Aspects Of Edward Said’s Orientalism In R. K. Narayan’s Malgudi

Abstract

Man is born with an insatiable thirst for exploring the untraveled and untouched territories. Orientalism in this sense is the brain child of Europeans who wanted to get into the eastern territories and explore the East. According to Said, the West labels these societies as a static and undeveloped. Western society is developed, rational, flexible and superior. This book reviews the history of this idea and how it’s still prevalent today. Western people fabricated views of Eastern nations. Western nations falsified information about the East for their own.

The contradiction is compared and juxtaposed with Edward Said’s projection of the Orients and Occidents. Narayan expresses the gradual intrusion of the Orients consciousness into the Occidents conscience in the form of civilization and cultural advancement Malgudi faces unending clashes between the civilized and uncivilized, between the ancient and the modern, between the strong and weak, between the blacks and the whites, between the hierarchy and subaltern, between the named and the nameless and between the east and the West. In The Empire Writes Back, Bill Ashcroft describes “all the culture attacked by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the contemporary day” (Ashcroft 2).