Would you call a prince Archie?

Unless you have been living in a closed oyster shell under a particularly large rock you should know about Archie, and probably have an opinion about it. Naturally, I am not referring to Riverdale’s carrot-haired Archie but Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor, son of Megan Markle and Prince Harry, seventh in line to the British crown. He may be a carrot-top, the bets are still on, as the first photos released of him, showed his cherub head swaddled in pure white.

In India, though we haven’t emulated the Daily Mail’s fervour of devoting a whopping 23 pages to someone who is six days old, there has been a ripple of excitement, celebration and spontaneous indignation at his name.

Readers would probably remember a similar uproar when Kareena Kapoor and Saif Ali Khan called their infant ‘Taimur’. Parents don’t need the sanction of the world to call their child anything, it is one of the few entitlements they have. If I have a child, I’m definitely calling him or her Nature River Spring Song Menon.

The Menon bit is unfortunately contentious as it points to my caste, which having grown-up in a cocooned world where neither religion nor caste were mentioned – yes, that was once possible in India; yes, I’m aware of my privilege – I have just the tiniest inkling of what that may mean. However, it is my name and I will impose it on the wee innocent.

Though we broke the shackles of British imperialism 72 years ago, we have always showed an avid interest in the Old Blighty. We have faithfully cried with Diana in her Martin Bashir interview, watched all seasons of the Crown and when we have managed to pool enough money, applied for a visa to go take a selfie at Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace. I would even say that for a lot of English speaking Indians, visiting England is almost a homecoming. We can look at daffodils and whisper in our hearts ‘A host of dancing Daffodils’. This may also be indicative that our English Literature curriculum needs urgent updating. Maybe, the new generation should study something more modern like Carol Ann Duffy’s poems, so that when they come to the Big Smoke, they can chant, ‘I like pouring your tea, lifting / the heavy pot, and tipping it up, / so the fragrant liquid streams in your china cup.’ Or perhaps, we should stick to the dancing daffodils.

‘Prince Archie’ does sound like an oxymoron, as if king and commoner collided in one name and stayed inextricably entwined (I am not referring to the Royal Marriage here). Almost like ‘inclusive elitism’ or ‘awfully nice’. He weighs seven pounds and 3 ounces or 3 kilos and 2 grams – a healthy baby by all reports. We are glad. His mother, unlike her sister-in-law, didn’t step out after giving birth looking as if she had a pedicure (though Megan is the one that is an actress). She took a break, like most normal women and turned-up for the photo shoot looking radiantly sleep deprived. It was refreshing to see that even princesses can look a bit bedraggled. It worked because we, the hoi polloi, want to think we are for a brief moment like them.

I predict great things for the baby. Before he was a week old, without lifting a finger he has got a journalist from BBC fired for a racial tweet. That, of course, is the elephant in the room. Prince Archie is the first mixed race baby in a monarchy that is over 1,500 years old. Unsurprisingly, all the bigots have crawled out of the woodwork to spew their filthy venom. I won’t give their words any space in this article, but suffice to say that when one makes a bigoted remark, the finger points at the person making it – the fall from grace isn’t of the person insulted but the one being insulting.

In India, where people are killed or excommunicated for marrying or dating people from different castes and religions, perhaps we can all learn a Royal Lesson. One of my favourite tweets on the episode of the royal birth is a comment about the photo of the Queen Mother smiling at her latest great grandchild, while Megan’s mother, Megan and Prince Harry look on in familial pride. The tweeter says that having grown up in a biracial family, for once it was comforting to see something so familiar yet so rare – people who have come together because of love. Cynicism can go take a hike. Prince Archie is here to stay and I think he is a symbol of a better, more inclusive world.

(Arathi Menon is an author based in London. Her latest book is a children’s middle grade novel called A Thud In the Middle Of The Night, published by DC Books in April, 2019)