Orient Romanticised: Disruption of Orient’s Reality in Select Occidental Literary Discourses

Abstract

This article critically analyses the side effects of the Western Imperialism through their careful manufacturing of Orientalism as a discourse over centuries and promoting a stereotyped ‘Oriental’ flavour through its literature such as, Thomas Moore’s narrative poem, Lalla Rookh (1817) that essentially obeys to confine to the identity of the Orient. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1989) forms the foundation of the article and studies the role of an Orientalist in the process of Orientalising the East, as the middleman between the East and West that helped substantiate the image of the stereotyped Orient by contributing to the literature. Modern Orientalism has a recurring theme of identity crisis and displacement, which roots from the long history of exploitation faced by the people in the name of The White Man’s Burden, coined in an 1899 poem by Rudyard Kipling as a symbol of his compassion towards the white supremacy. The article also identifies sensuality in language to express the exotic image of India in Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh, an Oriental romance as an Oriental romance to substantiate the image of the stereotyped Orient.