THE SUBCONTINENT DESPISES BOTHAM
Tunku Varadarajan explains why. It's because they admire the English gentleman
LET ME slap my prejudice on the table. I dislike Ian Botham. And my feelings are shared by millions on the Indian subconti- nent who can't stand Botham either, regarding him as one of the ghastlier English things to have intruded into their lives since those cartridges greased with cow-fat at Cawnpore. But why? Lest you hasten to the wrong conclusion, let me stress that the odium has little to do with his having taken Imran Khan to court. Mr Khan is a pompous, faintly ludicrous man (as well as being a pig to that nice Mrs Bhutto), and were it not for the plaintiff in the case being a man who calls himself `Beefy', I would certainly have liked to see him lose. No, it is not Mr Khan but some- thing much more complex.
I, we, the Indian subcontinent, despise Botham because he forces us to swallow a bitter truth: that there are creatures who live in England other than the Ideal Englishman. We like Ideal Englishmen in India. We even like them in Pakistan, in spite of all the kowtowing to the Islamic world that now goes on there. Their mem- ory is a source of constant nostalgia and joy, of how things were and how they should be. (Why, only the other day, India's leading nuclear physicist, Dr Raja Bamanna, said in an interview that 'grow- ing up in the British days is one of my hap- piest memories'.) Dr Ramanna, so far as I know, has never met Botham. I do not think he would want to, I know that because I have observed the cricketer microscopically ever since he erupted on the international cricket scene like a boil on a yokel's nose.
Botham has always reminded me of Kipling's men 'who would be King', who booted Indian babas out of first-class rail- way carriages with a bullying sergeant- major's sense of power. I am not saying that Botham is a racist: his deep and gen- uine friendship with the Antiguan crick- eter Vivian Richards shows that he is not one. (It is proof, also, of the English work- ing classes being, on the whole, in greater harmony with West Indians, with whom they are joined in their cultural poverty, than with people from the subcontinent, of Whose sophistication they are deeply suspi-
cious.) Two hundred-odd years of the Empire have taught the subcontinent two things: the first, that there is no one in the world as fair-minded, cultured and civilised as the educated Englishman; the second, that there is no one in the world as boorish, coarse and offensive as the English lower orders. From the time of their first contact with the English, educat- ed Indians observed quickly how sympa- thetic and attractive the upper-orders English could be.
Perhaps it was a shrewd way of bolster- ing self-esteem, for one way of learning to live as a colonised people is to convince yourself that your colonisers are a noble lot. But there really was something in the Proper Englishman for everyone. The Brahmins saw him as a worthy counter- part, and grew to admire the 'brahminical' qualities of the Indian Civil Service man (fresh from Balliol), of teachers and pro- fessors across the land, and of judges and magistrates. The Kshatsiyas, or the martial caste, saw in him a brave leader of men and an imaginative . military strategist. Indian merchants, the Vaishyas, also won- dered at his shrewdness and his nose for profit, and came to be grateful for the gift of a decent law of contracts.
The lower castes, of course, were spared by the English. rule of law, an Oxbridge invention, from the very worst excesses of the Indian caste system. (The finest Eng- land captain of all time, Mike Brearley, embodied all these qualities, which explains why he was always loved better by Indians than by his own people, many of whom, even in the 1930s, were embarrassed by his robust defence of Empire.) The educated Englishman respected the Indian too, making an effort to study his languages, his art, his history and (on this, of course, he was rather keen) his anthro- pology. And the Indians, bless them, also had a hierarchy. They didn't mix with just anyone. They called it caste, the English called it class; but it was all the same thing at the end of the day (when the' sun didn't set). Yet what has all this to do with Both- am? Everything, I say, because Indians can- not look at an Englishman now, and judge him, without thinking of class. Introduce an Englishman to an Indian today and the lat- ter's mind will whirr with atavistic refer- ences. For buried in folk memory, alongside the Ideal Englishman, is the bit- ter image of the swaggering NCO, the man you stepped off the pavement for, lest he aim a kick at you for insolence.
English soldiers, hard, coarse and loutish, have engraved in the Indian mind an indelible image of the English working class. Unlike their betters, they had no sense of Empire, only a sense of power. If they were a part of the imperial project, they certainly did not grasp the prevailing subtleties of its philosophy. Botham is directly descended from those sergeant- majors who strutted through India, hating the place and its heathens, longing to get back to England after a tour of duty, declaring its food dodgy, its natives feeble and untrustworthy, its climate hellish, its educated men uppity.
It was these NCOs who made empire dif- ficult to digest for Indians, and whose descendants still evoke powerful revulsion. Imagine India's astonishment, then, when Botham sued Mr Khan for suggesting that he did not have class. 'Fair comment,' echoed a subcontinent, where class is alive and well. We know your type, they seemed to say, and we have never liked it.
Tunku Varadarajan writes for the Times.
I don't mind the washing, it's the spin cycle that does my head in.'
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