ஆனால் சமீப காலத்தில் 'பகுத்தறிவு' என்று கோஷம் போட்ட கூட்டமெல்லாம் சிலுவை, பிறை நிலா பின்னால் குழுமியாயிற்று. முன்னால் சிலுவையையும், பிறையையும் நிறுத்திப் பின்னாலிருந்து இந்தியப் பண்பாட்டின் மீது சேற்றை அள்ளி வீசும் கூட்டத்தின் கோழைத்தனத்தைப் பற்றித் திரும்பத் திரும்பச் சொல்லி ஏதும் பயனிருப்பதாகத் தெரியவில்லை. ஆனால் குறைந்த பட்சம் இவை ஆவணங்களாக இருக்கட்டும் என்று எழுதுகிறேன்.
வாரக் அசல் பகுத்தறிவு- கேள்வி கேட்டு நியாயத்துக்கு ஒவ்வாதவற்றை சார்புக்காகச் சப்பைக் கட்டு கட்டி ஆதரிக்காமல் எதிர்க்க வேண்டியதை எதிர்க்கிறார். குறிப்பாக இரண்டாம் தர, கூட்டத்தோடு கோஷம் போடும் 'சிந்தனை'யை எதிர்க்கிறார். சிந்தனை எப்போதும் கட்சிக்காக வாதாடாது, அது எது உயர்ந்தது, எது மனிதருக்கு நல்லது, எது நெடும்காலத்துக்கும் தற்காலத்துக்கும் ஒருங்கே சிறந்த விளைவைத் தரும் என்ற சிக்கல்களில் இறங்கித் தெளிவைத் தேடும். மனிதம் தெளிவுக்குத்தான் பயணிக்கிறது.
வாரக் தெளிவைத் தேடும் நபராக எனக்குத் தெரிகிறார். இன்னும் எவ்வளவு பயணிக்கிறார் என்று பார்ப்போம்.
சூ.கா
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ORIENTALISM/SAIDISM
Tendentious Theory Blocks our View
Nowadays when discussing Orientalist art, one often begins with Linda Nochlin's article The Imaginary Orient, a work obviously influenced by Said's Orientalism. Nochlin's article can hardly be called art criticism. It is purely polemic, and, at times, quite hysterical. For her, the important element in any analysis of such art must be "the particular power structure in which these works came into being. For instance, the degree of realism (or lack of it) in individual Orientalist images can hardly be discussed without some attempt to clarify whose [italics in original] reality we are talking about." We are immediately in the fantasy world of relativism and parallel universes—"whose reality," indeed. Nochlin assumes that the Orientalist artist must in every case be a symbol of the prevailing political reality, in other words, in the the grip of blind historical forces against which he is helpless, that he must have an imperialistic agenda, and must be a racist. The thought that the artist may indeed be an individual, with his own personal, aesthetic reasons for being in a foreign land, that he possesses freewill, that the artist may actually love the country and its people that he paints, never seems to have occurred to her. For her, he represents the Occident, out to rape the submissive and backward Orient.
IT IS UNFORTUNATE for her ideological argument that she begins with Gérôme's Snake Charmer, which she claims is "a visual document of nineteenth-century colonialist ideology." It was placed in Constantinople, capital of the Ottoman Empire and seat of the Caliphate, and, of course, was not a European colony. The fact that so many Orientalist artists were working in parts of the Ottoman Empire, in Turkey itself, or Syria and Palestine and the Holy Land, is a simple refutation of this non-stop nonsense about "colonialist ideology." Egypt was conquered by the Ottomans in 1517 and remained a Turkish colony until 1798, when the French expedition under Bonaparte arrived with the intention of reinstating the authority of the Ottomans. The French interlude lasted barely three years. In 1801 a joint British-Ottoman expedition ended the French adventure. Between 1801 and 1882, Egypt was not occupied by a European power, and it was certainly not a European colony, and indeed, in a strict sense, it was never a European colony. It was an Ottoman colony for nearly three hundred years. David Roberts, who painted many magnificent scenes of Egypt and her monuments, died in 1864, and so could not have known that country under European occupation. Algeria was under French rule for 132 years, but as we shall see, those artists who went there developed an affection for and commitment to it, artists such as Eugene Fromentin. Morocco and Tunisia were under French rule for a brief period, roughly forty years each, only in the twentieth century.
