Joanna Lumley has returned to the land of her birth to celebrate India and walk in her ‘family’s footsteps’. But does her series overlook British oppression in the former colony – and her own ancestors’ role?

The trouble with Joanna Lumley’s India, currently showing on ITV, is that despite the promise to “celebrate” modern India and “walk in my family’s footsteps”, this isn’t the full story of Joanna Lumley’s India, and certainly not her family’s. Within minutes of the first episode, there is an omission. Strolling through Kolkata, formerly known as Calcutta, she points out the British-inspired architecture. But she fails to mention that St John’s Church, the first Anglican cathedral on the subcontinent, was built by James Agg, her great-great-great-great-grandfather and the first of her ancestors to arrive in 1777.

Perhaps she isn’t aware of the lineage. But it is not hard to trace it back. Or maybe it’s because of those four chilling words: British East India Company – the trading corporation turned “aggressive colonial power”, as the historian William Dalrymple put it, whose activities brought the word “loot” (from the Hindustani lut) into the English dictionary, and from which Agg seems likely to have made his fortune.

Not that you would think the company at all chilling from the revised history offered here. The company “bought some land” in Bengal, “started exporting” and then Kolkata “grew richer and richer”. These soundbites are not factually inaccurate. Yes, the capital of West Bengal grew “richer and richer”. But for who?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest St John’s Church in Kolkata … built in 1787 by James Agg. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

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For men like James Agg, the “son of a common hard-working stonemason” as he is described in the memoirs of William Hickey (the two arrived on the same ship). Agg joined the EIC Army in 1781. By 1796, he was back in Britain a very rich man, one of the era’s nabobs or “Englishmen who flourish”. According to the 19th-century writer and traveller John Sullivan, such men acted “like a sponge, drawing up riches from the banks of the Ganges and squeezing them down upon the banks of the Thames”.

This is worth knowing not only because it’s the kind of family detail promised by the show, but also for the insight it offers into the poverty Lumley points out in Kolkata, for which no adequate context is given. The EIC was not just a bunch of merchants, but a military force that subjugated and plundered India throughout the 18th and early 19th centuries. In Bengal, the first region to fall to the British, the immediate outcome was full pockets for the westerners and poverty for the citizens. Indians were blocked from trading, were forced off their land by impossible-to-pay taxes, and saw their world-renowned textile industry destroyed.



The poverty of this once-great city, Lumley tells us, is down to “conflict and politics”. Perhaps I misheard. She must have said “conquest and policies” – such as the 50% tax on income, the extraction of which was routinely helped along by torture. Defaulters could expect to be caged and left in the burning sun. Or at worst, to quote Edmund Burke’s 1795 testimony in Parliament about the horrors inflicted upon Bengali women, “they were dragged out, naked and exposed to the public view, and scourged before all the people ... they put the nipples of the women into the sharp edges of split bamboos and tore them from their bodies”.



Watch a trailer for Joanna Lumley’s India

As Lumley’s camera crew pans over a child beggar, it begins to feel like the presenter is in denial. This is not the only instance. Take the segment on the dalits, or “untouchables”. It is hard to imagine, purrs a moralising Lumley, how “this modern country” can “tolerate such discrimination”. Yet, as Shashi Tharoor outlines in his new book Inglorious Empire, the British helped to entrench caste prejudice, giving a final shape to it as a means of control. We had castes, Tharoor says, but we did not have the caste system.

Not every problem in India is the fault of the British, of course, but Lumley sure knows how to find the ones that are. Take the transgender, or hijra, community. Lumley is at her best when she warmly and compassionately says: “You are all my daughters.” Forgotten, though, is the detail that it was during British rule that authorities began to exclude hijra from society, eventually subjecting them to the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. Before, hijra were celebrated in sacred Hindu texts, welcomed as entertainers at the Mughal court. Believed to be bringers of good luck, they were invited to attend births and marriages.

And, lo and behold, lurking in the background is another overlooked ancestor: Lieutenant James Rutherford Lumley, Joanna’s great-great-grandfather, born in Kolkata in 1810, son of Major-General James Rutherford Lumley, in 1837 the sixth highest-ranking officer in the EIC Army. That same year, according to The Strangled Traveler by Martine van Woerkens and Mutiny at the Margins edited by Gavin Rand and Crispin Bates, we find Lumley Junior arresting members of another “undesirable” group, this time Jogees.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Joanna Lumley meets camel herders in Rajasthan. Photograph: ITV

He asks a magistrate for assistance, having “seized lately 50 or 60 Jogees”. After extracting confessions, he reports: “I have the very strongest ground of suspicion for believing all the 12 tribes of Jogees to be in truth Thugs.” Captain William Sleeman, another high-ranking officer, concurs. “We have always had reason to believe,” he writes, that a great many of the “religious mendicants that infest all parts of India were assassins by profession”. He singles out one group: “There are not anywhere worse characters than these Jogees, or greater pests to society.”

Jogee was a colloquial term for the Yogi, practitioners of daily yoga. Thugs were a supposedly hereditary cult of highway-robbers-cum-murderers whose crimes, the EIC said, were offerings to the Hindu goddess Kali. This was an invention, many thought, to justify an increased militarisation of society as the army gained more territory through conquest. The Thug scare was used to justify new laws that gave British soldiers despotic powers over Indians. The punishment, if labelled a Thug, was banishment or even death.

Lumley and Sleeman didn’t get their way in relabelling Jogees as Thugs. But imagine if they had. Yoga, which Indian prime minister Narendra Modi recently called the country’s greatest gift to the world, might never have reached the west. So who were the real Thugs? The Irish-born playwright Richard Sheridan described the modus operandi of the EIC as “wielding a truncheon in one hand and picking a pocket with the other”.

When the Guardian approached the programme-makers about these points, an ITV spokesperson said: “The series is an exploration of modern-day India with Joanna as the guide revisiting some of the places connected to her upbringing, her parents and grandparents, and sharing her personal memories of people she knew. The series does not set out to be an in-depth exploration of Joanna’s ancestry.” Research into the series, they added, was focused on the key figures she personally knew.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest View of Calcutta from the Esplanade, c1860, from a history of the Indian Mutiny. Photograph: Print Collector/Getty

This does strike me as a missed opportunity. There is one further ancestor I would like to see resurrected from the realm of the forgotten, a nameless woman who has lain silent in the Bengal archives for more than 200 years: Lumley’s great-great-great-great-grandmother. James Agg’s legacy in India is not just St John’s Church but four daughters by an unnamed mother, all left behind in Kolkata when he returned to Britain with his fortune. It was normal, in the age of the nabob, for English soldiers to live with an Indian woman. Many children born of such unions were baptised, the Bengal records showing the circumstances of their birth, like the 1785 entry for the first Agg child: “Hannah, natural Daughter of Lieut. James Agg of the Engineers.”

It is only a drop of Indian blood. But I hope Lumley will let it be her guide, as she considers ways to tell a fuller history of India in future programmes. I hope, too, that she will take on board the wisdom of the Dalai Lama, shared during her audience with him in episode three. His holiness identified the major problem in the world – “modern education” – which instead of compassion creates “more desire, more ambition”.

Lumley has shown the world what she can do when she gets behind a cause, such as the admirable campaign to give the Gurkhas a home in Britain. Why not campaign to give the truth a home in Britain, by adding to the school syllabus an unvarnished history of empire, not the nostalgic dream, the glory that only fuels ambition – but a compassionate version, honouring the tragedy that empire inflicted on its subject people.