At one point in the new film, Victoria & Abdul , the old empress gets despondent. “Everyone I really love has died and I just go on and on,” she complains.
That’s rather like the Raj itself.
Long past its expiry date, the British Empire chugs along amiably, at least on film. As it serves up yet another pot of warm and fuzzy nostalgia khichdi , Victoria & Abdul makes it apparent that these days brown is the new sepia.
Once the white man came to India to lift the natives out of their heathen darkness (and take their jute, iron and Kohinoor). But here the brown man goes to London to lift the spirits of the English queen.
This is still colonialism, just a more feel-good garden party version tempered with a dash of political correctness. The film absolves Victoria of all responsibility for colonialism and turns young Abdul into a man-sized plushie fit for a queen. He is her shahi tukda , as sweet as the profiteroles she loves.
Abdul kisses the queen’s feet, gazes at her with puppy dog eyes but lives to tell the tale unlike poor beleaguered Gunga Din, in the famous Rudyard Kipling poem, who saves the English soldier’s life but is shot and killed before he can finally find some respect.
Tho’ I’ve belted you and flayed you,
By the livin’ Gawd that made you,
You’re a better man than I am,
Gunga Din .
After chilled monkey brains
Perhaps we should consider it a promotion of sorts — from Gunga Din to Victoria’s secret. And Abdul as munshi-munchkin is certainly more palatable than the chilled monkey brains of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom . In a time of Brexit, when Britain feels its puniness every day, I can understand the seduction of Raj nostalgia for the English.
In The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel , the English seniors fled the dreariness of England and retirement parties with “crap cheese, crap wine” and “beige bloody bungalows” for Jaipur where the cheese and wine were probably still crap but the Hawa Mahal is candy-pink and the sun shines brightly.
Plenty of Indians were offended by the poverty porn of Slumdog Millionaire but didn’t notice how TheBest Exotic Marigold Hotel turned India into a midsummer night’s daydream for old English retirees. At one point in that film, Judi Dench says, “There’s no past you can bring back by longing for it” and irony goes and rusts to death somewhere.
What’s more confounding is our abiding fascination with the Raj. It’s fading no doubt but still there.
That Shashi Tharoor’s speech at a debate about colonial reparations went viral proves that we won’t swallow the old “at least they gave us railways” line as willingly anymore. The last couple of Raj outings at the movies have been greeted with polite yawns, poor show timings and scathing reviews.
But I remember the media hysteria when #WillKat visited India. It’s not as if they were returning the Kohinoor or apologising for Jallianwala Bagh but India’s nouveaux royalty — Bollywood and sports stars — lined up to meet, greet and gush while they ate (very little), prayed and loved.
Whitewashed glory
A cricketer marvelled at how the Duke and Duchess never gave the impression that they wanted to get away from it all even though it was so humid.
At that time I remember thinking someone give them a medal. Their ancestors survived gout, malaria, Gandhi and the Black Hole to lord it over India for two centuries and now this is what passes for fortitude!
Unfortunately, the harsh truth is that even as we say we are over the Raj, we still crave our crumbs of comfort from our reflection in its golden eye. Seventy years after Independence, we still seek too much validation from overseas.
It does not just have to be Britain, of course. When Richard Thaler won the 2017 Nobel for economics, the ruling party’s social media brigade went to town crowing about his tweet praising demonetisation as the “First step towards cashless and good start on reducing corruption.” That he tweeted “Really? Damn” moments later when someone told him the government had introduced a ₹2,000 note was conveniently omitted from the jubilation.
Almost a year after it was introduced, demonetisation will have to stand and fall on its own record and that hard data is already out there. Many Indian economists whose life’s work is about India have weighed in on it. To gloat in the reflected glory of a tweet from a Chicago economist is rather pathetic. And let’s not pretend it’s about respecting the Nobel because then those same cheerleaders should treat the views of Amartya Sen with equal reverence.
At a time when politicians pass cutting remarks about the Taj Mahal because it is the product of another “foreign” invader’s empire, our indulgence towards Victoria’s empire feels like whitewashing our dirty laundry in public.
Sandip Roy’s first novel is Don’t Let Him Know . He should be working on his second instead of watching television soap operas.
