Mani’s memoirs, the legendary Peter Sellers & Cambridge
Just the other day I got a call from my childhood friend Mani Shankar Aiyar. “I’m writing my memoirs,” he said in his trademark booming voice, “can you recall when Peter Sellers came to Cambridge?”His question took me back almost six decades. Mani and I had overlapped as undergraduates at England’s Cambridge University, and in my last academic year 1961-62, I had been elected president of the Cambridge India Society, while Mani had become secretary of the much more prestigious Cambridge Union, the prime debating society of the university. The union’s president then was Brian Pollitt, the son of Harry Pollitt, the legendary founder of the British Communist Party. Brian was the first communist to be elected president of the union and we had become close friends, after sharing the same “digs” (the Cambridge lingo for “lodgings”) in our first year at the university.
My most challenging task at the India Society, apart from getting interesting speakers to address us at our monthly meetings, was to pull the Society out of the red, a state it had been in for a great many years. Our meetings usually got an attendance of just 30 or 40 students. Even the presence of Kingsley Martin, the highly respected and influential editor of the ‘New Statesman and Nation’, whose writings influenced Jawaharlal Nehru, could not attract a larger audience. Camellia Panjabi, another contemporary who was then the secretary-designate of the India Society, and went on to join the Tata Administrative Service (TAS) and became a key figure in the expansion of the Taj group of hotels, said one day, “Why don’t you try and get Peter Sellers?”
Sellers was then one of Britain’s leading comedians, famous for a popular radio programme called ‘The Goon Show’. He had starred in some critically acclaimed British films, including the classic black comedy, ‘The Ladykillers’, in which Alec Guinness also acted. But Sellers hit the big time internationally, opposite Sophia Loren, in ‘The Millionairess’, which was based on a story by George Bernard Shaw and was released in 1960. He played the role of an Indian doctor, and spoke in what was considered as the typical sing-song Indian accent. As a result of Peter Sellers’ “Indian accent”, many of my English university friends would try to get a laugh by conversing with Indian students in the same accent.
Inviting Peter Sellers was a long shot, but I decided to give it a go. To my surprise, I did not get an immediate “no”, but a cautious response from his secretary. So, I pursued the matter and then, to my huge delight, she told me that he had agreed to drive down from London to Cambridge to address us. I hired the largest hall available, the Cambridge Union building, where it held its debates and which could hold several hundred people. We charged a small entrance fee of 2 shillings, I seem to recall (the equivalent of today’s Rs10), but such was the rush that we had to turn quite a few students away. It was probably the biggest number of people to attend an India Society meeting in the Society’s entire history! More importantly, it got the Society out of the red, even leaving behind a healthy balance.
For over an hour-and-a-half, Sellers had the overflowing hall in splits. Being the wonderful mimic he was, he spoke in a variety of English accents. Of course, they included the Indian one, but the French as well, which he would later use in the wildly successful ‘Pink Panther’ series of films, where he played the bumbling French detective, Inspector Clouseau.
As it so happened, when Mani asked if I could remember the date of the memorable Sellers’ function, I was rummaging through old files and newspaper clippings, trying to put them in some kind of order, now that I had plenty of time on my hand. And there, to my astonishment, I found my university diary of 1961-62, and a yellowed clipping from a local paper, the ‘Cambridge Daily News’, reporting the event! It was dated June 12, so Sellers had addressed the India Society the previous evening on June 11, 1962, over 59 years ago, a virtual lifetime. I was then 21 years old. I even found the brief handwritten speech I had delivered to introduce Sellers.
After the meeting, Camellia, Brian (since he was president of the Cambridge Union) and I took Sellers out for dinner to a small Indian restaurant nearby. He brought along Mario Fabrizi, an actor friend. At the dinner, he revealed that the director of ‘The Millionairess’ had originally wanted him to play the role of an Egyptian doctor, but he persuaded the director to change it to an Indian doctor because, as Sellers told us, “I had got to know many Indian doctors and liked them a lot.” He also made a startling confession.
“Did you know,” he asked us rhetorically, “that this has been the first time I have ever spoken in public? I was so nervous at the prospect that I brought Mario along, in case I broke down and could not continue.”
He needn’t have worried. He had held all of us completely spellbound with his masterly mimicry. Sadly, Peter Sellers died relatively young, at the age of 54, while still at the peak of his career.
Mani, thank you for the memories. And happy memoir-writing!
— The writer is a veteran journalist
