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Research has shown that most house servants of this type would have been younger black women.) Hollywood, of course, has plenty of form in this arena.įrom Mickey Rooney’s fanatically racist Japanese character in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (complete with buck teeth and a hideous accent – Golightly pronounced as ‘Go-right-ree’ – a performance derided in many other articles), to Gone with the Wind’s enshrining into popular culture of the ‘mammy’ character, a big-bosomed, sassy-fussy slave-nanny deliriously happy with her lot. (For the record, as far as I can discover, monkey brains have been historically known to have been consumed in a remote corner of ancient China, but not in India.) Snakes are feared and revered around the subcontinent, rarely eaten. Ludicrous! I lived for ten years in India and never came anywhere near a monkey brain, chilled or otherwise. Diners are presented with ‘chilled monkey brain’, eyeball soup, and the lip-smackingly delicious ‘snake surprise’ – the surprise being that the snakes were still alive. One scene, where Indy is invited to a banquet by a local prince, is particularly egregious. The white saviour trope (Indy literally drops out of the sky to save these hapless village bumpkins!), the absurdly evil Thuggee (for the record, the Thugee were real and they were murderers but all nuance of their actual historical role in Indian history was lost in this portrayal for instance, their eye-rolling worship of Kali is particularly troublesome – for millions in India the goddess Kali is far from a representation of evil), the slapstick Chinese sequence at the beginning, the cartoonishly stereotypical depictions of Indian culture.

Almost every scene of it now smacks of the patronising attitude towards other cultures long peddled by western film industries. Indy was very popular in our house, and this second offering in the franchise seemed tailor-made for us: a British Asian family tuning in to a wholesome adventure set in India – what could be better? And yes, we did all enjoy this rip-roaring yarn, Indy battling the evil Thuggee cult, recovering the ancient Shankara stones, and saving the benighted Indian villagers from starvation. Let’s start with one of my favourites: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Thus, it is with a slightly heavy heart that I dissect some of the great films that I’ve enjoyed over the years and say to myself: hang on, that really could have been done better. Nevertheless, sometimes it is important, in the light of experience and changing times, to re-examine tenets we have taken for granted, to tear down institutions we have held sacred, not out of a sense of victimhood or spite, but in an attempt to learn lessons and thus improve the lot of those who follow. Certainly, it would be disingenuous of me to claim that I didn’t enjoy those films, not once, but many times over.

Even now, I am loath to tear up the fabric of my own memories. Looking back, those seem to be such innocent times. One of my greatest pleasures when I was young was sitting in front of the box at Christmas as a parade of fantastic family films scrolled across the handful of channels we had back then: Superman, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Disney classics by the truck-load.