In the early 1980s India, Britain’s defunct empire, underwent a “zombie-like revival”, as Salman Rushdie described it in his exasperated essay Outside the Whale. Raj nostalgia pervaded film projects such as Octopussy, Gandhi and The Jewel in the Crown. Above them, Rushdie wrote, “hung the fantasy that the British empire represented something ‘noble’ or ‘great’ about Britain; that it was, in spite of all its flaws and meannesses and bigotries, fundamentally glamorous.”

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We are experiencing something at once similar and significantly different at the moment. Yet again, it’s often TV that embodies this renaissance of nostalgia expressing itself as reassessment. Admittedly, watching films and documentaries about India on British television has long been agony for the Indian viewer. (I presume it’s agony for the intelligent British person too.) What’s interesting is how recent documentaries about India, like Kolkata (featuring the amiably upbeat Sue Perkins) or World’s Busiest Railway and The Birth of Empire (in which the crumpled-linen-shirt-wearing Dan Snow is our guide), feel like a private conversation some English people are having with each other: sweeping remarks that pass for historical research coupled with a fluent personal impressionism. Besides, it clearly hasn’t occurred to the makers of these programmes that Indians might be among their viewers – even though some of them are shown in India on BBC World.

Part of the conversation is revisionist, in that it wants to slyly reconsider empire and its legacy. Jeremy Paxman, even-handed about the matter on the whole, but maybe not as unsparing as he was with Michael Howard, asked in his Empire series: “Did the empire do any good?” And part of the talk concerns ownership; and the question of ownership will often lead, these days, to the railways.

The typical revisionist says: “Yes, there was a lot wrong with empire, but we did give them the railways.” Just as many of us know now that the railways built by the British – strategically, for their own immense benefit – bear only an embryonic resemblance to the expanse of the Indian railways today, we’re all aware too that it played, and plays, an immeasurable part in the nation’s life. But can it justify colonialism? Everybody, including the revisionist, would agree not. In that case, could it justify what is being increasingly heard in some recent British documentaries – a tone of gentle indulgence towards empire, a soft-spoken reminder that it wasn’t “all bad”?

You encounter this line of inquiry, and the question of ownership, more frequently than you’d think. In Dubai last year to participate in its excellent literature festival, I discovered, at a characteristically opulent dinner, that the subject of conversation among British expats at my table was an event from the previous day involving Paxman and the Indian writer Pankaj Mishra, on the legacy of empire. “Your friend,” one of them said, meaning, I think, Mishra (we’d taken part in a discussion that evening), “has gone too far this time.” Another informed me: “Paxman says that if you don’t like us, why don’t you give us back our railways?”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Jeremy Paxman, even-handed about the matter on the whole, but maybe not as unsparing as he was with Michael Howard.’ Photograph: Jeff Overs/BBC/PA

I had no idea if Paxman had uttered these words, or if the man wished he had (given that there seemed to be an urgency to the message he was passing on), so I sighed and responded: “But that isn’t a particularly productive approach. The give and take of history is very difficult to disentangle. What if Indians began to say: ‘Give us back our numbers?’”

As it happens, Paxman has since denied that he ever made the remark attributed to him at dinner in Dubai. The point he might have made in the literary festival, he claims, is this: “I suggested that citizens of a country like India who blamed everything on the British, 60 years after independence, were like middle-aged men blaming their parents for what they’d made – or not made – of their lives.” It still strikes me as odd that a commentator as alert as Paxman should inadvertently repeat the mai baap (mother-father) terminology of the officers of the empire, who, complacent that they were “parents”, were shocked when their “children”, the sepoys, rose against them in the 1857 mutiny.

Certainly, the English didn’t arrive on Indian shores as long-lost parents, but as traders from a poorer nation. If they then became parent-like, authoritarian and wealthy, they also left their progeny destitute upon their departure on 1947: so the middle-aged offspring might have some reason for complaint.

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Post-multiculturalism, the British were guarded when discussing the legacy of empire in public, and probably in private. But that kind of left-liberal self-censorship is far rarer today in the United Kingdom. Much of what was said in the BBC’s India season qualifies as spirited aperçus meant for friends and family over drinks, but not as opinion directed to the intellectually curious, the historically minded, and certainly not to the people that the chatter is about. These programmes are better than Top Gear, which reinforced the impression that Britain comprises autotelic male buddies who can talk about everything under the sun. But their capacity for spontaneous insight isn’t that far away from Jeremy Clarkson.

After speaking to a schoolboy in La Martiniere School, Kolkata, who’s just boasted that the only language he uses is English, Snow narrows his eyes and offers: “I’m about to say something controversial, but I wonder if Macaulay’s wish to create a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect hasn’t come true here.” Snow only interviews historians who agree with what he already believes, so there’s no one to tell him that Indians had been fighting more than a decade before Macaulay for “Anglicist” education to be introduced to India; that the intellectual hegemony in Kolkata expressed itself in Bengali, not English, from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century; that the schoolboy’s claim reflects a relatively recent change brought about by globalisation, so that America, not England or Macaulay, is of real interest to him.

To understand whether or not the “empire did any good”, or whether that’s even the best way to conceive the question, you have to acquaint yourself with how Indians understand their history – an investment Britain’s TV historians aren’t willing to make. The sight of Snow and his colleagues among teeming crowds, asking Indians what they think of the railways, provoked in me a Goodness Gracious Me-type reverse fantasy, of Indian reporters on the streets of London inquiring into how the English are coping with the decimal system.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The sight of Snow and his colleagues among teeming crowds, asking Indians what they think of the railways, provoked in me a Goodness Gracious Me-type reverse fantasy, of Indian reporters on the streets of London inquiring into how the English are coping with the decimal system.’ The Goodness Gracious Me team. Photograph: Des Willie/BBC

Ironically, the 80s raj nostalgia took place alongside, and overlapped with, the burgeoning of Britain’s brief multicultural phase. What’s happening now is less to do with a yearning for the past as it is related to a justification and rewriting of the west’s place in a divided contemporary world. There’s been a civilisational upsurge in the west in the new millennium which has outlived the “end of history” debates, and which appears to be a consequence of the war on terror and the hysteria about “home-grown” terrorists. Often, on discussions like the BBC’s Dateline London, European reporters will speak passionately about “western values”.

One is tempted to rephrase Gandhi’s retort to the question an American reporter put to him (“What do you think of western civilisation?”; “I think it would be a good idea”) and ask: what are “western values”? Are democracy, freedom of expression and an independent press the domain of the west alone? One wouldn’t think so, looking at India and the various struggles elsewhere. Every country today – and Britain is no exception – is having to fight to maintain whatever freedoms it has. Yet in a possibly unconscious but popular and retrograde move, western values have been made synonymous with human values. The old days are upon us.

Besides, it seems the new spokesmen for these values have closed ranks, and believe that their lofty generalisations can’t be overheard by those they describe or dismiss. Or that – if they can be – it doesn’t matter. A regrettable private conversation has become an admissible public one.