Nochlin continues, "the watchers huddled against the ferociously detailed tiled wall in the background of Gérôme's painting are resolutely alienated from us, as is the act they watch with such childish, trancelike concentration. Our gaze is meant to include both the spectacle and its spectators as objects of picturesque delectation." "Ferociously detailed tiled wall?" What exactly is her complaint? The wall is very skillfully rendered, and Gérôme, like many other Orientalist painters, delighted in depicting sensuous, colorful detail of materials, cloths, carpets, costumes, and ceramics and marble. "Childish, trancelike concentration:" apart from the condescension implicit in "childish," Nochlin's finds their gaze "trancelike;" I would describe it rather as "interested," especially the black figure on the left who leans forward in eager anticipation, with a slight smile on his face.
"Clearly, these black and brown folk are mystified—but then again, so are we. Indeed, the defining mood of the painting is mystery, and it is created by a specific pictorial device. We are permitted only a beguiling rear view of the boy holding the snake. A full frontal view, which would reveal unambiguously both his sex and the fullness of his dangerous performance, is denied us. And the insistent, sexually charged mystery at the center of this painting signifies a more general one: the mystery of the East itself, a standard topos of the Orientalist ideology."
NOTICE HOW MS Nochlin's own mystification suddenly, by a sleight of hand, becomes the Orientalists' topos of "the mystery of the East." What is the mystery? We cannot see the boy's genitals. In which case, how does she know he is a he? She finds his buttocks "beguiling," and apparently is disappointed that she cannot see more. She hates being left in an "ambiguous" state. And why are the spectators—condescendingly described by Nochlin as "black and brown folk"!—mystified, since they do have a full frontal view of his sex and hence of his performance? Sexually charged mystery indeed! In what way would a full frontal view reveal to us a "dangerous performance" that is not obvious from the dorsal view? Perhaps the performance is dangerous simply because it involves a snake, but we do not need a front view to figure that out; any angle will do. It is Nochlin herself who leaps from one canvas to generalize about all the Orient. It is Nochlin herself who is guilty of the very reductionistic, essentialist Orientalist generalization of which she accuses this artist. How can one go from one scene depicting a snake charmer to the claim that this represents the entire East? Perhaps it does for Ms Nochlin. It certainly does not for me or thousands of others.
Nochlin claims that the watchers in the painting are "huddled" against a wall, but huddled implies discomfort. They do not look at all uncomfortable. It is Nochlin who is uncomfortable looking at them. She claims that they are "alienated" from "us," but the "us" is really an elliptical expression for herself, for Linda Nochlin. Some of the watchers are looking at the boy with the snake, but some appear to be watching an unrendered event behind the flutist. This further undermines Nochlin's analysis.
"Gérôme suggests that this Oriental world is a world without change." Gérôme, claims Nochlin, avoids the French presence. But there was no French colonial presence in Turkey where this painting is placed. "The absence of a sense of history, of temporal change, in Gérôme's painting is intimately related to another striking absence in the work: that of the telltale presence of Western man. There are never any Europeans in "picturesque" views of the Orient like these." But here Gérôme is not painting a historical subject or scene. All that Nochlin's extraordinary criticism amounts to is a demand that he paint another picture altogether, whose subject matter is to be dictated by her.
"Indeed," continues Nochlin, "it might be said that one of the defining features of Orientalist painting is its dependence for its very existence on a presence that is always an absence: the Western colonial or touristic presence."
ONE CAN IMAGINE what Nochlin's criticism of an Orientalist work that did show a European in one of their paintings would be: "Of course, Gérôme would have to put in a European to remind us that it is really the European who is the master; there is no space that belongs to the Oriental, it has all been usurped by the colonialist. The Oriental cannot be left alone even in his own home....." Nochlin complains about "a plethora of authenticating details," especially the "unnecessary ones." Orientalists are accused of painting an imaginary Orient, and then also accused of "insisting on authenticating details. One cannot have it both ways. Should they have left out the authenticating details? Would that have improved the paintings? And would not these details help dispel the mystery that seems to vex Ms. Nochlin? Surely it is the artist's prerogative to decide which details are necessary and which not.
"Neglected, ill-repaired architecture functions, in nineteenth-century Orientalist art, as a standard topos for commenting on the corruption of contemporary Islamic society." Has Nochlin ever been to the Orient? It is her Orient that seems to be imaginary. Even now, one of the most distressing sights, at least for me as someone originally from India, is the physical decay of so many beautiful historical palaces and monuments in contemporary India. It was even worse in the nineteenth century, until a British Viceroy, Lord Curzon, did something about it. The situation was, and is, similar in North Africa, Syria, Egypt, and other Islamic lands. The Orientalists painted what they saw. It is true that ruins do attract the Romantic mind, and have been popular at least since the ruins of ancient Rome were painted by Hubert Robert [1733-1808]. But delight in ruins is an aesthetic attitude, not a political statement.
