Outside the Whale

Anyone who has switched on the television set, been to the cinema or entered a bookshop in the last few months will be aware that the British Raj, after three and half decades in retirement, has been making a sort of comeback. After the big-budget fantasy double-bill of Gandhi and Octopussy, we have had the blackface minstrel-show of The Far Pavilions in its TV serial incarnation, and immediately afterwards the grotesquely overpraised Jewel in the Crown. I should also include the alleged 'documentary' about Subhas Chandra Bose, Granada Television's War of the Springing Tiger, which, in the finest traditions of journalistic impartiality, described India's second-most-revered Independence leader as a 'clown'. And lest we begin to console ourselves that the painful experiences are coming to an end, we are reminded that David Lean's film of A Passage to India is in the offing. I remember seeing an interview with Mr Lean in The Times, in which he explained his reasons for wishing to make a film of Forster's novel. 'I haven't seen Dickie Attenborough's Gandhi yet,' he said, 'but as far as I'm aware, nobody has yet succeeded in putting India on the screen.' The Indian film industry, from Satyajit Ray to Mr N. T. Rama Rao, will no doubt feel suitably humbled by the great man's opinion.

These are dark days. Having expressed my reservations about the Gandhi film elsewhere, I have no wish to renew my quarrel with Mahatma Dickie. As for Octopussy, one can only say that its portrait of modern India was as grittily and uncompromisingly realistic as its depiction of the skill, integrity and sophistication of the British secret services.

In defence of the Mahattenborough, he did allow a few Indians to be played by Indians. (One is becoming grateful for the smallest of mercies.) Those responsible for transferring The Far Pavilions to the screen would have no truck with such tomfoolery. True, Indian actors were allowed to play the villains (Saeed Jaffrey, who has turned the Raj revival into a personal cottage industry, with parts in Gandhi and The Jewel in the Crown as well, did his hissing and hand-rubbing party piece; and Sneh Gupta played the selfish princess, but unluckily for her, her entire part consisted of the interminably repeated line, 'Ram Ram'). Meanwhile, the good-guy roles were firmly commandeered by Ben Cross, Christopher Lee, Omar Sharif, and, most memorably, Amy Irving as the good princess, whose make-up person obviously believed that Indian princesses dip their eyes in black ink and get suntans on their lips.