South Asia Citizens Web

Can one go back into the past to fix the future? Only perhaps in Hollywood movies and in the election campaign of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s prime ministerial hopeful Narendra Modi.

The ’central thesis’ of Urs Apps book is that the birth of ’modern’ Orientalism was deeply linked to Europe’s ’discovery of Asian religions’. He challenges the view that modern Orientalism originated with Western imperialism or colonialism, a view sometimes associated with the work of Edward Said (Orientalism, 1978) instead tracing its gradual evolution, as it were, to a period from the late 17th century to the early 19th century, before the high noon of Western imperialism in Asia (pp. xi, xiii). The upshot of the inquiries of the progenitors of modern Orientalism was ultimately to undermine the Bible-based worldview and historical chronology that drew on the Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible), a worldview and chronology that App informs us was still widely accepted even in the 19th century.

Mr.Modi’s reconstructions of facts issue from well-established tradition of the Hindu right wing, wherein historiography is more often a matter of unanalyzed prejudice and timely convenience than of adherence to fact and evidence.

Royal Bengal tigers in India Photograph: David Yarrow Photography
(The Guardian 8 November 2013)
see also: David Yarrow face to face with nature – in pictures

Mr Abid Hasan Minto, president of the Awami Workers’ Party, has done well to go before the Supreme Court to challenge the 1990 judgement of the Federal Shariat Court’s appellate bench declaring land reforms to be un-Islamic. After that judgement it became fashionable to pronounce the demise of feudalism in Pakistan. Some economists of repute challenged leftist views on the subject. It was widely propagated that Pakistan is no more an agrarian economy. It was also said that the country was urbanising fast and the rural-urban divide was not sharply delineated any more.