South Asian Orient: Colonial Epistemological Inquiry and its Modern Connections

Abstract

As analysts assume that the South Asian regional political environment is difficult to comprehend due to its ethnic divisions and lingual bifurcations as the region hosts more than one and half billion inhabitants divided into India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Maldives, and Sri Lanka. Geographic diversity makes this region unique from all other regions in the world as it is bordered off the Persian Gulf and Arab world through the Indian ocean and opened up from Central Asia to the northern hemisphere. Such a racial, geographic, cultural, lingual and religious diversification had undergone epistemological inquiry during the colonial period in order to devise a central administrative system of regulating Raj’s affairs for the upcoming global world. Therefore, there emerged a unique sense of exploring the unfathomability and multiplicity of the scattering communalities. Through employing Edward W. Said’s critical framework, the present study exposes main theoretical Orientalist formulations by deconstructing major Western theories on South Asian cultures, geography and societies along with its connectivity to the overlapping of global power interests in the present world.