Gyles Brandreth’s Diary
From Victorian India to a land of selfies and Just A Minute fans
I am writing this crossing the Arabian Sea.
I’m 34,000 feet up in the air, as it happens, but I might as well be on the water, it’s so choppy up here. The turbulence is, frankly, terrifying. Tea slopping, meze jumping up and down on the plate, the Emirates stewardesses attempting to look serene, strapped to bulkheads; only my wife across the aisle appears oblivious to the drama. She’s chuckling, ensconced in Rupert Everett’s memoir, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins. I’m tapping this out on my mobile with one whiteknuckled finger and a lot of irritating predictive text going on. Journeys like this make me think I’m never going to leave the British Isles again.
But, of course, I’m glad I did. Oh Calcutta! That’s where I’ve come from. And if you haven’t been, you must go. They call it the city of joy and the capital of culture.
They also call it Kolkata, but they’ve not got rid of every vestige of British India. Far from it. The biggest building in the city – and now the most visited museum in India – is the Victoria Memorial, conceived by Lord Curzon (Viceroy of India, 1899-1905). Like the Taj Mahal in Agra, and echoing its scale and architecture, it is built of white Makrana marble as a fitting memorial to a unique empress.
As our Bengali guide told me, standing on the steps of the statue of Queen Victoria, ‘We owe a great deal to Lord Curzon. He introduced the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act in 1904 which led to the creation of the Archaeological Survey of India and that has been protecting our national heritage ever since.’ He added, ‘With the 1835 Education Act, you British also gave us the English language, which is something the Chinese and the Russians don’t have, and we’re very grateful for that. There is much to be said for the benefits of the British Empire.’ I did know that there is a big audience for Just A Minute in India. Even so, as I arrived at the Taj Mahal, I was a little surprised to be swamped by locals wanting to take selfies with me. No exaggeration: I was overwhelmed by scores of eager young Indians fighting to take snaps with me on their iphones.
Enjoying the moment, I glanced towards my wife to find, disconcertingly, that she was getting the same treatment.
It turned out the young people had no idea who we were. They just like taking selfies. India, in fact, is the selfie centre of the universe, to the extent that ‘selfitis’ is now a recognised mental disorder on the subcontinent. Some young Indians are taking upwards of a hundred selfies a day to post on social media. According to psychologist Dr Janarthanan Balakrishnan, ‘Those with the condition suffer from a lack of self-confidence and take the selfies to “fit in” with those around them.’
As well as taking selfies with strangers, many young Indians are hooked on taking selfies in dangerous settings – on window ledges, on clifftops, at the water’s edge when the waves are riding high. Sixty per cent of all selfie-deaths in the world take place in India. Deputy Commissioner of Police, Paramjeet Dahiya, told the Times of India: ‘We deploy bandobast [police protection] at selfie points nowadays. There is an epidemic of dangerous selfie-taking going on. Hundreds of young people are risking their lives.’
My mother was born in British India in 1914. Her mother was a donkey-riding, bible-toting missionary; her father an officer in the Indian Army. She left in the 1930s to go to university but, when she died in 2010, she hoped we would take her ashes back to the land of her birth and scatter them in the foothills of the Himalayas.
It was enough of a nightmare securing a visa to visit the country as a tourist; so I am afraid I baulked at the prospect of the paperwork that would have been involved in getting permission to export my mother’s ashes to the subcontinent. Given the heightened security at airports these days, I thought I wouldn’t try to sneak the old lady’s remains in with my hand luggage – especially as her ashes weigh around four pounds, without the urn.
The actor Corin Redgrave, son of the great Sir Michael Redgrave, told me that he carted his father’s ashes about in the boot of his car for months on end because he and his sisters couldn’t agree on what should be their final resting place. Corin and Vanessa thought somewhere in Highgate Cemetery close by Karl Marx might be nice. Their younger sibling, Lynn, favoured the Actor’s Church in Covent Garden. In the end, I think, Lynn got her way.
My father (whose ashes weighed in at six pounds, apparently typical for a six-foot man) was fond of quoting the case of the North Country housewife who put a portion of her late husband’s ashes into an egg-timer, saying, ‘He did nowt useful while he was alive. He can do summat useful now he’s dead.’
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I booked through Titantravel.co.uk and recommend it unreservedly. The trip was life-enhancing. Life-changing, too.
In Delhi, we visited the spot where Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated seventy years ago, 30th January 1948, and, there and then, inspired by his example, I decided to become a vegetarian. My wife gave me her blessing.
‘You can follow his diet by all means, Gyles,’ she said. ‘I just don’t want you dressing like him, that’s all.’