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Norway’s Modi cartoon was not satire. Just colonial laziness

Political satire is indispensable to democracy, racial caricature isn’t. If Europe’s liberal press still cannot tell difference, then decolonisation never happened in their imagination.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi could have been criticised in a hundred different ways during his Norway visit. A newspaper could have attacked his government’s politics, mocked his diplomacy, or caricatured the carefully choreographed optics that follow him abroad. Instead, Norwegian daily Aftenposten reached for the oldest racist colonial cliche ever used against India, the snake charmer. 

The cartoon depicts Modi playing a pungi (a wind instrument) and seated like a traditional snake charmer, with a fuel hose emerging from a basket like a serpent — an image meant to mock India’s fuel crisis amid the ongoing West Asia conflict. But it immediately collapsed into something far older and uglier.

How many more decades will the West continue to look at India through the exhausted lens of snake charmers, cows, fakirs and colonial fantasy before somebody in its supposedly enlightened liberal establishment realises the joke stopped being funny a century ago?

Colonial-era stereotype

The cartoon — which the paper may have deemed edgy or fearless journalism — was simply a tired, intellectually lazy recycling of an old colonial stereotype. The same patronising imagery through which generations of Europeans reduced an ancient civilisation into a circus act for Western amusement.

Norway, like much of Scandinavia, occupies a sanctified corner in the modern liberal imagination — a region associated with ethical diplomacy, human rights discourse, progressive politics and........

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