Mola Ram (High priest): The priest who tore out hearts, and the colonial history that invented him

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Steven Spielberg, 1984) is set in 1935, a year before Raiders. After a plane crash, Indiana, the singer Willie Scott and the boy Short Round reach a village in northern India whose sacred stone has been stolen and whose children have disappeared. The trail leads to Pankot Palace, ruled by a child maharaja, and beneath it to the temple of a revived Thuggee cult that worships the goddess Kali. Its high priest is Mola Ram. Under his command, kidnapped children work as slaves in the mines, digging for the remaining Sankara stones, which he believes will give the cult enough power to spread across the world. In the most famous scene, he pulls the heart out of a sacrificial victim’s chest with his bare hand; the heart keeps beating, and the man is lowered into a pit of lava. He forces Indiana to drink blood that puts him under the cult’s spell. At the end, on a rope bridge over a river, Indiana invokes Shiva, the stones burn, and Mola Ram falls to the crocodiles. British troops arrive to finish the rescue.

// The theoryWho decides what crime looks like in a colony

Postcolonial criminology starts from a simple historical fact: in colonies, the definition of crime was written by the colonizers. Criminologists such as Biko Agozino and Chris Cunneen argue that the discipline grew up partly as a tool of empire, classifying colonized peoples, their customs and their resistance as criminal, and that its categories still bear that origin. The literary scholar Edward Said had shown in Orientalism (1978) how Western writing constructed “the East” as irrational, cruel and in need of control. British India produced two famous examples. In the 1830s, the official William Sleeman led a campaign against the thugs, presented as a hereditary religious brotherhood of stranglers devoted to Kali. Historians such as Kim Wagner and Martine van Woerkens have since shown that the reality—banditry on the roads—was transformed by colonial officials into a vast secret cult, partly to justify new powers of policing. And in 1871 the Criminal Tribes Act declared entire communities to be criminal by birth.

// The subjectA villain without a country of his own

Inside the story, Mola Ram’s crimes are clear and serious: child slavery, human sacrifice, the drugging and control of a child ruler, and a project of domination that he describes as the destruction of the British, then of other religions, until Kali reigns. He is charismatic, theatrical and absolutely certain. What the film never gives him is context. We do not learn who he was, why the cult revived or what it means to the people of the region beyond terror. The villagers who lost their children are shown as helpless and grateful. The Indian characters are either victims, servants or fanatics. The film’s production history shows how sensitive this was at the time: the makers were refused permission to shoot in India, filmed the Indian scenes in Sri Lanka, and the finished film was banned by the Indian censors when it was released.

// The crackA theory of images, not of acts

Postcolonial criminology explains Mola Ram as a representation much better than as a criminal. Inside the fiction, enslaving children and killing people are crimes under any culture’s standards, and the theory does not deny that. Its point is different: it asks why this particular villain was imagined this way, which history he draws on and whose interests that history served. There is a risk of overstating the case: Temple of Doom is a pulp adventure that copies the serials of the 1930s, including their prejudices, more than a deliberate piece of propaganda. Spielberg himself later said it was the film in the series he liked least. But the old serials were themselves products of the colonial imagination, and copying them without question reproduces what they carried.

The second limit is the opposite risk: treating all violence in colonized societies as an invention of the colonizers. Banditry on the roads of nineteenth-century India was real, and it had real victims; what the historians question is the scale, the religious explanation and the use the empire made of it. Mola Ram is a fictional criminal, responsible for his fictional crimes. The film that made him is responsible for something else: for turning a goddess and a whole country into the scenery of a nightmare, using the same picture the empire had painted to rule them.