By the time of the 1984 film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg weren’t content to repeat themselves or play it safe. For the next Indiana Jones, they looked to the past for new material, favoring a much more macabre direction, complete with human sacrifices, child slavery, and psuedo-voodoo zombies. In this second outing, the archaeologist matches wits with worshipers of the Hindu deity known as Kali. Until the modern films ruined the series’ reputation, Temple of Doom was once perceived as the black sheep, out of sync and tone with the other films.
These villains, a mythical order of killers called the Thuggees, preyed upon vulnerable travelers to satiate their god’s bloodlust. The Thuggee legend popped up in other films and TV shows such as Highlander: The Series, Gunga Din, The Deceivers, Help!, and The Stranglers of Bombay. It’s mostly fiction. Thuggee crime rings likely weren’t really about Kali at all. The death cult label served as useful propaganda to persuade Indians and the rest of the world that Britain had the moral high ground when it came to seizing the subcontinent and using heavy-handed tactics. If Temple of Doom‘s themes and characters feel like something out of a trashy nineteenth-century tabloid, you’re right.
“George Said That It Was Going to Be a Very Dark Film.”
At the time of release, Temple of Doom sparked outrage, banned in India for insulting locals. Lucas and Spielberg weren’t racists, but were drawing on the films of their youth. Lucas tasked writing duo Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz to flesh out his ideas. “We were really looking at Gunga Din,” Katz said in the book The Complete Making of Indiana Jones. Spielberg adding, “George said that it was going to be a very dark film.” We hope he wasn’t referring to the Gunga Din actor in brown make-up. Thus, the writers and special effects team cranked up the nightmarish visuals and clichés to eleven.
Offensive depictions in film are rarely out of malice or intentional racism, more so mundane ignorance. The obscure Merchant-Ivory project, The Deceivers, is a good example. In this 1988 film, pre-Bond Pierce Brosnan goes undercover, brown-face and all, as a Thuggee initiate to infiltrate a murder ring. It was made by an Indian, Ismail Merchant. When Hammer released their lurid The Stranglers of Bombay, some educated reviewers took it as an “authentic” representation of the subcontinent in the Victorian Era, per Hammer Films: An Exhaustive FIlmograpy. The concept was so irresistible that even the Beatles joined in, portraying a cartoony version of the bloodthirsty cult in their 1965 musical comedy Help!. George Harrison later converted to Hindusim. Clearly, the group didn’t harbor any contempt against the culture.
Does ‘Temple of Doom’ Have a Historical Basis?
The Thuggee were extinct for a century when the film takes place, as Indy points out. Mola Ram, the cackling, deranged priest who runs the cult in the film, threatens that “soon Kali Ma will rule the world!” Kali worshipers, in this grim fictionalized depiction, seek not just to kick out the British but to eradicate all competing religions. As professor Subramanian Shankar astutely notes, the presence of the Prime Minister in the conspiracy implies that the Thuggee and the nationalists are seeking independence. Indiana Jones, in essence, functions as a stand-in for the British administrators, our fedora-wearing hero finishing the job that the Brits couldn’t, eradicating the Thuggee religious ceremonies and retaking the magical “Sankara Stones.”
It’s preposterous, yet there is a tiny kernel of truth to the Kali canard. It’s not a story to be taken seriously. Unless, that is, you are a Kali worshiper. Yes, Kali is a real deity. No, this sect isn’t evil, coexisting with the countless other offshoots of Hinduism for many centuries. Kali is the embodiment of death, time, hard truths, and transformation — Kali worshipers don’t worship death. As this 1958 Time Magazine article explains, by the twentieth century, criminal acts in her name were almost nonexistent and prosecuted like any other. No one eats monkey brains either, although that misconception has proven harder to stamp out. A 2001 University of Texas survey on Hindu cultural stereotypes reported that many Americans erroneously believed that Temple of Doom was based on reality.
Two Hundred Years Ago, Anybody Could Be a “Thug”
“Thuggee”was a term applied broadly and stories conflated every violent encounter, lumping them altogether. As historian Henry Schwarz pointed out, citing documents by British officials, anybody could technically be designated a Thuggee, and “local elites understood this and used that accusation against others to further their own ends.” The term identified any kind of organized thievery, usually run by local village kingpins who collected a cut in their territory. So, the crimes the British were recording probably didn’t have anything to do with religion at all. The white savior trope? That’s a whole other issue we don’t have time for.
Banditry was a universal issue across every country at some stage, but the colonial authorities never let a crime epidemic go to waste. 1829 saw the introduction of Peel’s Bill, which formally inaugurated a crackdown on rowdy elements in India. The use of force by British colonial administrators was used as a blanket deterrent against any resistance to British rule, according to the book Crime and Empire, a pretext to further clampdown on Indian nationalism. We’ll never know for sure if the Thuggee were really the same ones committing all the crimes in India, but based on what scant documentation there is, the connection is weak. It’s a fun movie, sure, but keep in mind that the plot is as historically accurate as the monkey brain entrée.
- Release Date
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May 23, 1984
- Runtime
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118