Kolkata is often called the last outpost of the British Empire. Ian Jack once wrote in The Guardian that two things united Kolkata and London — “the first is expensive property and the second is the institution once known as the gentlemen’s club” with dress codes which “while they have done away with cummerbunds, still make the visitor think twice before he sets foot in one.” A friend who belongs to a prestigious gentlemen’s club in London is nowhere as much at home as in their counterparts in Kolkata. He can do Bengal Club, Calcutta Club and Tollygunge Club in one day and be dressed right for all of them. And the office bearers of these stately clubs of Kolkata, tickled pink at the attention from a bona fide Londoner, never fail to roll out the frayed red carpet to welcome him.
That this Kolkata has been so nonchalant about the Platinum Jubilee of the Queen feels like a personal snub to Her Majesty. This is a city that created Corona sandesh during the COVID-19 pandemic and Football sandesh during the FIFA World Cup. Kolkata even has little Big Bens and the State’s chief minister Mamata Banerjee vowed to make the city another London. Even more famously, she became the only chief minister who could say, like the nursery rhyme pussycat, that she had been to London to see the Queen. Technically she saw Prince Andrew but tea at Buckingham Palace is tea at Buckingham Palace.
Missing sandesh
Since then Prince Andrew has fallen hard from grace. But it would have behooved the culture department of the West Bengal government to somehow acknowledge the Platinum Jubilee. They could have created a little film where the Queen meets some beloved Bengali comic character like Handa Bhoda or Jatayu and they offer her a Jubilee sandesh. And she reveals she always carries a little sandesh in her handbag.
“Corgis have always been part of Queen Elizabeth’s public persona. But a CGI bear can be manipulated to tug heartstrings in a way real corgis cannot”
That of course would be a tribute to the hugely popular video of Paddington Bear at Buckingham Palace offering a marmalade sandwich to the Queen and thanking her for her service. Paddington is adorably bumbling as he drinks straight out the teapot. It’s a faux pas but cute unlike the off-colour faux pas the late Duke of Edinburgh was famous for, such as wondering if the Jallianwala Bagh death toll was “exaggerated”. But it also shows a Royal Family anxious to give its image a cuddlier makeover instead of the cucumber-coolness that has been its trademark. It’s not clear however whether the real winner here is the Queen or Paddington. A Walt Disney executive told the Daily Mail, “That skit was worth at least £200 million in free publicity (for Paddington), maybe more.” In 2012 a Queen cameo with Daniel Craig’s James Bond created a stir before the London Olympics, but in 2022, after the devastation of a pandemic, Buckingham Palace clearly needed something furrier and friendlier to be at Her Majesty’s Service.
Poster of Victoria and Abdul
Watching the 2017 film Victoria and Abdul I was struck by how Queen Victoria’s munshi Abdul’s real job seemed to be a man-sized plushie, one fit for a queen, who could lift the spirits of a despondent monarch. Now a real plushie has been brought in to keep the sun shining on the Royal Family, even though it has set on most of the British Empire.
Pets over statues
It’s well known that pets can soften the image of even the most reprehensible dictators. Daisy Rockwell, recently much in the news for winning the International Booker along with Geetanjali Shree for her translation of Shree’s Tomb of Sand, is also an artist and has a delightful series on dictators and their pets, a sort of fluffy Axis of Evil. In it Vladimir Putin snuggles up to his poodle Tosya while Pervez Musharraf hangs out with his Pekinese. Apparently, Benazir Bhutto once told an interviewer that the biggest difference between her and Musharraf was that she was a cat person and he was a dog person.
Kolkata’s ‘Big Ben’
That’s why it made big news when Donald Trump became the first U.S. president since Andrew Johnson (1865-69) to not have a pet in the White House. George Washington had a parrot named Snipe, Abraham Lincoln had goats named Nanny and Nanko and even the famously dour Richard Nixon had a cocker spaniel named Checkers.
Corgis have always been part of Queen Elizabeth’s public persona. But a CGI bear can be manipulated to tug heartstrings in a way real corgis cannot. And there is a lesson in there for our own media-savvy politicians. Invite a beloved plushie to tea and for the price of a marmalade sandwich (or sandesh) you can reap in public goodwill beyond your wildest dreams. It’s much easier than building giant statues and puts the soft into soft power.
I had expected at the minimum a Platinum Jubilee Rani sandesh.
Sandip Roy, the author of Don’t Let Him Know, likes to let everyone know about his opinions whether asked or not.
