No, Indy, it does not belong in a museum
No matter what your white entitlement taught you
*Trigger Warning* Colonial trauma, racism, demonization of Indigenous peoples, cultural appropriation, Hinduphobia
No matter who someone is, if they live in the west they’ve been trained to think like a colonizer. One of the thought patterns of a colonizer is a sense of entitlement to the cultures of Indigenous peoples. That’s why they’ve been trained to think that sacred Indigenous artifacts belong in a museum.
Hollywood has helped to train them in thinking this way. They made films about a very attractive character, Indiana Jones, who was always getting into scrapes because rich powerful people wanted to own something that he thought “belonged in a museum”. How many times did he say that in every film? He said it at least once every film if not multiple times per film.
The significance of such sacred items to the actual Indigenous cultures they come from is not important to the charismatic archeologist Indiana Jones. What, for example, is this artifact pictured below? Which culture holds it sacred? What does it mean to them? Is it an ancestor? A God? An art piece? All of those things? None of those things?
Here’s Indiana Jones stealing said artifact:
The Indigenous culture didn’t matter to the movie makers. They were showing you the thrilling adventures of Indy casually stealing sacred art from its cultural home and putting it in a museum for white people to own and control. Indiana was a hero to do this because he was thwarting rich powerful men from stealing said items when clearly they “belong in a museum”.
What he was really saying was that rich powerful white men shouldn’t be the only ones to exploit the sacred artifacts of Indigenous peoples. Indiana Jones was saying that all white people should be able to exploit the sacred artifacts of Indigenous peoples. Then all white people could feel rich and powerful. They could equally be colonizers. Indiana Jones was confronting the class hierarchy within whiteness and saying that all white people should have access to exploit Indigenous peoples equally.
Indiana Jones was a racist white academic but he was not a class elitist, you see. He was as rugged and down in the dirt with the common working class white folk just as much as any white blue collar worker who never finished high school. Indy knew what it was like to work hard. Sure, he could speak ancient Greek and Latin and wore tweed suits in the classroom while he played at being a professor of archeology, but he also pulled on his dust covered sweaty everyman clothes and wielded that whip and gun with all the best of the slave catchers.
Yeah, that’s right. Indiana Jones’ iconic costume was actually the look of a slave catcher. What would an archeologist need a whip for? Or a gun? Or a cowboy hat? Why was he always sweaty and grimy and surrounded by brown people? He never once actually academically excavated anything with his own hands but he was constantly invading the spaces of brown people and bringing violence into their lives. Indiana Jones romanticizes the traumatic memories of enslaved Black and brown people in the USA to make lots of money in a Hollywood movie franchise.
Think about how Indiana Jones had a bunch of brown men excavating in the sand and heat while he “supervised”. Such a romantic scene in the setting sun. Did you notice his cowboy hat and his pioneer profile? He was a brave white man going where no man has gone before (other than all the brown people who lived in that place and who were being forced to work for him). This is why it’s not enough just to talk about “class warfare” in the pursuit of justice.
Indiana Jone’s racist rugged everyman persona was romantic, according to Hollywood. Think about how there was always some white woman ready to have sex with him, even as he exploited brown people. Being a dirt covered cowboy ordering brown people around must have been so sexy. It was a lesson to all the other white men: All you need to do to get a white woman is exploit the Black and brown people. In Temple of Doom, Indiana was so attractive that he even used his slave catching whip to catch his love interest, Willie, around the waist and pull her into his arms. Willie didn’t protest because men using whips on women (and publicly too) is not alarming in any way according to Hollywood. It’s attractive. (My thoughts on Fifty Shades of Grey and the misrepresentation of the kink community is a whole other article.)
Still, all of Indiana’s womanizing and colonizing was considered fine because he hated Nazis. That made him one of the good guys. A stand up guy, in fact. He was a man’s man with morals.
Indiana was such a stand up Nazi hating guy that he even had a jolly brown Muslim friend, Sallah, as his sidekick. Sallah was always cracking jokes and showing up with horses and helping Indy fight the bad guys. Sallah was played by John Rhys-Davies who is actually a Welsh white man who played the role in brown face. See? Totally not racist.
