‘You are going to London?” a smirking Indian immigration officer said to me at Mumbai airport. “Our Rishi Sunak is there.” “What do you mean ‘our’?” I asked. “He’s there, but he’s ours,” the officer replied. “He’s a British person whose grandparents are from East Africa,” I added, bringing some pedantry to a humourless exchange. “Yeah, they all say that,” he concluded. “You’ll be fine.” He stamped my passport and, with a slight wave, dismissed me, certain that when I landed, I’d be taken care of by one of “ours”. Perhaps even picked up by Sunak at Heathrow and asked: “Have you eaten yet?”
India and her diaspora number about 1.6 billion people and everyone has a view on the latest British PM, with what feels like 1.5 billion claiming to not just know him personally, but also be related to him. Given what I know of my people, this could be true and not be true. It puts a lot of pressure on Indian comedians like myself to participate.
As a comic who divides his time between India and the UK, and who has a lot of empire stuff in his act, I have been asked, via social media, to start including Sunak in my shows, our British-Indian connection being a presumed source of hilarity. “I was disappointed there wasn’t more Sunak,” an uncle recently told me. “You should say empire strikes back! Ha ha.”Meanwhile, the Indian press has gone for the “Indians are taking over everything everywhere” approach. Times of India even ran the headline: “From age of empire to Rishi Raj” – somehow suggesting that this was the British Raj in reverse. Seeing the Indian dailies talk like this about a Southampton-born, public-school-educated global investment banker with a US green card whose parents were British doctors and grandparents were Kenyan residents, put me in mind of the “Everything is Indian” sketch from Goodness Gracious Me.
All of this brings me to the difficulty of writing a Rishi Sunak joke, as an Indian person. The gags circulating on Indian social media are about how Asian No 10 Downing Street will get: with shoes left outside, Punjabi MC blaring, and the place becoming an Indian wedding venue. The sort of dated humour that reinforces mad xenophobic ideas about ethnic minorities only being able to enjoy their specific cultural things.
Perhaps to prove his Britishness, Sunak will overcompensate by blasting the Clash’s London Calling from No 10 or slip into Tommy Cooper routines. To add fuel to this idiotic fire, US comedian Trevor Noah suggested that racist people in the UK were worried that Indians were taking over and would do Indian things once in power, like suddenly start speaking with a bewildering accent. There was immediate backlash in the UK saying no such thing was happening because no one saw Sunak that way, forcing Noah to say “some people” were racist, which meant he had to explain the joke, which meant it died.
British comedians have been doing a far better job. A great meme of his speeches, layered on to a photo of Will Mckenzie, a character from the sitcom The Inbetweeners, revealed an eerie similarity, while another one of him as “Lionel Rishi” needs no explanation.
Forcing an Indian cultural stereotype on Sunak feels inaccurate. To me, he feels like a very 21st-century product. The sort that went to Ivy League colleges, worked at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, and flits between Silicon Valley, Canary Wharf and Dubai with consummate ease. The sort that could be found on a Peloton at a Fairmont Group Hotel early mornings and has premier mileage points on at least three airlines. The sort that could recommend the latest Peruvian-Japanese Michelin starred restaurant. The sort that is always jetlagged, always in a black limousine, always driving past at least 36 skyscrapers to a fancy short-term corporate apartment on the 33rd floor.
The accent would be Anglo-American but more stateless, a globally accepted sign of prestige. The Britishness would be underlined by fine suits, like characters in Christopher Nolan’s Inception. Their genuineness would be methodical, on script and sleek. Their origins would be impossible to gauge by skin colour. They would have lived in many major cities, have a passport belonging to a G7 nation and enjoy one hobby you wouldn’t expect – like turtle protection in the Galápagos. This is the demographic an Emirates business class ad would target. While you’d find this set running JP Morgan or Google, their ability to stare down Putin or Premiere Xi at high noon in order to prevent a nuclear war is untested.
All of which is a very long-winded way of saying jokes about this demographic are very niche. Even people reading this are thinking: “I don’t know anyone like this.” I do. There are 43,126 of them. They have names like Nik or Rishi or Dev. They are all of Indian origin. And one of them is Britain’s new prime minister.
