As the world-weary Begum of Khatm, Madhur Jaffrey first appears covered in silken garments edged with gold and strings of pearls round her throat in Merchant Ivory's 1983 film, Heat and Dust. Chewing paan, while puffing from an elegant cigarette holder, the dowager queen closely watches a palace darbar in session through the narrow chicks of a bamboo pardah (curtain) through kohl-rimmed, heavy-lidded eyes. With her ladies-in-waiting, who are similarly adorned, around her, she appears the quintessential zenana matriarch: beautiful, scheming and omniscient within her secluded world. The camera juxtaposes the shadowy interior of the zenana palace with the scene occurring outside, where the Nawab, in full courtly dress with an ornate turban and ceremonial sword, sits on his gaddi (throne) while greeting British dignitaries, officials and their wives.

Such scenes reflect a postcolonial fascination with colonial princely India and the exoticism of the palace zenana. In creating this portrait of a 1920s Muslim queen, Jaffrey embodies the ‘distinctly royal, romantic, and non-modern India’, of the native states which Euro-American viewers have increasingly encountered through luxury tourism and advertising, as noted in the last chapter, and associated with India the mystical and magical. While such films continue to stereotype South Asia through a royal past that is timeless, tradition-bound and superstition-riddled, the ‘loving fascination [of] the camera nonetheless demonstrates’ its enduring allure for the voyeuristic spectator.