All The World(s) Going And Coming

Science fiction writers have sometimes based Terrestrial colonials and extraterrestrial natives on European colonials and Asian or African natives. Equally, an account, for example, of British-ruled India can seem so exotic as to remind the reader of a science fictional setting:

"'Look! Brahmins and chumars [or see], bankers and tinkers, barbers and bunnias, pilgrims and potters - all the world going and coming.'"
-Rudyard Kipling, Kim (London, 2010), p. 58.

And, on the extrasolar planet Imhotep, Diana Crowfeather sees, among the "...brawling, polyglot, multiracial population, much of it transient, drifting in and out on the tides of space..." (Poul Anderson, Flandry's Legacy, p. 195), Tigeries, a Donarrian, Irumclagians, Shalmuans and a Wodenite.

Religions on Imhotep are also as diverse as in Kipling's India. Whereas Tigeries are inchoate pagans and Diana sleeps in "...a ruinous temple..." (p. 196), the Wodenite, Francis Xavier Axor, is ordained in the Galilean Order of the Jerusalem Catholic Church. The orphan Diana guides Axor just as the orphan Kim had guided a Tibetan lama (see image).

Read Kipling, then Anderson (if you haven't already).