Don’t forget that the original Crusades were wars between Christians and Muslims over the “Holy Land” where there was the legendary “Ark of the Covenant” and the “Holy Grail” and all that jazz. But Sallah, as Indiana’s brown face Muslim sidekick, totally ignores this historical awkwardness to help his white American friend, despite the fact that it was US allies, the British, who were decimating Middle Eastern communities in the 1930s (where two of the Indiana Jones movies were set). Sallah not complaining about racism and colonialism and historical erasure is what makes him such a great sidekick, see how that works?
Also, did you notice how, in the Last Crusade, the Elderly Knight told Indy not to take the Grail past the great seal, because it belongs in that sacred home? Indy did not argue and say that the Grail “belongs in a museum”. As far as the Indiana Jones franchise is concerned, artifacts only belong in museums when they are not Christian.
Meanwhile, Chinese boy Short Round was Indiana’s faithful sidekick in Temple of Doom. Again, that was so you wouldn’t think Indiana was a racist. Having an Asian sidekick is totally not-racist and anyone can see that “Short Round” is a totally normal human sounding name for a human child. The name “Short Round” is clearly not objectifying or insulting or playing into stereotypes of Asians being short or funny at all.
In Indiana Jones and Temple of Doom, Short Round was loyal at Indiana’s side because he was a model minority which puts him in stark contrast to those pesky savage Hindus with their Temples of Doom and their scary dark-skinned goddesses and their unruly masses. They’re just everywhere in their own country. And they refuse to be loyal to the white men! How dare they?
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was designed to make you Hinduphobic. Everything in it made the audience hate Hindus. From the totally distorted and bastardized understanding of Kali and Shiv, to the “mindless brainwashed devotees”, to the dirty scary villagers, to the horrible looking food covered in flies, to the insects and snakes and monkey’s brains laid out to eat in the “Maharaja’s” palace, to the child slave labor, to the villainous cult. And on and on and on. They even made the audience hate Hindu kids even though Indiana was supposedly there to rescue them. Remember the child who was “Maharaja” who later tried to kill loyal sidekick Short Round? That was to assure you that Indian rulers are in fact just troublesome little children who need to be ruled over with an iron fist by parental colonizers or they’ll do wild heathen things.
Never mind that it’s a pattern of colonization to infantilize colonized people and demonize their most vulnerable, particularly their children. Temple of Doom wanted you to know that Hindu children are not to be trusted and must be controlled by a white father who will civilize them. White men, as we all know, civilize best when they rape and pillage brown people while imposing white Christian patriarchal morality on their victims and telling them they’re lucky to be civilized by the white man.
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, you see, wanted you to think that the British Raj was there to save little heathen Hindu children and civilize them with Britishness. “Kill the Indian, Save the Child”, amirite? We won’t mention the British Raj induced mass poverty, illiteracy, famine, slavery, rape, and forced conversion to Christianity with all its inevitable rape culture, shhhh. Just like what they did in the US to Indigenous children there. Everyone knows how that turned out since there are hardly any of those native people left on their own land (although they do still exist in pockets and as 1% of the population). The white man was able, through genocidal policies, to comfortably claim the majority of that land, now called the USA (and Canada), and has kept it for himself so far.
Even though Temple of Doom is set in 1930s India, it doesn’t show any of the mass Independence movement against the tyrannical British Raj. The British, in turn, were beating, torturing, imprisoning, and killing Indians who were protesting their oppression and calling for Independence. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, instead of focusing on this actual struggle for justice, works hard to make you hate Hindus, the majority population who were being oppressed by the British.
Temple of Doom was trying to convince you that Hinduism is actually a villainous cult and all those scary rituals and chanting you saw in the movie is what Hindus get up to when no one “civilized” is looking. Temple of Doom was arguing that, really, India should never have gained Independence from the British empire because Hindus are scary. The only problem is that what they show in the movie is not at all what Hindus get up to when no one “civilized” is looking. In fact, Hindu practices have been picked up and made popular by westerners themselves. There are western yoga studios all over the place because westerners appropriate, exploit, and make money out of Hindu practices. Westerners are also appropriating Ayurveda which is an ancient Hindu system of medicine. Westerners also appropriate Hindu clothes, design, music, just to name a few of the things Hindus “get up to” that westerners love. The numeral and decimal system used in the west, as well as the concept of zero, and numerous other mathematical discoveries are actually Indian and Hindu. Hindu culture, philosophy, and lifestyle is admired and practiced the world over, despite the fact that Hindus never converted anyone (let alone brainwashed them) to follow any Hindu practices. Simultaneously, the Hindu roots of these practices and this lifestyle is erased by these cultural appropriators. Meanwhile, Hindus spend a lot of time asking westerners not to appropriate their practices because it is harmful to authentic Hindu lineages.
