Fussing over pedigree, power & privilege
Indian ignorance is unlimited; so is the obsession with titles
Indians love titles. Hence the plethora of yogis, babas, gurus, swamis, mas and devis whose credentials may not always bear looking into. But our inability to handle genuine titles, as opposed to politico-religious make-believe, was again glaringly obvious at last Monday’s spectacular song and dance festival in Kolkata to celebrate the start of China’s Year of the Dog.
The host, Ma Zhanwu, China’s consul-general, was first called “Excellency”, which is reserved for ambassadors. Then a senior Indian official referred to him as “His Highness”. I wondered if he was calling the soft-spoken, boyish-looking consul-general a taizidang or princeling, the modern Chinese slang for those who combine pedigree, power and privilege. But no! If Indian officials had been so knowledgeable, Doordarshan News wouldn’t have translated the surname of the most famous princeling of all, the allpowerful Communist Party general secretary and president of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping, as “Eleven”.
Indian ignorance is unlimited. Cambodia’s Norodom Sihanouk, who exchanged monarchical rank for political power, was taken aback when a local dignitary asked how he had enjoyed the “Indian” dance his daughter Princess Bopha Devi and the Royal Cambodian Ballet had just performed. When the ex-king explained the dance was Cambodian and that the dancers had flown in from Phnom Penh in two Dakotas, the Indian exclaimed, “You have a runway in Cambodia?” Norodom Sihanouk must have been further mortified when Subimal Dutt of the Indian Civil Service, India’s longest-serving foreign secretary (1955 -1961), greeted him in Delhi with “How do you do, Excellency?” Dutt confided to his diary that Jawaharlal Nehru, very unIndian in his grasp of protocol though no lover of royalty, whispered — probably hissed — in his ear, “Say your Royal Highness — you silly fool!”
I once erred almost as grievously. When someone wrote to the newspaper I worked for that “HH Baramba” had shot an outsized tiger, being the soul of politeness, I gave the credit in print to “Mr H.H. Baramba”. Back came an irate protest: the writer had meant “His Highness the Ruler of Baramba”. That was before Indira Gandhi took her revenge on the princes for daring to mount a political challenge to her reign.
An ageing restaurant owner in Dhaka was more savvy than Dutt or I. Having been a khansama in Calcutta’s fashionable Firpo’s restaurant before Partition, he knew all about styles and titles. He warned me that Jagaddipendra Narayan Bhup Bahadur, Bhaiya to his cronies, was Bengal’s only ruling prince and therefore “His Highness the Maharajah of Cooch Behar”. But grand and rich though he was, Uday Chand Mahtab was not a prince and was, therefore, only “Maharajadhiraja of Burdwan”. Obviously, the editors of the last Calcutta Club members directory didn’t have the benefit of his wisdom. It listed Uday Chand Mahtab’s sons, both the eldest who should by rights inherit the title and his younger brother as “HH”. I see the directory’s latest edition has lopped off both Highnesses.
The Chinese don’t need to advertise rank. It’s implicit in power. The original princelings were the sons of Yuan Shikai who made himself emperor in 1915 and lasted 83 days. Then came relatives of four nationalist chiefs, foremost among them “General Cash-my-cheque” or Chiang Kai-shek. Today’s princelings include the children of Long March veterans and other senior politicians. Notable among them are Bo Xilai, the former Politburo member who came a cropper for loving the good life too much even for a Communist, and, of course, Xi, son of Xi Zhongxun, one of the fathers of the revolution. The fastidious believe princelings by birth like him have a stronger sense of entitlement as successors to the earlier generation of revolutionaries than princelings by marriage.
No wonder Xi hit it off so well with Queen Elizabeth when he was her guest in Buckingham Palace, a privilege accorded to only one Indian leader, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, in 1963. Xi and the Queen were both backed by lineage. Nikita Khrushchev thought the absence of such bonding explained hiccups in China’s relationship with the erstwhile Soviet Union, and told Zhou Enlai that differences were inevitable: as the son of a peasant, he had nothing in common with the descendant of nobles like Zhou. The latter retorted, “We do have something in common. We have both betrayed our class!” That could well have been Xi telling off Narendra Modi. Given that commonalty between aristocrat and arriviste, there need be no obstacle to the eternal friendship between China and India Ma Zhanwu invoked at last Monday’s festival.