The banquet at the palace of the child maharajah, whose Muslim-Hindu name is Zalim Singh, is a feast with live baby snakes that emerge from a giant snake when sliced open, giant beetles, and eyeball soup (from what animal one is left to wonder). The chilled monkey brains—the featured dessert—demonstrates a complete ignorance of Hindu dietary restrictions. There is a double irony here: first, regarding the vegetarian diet of Hindus; and second, the Hindu god Hanuman’s assumption of the form of a monkey. As Nirej Sekhon writes, “In the second Indiana Jones film, the hero’s pseudo-archaeological misadventures land him in an unnamed part of India. After consuming a typical Indian feast of live vermin, eyeball soup, and monkey brains, the decidedly non-Indian Indy discovers a subterranean ‘temple of doom,’ where he is left to cringe in horror as the natives tear the heart out of a living human.” The unmapped village of Mayapore suggests that “civilization” (the West) has not reached it.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and postcolonial critiques of Hollywood's depiction of non-Western cultures.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 603