Temple of Doom said that Hindus were forcing children into slavery when, in fact, Hindus sent their children to school in a widespread indigenous education system that existed all the way back to ancient India. The British knowingly destroyed that education system in India even as they copied it (badly) and instituted it at home in Britain, which is why we see schools for common children popping up in Britain during this time. That’s why Gandhi said that Indians were more illiterate during British rule than before. It was the colonizers who exploited Hindus, including children, and forced them to labor for slave wages or less in indentured servitude after slavery was so-called “abolished” in the British empire. It was easy to force Hindu children into work when their families were starving, their indigenous education system was taken away from them, they were transported from their homeland under false pretenses and contracts they couldn’t read, and they were whipped and beaten into laboring for less than pennies.
Hindus revere monkeys as sacred and would never eat them but Temple of Doom presented monkey’s brains as some kind of Indian menu item. Meanwhile, many Hindus are vegetarians and connecting with Hindus as well as the Hindu diaspora has even made vegetarianism popular in western countries like the UK and USA. It’s not an accident that the first Vegetarian Society was begun in England in 1847, during British rule of India.
Temple of Doom showed Hindus eating insects and snakes even though insects and snakes are not a Hindu menu item, and again, many Hindus are vegetarians because they revere all life.
Meanwhile, the vegetarian food shown in the village was presented as disgusting, dirty, vile. Now, if there’s one thing that the world knows, it’s that Indians don’t know how to cook, right? I don’t why the entire world adores Indian food when we don’t know how to cook. Columbus went looking for India for our spices because our food was just so damn good but white woman Willie from Temple of Doom must be right, Indians don’t know how to cook. And we all know that white women are great cooks.
As if the insulting way our food was presented wasn’t enough, the way Temple of Doom presented Kali worshippers as mindless brainwashed zombies is a total distortion of the Divine Feminine path. Kali worshippers are nothing like that; they are, in fact, one of the most authority questioning sects in Hinduism. The path of the Divine Feminine is deeply philosophical and complex but that path is demonized by colonizers because the very existence of Goddess worship and Goddess devotees is a threat to white and Abrahamic patriarchal supremacy.
Temple of Doom showed imagery that has nothing to do with either Kali or Shiv worship but is supposedly how the Thuggee “worshipped Kali”. This is a falsified presentation of history because studies have been done on the Thuggee. Most of them weren’t even Hindu and they certainly weren’t sacrificing people. They were simply a gang who robbed and murdered travelers by tricking them into perceived friendship. Their preferred method of murder was strangulation although they sometimes used blades and poison. Some historians trace their origin to the disbanding of Indian armies during the British conquest of India while other historians trace their creation to Moghuls and Muslim tribes. The Thuggee were, in fact, mostly Muslims who grew so large and profitable as a gang that people from other communities who had been impoverished by colonialism began joining their ranks. The British blamed the Thuggee on Hindus, thereby creating a distorted and false version of history which, surprise surprise, was used to justify oppressing Hindus. Coincidentally, this is where the word “thug” comes from — a gang that led to the criminalization of innocent Hindus. The British themselves were robbing and murdering Indians (mostly Hindus) on a mass scale. Some have calculated that as many as 35 million Indians died in British policy induced famines even as surplus grain was transported to Britain where the white people ate Indian bread. “But no, the Hindus are the ones to be afraid of,” the British told everyone, “they are the murderers!” Creating Hinduphobia, you see, was a political agenda for the colonizers and that agenda against Hindus continues for western colonizers to this day.
Temple of Doom also perpetuated fundamental ignorance about Kali and Shiv. Kali and Shiv are forms of the Divine in Hindu tradition. They are actually spouses and very devoted to each other, presenting an ideal of marital bliss. Their worshippers are not in any kind of war with each other and Kali’s worshippers would certainly never steal Shiv’s sacred items as this movie portrays. Shiv’s worshippers would also never call Kali “evil”, as Temple of Doom asserts. All of this information is in the public domain and easily found if the movie makers had wanted to make an accurate depiction of Hindus…but that was never their intention. Their intention was to appropriate Hindu ideas and bastardize them to propagate a sensationalized and falsified version of history to make money. It didn’t matter to them that such a racist and colonized representation of Hindus would be damaging and dangerous for Hindus worldwide. It suits the western white supremacist agenda to push Hinduphobia because it’s profitable.
