Reading Wajahat Qazi’s article on Orientalism in Kashmir Observer led me to a simple but consequential question: Should postcolonial critique become a substitute for self-criticism?

While the article engages with the concepts of Orientalism and postcoloniality, it features abstractions that distort the analytical lens of Orientalism. 

Consequently, the article seems to impose the generalisations and abstractions it intends to critique.

The Europeans constructed the Kashmir imagery through three tropes: paradise, degeneration, and governability. However, the thematic scope of Qazi’s Orientalism discourse is confined to the degeneration tropes, and this response restricts itself accordingly. 

Although the author confines the colonial tropes to “lazy, indolent, sensuous and childlike,” the colonial tropes went further. Forster calls the Kashmiris proverbially unclean, filthy, lacking courage and moral discipline, fickle, deceitful, treacherous and cruel. Moorcroft calls them dissolute. Vigne labels them cunning. Lawrence depicts them as liars in the courtroom, rumour mongers, snitches and jealous people. Bruce calls them whining and cringing, lazy, flatterers and pessimistic people. 

However, the author not only avoids engaging with the rationale, incentives and implications of these tropes for European power generation, but actively calls to subtract the variables from the equation. 

The author premises the discussion by proposing to “subtract Orientalism’s entanglement with power and........

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