There is only one perfect gentleman’s gentleman in the world — at least for the Drones Clubloving, Aunt Agatha-fearing Indian. That is Jeeves, of course, whose avuncular habit of quoting from the classical greats might remind the reader in this part of the world of uncles and granduncles who firmly believed in the value of scripted wisdom. Not that Jeeves ever enters into the unending problems of his master, Bertie Wooster, or those of his friends suffering from similar forms of intellectual debility without invitation, but he is, in his inimitable way, always fluidly available, unassumingly there with the right pick-meup when catastrophe is about to strike. And, whenever asked, with a solution too, or glimmerings of it, based on ‘psychology’ and a carefully built edifice of smart moves, sometimes including the illegal removal of objects or pretend-courtships. The high dignity and learnedness of Jeeves, which bend to understairs gossip only when crucial information is required to help his master or his friends, are an unwritten bar against him being called a valet. He recalls the personal domestic assistant of the landed gentlemen that India is familiar with — discreet and all-knowing at the same time, with the silent tread that matches his genie-like role.

This is only partly related to the quality that the Indian high commissioner to the United Kingdom, Vikram Doraiswami, described recently to suggest that Jeeves is a disguised Indian. Jeeves never has to open doors, according to his perpetually awestruck, occasionally weakly rebellious master. He is one place, like those birds in Bombay who bung their astral bodies about, and reassembles elsewhere like the birds which appear next in Calcutta. The high commissioner might have gone further. Jeeves with his semi-mythical attributes may be an import from the land of snake charmers and elephants but even closer to the Indian bone are Bertie Wooster’s demanding aunts and Lord Emsworth’s galaxy of sisters. What would the grounds of Bland¹ ringing calls to her truant....

Editorial appeared in the Indian newspaper The Telegraph recently.