Indiana Jones blatantly mistranslated Sanskrit multiple times and made up nonsense about Hindu beliefs. As a sidenote, that Sanskrit handwriting on the wall is so clumsy that no Hindu would ever allow it and Hindu turbans and clothes do not look like that. We are not Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.
Is it just me or did Temple of Doom make this above piece of “archeological evidence” with a dish rag and some crayons? They probably ran it over with their cars until it was dirty enough to pass for “Hindoo”. Also, Krishna’s “crown” would never look like that and that turban is wrong again. I’m honestly embarrassed for the filmmakers because they’re clearly not embarrassed for themselves.
Meanwhile, Willie got all dressed up in Indian clothes and wore them much better than Indian women, of course. The clothes made her look exotic but also superior. She was a white blonde Indian princess which makes no logical sense but that’s colonizer entitlement for you. She was the only woman at the royal dinner table because only white women had a place in power while Indian women, according to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, had none.
Indian women, meanwhile, were literally sidelined onscreen.
Young Indian women were shown dancing literally on the sidelines because that’s obviously where they belong, duh. Meanwhile, the British Raj had actually outlawed Hindu temple dancers and their communities were criminalized and stigmatized, leaving those dancers vulnerable to exploitation and poverty. Before this, the temple dancers were independent matriarchal communities who were highly respected in Hindu society for their art and wisdom. They are now some of the most marginalized castes in Indian society as a direct result of the colonizers oppressing them and spreading lies to criminalize and stigmatize them.
Temple of Doom shows young Indian women dancing and older Indian women begging. There is no other representation. No Indian women had any speaking lines in English so the English speaking audience could not connect with them in a human way. They were objectified and portrayed with tropes in every way.
Despite all the poverty porn and “heathenness” of the Indians, specifically Hindus, Indiana Jones repeatedly mentions “fortune and glory” as the reason why he’s there. And indeed, everyone knows that’s why the white people were in India. They were there to loot the Indians, particularly Hindus, and so they had to demonize and erase them to justify looting them. That’s why cultural appropriation was such a central theme in the movie. Willie wears Indian clothing and jewelry as well as Chinese clothing and jewelry. Indiana wears Indian clothing and a Vaishnav tilak on his forehead even though that’s a totally different symbol from the Kali sect he’s supposedly been brainwashed into.
Indiana was shown above appropriating the sacred thread over his shoulder, as if being brainwashed into a demonic cult suddenly made him a “Brahmin”. There’s no end to how wrong it was for a colonizer like Indiana Jones to don the sacred thread considering how much trauma the caste system has caused to so much of Indian society — particularly people from marginalized castes. The truth is that in ancient India before the entry of colonizers, Hindus from all communities wore the sacred thread including women. Invasions, torture, constant war, forced conversions, and poverty led to a breakdown of that system. It was a process of colonial trauma and genocide against Hindus that led to only Brahmins still persisting in donning the thread today. It is also true that the Brahmin community had nothing to do with the Thuggee whose members were majority non-Brahmin. And again, most of the Thuggee were not Hindu, they were Muslim.
In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones appropriated Muslim Middle Eastern clothing because as a white man, he could wear whatever he wanted. These were costumes that he could put on and take off as he liked and had nothing to do with his identity as a white man. His whiteness made him entitled to play with other people’s cultures as if they had no meaning. This is despite the fact that during the 80s, when this film was made, the US was meddling in the Middle East to support Israel, reduce Soviet influence, and manipulate oil prices which led to the first Gulf War in the 1990s.
Also during the 1980s, US hostile policy towards communist China was shifting to the possibility of friendship although Reagan still favored Taiwan and was deadlocked with the Chinese over the issues of Taiwan’s independence. In Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones’s love interest Willie wore a Chinese woman’s clothes (and wore them better than the Chinese women did, of course), flanked by Chinese brown women as her sidekicks, like Short Round was Indiana’s sidekick. And thus Chinese boys and women were portrayed as making the most perfect model minorities, but not Chinese men because they were gangsters, according to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
This is why colonizers can’t be trusted. While positioning themselves as saviors, they exploit, bastardize, appropriate, desecrate, falsify, loot, erase, demonize. They have to erase and demonize because otherwise you’d care about the people they’re harming. They have to train you not to feel for those peoples. Remember, those sacred artifacts “belong in a museum” and those people are heathens anyway.
