Orientalism and Post colonial Predicament in South-Asia

Abstract

Both colonialism and modernity assumed the absence of material aspects of South Asian civilizations, however postmodernism, in contrast, challenged non-material aspects (i-e. belief systems) of its civilizations by denigrating them as superstitious cults. The historic religions as well as the political actuality of the South Asian traditional societies are declared simply as unauthentic in postmodern religions and politics. This dissertation is scholarly input of a larger intellectual scholarship to interact the field of comparative civilization with the literature of South Asian religious societies, the variances in postcolonial and postmodern theory, as well as emerging postmodern religion. This study relates these theoretical frameworks to South Asian civilizations and, particularly, to an assertion by Western postmodernists that there is an inherent absence of ‘skepticism’ in non-Western South Asian religious societies and they are not a handmaiden to secularism. During the core investigation, this study explores how postmodern authority as against its claim for rejection of modernity – in fact, adds to modernists’ allegations for the absence of civilization. How this new shape-shifter authority is a perpetuation and reinstatement of classical European Orientalism and how this new humanism consumes the postcolonial South Asia through its ahistorical representation? In responding to these inquiries, this study puts forward that postmodernism – retains Christianity’s will to power and in the process – formats postmodern secular man and that, genealogically, Christian-secular labels and thoughts re-relegated South Asia to the twilight zone beyond civilization. Thus, relatively comparative civilization has existed in epistemological segregation. In this dissertation, the key objective is to understand how colonial and modern history has consolidated Europeanisation of Christianity in which the comparative study of South Asian nations emerges in postmodern times. How the religion contributes to the Western self perception, and what is the state of comparative norms under such relativisation of truth-claims? This dissertation argues that we should understand postmodern dualism, and the rebirth of secular-spiritual urgency.