The article deals with the complex process of creating a country image, both at home and abroad. It consists of two parts, being interrelated with each other, however not in a direct way. In part one the focus is laid on the image of India created by Indians themselves, which is partly a result of the grand economic transformation initiated in the beginning of the 1990s, and partly a heritage of much older cultural and political tradition. In part two the case of India’s changing image in Poland is analyzed, viz. the case of a country, which unlike other European states, never ventured to establish its own political presence overseas, but nevertheless it was able to build a complex structure of various images of the civilization it hardly had any direct political contact with.