mixed with local businessmen easily, ‘the uneasiness with a different, non-Western civilization, typical of “Orientalist” representation, frequently lurks in his accounts’. His understanding of the economics of colonialism was as naive as his demography. He was also repelled by polyandry in Tibet.
In contrast to Efremov or Daniebegov, Herasim Stepnovich Lebedev was a genuine Orientalist scholar. An accomplished violinist and composer, Lebedev was familiar with Europe, including England, before he came to India. After a brief stint in Madras where he acquired some knowledge of Tamil, he went to Calcutta where his musical career bloomed, became a sort of ‘fiddler on the loose’, giving between 1787 and 1797 around a dozen concerts in the city. And as interesting was the publication of A Grammar of the Pure and Mixed Indian Dialects (GPMEID). Later scholars found in it a welter of oddities and saw no worth in it save its historical value. Lebedev has also been linked to the two comedies, The Disguise and Love is the Best Doctor, although it has been strongly contested. But he was actively involved in Bengali theatre and produced and directed a few plays. However, he was hounded out of Calcutta as a spy, though such a charge emanated more from paranoia than from any positive proof. Though we find a strong ‘curatorial’ streak in Lebedev’s Orientalism, he was not given due credit for his intimate understanding of or affection for India.
Prince Aleksei Dimitriyevich Saltykov (1806–59) undertook two travels to India between 1841 and 1846, after his short stints in Europe and the Middle East, and his book, a selection of letters, was first published in French in 1848 and later translated into Russian in 1851. He also drew a number of pictures of what he saw in India and wrote long travelogues, which Amartya Mukhopadhyay finds not so easy to classify as either ‘magisterial’, ‘exoticist’ or ‘curatorial’, but sees a free combination of all the stances, in addition to ‘a redeeming aesthetic detachment that is difficult to miss’. His portrayal of small towns and cities in India celebrates both similarities and differences. He had an insuperable zeal of a collector, and he was not altogether free from some of the inherited stereotypes. But he had a ‘healthy interest in Indian girls, but never bordering on voyeurism, or never questioning their virtue’.
Vasily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin (1842–1904) has also been sadly ignored as an author of ‘unspecialized travel literature’. But he was an important figure in the introduction of realism in Russian art and famous for his anti-militarist paintings, and these, together with the accounts of his two visits to India in 1874 and in 1882, are, according to Amartya Mukhopadhyay, too important to be dismissed in such an off-handed manner. His paintings on India were meant to depict ‘the ruthlessness of the colonizers…to break the heroic resistance of the Indian people’. He did not see India as an exotic and backward country, but as a land of strong and courageous people, with a rich culture and a highly developed art. Vereshchagin was a battle painter who loved battle but preached against war. He chose to be in the thick of the battle to experience the heroic, but it also taught him the cruelty and futility of it which he expressed in his series of battle paintings. But the Orientalist trope of Eastern depravity, whether in the mysterious sexuality of women or the pusillanimity and cunning of the male, often gets projected in the travel accounts of Vereshchagin.
Ivan Pavlovich Minaev (1840–1890) is a well-known academic Indologist, with an impressive array of works such as Pali Grammar, Declensions and Conjugations of Sanskrit Grammar, Indian Tales and Legends, Collected in Kumaun in 1875, Indian Tales, Buddhism: Investigations and Materials, translation of Travels of Marco Polo, Ancient India and so on. Drawing from philological and linguistic insights, but beyond his acknowledged presence in Indology, his three visits to India in 1874–75, 1880 and 1885–86 and the Diaries on them are important sources of Minaev’s Orientalist ideas. Some of his ideas about the importance of religion in forging the identities of communities in India did not quite go well with the later Bolshevist establishment. At another level, Minaev had to face the charges of being a Russian spy. He was unhappy about the distorted images of Russia filtered through biased British representations and uneasy with Russia’s image of ‘secondary modernity’; but he was occasionally thrilled to hear the words of welcome to the advent of Russia in some Indian quarters which would end the British rule and the hateful tax burdens it saddled the people with. However, he soon found out that it was not easy to ascertain the real feelings of the Indians towards the Russians, even from some of the well-known academicians and political figures he met. While, like Vereshchagin, Minaev was convinced of the liberating role of Russia in Central Asia, he did not believe that the British mission to civilise the Indians stood any chance of success, because India was unchanging and immutable. The best it could do was to touch a thin film of English-speaking intelligentsia, and Minaev says with unconcealed derision, ‘And this minority talks of progress!’ He seemed to share the Western dread of the Orient, ‘the Continent of Circe, the place of the “Lotos-Eaters”, where the most purposive Westerners get deflected from their rational goals’ (Amartya Mukhopadhyay).
India in Russian Orientalism is a scholarly exploration of the provocative or teasing subject of Orientalism. It does not pit the theme against what are shown as its reverse currents, but seeks to see how Orientalism can be figured out in the context where it is not necessarily propped up by power. That there are Orientalisms within Orientalism is well demonstrated in the book. It does not so much undermine the idea of Orientalism as extend it. Essentialising a culture also perhaps explains why there is pareidolia at work, of seeing what you want to see. But if essentialisation itself is an impulse built into the pursuit of knowledge, such stereotypes will merely reinvent themselves. Amartya Mukhopadhyay has given us a brilliant book to read, relish and ponder over.