The publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 is commonly viewed as inaugurating trends which have ever since been rather dominant, howsoever widespread the uneasiness and, indeed, resistance which Said’s ideas have increasingly generated. Said argued that, alongside their military triumphs and economic conquests of “the Orient”, Europeans created an entire body of knowledge which enabled them to represent the Orient; such representations, moreover, far from having any necessary relationship to the Orient, reveal more about Europeans than they do about the ‘natives’ and their social institutions, cultural practices, and the like. Orientalism is, in short, a style of thought, the “corporate institution for dealing with the Orient,” [1] and by means of Orientalism, Europeans sought to categorize, analyze, dissect, measure, dominate, rule, and instruct the native. The capsule summaries of Orientalism, when undertaken in reference to the “Saidian” frameworks which have informed the study of Indian history, do not fail to mention that in Orientalism Said only very infrequently had occasion to refer to Indian history, [2] and that, notwithstanding Said’s enthusiastic advocacy of subaltern history nearly a decade later, [3] Said had only a peripheral interest in Indian history or even India. Nonetheless, Said became a figure of paramount importance for those who sought to understand British India not through military history, policy studies, and economic history, but rather through, in the language of Foucault, the ‘discursive formations’ that were put into place by the colonial regime and, subsequently, the nationalist elites.

From the standpoint of Indian historiography, Said’s work had at least one other, usually less commonly noted, consequence whose reverberations would eventually be felt deeply in the India study circles in the American academy. At least a decade before the publication of Orientalism, Bernard S. Cohn, then professor of history and anthropology at the University of Chicago, had already anticipated the arguments of Foucault and Said in his work on representations of Indian society. [4] Said, to take one example, also described Orientalism as a kind of textualist fetish. [5] The Orientalist scholar, who generally began his career as a philologist, viewed the societies that fell under his gaze as easily appropriable through their texts, indeed as societies that perforce had to conform to texts, particularly those that, in the Orientalist view, were authoritative for native people. In a lengthy piece entitled “Notes on the History of the Study of Indian Society and Culture”, Cohn, pointing to the extraordinary importance that Orientalists attached to such texts as the Manusmriti as “accurate guides to the culture and society of the Hindus”, observed that “the acceptance of a textual view of the society by the orientalists also led to a picture of Indian society as being static, timeless, and spaceless.” [6] (1). Alongwith military triumphs and economic conquests of “the Orient”,the occident created an entire body of
knowledge. (2).The representations of the orient reveal more about Europeans than they do about the ‘natives’ and their
social institutions & cultural practices.(3). Aim was to categorize, analyze, dissect, measure, dominate, rule, and instruct the
native. (4)extraordinary importance attached to such texts as the Manusmriti as “accurate guides to the culture and society
of the Hindus. (5)observed that the ACCEPTENCE OF THE TEXTAL VIEW OF THE SOCIETY. (6). It led to a picture of Indian
society as being static, timeless, and spaceless.

	Created by Aliya Ban over 8 years ago

Sociology Note on Bernard cohn- Summary of the essay , created by Aliya Ban on 07/07/2018.