WHERE IS THE EAST?

Amrita Ghosh

What do we do when we talk about, or think of, the West? Consciously or

unconsciously, we envisage the West in terms of its binary opposite: the
East. But what is the East; and where exactly is the East located?
The term ‘East’ has always been in vogue in the Eurocentric visions, usually
conjuring ideas of mysticism and certain cultural and ideological differences
between the East and the West. Lately it has also been loosely synonymous
with a new age interest and invention of ‘eastern yoga’ and discovering the
spiritual self through what is constructed as the East. But locating the spatial
denomination of the term raises some curious problems. Which part of the
world shall we unanimously agree is the East? East of what? The word ‘East’
undoubtedly invokes a certain spatial imaginary, a topographical production
which is both a real and imagined concept, but it also ushers in crucial
questions about its frame of reference – is it the Far East, Middle East or the
Near East that is being conjured in the term; or is it a strange amalgamation
of all three that curiously becomes the ‘East?’ Thus, what has become of this
term is a problematic monolith in the western eye.
Furthermore, the question of spatiality also needs to be merged with
‘what’ the idea or construction of East means historically and in
contemporary culture. Certainly, the discursive multiplicity of the term has
changed or been reshaped over a vast span of time and space. Benjamin
Disraeli’s famous uttering, ‘The East is a career’, that Edward Said famously
used as an epigraph in his seminal work, Orientalism, perhaps still becomes
the best possible answer to analyse the practices of the term. More
specifically, there is a growing trend that frames the East as a way of
consumable exotic, selling Bollywoodian sensibility in the global market. In
what we understand as the post 9/11 world, the word invokes a vision of
radical alterity of the Middle East, as the threatening Other against Western

CRITICAL MUSLIM 20, OCTOBER–DECEMBER 2016

58
WHERE IS THE EAST? 59

modernity, which itself is extremely problematic as it diffuses various

historicities and specificities over a vast space.
The earliest usage and production of the term has its foundation in the
East India Company and the British Empire. The East was initially
prevalently used in the imperial framing of British colonies in India and
parts of South Asia. Later, with the British imperial expansion and oceanic
travel explorations, the term became analogous with China, Japan and some
other countries in the far eastern topography. Thus, one notices that from
the early discursive emergence of the word East, there begins a problematic
homogenous construction, which was by no means a natural cohesive
existence. Along with this awkward homogenising of geographical space,
the Far East had already been tagged with the ‘wondrous’ discourse that
peaked during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The cultural
historian Surekha Davies explains that:
from classical antiquity to the Enlightenment, the distant East was associated
with wondrous beings in the European imagination.... From the fifteenth cen-
tury, European oceanic exploration began to reveal hitherto unknown regions
of the globe...The distant East—often termed India—was sometimes conflated
with a region called Ethiopia which was variously placed in Africa or Asia.

Davies’ work tracks this idea of ‘wonder, disbelief, surprise’ about the
East and its peoples and culture by charting a chronology of travel writers
and mapmakers from the medieval times to the seventeenth century.
Clearly, there was confusion in delineating precise geographical regions to
the Eastern spaces and as Davies notes, cartographers and travel writers
dealt with ambiguity and tension in the aspect of verisimilitude and not
everyone attempted to sensationalise the East. She argues that ultimately
the mapmakers and writers allowed the readers to ascertain what they
would believe about the narrative on the East based on the multiple doubts
and lack of realism in many accounts. However, one thing is still certain in
the various narratives that emerged during this time: even in a discourse on
the East fraught with contradictions, its codification as exotic and wondrous
was a palpably common practice that seeped into the popular imagination
which could not be erased from any discourse of the ‘problematic’ East.
Gradually, the Far East became slowly synonymous with China, Japan and
some countries in the far eastern rim, and the term Near East and Middle
60 AMRITA GHOSH

