Imagining India though Media Lens: Indiana Jones and the Colonial World

Imagining India through Media Lens:

Indiana Jones and the Colonial World

Released in 1984, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was the second film in the Indiana Jones trilogy. Spielberg’s action-adventure, is not simply an escapist piece of fiction, but rather a post-colonial misrepresentation of India, its ancient tradition, culture, religion. As a result, modern India is subsumed by the notion of the underdeveloped and uncivilized “reality” powerfully and persuasively constructed by Spielberg.

‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is inordinately racist and sexist, even by Hollywood standards… The film’s only humanized nonwhite is necessarily 10 years old. Indeed, when not particularly downward trodden, the denizens of the third world theme-park where Indiana seeks his fortune and glory are all duplicitous, evil scum whose favored cuisine is a suitably yuckey repast of raw snakes, giant beetles, and chilled monkey brains. (J.Holberman, 1984; 85)’

This movie is placed in colonial India, but much later, in the year 1935. The colonial presence in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is quite marginal and presented as very benign and not intrusive. Instead, the cult of Kali at Pankot Palace is seen as the oppressor, this justifies the need for a benign, white presence to keep the Indians from killing one another. In fact, this very rationale was used to the bitter end when India was demanding its independence. It was also this rationale that caused the British to partition India. If the British couldn’t have India all to themselves, they were going to leave with a “divide and conquer” policy. Even though the colonizers had legally departed, the effects of colonialism lived on long after the dismantling of this brutalizing and dehumanizing system. Post-colonial, can never escape from its colonial roots and ramifications. Postcolonialism is an extension of the colonial era, and previously colonized nations have found it almost impossible to extricate the colonizer completely in their respective eras of independence.

There is a similar proclamation against colonialism delivered by Mola Ram. Of course it is hard to see Mola Ram as a freedom fighter when throughout the film he is portrayed as a cannibalistic demon. Mola Ram proclaims to Indy who is being held captive that, “Soon the Thuggies will be all powerful . . . the British in India will be slaughtered. Then we will overrun the Muslims . . . Then the Christian God will fall down.”

One of the most subversive aspects is the entrustment of Indy with the freeing of the Indian slave children from their evil Indian-Mola Ram. First of all, the villagers, all of whose children have been abducted into slavery, are presented as dirty, ignorant, subservient and illiterate. They are religious fanatics, blinded by their own fundamentalist natures, who are searching for salvation by the white superior. Moreover, by having Indy save the children, Spielberg and Lucas create the illusion that their parents were incapable of rescuing their offspring from Mola Ram.

Thus, in a postcolonial era, the Indians would suppress their own people and children only to need liberation by the Americans.

Reference:

Anonymous (2013). Indiana Jones and the temple of doom. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Jones_and_the_Temple_of_Doom

Caslin, S. (2006). The imperial archive: Key concepts in postcolonial studies. http://www.qub.ac.uk/imperial/key-concepts/feminism-    and-postcolonialism.htm

Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as Virtual Reality: The Orientalist and Colonial Legacies of Gunga Din by Dr. Kaizaad Navroze Kotwal

Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg By Andrew Gordon

Andrew T.Smith (2010). Archive for The Temple of Doom.

https://illegibleme.wordpress.com/tag/temple-of-doom/