Summary of The Confident Gaze by Shekhar Deshpande

National Geographic is one of the most famed and beloved articles of text and photography through history, anthropology and culture to the eyes of the western world. Shekhar Deshpande, the author of The Confident Gaze, delivers the western culture’s view on India and how vivid in detail the culture is shown through the raw emotion of the visually stunning and awe inspiring photographs from various places around the world. However in this essay, Deshpande describes the photographs and the angle from which they are taken to be interpreted in a way that will be pleasing to the Western world; Whether the perceptions that are taken are given from a false light or not.
“Human suffering becomes worth a good image…the will to see is dominated by what they see” (Deshpande pg2 paragraph4). In this quote Deshpande is giving the idea that the Western world is consumed by images revealing poverty and suffering in other places around the world. He is saying that people are enticed by these pictures because of how they make them feel; meaning in a way, superior to those we see in the pictures that are in a worse state than us.
Deshpande also states that “The idea of progress is always in terms of whether the others have taken steps to be ‘Western’” (Deshpande pg3 paragraph2). This relates to Deshpande’s idea that we as a Western culture expect other countries to aspire to be like us. We expect others to catch up to us and be “Western”. When we saw how well India was doing according to National Geographic, we admired how well they were doing when comparing how far they’ve come to be like us, but Deshpande stated that, “…it has a lot of catching up to do if ‘catching up’ has to mean something” (Deshpande pg3 last line). Deshpande is meaning that if we have to compare every country and culture to us that everyone else will only ever have catching up to do.

Brought to you by:
Beth Brummel
&
Mike Kingma