East came to be dubiously interchanged. The geographer Karen Culcasi

suggests that ‘Great Britain’s possessions in South Asia made the Middle East
not only a geo-strategically important region but also the middle of the
journey east to India; hence the term “Middle East”.’ However, despite the
imperialist genesis of the term, the space denoted by the imperial
framework was still vague, implying anything between the ‘Far East’ and the
‘Near East,’ between the Mediterranean and Indian oceans. In 1948, the
United Nations defined the Middle East to be spread across three continents
including Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Saudi Arabia,
Yemen, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Greece. The administration of George W. Bush
adopted the label as recently as 2004 for a region extending from Morocco
to Pakistan. Whatever be the larger and problematic categorisation of
countries for understanding the term, it is crucial to note that the term
comes with an ideological production in hegemonic narratives that reflects
a violent, backward region with Islamic fundamentalism, oppression, and
lack of freedom or democracy. Such a spatial denomination has clouded our
minds especially in the post 9/11 world, with East having a synonymous
undercurrent of religious Islamic fundamentalism, crisis, bloodshed and
lack of peace. Thus, a certain current imaginary about the East has become
merged with this idea of the Middle East, whose spatiality is still not clear.
Most significantly, as Culcasi rightly points out, this kind of lumping areas
with an Islamic culture ‘not only ignores non-Arab/Muslims living in the
region but also potentially merges these two distinct cultural traits into one
uniform characteristic’. It also fails to realise that ‘the Arabs from Morocco
to Egypt to Iraq differ immensely in their history, local practices, and
dialects’. A larger problem of such a construction of Middle East is the
creation of a homogenous, monolithic vision of Islam as a religion, ignoring
the nuances and diversities amidst the Muslim people, who are then lumped
together into a dangerous representation that gains currency in popular,
normative culture.
The East is thus a non-space, difficult to locate cartographically, a term
which is more socially and politically constructed and shifted in different
temporalities and power discourses.The best understanding of the problematic
monolithic representations of the East comes from Edward Said’s Orientalism,
which remains, I would argue, as important now as when it was first published
in 1978. In the introduction, Said explains orientalism as:
WHERE IS THE EAST? 61
a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic,
sociological, historical and philological texts; it is an elaboration of not only a
basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, the
Orient and the Occident) but also of a whole series of ‘interests’, which, by
such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological
analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also
maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to under-
stand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a
manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world.

Said sees the ideological and discursive emergence of the Orient as a

constructed antithesis to the Western imagination. And this imagination
exists on an uneven exchange of power, where the Occident has the
capability of constructing, discovering and imagining the east in ways that
invoke wonder, monstrosity, barbarism, violence, backwardness and lack of
reasoning. Evidently, the representation of the Middle East is not much
different from Said’s explanation of the genesis of the Eastern Orient held
in the Western imagination. Lately, the construct of East in contemporary
culture has emerged with an orientalism redux where locating the spatiality
becomes insignificant to a large extent. Apart from far east cultures of
China and Japan, where the discourse is one of more benevolent wondrous
exoticism, the terminology presently holds on to what Said long ago
labelled as the idea of East in the Western yardstick.
If one extreme of knowing what the East means is through the prism of
the post 9/11 world, another extreme can be stated to be the post-Slumdog
Millionaire interest in the East in a very specific fetishised way. Bollywood’s
large diasporic audience and wide popularity across cultures has been
distinct since the post-liberalised economy of India opened its markets and
borders. At about the same time as Danny Boyle’s 2008 movie, a plethora
of films and media programmes gave rise to a resurgence of interest in the
East (The Darjeeling Limited [2007], Eat, Pray, Love [2010], The Best Exotic
Marigold Hotel [2012]). This construction of East in the entertainment
industry, designed for the consumption of West, is intrinsically sprinkled
with a benign orientalism.
Under the project of globalisation, the once accepted binaries of the
North-South and West-East have supposedly broken down, generic borders
have vanished or at least they have been problematised and questioned. Also
62 AMRITA GHOSH

gone, as Gayatri Spivak reminds us, are ‘such nice polarities as modernity/
tradition, colonial/postcolonial’. Globalisation has not only connected the
world but is also transforming a range of social relations be they culture,
economic or political. While globalisation may have dissolved all kinds of
boundaries, it takes place, as Spivak reminds us, essentially in terms of
‘capital and data’ – that is, the flow of capital via the transnational
companies who have the power to decide which ‘data’ and information
would construct a certain ‘worlding of a world.’ Here, the age old
essentialised binaries of Occident and Orient are not only maintained but
pose a grave problem in a world where intermixing of communities,
cultures and religions are increasingly common. They project a more
damaging aspect of stereotyping and essentialist elements of culture,
religions and regions that broaden the North-South gulf even more. Not
surprisingly, globalisation and orientalism go hand in hand, because a
western hegemony is still maintained in this flow of capital and certain kind
of data. The ‘universalisation of capital’ through a corporate-funded thrust
for the global then becomes responsible for the production of a redux
orientalism, which caters to an evolution of a universal ‘eastern subject.’
A good illustration of the emergence of redux orientalism in the post
globalised world is provided by Oprah Winfrey’s two-episode film, India,
The Next Chapter (2012). Our heroine travels to India, visits various Indian
cities, and ‘educates’ Western viewers about the elites and subalterns of the
Indian socio-cultural fabric. Oprah’s goal, as stated by her, is to ‘spread little
pieces of light in this world’. To depict a more ‘authentic’ representation of
India, Oprah visits Mumbai’s slum dwelling population, as well as a wealthy
upper middle class family in her journey. The camera first pans through the
urban city, and stops to focus on a gathering crowd that has collected on the
roads to see the shooting. Oprah turns to the camera and notes, ‘even
though there’s lots of people and there’s lots going on, there is sense of
karma’. Elsewhere, during an interview with Indian journalist Barkha Dutt
about her Indian experience, Oprah stresses that:
whether it is Jaipur, or Agra, whether you are in Mumbai, or the countryside
with the widows, or with glitterati, you feel like you are in the centre of some-
thing bigger and greater than yourself. And although everybody kinda looks the
same [italics mine], there is a lot of diversity in India, you feel like you are in a
WHERE IS THE EAST? 63
part of humanity, where your humanity is being expanded; I feel opened and
expanded by this experience.