New York Times journalist Alan Cowell wrote in 1989 that Cairo "oozes decay." As for Istanbul or Constantinople, Orhan Pamuk's entire book on the city is about decay, ruin, neglect and poverty. He grieves for "a city that has been in decline for a hundred and fifty years;" he finds melancholic joy "in the crumbling fountains that haven't worked for centuries; the poor quarters with their forgotten mosques,...the dilapidated little neighbourhood shops packed with despondent unemployed men; the crumbling city walls like so many upended cobblestone streets....". It is ironic and amusing that Edward Said was himself accused of "Orientalism" in the pejorative sense when he complained of the decay in modern-day Cairo.
And, it is well-attested that tiles in Turkish mosques often fell off simply because of the poor quality of the glue used. To capture that dilapidation in paint is not part of the "project of imperialism". Is not Nochlin's claim that Orientalists always paint a timeless Orient, "a world without change," contradicted by her other claim that Orientalists were always painting decay? Decay is a sign of mutability, that things are no longer what they were. Nochlin wants to have it both ways.
NOCHLIN COMPLAINS THAT there are too many lazy natives in Orientalist paintings, not enough people doing their jobs, not enough activity. But she cannot have looked carefully. There is a rich-toned work by Rudolf Ernst in the Dahesh Museum of two men in their workshop, beating into shape copper objects; Charles Wilda's A Coppersmith, Cairo [1884]; E. Aubry Hunt's The Farrier, Tangiers; Edwin Lord Weeks and Eugène Girardet painted tailors at work; and there are any number of paintings of the bazaar bustling with activity, such as Germain-Fabius Brest's View of Constantinople of 1870, now in the museum in Nantes; Albert Pasini's Bazar at Constantinople; Amadeo Preziosi's Market Scene in Cairo; Fausto Zonaro's Barbers Working in a Square in Constantinople. Then there are busy port scenes in numerous paintings such as Carlo Bossoli's Oriental Port. Dervishes are often portrayed, and they are hardly inactive. There are also paintings of hunting with falcons, guns, on horseback, and so on, as in the works of Eugene Fromentin. And what of the exhilarating sense of movement in Giulio Rosati's Successful Raiding Expedition?
The absence of certain activities in a painter's oeuvre cannot possibly be taken to mean that he, the artist, thought the natives were "a lazy bunch of layabouts." In such a shallow interpretation, from the Dutch and Flemish genre paintings of the seventeenth century one would get the impression that the Dutch spent their entire time in taverns, brothels, and merry-making. There are few paintings of people engaged in any work or craft; exceptions include Metsu's Interior of a Smithy, and Brekelenham's Interior of a Tailor's Shop. Yet we know that seventeenth-century Netherlands was a hive of commercial activity, and extraordinarily successful economically. As the art-historian Wayne Franits notes, there are also few paintings of commercial activities in Dutch ports, but we know how busy the ports were.
Nochlin contemptuously dismisses Delacroix who, she claims, was said to have read Herodotus for descriptions of Oriental debauchery. There are no such descriptions in Herodotus. He gives a sober, not a prurient account, of the well-known institute of temple prostitution, and a sympathetic account of the manners and customs of Orientals.
Nochlin lets fly one baseless charge after another. One wonders if she has bothered to really look at, let alone enjoy, a work of Orientalist art. Here are her final thoughts on Orientalist art: "Works like Gérôme's, and that of other Orientalists of his ilk, are valuable and well worth investigating not because they share the esthetic values of great art on a slightly lower level, but because as visual imagery they anticipate and predict the qualities of incipient mass culture. As such, their strategies of concealment lend themselves admirably to the critical methodologies, the deconstructive techniques now employed by the best film historians, or by sociologists of advertising imagery or analysis of visual propaganda, rather than those of mainstream art history." Evidently, for Ms. Nochlin and her ilk, Orientalist art, as John MacKenzie pointed out, "exists on an entirely different plane from that considered by 'mainstream art history.'" In his brilliant demolition, so far from the fashionable nonsense of 'deconstruction' offered by Said and his ilk, MacKenzie takes them to task for their imprecision, especially the cavalier way they talk about "imperialism". MacKenzie insists, "It will not do to pick and mix artists from different points in the nineteenth century and portray them as locked into a set of racial and imperialist assumptions. The durability of the oriental obsession, from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries must raise doubts that its 'deconstruction' can be anything other than highly complex, producing different results at varying periods, as well as opposing dualities among artists and even within the single artist's work."
