Cultivating the New Eastern Gaze

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The Naked Snake Charmer

In describing the painting “The Snake Charmer” (see above) by Jean-Léon Gérôme, art critic Jonathan Jones of The Guardian was direct and blunt:

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s painting The Snake Charmer is a sleazy imperialist vision of “the east”. In front of glittering Islamic tiles that make the painting shimmer with blue and silver, a group of men sit on the ground watching a nude snake charmer, draped with a slithering phallic python.

Jonathan Jones objects to Jean-Léon Gérôme being clubbed along with French impressionists. Jones says:

… Gérôme is no impressionist. Painted in about 1879, this is a glitteringly cinematic slice of orientalist fantasy. Gérôme was the kind of painter the impressionists were rebelling against — a pristine purveyor of high-gloss dreams.

The western gaze has shaped the East for over two millennia. This gaze has determined the contours of the East and, with colonialism, molded the very core of the East. This gaze has influenced the East in almost every possible way, shaping its perception, its place in the world, its sociocultural contours, its politics, and more.

Edward Said and Orientalism

The foremost work on the western gaze — tracing its history from the ancient Greco-Roman times to the contemporary era — is the book Orientalism by Edward Said. The book is far-ranging and far-reaching. Here is an essential quote about the western gaze toward the East:

…the major component in European culture is precisely what made that culture hegemonic both in and outside Europe: the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures. There is in addition the hegemony of European ideas about the Orient, themselves reiterating European superiority over Oriental backwardness, usually overriding the possibility that a more independent, or more skeptical, thinker might have had different views on the matter. In a quite constant way, Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand.

There has been considerable scholarship that has followed the pathbreaking work on Orientalism by Edward Said. In subsequent pieces in this series on western vs. eastern gaze, I will return to some of these scholarly endeavors.

The Eastern Gaze

In contrast to the underlying themes and tropes about the western gaze about the East — exoticism, titillation, mystery, violence, obscurantism, fear, inscrutability and more — the typical eastern gaze of the West has been characterized by wonder, awe, admiration, envy, and desires for emulation. For example, Teja Lele reported in April 2026:

A century-old dinner menu, dated 31 January 1897, from Vadodara’s Laxmi Vilas Palace, caused a stir when Gurugram-based food historian Neha Vermani shared it online in February. The menu was for a dinner hosted by Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III of Baroda for Maharaja Madhavrao Scindia of Gwalior, two of the most powerful kings in colonial India. And yet, what they ate that evening reads like something from a European dining room: potage d’amandes, braised fish with mayonnaise, chicken cream soup with truffles, lamb cutlets “àl’Italienne”, roast partridge with peas. A vegetable curry with rice makes an appearance, but almost quietly, folded into a sequence of French courses. Dessert was apples with cream and pistachio ice cream.

Postcolonial studies — e.g., the works of Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and more — started bringing in fresh eastern gazes on the west, although mostly in the form of critique of the western colonial gaze. For instance, in a 2025 retrospective review of the 2007 book Provincializing Europe by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Richard Bourke writes:

Connected to this indictment is Chakrabarty’s … complaint about the authority of the European model. Since Europe, allegedly, operates as a prototype, a knowledge of its history is universally obligatory, whereas familiarity with the Indian past can be safely confined to specialists. Because India is expected to match up, and ultimately to catch up, chronicling its progress requires mastery of European narratives. This situation fosters an asymmetry of ignorance applied to different regions of the world. According to Chakrabarty, this asymmetry relegates historians of the sub-continent to a subordinate, or ‘subaltern’, position relative to their Western counterparts… The academic division of labour is made to look like a form of servitude, with Chicago-based historians of India banished to the margins. It is as if historians of Finland, Albania, and Romania somehow hogged the limelight.

The time has come for the 6.5 billion of the Global South to turn their eastern gaze on the cultures and lives of the 1.5 billion of the West, not in awe and admiration but in (among other stances) bewildered bemused wonderment.

It’s Time for New Forms of Eastern Gaze

The world order — shaped by centuries of colonialism and decades of techno-economic imperialism — has started dismantling. The time is thus ripe for new forms of eastern gaze upon the West. Yes, ideally, we should live in a world where such “gazes” — all representing strong or mild forms of othering and discrimination — must be rid of. But first it is necessary to bring some degree of counterbalance to centuries, indeed millennia, old western Orientalist gaze on the East.

It is of course necessary to transcend the traditional eastern awe of and amazement about the West.

And, it is necessary also not to stoop to crude forms of Occidentalism.

Indeed, the new forms of eastern gaze upon the West — the ones that will be refreshing and transformative — will come from artists, comedians, enlightened filmmakers, perspicacious diplomats, thoughtful journalists, and new generations of academics.

Watch this space. We will keep exploring these new eastern gazes.