The boom came in the next decade. Richard Attenborough made Gandhi and Granada TV serialised Paul Scott's Raj Quartet. In books, there was Charles Allen's Plain Tales from the Raj, transcribed from radio interviews with its still plentiful survivors, and Molly Kaye's Far Pavilions. Throughout the 1980s, it was difficult to switch on British television with seeing a documentary about puffing Indian trains or an interview with some maharaja and maharani in their palace. India, these films and books suggested, still offered you a chance to see how things had been. It was isolated from the currents of modernity. As well as being immensely interesting and sometimes beautiful, it was also quaint.
I wonder if I succumbed to this idea myself. I probably did. Why else would I like Ambassador cars, long journeys hauled by steam locomotives, the old formality of Indian newspapers on their grey newsprint, the invigorating irritation of trying to make a 'lightning' call from Patna to Calcutta? You may say there was some condescension in this attitude—and, again, there probably was—but it came out of a real liking for a country that was simultaneously very foreign and not foreign at all, and also one that was completely of itself, ploughing its own political and economic furrow in the world.
The romance of the Raj has gone now. It died when the Indian economy came out of its aspic and demanded respect—fear even—rather than patronisation from the West. In Britain, you can hardly condescend, however nicely, to a country that owns all your steel industry. All it has left behind are restaurants with mock-Raj names like the Bombay Bicycle Club and a passion for ceiling fans in a fake Victorian style which was invented about 1986. But no intelligent citizen of Britain now can be as ignorant of India as I was forty years ago, and for that the romance of the Raj has in a small way to be thanked.
