When the European public of the 1920s imagined India, what did they conjure in their minds? Was it a realistic picture? Could it be? Certainly, most of them had never seen the place.
Presumably, some of the filmmakers whose work the public consumed, had. But filmmakers, for the most part, seek to entertain. So when they set a film in India, they made this India the stuff of fantasy, with beautiful dancers and ecstatic priests, and heathen monuments hewn from rock, all of it encroached upon by jungles filled with terrible beasts. This place was defined by its otherness to the West. Its people were outsiders, even when depicted in their own land.
