The Rockstar and the Tory: Why Freddie Mercury may be more Indian than Rishi Sunak

Rishi Sunak, if you were to describe him as a social-political-cultural conundrum, would fit Sir Winston Churchill's famous description of Russia: "Riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma".

Argumentative Indians and xenophobic Britons are furiously debating the colonial-era British prime minister's notorious quote about Indians being unable to govern themselves in the backdrop of the Indian-origin Sunak taking over the job once held by Churchill in similarly challenging times, with good reason. It is perhaps best to look at the 42-year-old former hedge fund manager as a Rubik's Cube for grown-ups.

If you look at him as a devout Hindu taking over a British office with a sacred thread on after a childhood of work at the local temple, he is decidedly Hindu -- as those sympathetic to current Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's BJP would say.

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If you look at the fact that Sunak's parental roots are in East Africa, as a Twitter quip goes, he is as Kenyan as former US president Barack Obama. If you see his partially ancestral town of Gujranwala, that would be Pakistan. If geography is history (and one in which the British played their own part) and you shift your focus to Sunak's Bangalore wedding, he is modern India's own son-in-law by virtue of his marriage to Akshata, daughter of technology tycoon NR Narayana Murthy. She is still an Indian citizen. If his now discarded Green Card is any indication, the former Goldman Sachs analyst is an almost-American.

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Look beyond all that and Sunak is a true-blue upper crust Yorkshireman after being born in humbler environs of Southampton. Having connected the extreme dots of England via Winchester school and America's Stanford University, he is a true Briton -- a modern Briton at that, one comfortable with multiculturalism at political levels even as the UK retains shades of a former white colonial power with a xenophobic streak that saw it Brexiting out of the European Union -- led by the likes of Conservative Sunak himself.

Long before Sunak became a topic in the UK for his Indian origin, there was England's cricket captain Nasser Hussain, born in Chennai to a Tamil Muslim father and an English mother. He turned out to be one of England's most respected captains of all time and played against India rather well. He was very English, though he admitted he was "proud of his Indian roots."

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Where does all this leave Sunak's Indianness?

Honestly, this is all too complicated but I would put my money on Sunak the Brit over any other identity at this moment when his success seems to have so many fathers. He is Tory to the boot and elected from a county that for too long shunned cricketers from outside England until India's own master blaster Sachin Tendulkar came along to break a glass ceiling in cricket's land of birth. Sunak is no diversity-rider in vote or thought and courts a love of meritocracy his father-in-law wore on his sleeves as the co-founder of Infosys.

However, a rockstar politician in Britain would not be the same as a real rockstar, right? So, why not look at a real one --- and it would seem Freddie Mercury from India fits the bill a lot better than Dishy Rishi if you were to look at his upbringing and influences.

The Queen singer is now a legend thanks to an Oscar-winning biopic from Hollywood. A hard look would reveal he has striking similarities -- and a telling divergence --- when one compares him with Sunak for his Indian-ness.

Farokh Bomsi Balsara was born in Zanzibar, and hence takes a spicy East African connection with Sunak but he spent his formative high school years at Panchgani in Maharashtra. He acknowledged India's own nightingale Lata Mangeshkar as his biggest inspiration for singing.

I cannot recall Sunak acknowledging any Indian influence such as Mahatma Gandhi, who seems to have inspired Martin Luther King Jr or Nelson Mandela more. As Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, however, he released a Gandhi commemorative coin. In any toss for Indianness with this coin, however, I would think aapro dikra (Parsee Gujarati for our boy) Freddie would come up heads.

I still recall stumbling into a UK-sponsored Freddie Mercury memorial exhibition in Mumbai a couple of decades ago and coming home with a valuable brochure of his childhood photos including one where he is given a sacred thread (Kushti). He is said to have once remarked that his origin was Persian (since his Zoroastrian ancestors fled what is now Iran in the 7th Century to flee Islamic conquest), but he is as Persian as a jalebi, the sweet dish that is an Indian staple though it is recognized to be of Persian origin.

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Mercury's songs include Bicycle Race, inspired clearly by his Panchgani schoolday race -- of which there is a lovely picture.

Like Sunak, Freddie Mercury has a personal, cultural and professional track record that touches three continents -- and I would put my money on Farokh as more Indian, if you were to go by influences.

If Freddie was famously mercurial, UK must hope that Sunak, living up to the Sanskrit translation of his first name, will be sage. If that helps, Sunak is a Hindu Brit, Mercury an Indo-Briton. Former Beatles guitarist George Harrison was English and white -- but died chanting Hare Krishna after embracing Hinduism. We live in a rich, complicated world.

But what does all that go to prove? Very little.

This is not colonial-era Britain that a lot of right-wing Hindu Indian politicos would seem to be still dissecting. Nor is it same India that Sunak's ancestors left. Much water has flown down the Indus, Thames, Ganges, whatever...and what remains is the eternal exchange of ideas that argumentative India has always been famous for.

If there is the last word, it must go to the last stanza from Freddie Mercury's most famous Bohemian Rhapsody: "Nothing really matters....anyway the wind blows."

(Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer.)

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