NOTE 79 Some commendable efforts have been made lately to come to grips with related issues, but these attempts (the most important being the rise of the Subaltern Studies collective) lack (with the exception of Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak) the broad theoretical infusion of post-structuralist insights that Said brings to bear on his critique of Orientalism. We arc not arguing for any wholesale importations of recent theories but only emphasizing the importance of learning from them in a manner that also keeps in view the danger of submitting to the lure of engaging in a hegemonic discourse of western theory. What we proposed to do here is not to document or analyse the discourse of Indie Orientalism. Our purpose is something provisional and suggestive, something we hope, which will lead to more ambitious and comprehensive studies re-examining the passed-ovcr and now dominant discourse ruling the human and social sciences. Rather, to invoke the notion of the Foucauldian episteme (1980) which in the first place produces these discourses. In the discourses on various ethnic groups, for instance, the episteme which presupposes the representational view of knowledge, of the subject always in control and in a position of transcendence over the object, dcprivilcges the knowledges that these groups have or can have about themselves (Inden 1986: 402). An illustration from a recent ethnographic study is revealing. The very first page of R.N. Thakur's Himalayan Lepchas (1988) betrays the trappings of an indegenous Orientalism: A knowledge of the races, tribes, and culture is a pre-requisitc for an efficient administrative system and strategy of development (1988:1). Apart from the ethnocentric flavour of colonial enterprise, there is no attempt here at distancing in the relationship between the scholar and the state. And there is no self-consciousness and resultant scrutiny concerning the methodology and praxis. The work thus suffers in its unresponsiveness to its material. The implication is the belief in 'the absurd theses that man plays no part in setting up both the material and the processes of knowledge' (Said 1978:300). The failure here—as in all the texts dealt in this paper—is human as well as intellectual in that it stands in opposition to an area of the country (or ethnic space) it regards alien. The hegemony inherent in this Levi-Straussian binary opposition is vulnerable to the mildest form of Derridcan deconstruction (1978). The project of orientalizing the Orient is repeated over and over in the orchestrated activity of tribal ethnography on the Himalayas. There are also examples galore in the book of what Said, quoting Anwar Abdel Maick, refers to as 'the hegemonism of possessing minorities' (1978:108). Further, Chapter V entitled 'The Significant Three: The Lepchas, the Bhutias and the Nepalese' blatantly smacks of the British