| Summary: | In the eyes of the travel merchants, India exists only through the imaginary dimension she elicits and that constantly recreates her. This imaginary element in the construction of a tourist discourse plays on a set of representations which focus on three themes: a timeless India, a spiritual India and a poor India. These themes determine high places which are both carriers of exoticism, affection, emotion and identity, and whose map is indicative of the variety of discourses used by travel merchants. These stereotypical suppositions and the iconographic rhetoric used are indicative of a thought according to which this mystical, traditional and destitute India, acts as a counterpoint to a rational, modern and developed West. Thus, it will be shown that, instrumentally, these suppositions proceed through metaphors: India is Hinduism, a pilgrimage to the sources of wisdom where tribal populations, maharajas, tigers, snake charmers, lush groves, and temples, abound. All those images create a seemingly timeless India.
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