History reimagined: what if Swaraj had been denied?

The Queen last week launched the "UK-India Year of Culture 2017" by authorising a spectacular light display with an Indian motif beamed on to the façade of Buckingham Palace - a blue peacock surrounded by classical Indian dancers.

Alan Gemmell, director of British Council India, noted: "It isn't every day that you have the opportunity to project an image onto the façade of Buckingham Palace. The peacock, both regal and dramatic, is the perfect metaphor for a year of incredible cultural events connecting UK and India."

The BBC is currently giving us a somewhat grimmer vision of Buckingham Palace by dramatising Len Deighton's novel, SS-GB.

The novel imagines: "It's 1941, the Luftwaffe have defeated the RAF in the Battle of Britain, and Hitler's Wehrmacht have conquered southern England. Winston Churchill has been executed, King George VI has been imprisoned in the Tower of London, and Swastika banners adorn the bombed out ruins of Buckingham Palace. Tyranny has triumphed. The Nazis have won."

A Daily Telegraph article suggested: "Don't kid yourself: if the Nazis had occupied Britain, they would have found many willing collaborators."

In the Daily Mail, historian Dominic Sandbrook offered a personal take on one of the great what ifs of history: "What follows is necessarily speculative, but it has reminded me how lucky we are to enjoy the democratic freedoms we too often take for granted."

Perhaps that is also true of India.

What if the Independence movement had been crushed, nationalist leaders publicly hanged and the Raj set to continue for a thousand years - as some Brits had undoubted-ly wanted?

And what would be the public reaction in India if a TV drama tried to recreate such an outcome?

Post Crash

Exceptional works include Grant Wood's American Gothic (1930) depicting the gaunt faces of a father and his daughter. There are also disturbing images of wheat fields turned to dust bowls, and a harrowing picture of a black woman about to be lynched by the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan.

Just as America entered the depression and experienced "economic insecurity and social hardship fuelled by mass urbanisation, industrialisation and immigration", over in Russia Joseph Stalin decreed after 1932 that only art that served as propaganda for the Soviet socialist cause would be permitted.

All this is the subject of a separate exhibition in another part of the Royal Academy - Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932.

Perhaps the real value of the two exhibitions lies in their giving us a deeper understanding of how America and Russia have evolved.

Who knows but perhaps there also will be art to define post-Brexit Britain and post-Trump America - an America in which an Indian can be shot dead by a man shouting, "Get out of my country".

King Kapoor

Anil Kapoor, who happened to be passing through London last week, graced the British Film Institute (BFI) with his presence just as the British Council was telling a press conference of the many events that will take place both in Britain and in India during the UK-India Year of Culture 2017.

I must say he was wonderfully eloquent in the way he linked Richard Attenborough and Danny Boyle, who had directed Gandhi and Slumdog Millionaire in 1982 and 2009 respectively, and suggested India owed them a great debt.

Anoushka Shankar will play the sitar by the Taj Mahal in Agra during a screening of the BFI-restored 1928 silent film, Shiraz , which was a collaboration between the UK, India and Germany and starred Himansu Rai.

Calcutta culture

Present at the BFI was Sir Dominic Asquith, Britain's excellent high com-missioner in Delhi, who declared he had hugely enjoyed his three trips to Calcutta where he said a number of events will be held - "how can you not in the city of culture?"

Tittle tattle

Arun Jaitley slapped me down unceremoniously at a press conference in London last week when I asked the finance minister what view he took of Shashi Tharoor's An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India.

"It is not necessary for me to give a view," he snapped, although Jaitley had just commended "the excellent relationship" between Britain and India "over the decades".

Tharoor is due to launch his exceedingly anti-British book today at the Royal Overseas League in London.

He seems inclined to mess up India-UK relations when others are attempting to spread sweetness and light. He no longer seeks reparations but a grovelling apology instead from the head of government (or state?), preferably on bended knee.