ORIENTALIST ART MUST be seen as a continuation of those aesthetic impulses that began at the dawn of Western painting. Many Orientalist painters and sculptors were motivated by the same artistic desires as those of the Renaissance. Gentile Bellini, Carpaccio and other Venetians, but also Rembrandt and the Flemish Pierre Coeck d'Alost, have been mentioned. Nochlin seems irritated by Gérôme's Arabic calligraphy, but in fact, a little "mainstream art history" would reveal that from the late thirteenth century onward, Western artists were fascinated by Oriental scripts and used it in many of their works. Many artists, not knowing Oriental languages or scripts, invented pseudo-scripts for decorative purposes and used them on textiles, gilt halos, and frames for religious images: artists such as Duccio, Giotto, Fra Angelico, Andrea Mantegna, Gentile da Fabriano, and so on. The one exception was Pisanello, who copied almost exactly the Arabic script that says, "al-Muayyad Abu Nasr Shaykh," in his Studies of Costume Worn by the Emperor John VIII Paleologus and Esatern Delegates at the Council of Eastern and Western Churches in Ferrara, 1438, a drawing now in the Louvre. Rosamond Mack points out that "Italians admired the aesthetic qualities of Islamic calligraphy" and used it in patterned textiles. Early Italian painters were confused about Arabic writing, but Mack writes, "the misapprehension was driven by Western veneration of Christianity's Eastern roots and the desire to possess and preserve that sacred heritage."
Artistic concerns were paramount: "Artistic concerns also played an important role in the various adaptations of Arabic writing and the Islamic objects on which such writing appeared. Giotto and his contemporaries developed an immediately recognizable version of the Eastern honorific garment to make their representations more vivid and, and in their view, more accurate. The imitation writing on halos and frames was ornamentally sophisticated, consistent with the Eastern garments, and perhaps also emphasized that these were images of a universal faith." Aesthetic concerns, along with the ubiquitous Western desire for universalism, were the main impelling forces.
Gérôme and other Orientalists were more successful in rendering Arabic script; they also admired the aesthetic qualities of Arabic calligraphy. Referring to the Arabic inscriptions in Gérôme's Snake Charmer, Nochlin quotes Ettinghausen, a great scholar and expert on Islamic Art, as saying that they could "be easily read." Then Nochlin adds a contradictory footnote: "Edward Said has pointed out to me in conversation that most of the so-called writing on the back wall of the Snake Charmer is in fact unreadable." Pace Said, the large frieze at the top of the painting, running from right to left, is perfectly legible. It is the famous verse 256 from Surah II, al-Baqara, The Cow, written in thuluth script.
UNFORTUNATELY, THE INSCRIPTION thereafter is truncated, so that the upper part is lost, but even then one can make out parts of it, probably not a Koranic verse but rather a dedication to a caliph; the name Uthman is just visible, and possibly the word Sultan. The Turkish artists and architects often added a dedication in mosques, and even on coats-of-arms, such inscriptions as, “The ruler of the Ottoman Empire, Sultan Abdülhamit who puts his trust in God." Or was Gérôme simply copying faithfully a real wall with those very verses? I have learned from Professor Gerald Ackerman that Gérôme executed the painting in his Paris studio, copying a photo from the Topkapi Palace published by Abdullah Frères, the Istanbul photography firm. This discovery makes Nochlin's remarks even further off the mark.
Many copper vessels, plates, and weapons decorated with silver and gold and produced in Egypt, Turkey, or Morocco, both contemporary and those manufactured a hundred years ago, show what purport to be Arabic scripts or inscriptions, but in fact are gibberish, since the artisan producing such objects is often illiterate, certainly ignorant of Classical Arabic, and the complex rules of Arabic calligraphy.
Let me summarize: Does the frieze represent actual writing? The answer is yes. Is the writing in any sense legible? Here again, the answer is yes. It is not easily legible, but nor are all the stylized inscriptions in, for instance, the Dome of the Rock. It is simply a feature of Islamic calligraphic art, and in this case Gérôme was not inventing the writing. But even if Gérôme had invented the inscriptions, what conclusion would follow? Only that Gérôme did not know Arabic. But neither does Nochlin. If Gérôme's ignorance of Arabic is an obstacle to painting about the Orient, why isn't Nochlin's ignorance of Arabic (or Turkish) an obstacle to writing about Orientalism in art?
There were at least four hundred Orientalist artists of stature, British, American, French, Italian, and German, producing thousands of works of quality and artistic merit. It does not do to generalize about artists from so many varied backgrounds, each with his cultural, and above all, aesthetic perspectives, in the calumniating fashion that Nochlin does. It is Nochlin who sees the entire Orient defamed in one painting. It is her generalizations and tendentious readings that are offensive. It is she who is degrading the Orient by such claims, not the artists she misreads and exploits for tendentious ends. These artists often portrayed the essential dignity of that non-European Other, the Oriental.
Ibn Warraq is a writer and debater. The article is a revised chapter from his study Defending the West. A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism, to be published in September 2007 by Prometheus Books.
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