Zoo Station

Sorry for lull in blogging, folks. I've just been swamped with work, which left very little time for the good things in life, including blogging. I hope things have calmed down a bit, and to celebrate the possibility of a relatively calm remainder of the week, here's a London Times piece by Stephen McLarence that investigates India's enduring love affair with P.G. Wodehouse.

In a country where most books in English sell fewer than 1,000 copies and 5,000 constitutes a bestseller, the corduroy-suited Abraham estimates that his company sells up to 70,000 Wodehouses a year: part of a thriving “retro-market” that ranges from Agatha Christie to Modesty Blaise. Most Wodehouses are bought by middle-class Indians whose public school-like “English-Medium” education arguably equips them to appreciate the author’s verbal virtuosity and literary allusions better than many Brits.
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Back in 1945, George Orwell noted the books’ moral uprightness in his celebrated essay In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse: “Most of the people whom Wodehouse intends as sympathetic characters are parasites, and some of them are plain imbeciles, but very few of them could be described as immoral . . . Not only are there no dirty jokes, but there are hardly any compromising situations.” Orwell recalled meeting a young Indian nationalist who saw Wodehouse as a satirist of English society, “an anti-British writer who had done useful work by showing up the British aristocracy in their true colours . . . On the contrary, a harmless, old-fashioned snobbishness is perceptible all through his work.”

That snobbery may contribute to another, less acknowledged, reason for Wodehouse’s Indian appeal. Some educated Indians, particularly older ones, have a nostalgia for the “British days”. The books offer a chance to indulge that nostalgia, and are conveniently full of effete upper-class dimwits who conform to the Indian stereotype of their former rulers.

I will admit that I haven't read as much Wodehouse as I ought to have, so I'll leave the expert comments to those of you that are Wodehouse fans.