Twentieth-century critics of eighteenth-century fictional representations of India were less than flattering about what the eminent Indologist Sylvain Lévy, writing in 1930, disparaged as ‘des exercices littéraires … Inde des Rajas, Inde des fakirs, Inde des bayadères’ (literary exercises … India of the Rajas, India of the fakirs, India of the bayadères). Although several anthologies written in French have made passing reference to the number of eighteenth-century literary works claiming to be set in India, they often hastily dismiss such representations with the caveat that the ‘India’ in question is one of which ‘les géographes ont perdu de vue’ (geographers have lost sight). Yet, while the writers of these overtly fictional texts frequently had only a vicarious experience of what Mary Louise Pratt terms the ‘contact zone’ (the space where cultures ‘meet and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination’), their fiction contributed to the generation of meaning surrounding the term ‘Inde’. As Murr established in 1983, there were three important sources of information about India: Jesuit missionary letters (collated and published as Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, écrites des missions étrangères, par quelques mission-naires de la compagnie de Jésus between 1707 and 1776); savants who travelled to India, such as the académicien Guillaume le Gentil de la Galaisière in 1761; and the philosophes’ discursive explorations. By neglecting fictional representations, however, Murr overlooks an important medium which contributed to the cultural and ideological presuppositions evoked by the word ‘India’ and which governed the narrative shapes that could be used to represent it. If, as Embree has so cogently argued, India is a Western imaginative construct, and for ‘over two thousand years a constellation of ideas and images associated with the word has been part of the intellectual heritage of the Western world’, it is only by engaging with the range of discourses and genres which used the construct that its role in French imaginings during the late eighteenth century can be fully explored.