Sneers before bedtime
Sir: I was dismayed that The Spectator gave a platform to sneer-master general A.A. Gill (India Travel, 18 October) in the guise of a travel piece about Calcutta. Having done a hatchet job on the Cotswolds, this smartaleck iconoclast turns his bile on ‘the idiot’ Lord Mountbatten, ‘dumpy old white woman’ Queen Victoria (lookist, ageist, racist, misogynist in that order), the ‘bad taste, sorry manners’ of British tourists, a virulent attack on Lutyens’s British New Delhi, a good few insults for Yorkshiremen, a blast at that fashionable whipping-boy the British empire, and even a swipe at Spectator readers. Not to mention putting the Christopher Hitchens boot into that ‘embarrassing Albanian necromancer Mother Teresa’.
I agree with him only that Calcutta is a vibrant and fascinating city, as I have been there a dozen times in the last 30 years. As for his ‘socialist city being rescued from provincial occupation’, not all locals would concur. I came across a young Indian writing a history of Bengal, who told me ‘British times — best times’, and an elderly Indian who, remembering the Raj, said, ‘since the British left, everything is the same, plus corruption, minus efficiency’. Before Gill responds that they were just buttering up an Englishman, I should point out that I am an American.
Tom Boyd
Cirencester, Gloucestershire
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