Sim Sim Salabim

India has fakirs, turbans, snake charmers, the Ganges and Gandhi. It's also full of temples overgrown with humid jungle and occasionally home to an evil cult, elephants and tigers. Snakes are everywhere, so it's a good idea to have a cute and heroic mongoose with you to take them on.

Often, this trope goes hand-in-hand with a case of Mistaken Nationality, as India, for some reason, suddenly takes on Arab and Persian characteristics in some American films. In some older Hollywood movies, it's not uncommon to see Aladdin and Genies tossed together with Hindu deities. To be fair, this is Truth in Television to an extent as India has a large Muslim population (13.4%, according to The Other Wiki) and was ruled by Islamic kingdoms for century-spanning portions of its history, so it's certainly been more influenced by the Middle East than most Western countries have been.

Anime and Manga

 * Kushan in Berserk.
 * With some Arabian Nights Days and The Empire thrown in.
 * While his country is unnamed, Shuraiya from Shugo Chara, and his followers, are extemely stereotypically Indian.
 * Kaolla Su and her family in Love Hina also feature some Indian stereotypes, although the manga establishes their homeland as being in the South Pacific.
 * As it does with every other racial stereotype in the book, G Gundam plays this to maximum effect with Neo India's Cobra Gundam, piloted by a hypnotist/snake-charmer.
 * In Eyeshield 21 the World Cup arc has this in, of course, Team India. They all wear turbans, one of the players is a snake charmer, and their coach has a very thick beard.

Comic Books

 * The Indian state of Gaipajama (with town names like Sethru and Jamjah) in the Tintin book Cigars of the Pharaoh.
 * Asterix visits this version of India in Asterix and the Flying Carpet.

Film
"Bertram Pincus: Dr. Prashar - you're from a... scary country, right? [pause] Dr. Prashar: I'm from India... Bertram Pincus: But, you're not... Christian, like us? [pause] Dr. Prashar: I'm a Hindu... Bertram Pincus: Yeah. So, um, how would you extract information from a hostile? Dr. Prashar: Well... as a... Hindu person... I would just... ask him... politely..."
 * India as seen in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, although being set in one of the princely states (ruled by princes of India that co-operated with the British in exchange for pretty much free rein), the whole 'very backwards' thing is justified. A stereotypical Indian wise man even shows up in Egypt in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
 * Jumanji's world inside the gameboard seemed to be a Flanderized mix of this and Darkest Africa.
 * The James Bond film Octopussy takes us to a very trope-laden India. Snake charmers, sword swallowers, fire breathers, fire walkers, beds of nails... the lot.
 * Ricky Gervais's character in Ghost Town seems to follow this mentality when asking fellow dentist, Dr. Prashar, for advice -


 * The country of the "Easterners" of Help

Literature

 * Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Books and their various adaptations. Kipling's Jungle Book story "Rikki-Tikki Tavi" is the origin of the cute and heroic mongoose trope.
 * "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" in all likelihood is itself based on the Panchatantra "The Faithful Mongoose", as was a Sindibad tale (where a weasel was substituted for the mongoose). Kipling was pretty cognizant of Muslim and Hindu folktales since childhood.
 * Cleverly subverted by Barbara Cleverly in The Last Kashmiri Rose (2001) - as there is no modern interest to display Colonial India as a Disneyfied place of superstitious natives ruled by brave colonial administrators and turbaned rifle-armed Martial Race troopers, she could freely display the vices of the system: idleness, drunkenness, exploitation of cheap labor (even poor Brits could afford Indian servants), incompetence...

Live Action TV

 * Outsourced (TV series) - Right outside the office you see the street has some sort of Middle Eastern looking drapes hanging in the middle of the road.
 * The Far Pavilions - the 1984 TV series and the 1978 novel on which it had been based - has them all: snakes as murder weapons, cruel and superstitious natives, sati, characters Raised by Natives, the might of The Raj putting things back in order and so on.

Video Games

 * Punch Out has Great Tiger, a "boxer" who fights with attacks like teleporting and illusions.
 * Street Fighter has Dhalsim, who wears a skull necklace (probably a reference to Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction) and uses attacks with names like "Yoga Fire".
 * Later story developments give a more down-to-earth story to Dhalsim's skulls: they are the skulls of little children who died of a disease in his home village.
 * World of Warcraft: In the World's End Tavern in Shattrath's Lower City, there's an NPC with this as its name.

Western Animation
"Stewie: "Jonny Quest" ... okay, welcome aboard. Stewie: "Doctor Benton Quest" ... alright, have a good flight. Stewie: "Hadji" ... hmm, uh, listen, you've been randomly selected for additional screening. Hadji: But you didn't even type anything in! Stewie: Look, if it were up to me, you'd be right there on that flight, but ... uh, I'm going to need you to take off your shoes, and that lovely, uh, hat. Hadji: Sim sim salabim! Stewie: Yeah, I'd cut back on that."
 * Named for the magic words used by Hadji of Jonny Quest, who grew up in a version of this India. The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest also gave Hadji some quite sleazy hacker skills; though this was meant to subvert this stereotype, little did they know that hacker skills would make him even more of a stereotypical Indian, now that India is a big software development superpower!
 * Somewhat averted in a Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego? episode, in which Carmen is plotting to make her own dinosaur. Zack and Ivy land in a boat of Indian spices, discover Carmen stealing the Taj Hall, and have to deal with a merchant to get a Carmen clue. (The Taj Hall is the Indian version of Carnegie Hall, by the way. It's often confused with the Taj Mahal, but they have little in common.)
 * Played straight in Batman: Gotham Knight, complete with mongoose and cobra action. The plot of the short is that Bruce goes to India to get lessons from a fakir on managing pain.
 * Invoked in an episode of Family Guy, parodying "random selection" for "further screening" at airports:


 * Shows up in an old episode of The Simpsons, where Homer and Apu travel to India to visit the Kwik-E-Mart HQ

Real Life

 * Subverted in a comic strip story drawn by Sergio Aragones about his trip to India. He took a flight and found that a large group of Hare Krishnas, an ostensibly Indian religion, were on the same trip, thankfully in a different section of the plane. As he saw the group disembark and chanting noisily as they marched, Sergio noticed that the native Indians were gawking and laughing their heads off at this ridiculous bunch of Westerners that have arrived.