Framed by the critical literature regarding Western depictions of the ‘Middle Eastern Orient’ – depicted loosely, often incoherently, as Arab-Persian-Turkic and inevitably Muslim – this paper looks outward in a different direction. My gaze is the cinematic depiction of an equally amorphous ‘India’ in Egypt, long the center of Arabic language studio film production. I focus on comic depictions of an exotic other, perhaps Muslim, perhaps not, who is culturally foreign and decidedly imaginary. I start in the ‘golden’ black-and-white era with Salama fi Khayr (1934) and Si Omar (1941), both starring Arab cinema’s first comic king, Najib al-Rihani. These films feature the foreign ‘maharaja’ and ‘fortune teller’ who, sharing visual imagery and linguistic wordplay with Western imaginings, would be imitated over the years. Following up with filmic treatments from successive decades, up to and including recent years, I explore images and wordplay that are particular to Egyptian/Arab inflected films. In so doing I ask what these filmic images and caricatures may say about an Egyptian/Arab view of neighbors who are at once fellow Muslim others, part of a particular shared civilizational history, and/or non-Muslim strangers. Both Muslim and non-Muslims constitute a broader construct that Vijay Prashad has called the ‘Oriental menagerie’ and what here I term as ‘alternate Orientals.’ This is all mediated through a shared anti-colonial drive – by Egyptians/Arabs and South Asians alike – against a common British master, as well as the post-independence politics of the cold war and Bandung/non-aligned era, and the long standing cultural impact of Bollywood on the Arab and Arabic-speaking world.