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.
