Phantom India: Reflections of a voyage is a 1969 French seven part television documentary mini-series about India, directed by Louis Malle. It was shown on BBC television as Phantom India.

Malle later said that the film was his most personal work and the one he was most proud of, it is widely regarded as the crowning achievement of his career. It was initially inspired by a two-month trip to India in late 1967 that Malle made on behalf of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs to present a selection of "new French cinema" throughout the country. Filming took place between January 5, 1968 and May 1, 1968 with a crew of two, a cameraman and a sound recordist. Malle arrived in India with no particular plans and financed the trip himself. The resulting 30 hours of footage was then edited down to the 363 minutes of Phantom India. The 105-minute long Calcutta used the footage he had recorded over his three-week stay in that city. Phantom India was shown on French television and the BBC in the UK in 1969. Many British Indians and the Indian Government felt that Malle had shown a one-sided portrait of India, focussing on the impoverished, rather than the developing, parts of the country. A diplomatic incident occurred when the Indian government asked the BBC to stop broadcasting the programme. The BBC refused and were briefly asked to leave their New Delhi bureau.

Had Louis Malle only made Phantom India, he would still hold an honored place in the history of film. Made with a small crew consisiting of cinematographer Etienne Becker and sound man Jean-Claude Laureux, Phantom India is not only a remarkable document of a time and place, but also a meditation on the difficulty of truly knowing the Other. Malle found this work to be inspirational: "In the autumn of 1967 I was asked by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs to present in India a series of eight French films... I was supposed to stay two weeks but I ended up staying almost two months... After those two months I realized that although India was impossible to understand for a foreigner - it was so opaque - yet I was so completely fascinated by it that I would have to come back. So I returned to France at the end of 1967, and in a couple of weeks I raised the money I needed... My proposition was that we would start in Calcutta, look around and eventually shoot. No plans, no script, no lighting equipment, no distribution commitments of any kind... It was enormously important for me, and I'm still trying to make sense of it today."

Born to a family of wealth and privilege, Louis Malle emerged in the 1950s as one of the maverick voices of the French New Wave. Unlike many of his New Wave contemporaries, Malle defied the auteurist trappings of the movement by exploring new formal and thematic concerns with each project.

After 37 years of those films, when we are commemorating an year of new governments both at the centre and the state, it will be stark in comparision to see much of India is already same - Good and Badin equalmeasures and not much has changed through these years.

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