Homer's Turk
Author : Jerry Toner
Publisher : Harvard University Press, $29.95
In Jerry Toner's Homer’s Turk, the voice of the East is largely missing. Because of this shortcoming, says ASHOK VOHRA, the theories in the book are Eurocentric
Every new traveller to an unfamiliar land and its people is baffled not so much by its flora and fauna, climate and other geographical novelties, as by the difficulty in understanding the prevalent social, political and religious practices, customs, culture, traditions and food habits of the habitants. The difficulty becomes more acute when the land and the people are completely alien to the visitor’s culture. With the passage of time he is able to understand, at least superficially, these new practices and becomes familiar with them.
After a considerable time of interaction with the natives and extensive observations of the pattern of their behaviour, the visitor grasps the import of their practices. He finds some family resemblances between the practices of his own customs, culture and tradition, and the ones which he comes across in the unknown land. Still he finds it arduous to express his experiences and observations in a language which would convey to his people back home the true nature, content and extent of the unfamiliar experiences, traditions, and social, political and religious practices of the aliens.
Jerry Toner, in his book Homer’s Turk, argues that Western classics have played a “pivotal role” in understanding and communicating the ingredients, nuances and subtleties of the new civilisation. He argues, “When faced with new world, it has often been to the old world that they (Europeans) have turned to help them understand such novelty”. These Greek and Roman classics, according to him, “provided models and exemplars... a repertoire of rhetorical styles, imagery, comparisons, tropes and representative figures” to enable the travellers to come to grips with the new civilisations and religions. He supports his argument with the travelogues written by several Europeans travellers and historians from Jacobean to modern Hollywood blockbusters, from the Augustan to the post-modern.
The author has based his thesis on the assumption that classical references provide to the traveller “the space to form a more detached, more sympathetic view” of the newly encountered civilisation. “Classics”, according to him, “represented civilisation and itself was believed to hold civilising powers”. As a consequence, he upholds that the classics “acted as a prism through which writers saw the object of their study, one that refracted the images they saw”. It was because of these powers of the classics that the travellers used them as mediations to translate “the East into familiar past in order to familiarise their audience back home”.
The Western authors believed that the classics are the repositories of eternal truths and used the classic texts for three purposes. The first was to preserve “political conservativism”. The second was “to push the claims of reform and revolution”. Finally, the third was to serve “anthropological” purposes — to provide “models of objective history” which, in turn, helped in developing a “heretical framework for interpreting the religious other”.
Homer’s Turk, as Toner agrees, is “a book about English images”. The voice of the Easterners, therefore, is “largely absent”. Because of this shortcoming, the theories in it are one-sided. They are Eurocentric. For example, most of the writings referred to in it conclude that the Orient is “childlike, juvenile and irrational” and that “the Asiatics are born to be slaves”. They view “Europe as a sovereign princess and Asia as her handmaid”. Consequently, it is the task of the English to teach “it about liberty, freedom and democracy”. Too much reliance on the reference to the classics and treating them as final authority only helps in propagating the stereotypes of the orient and interpreting the foreign otherness in irreverent tones.
For instance, too much dependence on the classics led some readers to see the “East as exotic and dangerous as a place of alluring sexuality”. The ancient perceptions of the East led many to believe it as “the place of loose sexual morality, the idea being that the physical heat of the place must result in human beings of certain sexual proclivities”. Even with respect to the literature, the classics — some of which are as old as Alexander — claim that European talents are far superior to the Asian talents.
likewise, the accounts of Indian culture and civilisation in the classics are far from true. They contain descriptions which allege that there are some Indian “men that sleep in their ears”, or “men are without ears”; and, that there are “ants that mine gold” in India. The descriptions also contain libellous accounts as the inhabitants of India “have intercourse with the women in the open and... eat the bodies of their kinsmen”. Besides narrating that it is a land where “tough sophists stand on one leg and hold logs over their heads”, they also claim that it is a land “of flowing milk and olive oil” and that its “people lived to be over four hundred years old but stayed young and beautiful and had no disease”.
European classical literature upholds that Indian culture is “static and unchanging” and has no sense of history and, therefore, of progress. It maintains, “Hindus, at the time of Alexander’s invasion, were in a state of manners, society and knowledge, exactly the same with that in which they were discovered by the nations of modern Europe”. Nothing could be more misleading. This kind of misconception about Indian culture, values, traditions and literature led philosopher-historians like JS Mill to conclude that Indian history “begins with the arrival of the British”. The British, according to such historians, were needed by India “to lead it out of the perpetual standstill in which it was trapped”. Nothing can be farther than the truth then such inferences.
These travellers because of the influence of the Western classics not only upheld that as compared to the advanced West the Orient enjoys only primitive existence. Regarding “the locals as uncivilised cowards”, they also saw “the Orient as having had nothing but a decivilising influence on the West” and “the Orientals as ‘antipathetical’ to an Englishman”. They believed that an ‘East Indian’ is worst of all the Orientals.
The depiction of the Orient in the Hollywood blockbusters shows that even in the present day the West has not been able to shed the classic image of the Orient. In almost all the flicks, “the Orient is shown as a hackneyed backdrop — an ossified society where nothing changes, peopled by caricatures addicted to exoticism, eroticism and decadence, fit only to be oppressed by sadistic despots”.
One may not agree with the author’s interpretation of the concept of ‘classic’ as a ‘plastic concept’, or the conclusions drawn in the book. However, one has to admit that the book is well-researched, readable and accessible.
The reviewer is Professor of Philosophy, University of Delhi