The Occident is from Mars, the Orient is from Venus

Less than a week into my first trip east of Vienna I was on a houseboat on Srinagar’s Dal Lake, sometimes admiring the graciously moving daughter of the Indian family on the boat next to mine. After two days the son of the family wanted to invite me over to get more acquainted. I kindly declined. It was my first experience that the lure between West and East went beyond temples and democratic institutions.

The images that the West holds of the East dates back from Antiquity. After Titus’ victory over the Israelis, coins were minted showing a victorious male in Roman military uniform standing against a palm tree, and a weeping female, sitting in a gesture of submission. It is the oldest image of the East as weak and feminine and the West as strong and masculine. That image has pertained well into the the third millennium, not in the least because it matched nicely with the developing political and economic disparities between the two sides of the Eurasian landmass.

Exoticism, as much as power and money, has a sexual component. In this book Mr. Bernstein chronicles the “history of erotic encounters” between West and East. As a definition for the East, he takes the Orient, an area that ranges from Morocco to Japan; countries that the West managed to colonise almost completely since the 15th century. And whereas monogamy was the norm in the West since the rise of Christianity, in the East polygamy, the “culture of the harem”, reigned for whoever had the means to enjoy it. The East set aside a group of women for men’s sexual enjoyment, and Western traders and colonisers had few qualms about enjoying that privilege also.

The author concentrates on this “culture of the harem”, and therefore mainly on relationships between Western man and Asian women. As a reason Mr. Bernstein claims that this is the most common form. This may be right, but if you look a bit more carefully, you can find plenty of examples of relationships between Western women and Asian men. Lady Ellenborough comes to mind, who lived with a Syrian sheikh for 30 years. Marguerite Duras wrote about her own relationship as a young woman in colonial Vietnam with a Chinese in her novel l’Amant. Or Indonesia’s first prime minister Soetan Sjahrir, who was married to Maria Duchateau. She was one of the (few) women that supported their husbands in the anti-colonial struggle. Most Indonesian men that went to live in the Netherlands married local women, creating a largely multi-racial offspring.

Mr. Bernstein shows only limited interest for the female side of the relationship. In Thailand, he rates that interest as mainly financial. Nowhere does he mention the Southeast Asian fascination for mixed-racial babies, as mixed-racial people are considered so much more pretty than white or Asian people. In his book about concubinage in the Dutch East Indies De Njai Reggie Baaij’s does look at this subject from a female side. He concludes that the relationships were very often asymmetric. The men were in charge, leaving their concubines and often their children whenever it suited him. The former concubines and their children then often led a marginal life in the native society. The level of understanding between the man and the often illiterate woman could be too limited to develop any real level of intimacy. And if the men did not take concubines but visited prostitutes, the treatment for shanker with mercury was painful and expensive.

Although flawed, the book contains a good description of sexuality in British India, and how Richard Burton’s discovery of an ancient sexual culture greatly influenced the West in a time that India was copying the West, as well as a chapter about how Japan handled the influx of American soldiers after its defeat in the Second World War. ( )