Book Review: Orientalism, Terrorism, Indigenism, South Asian Readings in Postcolonialism by Pavan Kumar Malreddy

Reviewed by Sourav Banerjee

Title: Orientalism, Terrorism, Indigenism, South Asian Readings in Postcolonialism
Author: Pavan Kumar Malreddy
Publisher: SAGE Publications India Private Limited
Pages: 170
Price: INR 795/-

The author of this book is Pavan Kumar Malreddy, a Researcher at the Institute for English and American Studies, Goethe University, Frankfurt. He is famous for his essays in various journals on radical issues affecting the world in the field of race, post-colonialism, terrorism, and indigenous politics. In this book, the author successfully contributes to the detailed aspect and conceptualization of contemporary subjects such as terrorism, orientalism and Dalit Bahujan movements and how the same is received in popular media along with academic literature. The author has taken excerpts from contemporary occurrences with regard to the efflux of postcolonial structure of terrorism and orientalism that has emerged in South Asian countries. The contradiction took place internally between South Asian approaches to post colonialism (Subaltern Studies) and its European counterparts along with the resistance produced by the indigenization of local literary traditions in the work of select South Asian literary figures.

In “Discourses: Orientalism, Terrorism and Popular Culture” the author illustrates how, as if the advent of the cold war and its impact on the world at large was not good enough, the attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, famously known as 9/11, altered the landscape of western thought process, infusing notions of terrorism and religious intolerance as serious existential challenges, along with its approach to the Orient. While governmental issues quickly aligned to the changing world requirements, the vocabulary of the worldwide talks slurped up terms up to this point, sneaking in the shadowy interests of the Orient, as seen by the west. At the same time, with the collapse of communism in Europe, dialogues arrived at the decision to terminate ‘privatization’. The attack by ‘Al Qaeda’, headed then by Usama ibn Mohammed ibn Awad Ibn Ladin (popularly known as Osama Bin Laden) on 9/11, gave birth to phobias, suspicion, segregation, and furthermore, a still staggering nativism. It further narrates how the orientalists believed that Arabs are uncivilized and Islam was a religion meant to be followed by terrorists. Muslims in massive numbers propagated Islam and called for stability, unification, the only way for development and hope to sustain on this planet, carrying the slogan of ‘Islam is the solution.’ With the attack of 9/11, ‘Terror from the east’ emerged and the world’s supposedly most powerful nation, the United States of America, found itself in a fragile and vulnerable position as prey to religious extremism. The orientalists brought to light the lesser developed eastern countries to take an upper hand of their might over the rest.