The White Gaze: Critical Reflections on the East-West Dichotomy

Abstract

In his much quoted verse above Rudyard Kipling revealed something of the nucleus of the long-lived tradition of Orientalist thought. According to J.J. Clarke, the ambivalence of the West towards the East is age-old. This ambivalence largely stems from the difference in religion and culture that the two poles share. Religion, an act of cultural construction circulates in a particular form and culture thereby, can be said to be a definer of character. Every culture thus develops its own particular values and beliefs. Elucidating this concept further, the paper intends to examine this thought by applying Said’s study of Orientalism to hegemonically Western discourse about the East and seek to highlight the fact that the East-West dichotomy is a result of ‘selective cultural mapping’, a deliberate attempt to alienate the East. To lay bare the East-West dichotomy and highlight the West’s selective cultural mapping of the East, the paper will analyze E.M Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) and its movie adaptation by David Lean and will do a comparative study. Furthermore, I will concentrate on highlighting the West’s fear of islamophobia and the consequences arising from it with due reference to the movie Khuda Ke Liye (2007), a Pakistani Urdu movie by Shoaib Mansoor.