When the first Indo-Persian eyewitness accounts of visits to Europe appeared in the late eighteenth century, these male authors were taken aback by displays of physical intimacy between men and women in the public sphere. Such proximity was read as signaling the disintegration of ‘the moral and the immoral, and the decent and the indecent’ in European society. These texts, alongside those penned by Iranian Persian visitors to Europe, share perceptions of zan-i firangi (European women) as objects of their critical and objectifying scrutiny. By 1839, Indo-Persian accounts often tied the corrupting influence of European women's sexual immorality to the political threat embodied by Europe. Symbolically, European women came to represent the broader political and cultural conflicts between the East and West; as such, the female body became “an important metaphor for demarcating the self and the other.” For observers to identify the female body as a marker of cultural difference might not seem surprising, considering that European colonizers, including those who traveled to Muslim courts, had been engaging in a discourse about the “other” for a few centuries as an instrument of colonization. In contrast, however, these Indo-Persian first-person responses about European difference emerged comparatively late in the history of such East-West exchange, in response to the ever-increasing dominance of European colonial might that was taking shape throughout South Asia during the late eighteenth century.