A strange unsublime exoticisation

The third and concluding part of Amit Chaudhuri's essay is out (click here for parts one and two).Amardeep has a brief commentary on the first two parts here.

"We’ve inherited the Saidian asymmetry along with the Saidian critique; it leads us to believe that Oriental and, for our purposes, Indian history was a bucolic zone untouched by the market until, probably, the Indian novelist in English came along; that the Orient has been in a state of nature in the last two hundred years, translated into the realm of production and consumption only by Western writers and entrepreneurs. And in this way, we exoticize exocitization itself, making it impossibly foreign to, and distant from, ourselves.
A glance at the cultural history of our modernity, however, tells us that we’ve been “producing” the Orient, and exoticizing it, for a very long time; that the exotic has been a necessary, perhaps indispensable, constituent of our self-expression and political identity, as given voice to in popular culture, in calendar prints, oleographs, the “mythologicals” of early Hindi cinema, as well as the lavish visions of Indian history in the latter — these are the signatures of the cultural and political world of the anonymous; a “production” of the East more challenging or significant than anything the word, “Orientalism” can hope to encapsulate, and part of whose inheritance, as seen in the core of kitsch in the BJP’s version of Hindutva, is ambiguous."