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 globally funded journalism initiatives. Their media ecosystems often position themselves as morally evolved alternatives to the cruder nationalism and populism they criticise elsewhere. Yet when an Indian leader lands on their soil, a respected publication instinctively reaches for imagery that could have been lifted from a 19th-century colonial postcard.There is a familiar defence: that “political satire must offend”. But this one misses the point entirely. Nobody is arguing that Modi should be immune from ridicule. Democratic leaders are not sacred figures. So journalists can lambast him and newspapers can savage him daily if they wish. But reducing political criticism to racial shorthand exposes something far more primitive beneath the sophistication European liberal media claims for itself.Because the symbol of the snake charmer comes loaded with history.
