Asian World Podcast: Exploring History and Culture with Dr. Michael Hawkins · Professor Michael Hawkins, Ph.D

Orientalism, Pt. 1

·32 min·2 clips

Dr. Hawkins says the legacy is: "You dance for me, but I never dance for you."

1. Asian World Podcast: Exploring History and Culture with Dr. Michael Hawkins focuses on Orientalism and British involvement in India. 2. Dr. Michael Hawkins speaks as the host and scholar, and he uses Bernard Cohn, Edward Said, Ann Laura Stoler, and Frederick Cooper to frame the argument. 3. The episode asks what Orientalism is for: how British power used knowledge to define India for governing purposes. 4. Dr. Hawkins traces the story to the late 18th century, when British Parliament and the Crown regulated the East India Company and extended surveillance into India. 5. He says British bureaucrats wanted knowledge so they could make effective policy, spend money correctly, and govern the subcontinent. 6. He defines Orientalism as the "concerted British effort to discover, define, categorize, and exhibit India for governing purposes." 7. He contrasts British fascination with India’s culture, religion, climate, food, people, and lore with a Western post-Enlightenment way of classifying knowledge. 8. He explains enlightenment epistemology through taxonomy, meaning categories that make trees, rocks, gases, animals, and planets knowable. 9. He uses the asphalt-and-gold example to show how people decide whether something belongs in a category by measuring it against an ideal form. 10. He argues that this same method becomes controversial when human beings are reduced to racial, ethnic, or cultural types. 11. He says British officials asked Brahmins who they were, but the exchange moved toward Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Upanishads instead of a secular identity category. 12. He describes the British response as a claim that they would tell Indians who they were and supply a universal taxonomized grid of humanity. 13. He lists maps, statistical reports, ethnologies, literature, art, poetry, sketchings, museological artifacts, public lectures, and economic analyses as codified knowledge. 14. He cites Bernard Cohn’s line that the British invasion of India was an invasion of "epistemological space" more than physical space. 15. He says the British sought essential figures like the Brahmin scholar, Sikh warrior, Muslim woman, Hindu child, Maharaja ruler, temple, meal, and landscape. 16. He turns to Edward Said’s 1979 book Orientalism and its claim that the Orient was an intellectual invention of Western empire. 17. He then complicates Said by saying the fall of the Soviet Union opened travel and fieldwork for a new generation of scholars in the 1990s. 18. He cites Stoler and Cooper’s 1997 argument that colonial encounters involved negotiation, indigenous agency, and mutual calculation rather than one-way intellectual ownership. 19. The episode sounds conversational and lecture-like, with long explanatory passages, personal anecdotes, and repeated examples from fieldwork and teaching. 20. Listeners interested in empire, colonial knowledge, and Asian history will likely stay; listeners wanting a short, fast narrative may skip it.

As heard by us

British India becomes the starting point for a larger argument about how empire turns categories into tools of rule.

Asian World Podcast's Orientalism, Pt. 1 opens in British India, where the late 18th century nationalization of the British East India Company brings Parliament and the Crown into a tighter regime of surveillance and regulation. Dr.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

A brisk argument about Orientalism, British India, and how empire turned knowledge into policy.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Asian World Podcast: Exploring History and Culture with Dr. Michael Hawkins