The Asia Research Institute are delighted to be hosting  this research seminar with ARI member Dr Paul McGarr.

The seminar will take place 1-2.30pm, with a buffet lunch being offered beforehand from 12pm.

Abstract

Margaret Thatcher’s emotional responses to India were shaped by an imperial childhood spent in a middle-England home in Grantham, a stone’s throw from Nottingham. Today, Nottingham forms part of a triangle of cosmopolitan Midland’s cities, encompassing Birmingham and Leicester, that are home to the UK’s largest communities of South Asian heritage. Grantham, in contrast, has been characterised as a model of British parochialism. If one local heritage worker is to be believed, the town retains a melancholic nostalgia for a bygone age, epitomised by its connections to the Dambusters and Isaac Newton.

Back in 2009, prior to the unveiling of Thatcher’s statue in Grantham, and controversies surrounding its vandalism, residents were asked to choose between placing a memorial to the former premier on a prominent town plot or using the space to display an Edwardian steamroller. Eight-five per cent of Grantham’s residents opted for the steamroller. Given the insularity of her surroundings, it was unsurprising that a youthful Thatcher was drawn to interpret India through the exotic and seductive imperial lens of Rudyard Kipling. Ironically, given her fractious relations with Whitehall, at one time Thatcher considered a career in the Indian Civil Service. Thatcher viewed the UK’s connection with India as cause for national pride.

As a political radical and a technocrat, she also rejected backward-looking notions of restoration. Likewise, Indira Gandhi disparaged the ‘old myth’ of imperial kinship. The Indian premier was unequivocal that sentiment had no place in modern diplomacy. Gandhi considered Britain to be overly invested in ‘raj nostalgia’ and resistant to reasoned conceptions of bilateral relations. By the 1970s, the UK had effectively decolonized. However, policymakers in Britain and India continued to manifest psychological after-shocks from imperialism that warrant re-examination.

The paper rethinks UK-Indian relations under Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi. More broadly, it reinterprets a relationship of enduring significance to citizens of both states, and – given India’s centrality to current debates surrounding the UK's security, economy, and culture - contemporary governments.