This research explores how Year 7 pupils’ understanding of India can influence their conceptions of place. Findings reveal that pupils expected to learn about distant place through comparison to their own experience, a customary technique in both primary and secondary geography education, which fosters a binary understanding of the world, reinforcing ideas of ‘us and them’. By explicitly discussing the complexities of representation, place, and everyday life – concepts not usually addressed until A-level – pupils were able to dispel the idea of ‘a single story’, and began to develop empathetic understanding of the diverse reality of everyday life in distant places. India served as a contextual backdrop for their learning, and as they were exposed to more and more contemporary images and facts about India, the more they moved towards a continuum, rather than binary approach (Picton, 2008), and began to think in more relational terms (Martin, 2013).