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.

File photo of Prime Minister Narendra Modi | Suraj Singh Bisht, ThePrint

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.

A systemic pattern

For nearly two centuries, colonial literature, travel journals, postcards, exhibitions and later Hollywood films constructed India as a land of mystical absurdity — dirty streets, turbaned magicians, rope tricks, cobras and superstition. The Empire always required the colonised world to appear irrational and backwards so that domination could masquerade as civilisation.

Even after formal colonialism ended, the stereotypes survived comfortably inside Western popular culture. Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom remains one of the most notorious examples of how India was packaged for a feverish colonial hangover: grotesque rituals, monkey brains, black magic cults and barbaric spectacle stitched together into an orientalist fever dream masquerading as adventure cinema. The film provoked outrage in India even decades ago because they recognised the persistence of a gaze that refused to see them as modern equals.

The Aftenposten cartoon belongs to that same lineage. It is the visual language of the colonialists updated for liberal newsrooms.

And this is not an isolated episode. Western media have repeatedly fallen back on racial caricatures while discussing India, often under the protective cover of satire.

In 2014, The New York Times faced widespread criticism after publishing a cartoon following India’s Mars mission that showed a turbaned farmer with a cow knocking at the door of an “Elite Space Club”. India, despite reaching Mars, still belonged outside the club of advanced nations.

Then, in 2023, German magazine Der Spiegel drew criticism for a xenophobic cartoon on India overtaking China in population, depicting overcrowded Indians clinging chaotically to trains while sleek Chinese passengers sped ahead in bullet trains. 

There is a clear pattern here, and pretending otherwise requires deliberate blindness.

And Modi is not unaccustomed to this racism either. During his 2014 Madison Square Garden speech in New York, Modi admonished the assumption that India was a land of black magic and snake charmers, a perception he had been asked about brazenly by a Taiwanese national.

“Our ancestors would play with snakes, whereas we play with the mouse,” he had said, partly with humour and partly as commentary on how stubbornly these colonial instincts survive despite India’s technological advancement.

A long-lost significance

The other irony is that the actual history of snake charmers in India is far more complex than the caricature Europeans inherited. Snake charming emerged from hereditary performing communities with serious knowledge of reptiles, venom extraction and forest ecology. Many worked as handlers who removed snakes from human settlements long before modern wildlife departments existed. 

Colonial observers erased all complexity and transformed these communities into symbols of India’s supposed primitiveness because that version was easier to package for European audiences hungry for the “exotic East”.

That stereotype then travelled globally, attaching itself to generations of Indians abroad who grew up answering jokes about snakes, cows and mystics while trying to explain that India was also home to scientists, engineers, writers, economists and one of the world’s most sophisticated democratic systems.

So, the spectacular self-aware liberal Western institutions that otherwise pride themselves on historical sensitivity must learn that one cannot endlessly sermonise about racism at home while casually reproducing colonial tropes abroad. 

Political satire is indispensable to democracy, racial caricature is not. And if Europe’s liberal press still cannot tell the difference in 2026, then perhaps the decolonisation it so enthusiastically prescribes to others never fully happened within its own imagination.

Views are personal.

(Edited by Saptak Datta)