There are two narratives that are critically worthy of our attention here.
First, the epistemological production of a spiritual essence of India and its
people, where the chaos of people and ‘lot going on’ still has the
undercurrent of a karmic solution. The problem with that kind of
ethnography is that it not only misrepresents a culture and the people, but
it exhibits a sense of spirituality as a spectacle, a new-age spirituality pill
that provides instant solace and therapy to the western subject and helps in
its consolidation of self-hood against the native other. How, one wonders,
one can look at a crowd on the street and experience a karmic essence?
More problematically, Oprah’s interview with Barkha Dutt echoes Joseph
Conrad’s journey into the ‘heart of darkness’ where all native subjects are
devoid of individualised identity: ‘they look the same’ and yet their
‘othering’ affirms the opening and expansion of the Western subjectivity. It
is distinctly reminiscent of Edward Said’s claim that the discourse of
orientalism is not about the orient; rather, it is instrumental in defining the
western, European self. Oprah’s assertion that her humanity is being
expanded and opened, no matter how benevolent and seemingly innocuous
it sounds, serves as a token to this kind of manifest orientalism where the
Western self is reaffirmed in its difference – yes, the eastern subject is
human, but is a different human subject, and in this difference lies the
‘opening’ and construction of the western self-hood. People from the East
still remain quasi-caricatured figures of exotic wonder and spirituality.
Ultimately, this has become the other extreme of tokenising the East in
postnormal times. Oprah’s television programme is just one glimpse of the
many representations of the East in popular culture, media, films, which
highlight that the nature of neo-colonial imaginings of orientalism are still
relevant and thriving in the present context. Disturbingly enough, in the
renewed codes of a globalised world, this representation of an othered space
and its people commodifies a new passage to the East as the consumable
exotic whose projection is good for consumption in global markets. It
reaffirms the new age orientalist discourse of finding oneself in an exotic
escape to the ‘East.’
64 AMRITA GHOSH

The East is thus an imaginary construction to be found somewhere

between spatial and ideological stations. Yet, it would still be valid to ask,
where does one nonetheless find and locate the East between the two
extremes in the post 9/11 and post-Slumdog Millionaire world? It would be
fair to say that the dilemma of the question precisely indicates where the
answer lies. That is, locating the ‘East’ is not possible. No matter how
certain social and political discourses attempt in defining or framing the
East, it is not a homogenous space, nor is it an essential realm. Such
discourses only reflect the hegemonic power that ideologically produces an
idea of East that is not a naturalised state, only adding to harmful projections
of an ever-increasing North-South faction. And yet, one may argue that the
‘real’ East lies somewhere, where the hegemonic flattening of history and
spatiality ends.
In Provincializing Europe, the Indian historian Dipesh Chakravorty provides
a glimpse of a potential answer. He calls for a rewriting of history from
within the ‘East’; a history that would become an alternative to the
established ideas of framing, locating and defining the East. Perhaps, only
then we can move towards finding the East, in reconstructing our
imaginations towards, what Chakravorty calls, the ‘anti-modern’
consciousness. In the end, one needs to go beyond the East-West binary in
order to truly break the impasse. This is where the overarching question of
locating and understanding the East becomes a critical one. Only by
breaking and shifting the age-old existing status quo will we be able to
rethink afresh and move towards more viable and humane dimensions of
representations of identities and cultures.