Bengali Anglophilia

IT WAS AN uncharacteristically sunny but cold morning in London as I disembarked from the Air India flight. The previous few days had seen the UK reeling from the after-effects of a storm that had led to a disruption of train services—always a catastrophic happening in southern England. So, as usual, I received a lot of praise from mindless flatterers about having brought in the bright weather from the gas chambers of Delhi.

It was a similar day in the last week of September 1975, that I first set foot in London to begin a love affair with the erstwhile mother country. I say mother country with a sneer because despite the Anglophilia of the Hindu Bengalis, Britain was always an object of very strange relationship. From about the mid-19th century till about the 1960s—nearly a hundred years— Bengalis drew a very romantic portrait of Britain in their minds. At the same time, their adoration was offset by a genuine hatred of British imperial rule. The distaste was intense but never personal. Nirad C Chaudhuri personified this strange ambivalence, as perhaps did the family of Subhas Chandra Bose.

Bengali Anglophilia was markedly different from the sahib-ness of, say, the Nehrus. Motilal Nehru sent Jawaharlal away to school in Harrow and college in Cambridge because he wanted a perfect English gentleman to reside in Anand Bhavan, Allahabad. When Jawaharlal returned to India and joined the national movement, his personality had been moulded by England. There was very little of India in him, so much so that he spent the next 50 years on a voyage of discovery of India. The India that came to be etched in his mind was never the result of any organic development; it was an intellectual implant.

By contrast, the Anglophilia of the Bengalis was grafted on local tradition and culture. Subhas Bose, for example, devoted much of his student days in search of spiritual salvation. His ideal was Swami Vivekananda. This quest to find and give India a higher moral and ethical purpose was supplemented by an appreciation of Western culture that incorporated elements of both the British and the European. Indeed, Subhas Bose tried to keep a distance from English society—while Nehru was fully integrated in it—and was attracted instinctively to what he saw in the European mainland. The English for their part were not terribly impressed by Bose and saw in him the perversity of the radical Bengalis. They missed out on the underlying admiration of the English people that defined the Bengali intellectuals after 1857. Had their antennae been more receptive to signals, the history of Britain’s disentanglement from India may well have been different.

All this was in the distant past. The Britain that came into being after the end of Empire was, initially, an attempt to preserve the country’s relevance in the face of an advancing America and Soviet Union. In the two decades after the 1956 Suez crisis, Britain tried to show it counted when it was clear it did not. This pretence was, however, charming, and quite unwittingly, Britain’s soft power made it a force in the cultural Anglosphere. The period from the 1950s to the Thatcher era was the high point of cultural Britishness, even if it was defined through the Beatles, Rolling Stones, John le Carré and George Orwell.

That’s the Britain, not quite traditional but not yet pretentiously multicultural and Woke, that I grew to love and admire. The ubiquitous red pillar boxes for the post and the red telephone kiosks have more or less disappeared, although the double-decker red buses still ply on the routes I travelled as a long-haired student. Many of the familiar small shops, some run by charming old ladies without too much business sense, have, alas, disappeared, overwhelmed by the relentless march of brand-based capitalism.

Britain is today much sleeker, cosmopolitan but still over-taxed and slow. But gone are the genteel shabbiness, the oddities and the stodginess that came with the idea that the important thing in life is to be comfortable with oneself. I don’t think that happens in an environment where it is unsafe to flaunt mobile phones in Central London and where the Black Friday sale culture also manifests itself on High Street.

Still, I will always grumble but return to London.

About The Author

Swapan Dasgupta

Swapan Dasgupta is India's foremost conservative columnist. He is the author of Awakening Bharat Mata

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