Jeffrey Archer was Brit, but dil tha Hindustani

We lost Jeffrey Archer last week, a true son of India. When I was growing up, there was a cluster of books under the 'Indian writers' section in my school library: Rabindranath Tagore, Mahasweta Devi, Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, and Jeffrey Archer.

Archer, for some reason, was hugely popular among India's upper-middle classes throughout the 80s, 90s and even the 2000s, one of those unexplained global phenomena like UFO sightings in Arizona. He was a posh Englishman - which India loved - reinforcing the idea that England might still have a few Downton Abbey sorts, and not everyone was a multicultural Rishi Sunak.

His books had titles like 'Kane and Abel', 'First Among Equals', 'A Prisoner of Birth', 'Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less', which all sound like rejected 80s Bond movie titles. Indians loved them, and many in his home country didn't. For one reason: his main characters were ambitious. They would do anything to achieve their goals, including breaking the law, decorum, and norms. A very un-British way to behave. A great English literary hero must fail. And boasting must only be self-deprecation.


If anything, Archer's soul was more Bollywood. Someone goes from penury to status, by any means, and enjoys winning, which we totally get. Many elite Indians would read Archer and consider themselves intellectuals, and then say they don't watch Bollywood movies, when, essentially, they were the same thing.

Today, the average urban Indian bookshelf of the Gen Xer or millennial might have a few Shashi Tharoors, Naval Ravikant, some Elon Musk stuff, something about how Google came to be, a biography of Ratan Tata or Narayana Murthy, maybe an Art of Living thing. There are many wealthy Indians with bookshelves that contain antique-looking books in great hardback bindings, in an old, leathery library setting. There's Jane Austen and Plutarch and Cicero and Montaigne. Don't be fooled by those: those aren't books, those are wall decorations made to make the family look well-read.

There's no Archer there anymore.

However, there was an era when all an Indian bookshelf had was Archer, Frederick Forsyth (if you wanted to go 4x on Archer), Wilbur Smith, and Sidney Sheldon. The best way I could describe these stories would be to say, imagine Jason Bourne, Basic Instinct, Saving Private Ryan, and Mission: Impossible, all got together and had a baby. And that baby grew up and married a child of Yash Raj blockbusters and Balaji soaps.

Those who made the perilous decision to tell English people that their favourite English novelist was Archer found out, shockingly, that he's not taken seriously there, compared with, say, Dickens.

That kind of reckoning/shattering often happened to Indians when they shared their Western cultural preferences abroad for the first time and found out that Phil Collins, ABBA, Cliff Richard, and Boney M were also not taken seriously in the Western pop music canon. Or when Westerners ask what philosophers you have heard of, and Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull didn't feature next to Plato and Socrates. Cruel.

Even when, slightly disgraced in his home country, as late as 10 years ago, Archer found live audiences among the posh Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata housewives' set, whose book clubs feted him and whom he charmed. While back in Britain all they remembered was that he had gone to jail for perjury.

For as long as I can remember, Archer sat right up there at Indian airports, next to books like 7 Ways Guruji Can Solve Your Financial Problems, and other self-help slop that Indian readers love. Of course, today, you'd say: what even is a book, when most flights have passengers scrolling Instagram reels of some Bihari teenager doing backwards cartwheels on a moving train?

However, for me, the world changed in 2005. I saw a man next to me on a flight reading a Jeffrey Archer. But when I looked closer, I noticed it was an Archer book cover, but what it hid was a Chetan Bhagat. India had changed. It wasn't Archer's anymore.