Temple of Doom is the Indiana Jones franchise making their case that Indigenous artifacts are dangerous when left in the hands of Indigenous people. Why, if Indigenous peoples are left to their own devices then they might have dangerous cults! They might brainwash people into following them. Even Indy isn’t safe from their malevolent black magic. He almost killed Willie — a white blonde princess! — when he was brainwashed by the “evil Hindoos”. Because we all know that it was Hindus who went around the world forcing innocent people to convert to their religion, right? Oh wait, that was actually the Christians.
Jesus, if he ever existed, lived his entire life in the Middle East. He never went to Russia, Western Europe, Australia, central or southern or western Africa, or the Americas, and on and on. Those regions did not become Christian because they met Jesus and “saw the light”. Those people are Christians because they were colonized and looted and raped and forced to convert away from their Indigenous beliefs. Their children were forced into schools that traumatized them — you could even say brainwashed them — into being Christian. They did this all over the world, and particularly in India, in some of the most brutal ways. It’s no accident that Christianity is the world’s richest religion.
Meanwhile, Indiana does return the “sacred stone” to the poor downtrodden Indians but only because they see him as a savior. That’s key. Only the adoring natives will be allowed to exist, as long as they practice their traditions in a sanitized way and thank the white people for graciously allowing them to exist. Colonizers want to be worshipped and adored by the people they pillage and exploit. In short, the colonizers want to be the gods of the natives.
IMDB calls this character “Shaman” even though there’s no such thing as a Shaman in Hinduism or Buddhism or Jainism or Sikhism or any other indigenous spiritual beliefs anywhere in India. Shaman is not an Indian word, it actually refers to beliefs from Northern Mongolia. But the movie cast list characterizes the only “good Hindu” as a “Shaman”, in other words “not Hindu”. But he welcomed Indiana Jones as a literal savior sent by the Hindu God Shiv. “It was Shiva who made you fall from the sky…” he told Indy.
Steven Spielberg directed these films, aided and abetted by his producer and pal George Lucas.
Remember how George Lucas made his name and money off of the Star Wars films which were based on bastardized Hindu ideas and other eastern philosophies? That’s a whole other article but it’s important to keep in mind that George Lucas has made a lot of money appropriating Hindu ideas and stories. It turns out that India is still a gold mine for white colonizers even 73 years after Independence. Did you know that there are now Star Wars exhibits in museums? They literally put appropriated Hindu ideas in a museum. And they still do not credit Hindus in any of those exhibits or pass any of the money made to impoverished and exploited Hindu communities. Nowhere do they acknowledge where these ideas and this philosophy and this story actually came from. But it’s all still put in a museum for westerners to gawk at and continue making money.
It turns out there’s lots of money to be made with culturally appropriating and desecrating and demonizing Indigenous cultures. In movies. In media. In museums. In fashion. In jewelry. In food. In yoga studios. The list goes on and on.
All of it is violent. All of it is colonizing. It furthers the colonizing aims of the western white empire and it must be stopped.
Resources
App that gives truth behind 10 looted items in British Museum
Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
British created mass poverty in India
Indigenous Indian Education system was destroyed by British
White colonizer rape culture, pedophilia, and Christian supremacy
Boarding school trauma in the US
British army beating nonviolent protestors of Independence movement
British Raj imprisoning and torturing Independence activists
British Raj killing independence activists
West appropriating Yoga has made it a $80 billion industry
Indian and Hindu mathematical practices
India’s indigenous education system was widespread
British used indentured servitude to force Indian children to work
Hindus popularize vegetarian diets
Columbus went looking for India for spices
British killed 35 million Indians in unnecessary famines
Temple dancers were criminalized
Temple dancers were revered before colonizers oppressed them
British looted $45 trillion from India
Definition of cultural appropriation
Sacred thread worn by all communities
US dependence on oil and foreign policy in Middle East
US policy towards China in 1980s
Jesus lived in the Middle East
US used Papal doctrine to justify taking Native land
Christian missionaries and boarding schools in the US
Christianity is world’s richest religion
Star Wars is appropriated Hindu ideas
Star Wars appropriates Hindu ideas
Star Wars “creator” George Lucas builds museum
George Lucas’s $6.4 billion fortune
Legend of Korra and Avatar the Last Airbender franchise