As a precocious custodian of my family library — essentially a creaking mahogany showcase — a steadfast feature of my childhood has been shelves and shelves of undusted PG Wodehouse books. These were birthday presents accumulated over years in a household full of children.
We weren’t particularly Anglophile, I was partial to comics like Amar Chitra Katha and Asterix, so it did take a leap of faith for me to dive into the more ‘adult’ world of the charmingly gormless toff, Bertie Wooster, and his wonderfully adroit valet, Jeeves. The popular television series, Yes Minister , with its similarly odd-couple pairing, had prepared the ground somewhat. As I discovered, just one title (well, it was an Omnibus ) was enough to get me hooked, and I was able to binge-read an entire oeuvre (or part, thereof) over the course of just one summer vacation. Having pulled myself up by my bootstraps, I came away strangely feeling both smug and chastened, for having stayed with the material so resolutely. The readathon allowed me to ascertain that hidden recesses of human meaning can be excavated from even such a thing as a stiff upper lip.
Of course, India can easily be called ‘the incongruous outpost of Wodehouseana’, to paraphrase Shashi Tharoor. Indians are masters of cultural appropriation, whether one pins that down to a persisting colonial mindset and the aspirations it engenders, or simply evidence of a broad aesthetic bandwidth that encompasses everything from JK Rowling to Janis Joplin to Justin Bieber. The oxymoron of choice is that we are a selectively eclectic breed. White sells better than black, America sells best. In the murky waters of middle-England aristocracy and its insufferable gentility, that Jeeves ferries his hapless master/ward around, there is little semblance of our own pre-ordained hierarchies, where the bridges of inequity cannot be vaulted over by simply a flair for erudite repartee. It is unlikely that audiences in India read Wodehouse with any sense of irony about their own upstairs-downstairs arrangements, because, manservant or not, the elegantly accented Jeeves is as upper crust as it gets in India. In the end, the butler has the last word but that is no subversion.
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However, to revel in this vaunted literary legacy should not invite reproach in what is the centenary year of Jeeves and Wooster. Their first appearance was in the short story,
Jeeves and Wooster in Perfect Nonsense will play at the NCPA’s Jamshed Bhabha Theatre from January 8 to January 10 (two shows daily, at 4 pm and 8 pm). Tickets, priced at Rs 2,004 to Rs 8,015, are available on bookmyshow.com, or the NCPA box office.