Queen Elizabeth had a Merchant Ivory-standard, Raj-era Britishness
Take a look at this quarter-century old profile from a newspaper in India, Britain's prized former colony
The morning after the Queen’s death, I woke to find a WhatsApp message from a friend in India. It bore the pdf of a Times of India piece I wrote in October 1997. It was a profile of Queen Elizabeth II and it was at the height of the ructions and muttered republicanism in the wake of Diana’s death.
How would the then 71-year-old monarch manage? Would she manage? Should anyone even care, especially India, the former British colony that triggered the end of empire by winning its own independence in 1947, five years before Elizabeth acceded to the throne?
Like the guru of an eastern cult, she herself was the message
Turned out, The Times of India, the country’s largest English-language newspaper, did care. With good reason. It cared enough to get me to write about the Queen, to try and understand, as the piece says, her “Merchant Ivory-standard Britishne…
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