'Help!'

Indian immigrants poured into Britain between 1948 and 1962, when the Conservative government passed the Commonwealth Immigrants Act. For many in Britain, India was not the land they had oppressed for several hundred years, but the land of yoga and yogis, spicy food and strange religious and sexual practices.

In The Beatles movie Help! (1965), Ringo is chased around London by mad priests of Kali and there is not one Indian in the cast, but it was also during filming that George Harrison became fascinated by sitar music and he would play a sitar on Norwegian Wood a few months later. It would become a passion that would last all his life and, tellingly, he got the other Beatles interested.