A photograph of four orientalists (Bombay, 1885): knowledge production, religious identities, and the negotiation of invisible conflicts

Abstract By analyzing the history of a photograph taken in a Bombay photo studio in 1885, this article explores notions of the production of knowledge on India and cultural dialogues, encounters, appropriations, and conflicts in colonial British India in the late nineteenth century. The photograph was taken after a Hindu religious ceremony in honour of the Italian Sanskritist Angelo de Gubernatis. Dressed as a Hindu Brahman, he is the only European photographed next to three Indian scholars, but what the image suggests of encounter and hybridity was challenged by the many written texts that reveal the conflicting dialogues that took place before and after the portrait was taken. Several factors were examined in order to decide who should and who should not be in the photograph: religion, cast, and even gender were successively discussed, before the category of “knowledge” became the bond that unified the four men who studied, taught, and wrote on India

Orientalism and the puzzle of the Aryan invasion theory

The origin of the Aryan invasion theory (AIT) is generally located in the discovery of the Indo-European and Dravidian language families. However, these discoveries cannot account for the emergence of the AIT, because the postulation of the invasion preceded the linguistic research. In its search for an alternative account of the cognitive conditions under which this theory could come into being, this article illustrates a particular way of studying the intellectual history of Orientalism. The Orientalist discourse on India is approached as a body of reflections on the western cultural experience of India. This perspective brings us to the thesis that the pre-conditions for the emergence of the AIT lay in the postulation of two entities in the Orientalist discourse on India: the ‘Hindu religion’ and its ‘caste system’. Both these notions and the AIT appeared cogent and coherent to European minds, because they mirrored internal developments within European culture and its intellectual debates, which had given shape to Europe’s experience of India

German Romantics Imagining India : Friedrich Schlegel in Paris and Roots of Ethnic Nationalism in Europe

When, some two centuries ago, German Romantics turned their backs on modernity – industrialisation, urbanisation, commerce and secularisation – they turned to ancient India. For them, India exemplified the primordial unity of mankind with this and the afterworld. For sections of the emerging nationalist movement in Germany, found the deployment of India handy to question the cultural hegemony, and eventually break the political dominance, of France. They tried to surpass the French, who claimed the ancient Roman heritage, by claiming an even older heritage for the Germans. Friedrich Schlegel for example suggested that the German language, and not the French, stood in unbroken continuity with ancient Sanskrit. For Romantics such as he, Sanskrit, the oldest surviving Indo-European language, was closest to the language of original divine revelation. This lead Schlegel to romanticise India in a way that stood in marked contrast to the Orientalist clichés current in other parts of Europe at the time. For him, the link between Sanskrit and German made Germany the true oriental self of Europe. The importance of this particular representation of India for the German national movement is underlined by the great number of university chairs that sprang up in the course of the nineteenth century: twenty two in Germany as opposed to only three in the United Kingdom. This paper explores the particular kind of ‘inverse’ Orientalism of the Germans in the context of its recent post-colonial critique

Prophet Hazrat Muhammad’s S.A.W Personal Names; Approaches of Contemporary Orientalists

In the sixteen to twenty-first centuries a number of Seerah books were written in the aspect of anti-Islamic view. Orientalists started to research on the Prophet Muhammad S.A.W different aspects of life. They started their biased research to fulfill their missionary aims. In that situation, the orientalists of the mid-nineteenth to the twenty-first century had changed their vision towards Islam and Prophet Muhammad’s S.A.W Seerah as well. These orientalists are less biased and show a soft image of Islam and Prophet Muhammad’s S.A.W Seerah. They show their positive face towards the East. Prophet Muhammad S.A.W carries an abundance of attributive names Asmā’u ’n-Nabiyy which are given on His S.A.W noble characteristics and also Allah Almighty calls his beloved Prophet S.A.W with different epithets. The main focus of this research work is to explore the approaches of orientalists and somehow clear the doubts of orientalists and western scholars of the modern age in regard to Prophet Muhammad’s S.A.W pious names

ظاهرة الوحي القرآني في دراسة المستشرقين الفرنسيين

The Phenomenon of Quranic Revelation in the Study of French Orientalists This research deals with the study of the pure revelation of the French orientalists by researching the phenomenon of revelation about the People of the book, and the phenomenon of revelation in modern European thought, and standing at examples of the French orientalists, through the definition of revelation and inspiration, and the apathy of revelation..

Book Review: Many Ways of Pluralism: Essays in Honour of Kalarikkal Poulose Aleaz

A review of Many Ways of Pluralism: Essays in Honour of Kalarikkal Poulose Aleaz edited by V. J. John

A Critical Review of the Objections of the Orientalists to Islamic Civilization and Values

Orientalism has been involved in spreading propaganda against Islam from its beginning. Orientalists (sometimes in the form of researchers, sometimes in the form of businessmen and sometimes in form of religious scholars) collect information about Islam, Prophet of Islam and the Islamic world. On the base of this information, they attack on different aspects of Islam with their fabricated and self-made propaganda. In this Article a critical analysis of Orientalists objections about Islamic Culture and civilization is presented. In the beginning, the Orientalists who researched the Islamic civilization have been reviewed.  Later, the objections of the Orientalists to the veiling of Muslim women, the misinterpretation of the veil, the attempts to associate the veil with the elite, the presentation of the veil as a custom instead of the order of the Islamic Sharia and the efforts of the Orientalists to disparage Islamic morals and dignity through painting has been reviewed.  The article discusses the spectacle of the snake charmer, the sale of naked women in slave markets, half-naked maids in Moroccan baths, and images of extrajudicial executions