My earliest memories are of Methodist Mission quarters in the diocese of Dilkusha, Fiji. Dilkusha, the name of a minor Indian principality, was mentioned in E.M. Forster’s classic novel A Passage to India: its name literally means “Heart’s Delight” in Hindi–Urdu.

Dilkusha was the Indian wing of the much larger Fijian diocese of Davuilevu (in Fiji’s Rewa province), site of the famous Baker Hall – named after Reverend Thomas Baker, an Australian Methodist evangelist who ended up in the pot of a disgruntled Fijian chief on July 20 1867.

We were told the reverend had humiliated the high chief in front of his people by touching his hair: a clear affront to Fijian aristocratic protocol. His spare boots, however, survived. They may be seen in the Fiji Museum.

Dilkusha, the lesser sister diocese, had no such epic tale. But it quickly became a vibrant centre for Australian Christian evangelists, eager to convert Indian heathens. My father, grandson of an indentured labourer on his mother’s side, came here in the mid-1940s as a primary school teacher.

In the end my father, like Mr Biswas in V.S. Naipaul’s great novel on the plantation Indian diaspora, built a house of his own in the adjoining village of Waila (Realm of Floods). But when I remember my homeland, it is through the decade I spent in Dilkusha Methodist quarters, in the 1950s and early 1960s.

We were part of an enclosed community run by successive Methodist priests. Our joys were few: fishing or canoeing in the great Rewa River below, attending Sunday church services or walking across the paddock to the Boys’ Hostel.

Dilkusha’s history was rich – but for me, it was a drab world. And then magic occurred: we discovered Aladdin’s cave.

Across the river from us, in Nausori Town, a Gujarati Muslim entrepreneur built a cinema hall – Empire Theatre – and my life changed.

I was five years old in 1950, a year short of six, when you could enter school and would be considered mature. Then, in 1951, Raj Kapoor’s film Awaara (The Vagabond), about geneticism and social determinism, came to Empire Theatre. Aged six, my life began to change.

I was never good at reading, unlike my Dilkusha mate Sarwesh (“Tomato”) Thakur, who was an exceptional reader. At school, we learned to read in English, but we spoke in Fiji Hindi at home. My father’s side of the family, however, were more comfortable with Fijian, or iTaukei – the language of the country’s First Nation peoples.

It mattered little that I wasn’t a good reader (or a reader at all). On Saturdays, I entered a world of my own. Over a period of time, I had a repertoire of films in me, thanks to the weekly allowance of a shilling from my parents and another shilling from my Dādī (grandmother), Nausori market’s foremost coconut-oil seller. (I have yet to work out why she did it for me alone when she had some 20 other grandchildren!)

So cinema – and Empire Theatre – became my world. It was my literature, my culture, my dream world. It was my escape from failure to compete with my peers, and my school of drama – indeed, my language too. I look back and ask myself how I could have lived without the Saturday matinees – the 10am Hindi film and the 2.30pm Hollywood film.

I lived for Saturdays until I left Fiji aged 18, in 1964. In the Empire Theatre’s downstairs, one shilling (ten cents) seats, infested with khaṭmal (bed bugs), my fantasies were created.

While the films I watched there would connect me with the India I had never physically inhabited, the worlds they opened to me were like temples of desire: elusive and mysterious, as well as enchanting. This would change – but long after I had left Fiji, after I had become a film scholar, writing from distant, sometimes cold lands.

Years later, writing from Perth, Australia, I watched Bollywood fantasies shift from their roots in melodrama to an endorsement of a nation ideologically defined as Hindu. This often involved demonising India’s non-Hindus, especially its age-old Muslim inhabitants. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, elected in 2014, this is also the nation’s political agenda.

It is strikingly displayed in the jingoistic espionage thrillers Dhurandhar I (The Stalwart, 2025) and Durandhar II (The Revenge, 2026) – the latter currently screening in Perth. These films, based on the adventures of an Indian spy in Karachi, Pakistan, define an Indian nation obsessed by the spectres of an enemy that is both another nation (Pakistan) and a “nation”, the Muslim minority within India.

Back in 1950s Dilkusha, my Empire Theatre fantasies were of a different order. They began with the Arabian Nights. The defining film in that genre, Homi Wadia’s Alibaba and the Forty Thieves (1954), was properly introduced to me when my father’s friend, the cook at Dilkusha Boys’ Hostel, took me to watch it one Wednesday night in 1955.

I knew the Alibaba tale, but Wadia’s rendition is a great piece of cinema. It captured Oriental fantasies way better than his Hollywood counterparts. I have seen it more than any other film – and consider it the finest version of an Arabian Nights tale ever.

I also loved sentimental songs from the films of Bollywood’s Golden Age, roughly spanning the films made between Deedar (Sight, 1951) and Gumrah (Infidelity, 1963) – and often marked by a final shot of the lonely hero walking away towards the horizon.

It was in Empire Theatre that I saw the original version of Aah (Sighs, 1953), actor and director Raj Kapoor’s homage to P.C. Barua’s foundational 1935 Bollywood film Devdas (based on a Bengali novel by Saratchandra........

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