Orientalism and India

Abstract

In this article Orientalism, a special hegemonic discourse about "the Orient" by Europeans is discussed by focusing on how it is manifested in a "Western" view of India. Orientalism as a discourse about the Orient is a concept first coined by Edward Said in his book Orientalism (1978) and contains a long history of European way of relating to the Orient as a counterpart of European/Western culture. In this article Orientalist discourses about India by hegemonically Western (and particularly Anglo-Saxon) sources are portrayed and the so-called Indo-Orientalist essentialism defining Indianness from the outside analyzed. Moreover, a Indo-Orientalism as an imported ideology to be used in Indian nationalist discourses to emphasize a dichotomy between India and "the West" is discussed.