What sometimes seems to happen with analogue-type settings is that vast geographies and eras are collapsed into a singular image that aims to be both fantastical and somehow representative. For example, Hinduism (my religion, culturally) is incredibly diverse, has changed over the millennia, and is obviously not the only religion in South Asia. I don’t think a fantasy setting could or should try to do justice to that entire history. I think it would be more generative to take a specific region, at a specific time period, learn as much as you can about it, and then use all that as inspiration, rather than try to create a fantasy Hinduism that would serve as an rpg playground.
Without that grounded specificity—which takes work—fantasy drifts into the same old orientalist cliches. There is a fantasy-Nepal setting that osr types always praise called Yoon-suin. The very first page of this setting starts talking about the caste system in their game, and this is extremely off-putting to me. Caste is an ongoing structure of violence in South Asian communities. Why is that the first thing this non-South Asian author needs to include in their setting? Why does that do the work of communicating the “exoticness” of your world?
The “thugees” that a few people mentioned are the same way. It’s a category created by the British, who, being unable to correctly read and contextualize the people they were colonizing, and/or perhaps as an effort to dehumanize them, ended up creating an entire criminal category that was almost immediately sensationalized by British writers into a stereotype of “murderous Indians” until finding its way into things like Indiana Jones (and being the origination for the racialized term “thug” in the English language).
Anyway, all of that is to say that an Indian fantasy setting is totally viable—as also shown by the many contemporary Indian fantasy writers—but will be better if one does a bit of work to make it grounded and textured (and therefore all the more richer for one’s own imagination) rather than a bland repetition of colonial cliches.
Without that grounded specificity—which takes work—fantasy drifts into the same old orientalist cliches. There is a fantasy-Nepal setting that osr types always praise called Yoon-suin. The very first page of this setting starts talking about the caste system in their game, and this is extremely off-putting to me. Caste is an ongoing structure of violence in South Asian communities. Why is that the first thing this non-South Asian author needs to include in their setting? Why does that do the work of communicating the “exoticness” of your world?
The “thugees” that a few people mentioned are the same way. It’s a category created by the British, who, being unable to correctly read and contextualize the people they were colonizing, and/or perhaps as an effort to dehumanize them, ended up creating an entire criminal category that was almost immediately sensationalized by British writers into a stereotype of “murderous Indians” until finding its way into things like Indiana Jones (and being the origination for the racialized term “thug” in the English language).
Anyway, all of that is to say that an Indian fantasy setting is totally viable—as also shown by the many contemporary Indian fantasy writers—but will be better if one does a bit of work to make it grounded and textured (and therefore all the more richer for one’s own imagination) rather than a bland repetition of colonial cliches.
