Even before Lang used a yoghi in Spiders, German actor-director Paul Wegener had made a 1916 film called Der Yoghi, about a mysterious Indian fellow who has concocted an invisibility potion. And just before putting on the turban to play the rajah in The Indian Tomb, actor Conrad Veidt had just finished playing Cesare, the mysterious “somnambulist” with supposed paranormal abilities in Robert Wiene’s celebrated film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920).
The second major character change was to transform the architect’s wife Irene into his fiance Irene. This small change invested her character with more urgency and also opened up the possibility of her having a flirtation with the prince—a possibility that Lang would use to energize the climax of the film. This change may also reflect something of Fritz’s and Thea’s attitude toward marriage at the time—namely the fact that they were carrying on a very public affair with each other while they were also married to other people. For them to make a film about a heroic wife willing to sacrifice anything for her husband might have been too embarrassing for either of them at this time. The undesirable consequences of marriage would also be strongly emphasized in their next two collaborations, The Shifting Image (Der wandernde Bild) and Four Around a Woman, aka Fighting Hearts (Die Vier um die Frau).
Third, Miriam, the child who befriends and aids the architect in the novel, was transformed into a serving woman named Mirrjah. In the film, she becomes the princess’s ally. Curiously, she does not retain the function of being the character who effects the reunion of the architect and his fiancée. (As we will see, how Lang and von Harbou solved that problem is still a mystery.)
Other details from the novel would also be retained but used in new ways, including the prince’s tiger pen, the killer cobra in the ninth chapter, and even a few lines of dialogue. In particular, Lang’s imagination seems to have been fueled by the prince’s grisly speech to the architect in the third chapter of the book, reproduced here from our translation. The architect is professing his love for India, but the prince expresses the opposite affection:
You will see India, the country that is a woman—you must look to her down to the bone, to the last beat of her heart. You must draw away the veil of secrets that has no secrets. You must sense the origin of the insanity which can cause a nation of millions to tear their flesh for the greater glory of insane gods; the snakes, cows, and monkeys speak sacred words, forcing the people to be in terrible unison with upraised arms in one place, to grow their fingernails to the backs of their fists, to sleep on beds of nails, and to bury themselves in burning cow dung. [ . . . ] You must look at the diseases of this people, for it is as if even they have been gripped by the disease of madness itself. Their members swell until the people resemble Ganesha, the son of Shiva, the god with the elephant head. The snow of leprosy covers them like salt, and the plague rides on the rats no one will kill because the Hindu must not kill.
Many of the images from that speech would turn up later on screen.
Thus armed with enough hokum to sink a battleship, The Indian Tomb began its journey from page to screen, and in the process, Thea von Harbou was about to get a graduate-level course in how to construct a screenplay.
Part One The Mission of the Yoghi (Die Sendung des Yoghi)