Conversation at a dinner in a fashionable St John's Wood house on the eve of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's arrival in London brought to mind the qualms Tony Hayday, Britain's deputy high commissioner in Calcutta in the 1980s, used to express. Those were the years of Raj efflorescence. India's media salivated over what seemed like an endless stream of books, exhibitions and other effusions that appeared to suggest that the British in London were caught up in the heady romance and nostalgia of a continuing festival of India. That worried Hayday. "People will go from here with high expectations and be disappointed to find the British as a whole have absolutely no interest in them or the Raj!"
The St John's Wood dinner party exposed another misconception. When conversation turned to public statuary, a political life peer, active in several of the House of Lords' international committees, asked what I thought of "the Gandhi statue". Assuming he meant Philip Jackson's 9-foot bronze in Parliament Square where Modi later paid homage, I replied at once what I had thought since the statue was installed some months ago, "Too big to be so low down." But no, His Lordship hadn't even heard of Jackson's Gandhi. He meant the modest and now virtually forgotten bust installed in Tavistock Square 47 years ago.
I lived in Britain then and remember the BBC radio reporter, who covered the event, telling me that though Harold Wilson, the then British prime minister, put in an appearance, he flatly refused to say a word into the mike. The interpretation was that Wilson wouldn't waste his breath on a programme broadcast in India where Labour had no votes.
In today's changed circumstances, with 1.5 million ethnic Indians comprising one of Britain's most vocal (and also richest) minorities, David Cameron made a fulsome speech when the statue, which cost more than a million pounds paid for mainly by wealthy non-resident Indians, was erected. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley flew in from Delhi with Modi's benediction. Gopalkrishna Gandhi's presence probably tried to convey that something of his grandfather's liberal, secular bipartisan legacy still survived in India.
The silence round that St John's Wood dinner table when I spoke of this statue told me that none of the other diners - all native English - had heard of it. They knew Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill stood outside the houses of parliament; they knew Nelson Mandela had joined them there. But not Gandhi. Gandhi hadn't featured in their consciousness since India's independence.
You could hardly have a more elite group. Apart from the life peer, the other men at the dinner included the foreign editor of a major national daily newspaper, the head of an important company that makes award-winning documentary films, and the former head of an international auditing firm, who is now high in the counsels of the European Union. Their spouses were equally weighty. One was a Dame of the British Empire, two others were governors of a prestigious British university and a major London hospital. The fourth was a prominent psychoanalyst.
Like other upper middle class public school and Oxbridge men and women, they took a benevolent, if paternalistic, interest and also a certain unspoken pride in India. Liberal Britons of their class and generation tend to see the world's biggest democracy as something of their own creation. Proof of Britain's undying footprint, India preserves - or so they believe - the rule of law, bureaucratic propriety and the Westminster system of governance. Their gentle vision doesn't embrace ethnic Indians in Britain or the impact of the community on domestic politics.
A British prime minister's wife decked out in a saree or salwar-kameez to pander to immigrant voters is no part of their understanding of the imperial connection. Emigrants - escapees from the motherland - could not be linked to the concept of the India my dinner companions were familiar with. Gandhi poised to stride across Parliament Square for a head-on collision with a chunky Churchill if he, too, were to leave his plinth seemed as remote to them from the real India as Southall's saree shops or Leicester's Curry Mile, glittering with Diwali lights and redolent of spices.
The mind blots out what it doesn't wish to recognise. Despite the newspaper and TV coverage of the inauguration of the statue, they had succeeded in doing that with the Parliament Square Mahatma. The Tavistock Square bust was an acknowledgement of the old imperial relationship. The new statue highlights the opportunism of contemporary vote bank politics with which they would have no truck.
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