Written by Manahil Masood
Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited (2007) is often praised for its visual beauty and emotional depth, telling the story of three estranged American brothers (played by Owen Wilson, Adrian Brody, and Jason Schwartzman) who embark on a train journey across India in an attempt to reconnect after their father’s death. A bitter-sweet tale of grief, brotherhood, and transformation, this film has undeniably been a great source of comfort to me in its witty and whimsical depictions of the flaws and hardships of humanity. Yet, as a South Asian viewer myself, there are times that the film’s ‘self-aware’ portrayal of the ignorant and arrogant protagonists feels less self-deprecating and more uncomfortably familiar. India, in Anderson’s vision, is not a lived-in reality but a backdrop for the White Man’s self-discovery, reduced to a curated landscape of vibrant colours, religious mysticism, and spiritual renewal. Almost fifty years on from the publication of Edward Said’s seminal text, Orientalism (1978), this article explores how The Darjeeling Limited appropriates and essentialises India, reinforcing colonial-era narratives of the East as the exotic foil of the rational West.
Edward Said’s Orientalism acted as a personal response to the dominant contemporary canon of Eurocentric essentialism, resurrecting the academic term ‘orientalism’, and redefining it as the supremacist ideology of Western imperialism. Said expanded upon earlier critiques countering the Western narrative of a ‘passive, static, barbaric’ Orient through his Gramscian and Foucaldian exploration of interconnected knowledge, power, and culture. Indeed, for Said, Orientalism was a post-colonial critical investigation into the corrupting effects of power upon knowledge in Western academic and artistic spaces. These corrupted Orientalist tropes arguably shape The Darjeeling Limited, where India is less a setting and more a symbolic construct, existing primarily to facilitate the emotional growth of the Whitman brothers and prioritising Western self-fulfilment over Indian realities. By presenting a hyper-objectified vision of the country, arguably, the director’s camera secedes the colonist’s gun as the latest weapon of the West.
From the opening sequence, Bill Murray’s businessman character chasing a train through a golden-hued desert, Anderson frames India as a land of chaos and visual spectacle. Throughout the film, the saturated colour palettes, religious iconography, and meticulously composed shots create a mythologised version of India that feels reminiscent of nineteenth-century colonial travel paintings, depicting India as a monolithic land of spiritual mystery rather than a dynamic, developed nation. For Said, this imperialist myth of the unchanging Orient is foundational to the othering of the East, with this infantilising notion of timelessness arguably becoming synonymous with intellectual inferiority.
Indeed, the Darjeeling Limited train itself, with its ornate décor and exaggerated quaintness, becomes a moving diorama, reinforcing the Western fantasy of India as a timelessly exotic playground rather than a real, functioning society. The presence of Indian passengers is barely acknowledged; rather, the train exists to house the emotional turbulence of its Western protagonists, rendering Indian spaces subservient to Western narratives and utilisation. The Whitman brothers treat India as something to be consumed and performed, purchasing spiritual artifacts without context and engaging in surface-level appropriation of Indian culture in a problematic quest to “make this trip a spiritual journey where each of us seek the unknown”.
By Owen Wilson’s character, Francis Whitman’s own definition, this film depicts an attempted ‘Eastern spiritual journey’, framing India as a therapeutic tool for Western self-improvement. Here, the space is defined not for the people who inhabit it but designed for the personal growth of foreign visitors who freely appropriate religious rituals. Whilst religious borrowing has always existed, it is important to acknowledge that seemingly harmless liberal spirituality oftentimes exploits marginalised communities who consider these practises integral to their common identity and thus imbue them with intrinsic value that becomes “violated” when taken and commodified by an outsider. Indeed, this crass commodification of Asian religions for Western capitalist consumption harks back to the colonial-era fascination with documenting and fetishising mystical customs practised on the path to inner enlightenment.
As well as essentialising, appropriating, and commodifying the practises of the country, the film further perpetuates Orientalist tropes in its commitment to giving the Whitman brothers complex, emotional arcs, all while ostracising the Indian characters as peripheral, voiceless, or eroticised. Rita (played by Amara Karan), the train stewardess, is a notable example, sexualised as an object of fleeting Western desire rather than a developed character in her own right. Jack Whitman (Jason Schwartzman) initiates a brief and impersonal affair with her, a relationship marked by his sense of entitlement rather than mutual emotional connection. Rita’s presence, much like India itself, is reduced to aesthetic and symbolic value, serving Jack’s self-exploration rather than her own narrative. She is but the dutiful servant to the empire: submissive, sexual, and voiceless.
Even in the film’s climax, the death of a young Indian boy, the emotional gravity is redirected toward the Whitman brothers’ grief. The brothers happen across three young children drowning in a river, with each Whitman brother rushing to action to save them. Despite their best efforts, Peter (played by Adrian Brody), is ultimately unable to rescue one child before he hits the rapids, defeatedly admitting that “I didn’t save mine”. The loss of the nameless child is not explored through the eyes of his family but through the Western protagonists’ experience of tragedy and redemption. The three children perhaps symbolise the Whitman brother’s own childhoods, and so, the death of one of the children acts as a turning-point in the plot to emotionally develop the American characters. Indian suffering is co-opted for Western self-realisation, and the grief of the child’s family is conflated to Peter’s unresolved grief at the loss of his own father. Here, the colonial trope of the ‘useful native’ is reinforced, with Indian lives and deaths existing primarily to further Western narratives.
So, whilst Anderson’s signature whimsy and irony have led some to argue that the film is self-aware in its portrayal of Western privilege, this irony does not necessarily dismantle Orientalist representation. If anything, the film’s aesthetic beauty obscures its ideological underpinnings, erasing India’s modern political realities and postcolonial struggles to ultimately indulge in the very appropriation that could have been critiqued. Indeed, as long as India continues to be represented as a backdrop for Western self-discovery, the legacy of Orientalism in art and film remains ever persistent.
Bibliography
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Anderson, Wes, dir. The Darjeeling Limited. 2007; Fox Searchlight Pictures.
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Broey Deschanel, “Wes Anderson and the Follies of Modern Orientalism”, posted 15 July 2020, Youtube, 16 min, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rw0b4EXgtvs
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Featured image credit: “The Darjeeling Limited” by Pink Cow Photography is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
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