ABSTRACT
European orientalism had become merely a scapegoat for the East's own problems, anxieties and pains. Opinion regarding the validity of Edward Said's Orientalism was then mixed. But a pattern of sorts can be detected, based not so much on the nationality and religion of the scholars and intellectuals concerned as on their attitude to history and the modern and post-modern philosophical ideas which frequently influence it. In particular, Said fails to pay proper attention to the part played by orientalism in India, where it contributed to the modernization of Indian vernacular languages and literature, the emergence of historical consciousness, the search for a new identity in the modern world and a reconstruction of Hindu tradition. As for John MacKenzie's accusation that Said's work on orientalism and imperial culture is ahistorical, what is 'strikingly ahistorical' is MacKenzie's blithe assumption that the past can and must be seen for what it really was, and that historians can and must be objective, disinterested and non-ideological.
