On Kate’s promise to India

The cover for the April 2016 issue of Woman’s Day read “Passage to India: Kate’s Promise – ‘I’ll be your queen of hearts’”. The cover story itself details the royal couple’s week-long tour of India. The article was titled “Indian Odyssey: Kate’s Spiritual Journey”, with a sub-title reading “The duchess finds peace and a new cause to champion”. I found this article to be a blatant and overt example of Eurocentrism and Orientalism.

            Eurocentrism is the idea that European or Western values, judgements, beliefs and cultures are normal, natural and ideal. It centralises European or Western values, and dismisses all others to the periphery and deems them unimportant. This article is very Eurocentric because it is told from the European/Western viewpoint. The only reason that this article exists is because the royal couple went to India in the first place. The first time India is mentioned in the article, it is “the former British colony”. This is a clear indication that this article is going to be from the perspective of Western writers. It also goes on to uphold popular views in the Western world that show India as a binary – India is either poor, poverty-stricken and full of slums, or else a spiritual paradise where white people go to ‘find themselves’. This article supports both of these portrayals of India. At the beginning of the article, there is one, singular sentence showing India positively, and even then, it is only in relation to something that the Western world has always linked India with: cricket. Apparently, Kate “couldn’t have been happier about it as she played cricket with local sporting legends in Mumbai”. After quickly getting this positive portrayal of India out of the way, the rest of the article focuses either on India as a crippled nation in need of British help, or on the royal couple themselves and their expensive outfits. Immediately after the sentence on cricket in Mumbai, the article dives straight into talking about the poor side of the country. “But it was in slightly less glamorous surrounds, while meeting the poverty-stricken “slumdogs” of Malabar Hill and talking to street kids in the gritty shantytowns of New Delhi, that Kate experienced unexpected moments that brought tears to her eyes.” Here we see the writer portraying India as the poor, poverty-stricken country that it is made out to be so often. But it is also referred to as the place for “Kate’s spiritual journey”, where she had “a life-changing experience. This suggests that in addition to being Eurocentric, the article is Orientalist. It paints India as ‘the other’, an external place somewhere else that is seen as unnatural or deviant and existing outside what is considered ‘normal’, in this case Britain. India is shown to be part of the Exotic, depicting it as strange, foreign and exciting. To Indians in India, the country is in fact what normal is, it is only painted in this light because of the foreign eye through which the article is written.

            By noticing the way that these kinds of articles are written, we can see that the Western world and Europeans hold more cultural power on the world stage than people of colour. That is, they have more power to define others – for example, the way that India is defined in this article. Being more aware of these types of depictions and mediations will allow us to take a more critical stance on the information we are fed in the media.