Rishi Wishy Jottings

Shantanu Thakur

Rishi is an ancient name with Vedic vintage, but one can well expect a whole lot of newborn babies in India to be baptized by that name now. To be frank, Rishi Sunak making it to 10 Downing Street made most of us feel happy and jubilant, coinciding as it did with our annual festival of lights; as if we were finally getting there where the shots used to be called for ages; as if history was turning. I know, this sounds silly and funny to many, this irrational elation at Rishi Sunak's selection as the Prime Minister of the UK. That's what the pundits have been trying to tell us all along - don't be so naïve as to imagine that the youngest PM in the UK is one of us; that he has an Indian lineage three generations removed; that he, for all practical and sensible purposes, is an English citizen and not a Desi in the sense we would like to fancy him as. East was and is east, and the West was, is, and will be west for far longer than our wishful thinking might love to conjure a meeting of the twain. But the feel-good factor is not going to disappear so easily despite glib, smart, dampener logic. Our reference point of English as the ideal icon of acknowledgement and recognition has been an almost genetic inheritance; as much in the conscious as in the unconscious. A Bilaat-Pherothas shed some of its perceived sheens only recently. We are habitual admirers of things English – language-related, sartorial, etiquettes and all that. We are just as many Indians as Bharatiyas. (If this genre of humour is Indian at all!)Jaii Hind, yes; but a cheer also for Jaii Vilayat.

Identity often emerges through a palimpsest; there are many layers to it. Colonial legacies live on in the subconscious for long periods which is but natural and that need not necessarily be something to squirm about. Right from the days of the Raj, to be respectable in most walks of life, we had to show ourselves as eligible by English standards: for the doctors, it was the FRCS; for the lawyers the prestigious Bar-at-Law; for the Engineers, the Imperial College; for the meritorious and the scholarly the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford and the LSE; for the administrators the ICS; for the upwardly mobile the ability to write and speak good English- the list goes on.Angrez to chale gaye, lekin paramparaa chor ke gaye . For the immigrants to the golden shores of England, it had been a challenge to prove one's worth in the face of many odds; the so-called level playing field made its appearance only after one had made it to at least the semi-finals. The bright, young, promising new PM of the UK has himself emphatically stated his sense of pride in the hard work his parents and grandparents had undertaken to prove themselves in life and that he deserves to be where he is in his own right while acknowledging as much the opportunities his country gave him. He was neither born rich nor has he had leadership thrust upon him; he has indeed earned his honours. We Indians feel good at his achievements and we have no reasons to be uncomfortable in owning this; nobody here is trying to appropriate Rishi Sunak to ourselves, and nobody is up there in seventh heaven, but we do feel good at his historic success. This natural vibe, on the contrary, is inspirational, motivational connect to the world at large where narrow, petty boundaries fail to tie things down. It helps in bringing the world closer and it surely speaks volumes about inclusivity in the UK.

Indians here are not expecting anything out of the ordinary from the first Indian-origin PM of the UK. We wish him the very best in succeeding to rise to the expectations of his country – which is the UK. We do not expect miraculous turn-around changes in the diplomatic relations between his country and ours; these matters move on their tracks and even the aam Indian understands that today. We are not expecting a personal interest from him in Indian matters; that would be naïve and also unfair to him. But, yes, Indians are happy and proud of his genealogical origins and there's neither politics nor stupidity entrenched in this. One is not hallucinating about the tricolour going up in the UK, or the Ganges flowing into the Thames, but we are sensibly aware of the way time and history have evolved. Like they are saying: it's like an Obama moment there at Westminster. That's rather elementary, isn't it Watson?

I would not make a clown of myself by addressing him as Rishiji, or, Rishi bhaii now; but don't you smirk either if grandmas in India hug him with a warm, affectionate Rishi Baba!