One of the more striking indications of the way in which perceptions of India have changed around the world lies in your answer to a simple question: could even Steven Spielberg make a film like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom today? It's been just over two decades since that blockbuster swept the world's movie screens, taking boy-wonder Spielberg (who'd already gone from the dental Jaws to the transcendental Close Encounters of the Third Kind) into the cinematic stratosphere.

Despite lame dialogue, contrived plotlines and a visual gloominess that makes you wonder why anyone sat through the thing at all, the real problem with the second film in Indiana Jones trilogy was undoubtedly its grotesque depiction of India.

The heart of Spielberg's story lay (along with the hearts of assorted human unfortunates) in the eponymous temple of doom beneath a palace somewhere in northern India, near the Himalayan border with China.

Indiana Jones, accompanied by a blonde moll and a Chinese sidekick (actually played by a Vietnamese, but the filmmakers probably figured that all Orientals look alike) enter an Indian temple in quest of a translucent Sivalingam that belongs to an impoverished village. The intrepid trio proceeds to annihilate a bloodthirsty cult of Kali worshippers there and liberate a swarm of children the villains have enslaved. At the end they return the kids and the stone to the village, now prosperous and green again. Virtue has triumphed over evil.

Sounds pretty good, I suppose. The critics thought so (the film scores an astonishing 93% favourable rating on the website rottentomatoes.com, which tracks movie reviews) and so did the fans, who flocked to cinema-halls from Sacramento to Sydney.

Stepping goggle-eyed off Spielberg's celluloid roller-coaster, hundreds of millions of people, mostly young and impressionable people who almost certainly had never set foot in the subcontinent, met an Indian family, or read an exposition of Hinduism acquired an abiding image of India. It was of a country where kings and courtiers feasted on stewed snakes and monkey brains, where Kali worshippers plucked the hearts out of their victims and embroiled them in flaming pits, and where evil, poverty and destitution reigned until the Great White Hero could intervene to restore justice and prosperity.

Never mind that anyone with some education and a little common sense should have been able to see how absurd these propositions were the filmmakers correctly assumed that they wouldn't. Given both the relative youth of the audience and the colossal global ignorance about India in those days, the Indiana Jones view of India was swallowed without challenge by cinegoers around the world.

(Many NRIs recounted tales of foreigners cancelling prior commitments to dinner for fear of being served stewed snakes and monkey brains by their Indian hosts!) Of course, Steven Spielberg and his accomplices weren't involved in any sinister conspiracy to denigrate India; what was at work was not bias but indifference, even sloppiness. Spielberg may well have learned of the exotic culinary practices of some Chinese in Hong Kong, found them sufficiently revolting to be filmed, and put them quite literally into the mouths of Indians. Who knows the difference, he may well have thought, and who cares?

It was in the same vein, then, as his supposedly 'Himalayan' village populated not by stocky, high-cheekboned Gurkhas or Garhwalis, but by dark-skinned, long-limbed Sinhalese speakers: those were the extras he found on 'location' in Sri Lanka, and all foreign languages sound alike anyway, don't they?

So too the scenes in the temple he knew what kind of horror would make his shrieking patrons choke on their popcorn, he knew just how his phantasmagorical Temple of Doom should be depicted, and if neither bore any relation to any kind of Indian reality, who would give a damn? After all, an Indian actor was prepared to drag one of his goddesses into the gore, and to mouth lines about his religion's desire to stop the spread of Christianity by any means. Why blame Spielberg, if Amrish Puri could sell his self-respect for several fistfuls of dollars?

Of course I can imagine Spielberg's fans rising to his defence with the argument that the film wasn't meant to be taken seriously. But entertainment is a highly effective method of instruction, and the fantasy in Indiana Jones is always anchored in reality: thus, there is a real city (Shanghai), a real country (China) and a real mountain-range (the Himalayas), which no one suggests are the figments of Spielberg's fancy. But he does not invest any of them with non-existent sins. India, Indians and Hinduism, however, do not escape so lightly. The filmmakers are cavalier in their disregard.

If they had to show Indians, a notoriously vegetarian people, eating yuckily, why on the worst excesses of Chinese carnivorism? If they had to libel a cult, why not invent one, rather than abuse a goddess revered by millions? (The film is set in the 1930s, when Kali worship did not include human sacrifice a century after the elimination of the Thugs, who by comparison with Spielberg's Amrish Puri, seem positively humanitarian.) Where in a Hindu temple would one worship grotesque skulls and skeletons, and find slogans on Kali scrawled on the walls like so much political graffiti? The reason all these feature in this appalling film is, quite simply, that the filmmakers knew they would get away with it.

No one would care except Indians, and we didn't matter. Well, now we do. What has changed in the years since Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is that India has ceased being a land that could be relegated to the margins, a place of exotic inconveniences, full of snake-charmers impaled on beds of nails. It's now a country that counts, populated by software geeks who might be making your airline reservations and reading your MRIs, a land which foreigners can no longer afford to be ignorant about. Even Hollywood moguls. If Jones ever got out of Indiana, what he'd find in our country today isn't a temple of doom, but something quite different. Call it a template of dhoom.