What if the UK were ruled by India in the near future? Scottish MP Alan Gemmell's novel engages with gritty fictional and real-world problems

It’s an exchange that echoes the tenor of the rest of this brisk thriller in which a fictional India – increasingly more powerful, economically and geopolitically, on the world stage – rescues a fictional beleaguered-England, and extracts its pound by making the UK its 30th state. But it is also a scene that Gemmell researched in ways that might have been made possible mainly because of his real-life job(s).

Gemmell was posted in India for years as director of the British Council and then the UK trade commissioner for South Asia, before being elected MP for Central Ayrshire in 2024. As part of his research – and to satisfy his curiosity – he says he asked the actual director of the British Museum how long it would take to return everything in the British Museum to former colonies if you started right this minute. The answer Gemmell got: five years. (As with everything else in '30th State', this period is shrunk to give it an immediacy consistent with the political thriller.)

As someone straddling India and the UK, Gemmell was acutely aware of the growing demand from former colonies for the return and repatriation of goods in museums across Europe to the places and people they were taken from. Gemmell says he got such requests while he was stationed in Delhi and Mumbai. "A more successful restitution story was around a request by the Maharashtra government just before I left, for items from the V&A (Victoria and Albert Museum) and other collections in relation to... a tiger-claw (weapon; wagh nakh) and sword (belonging to Shivaji Maharaj)... I'd already written the book by then, but it was clear that restitution is a live issue," Gemmell says.

Gemmell’s novel is, in some ways, also a response to omissions in history taught in British schools. In India, the history of colonial rule and the partitions of India are of course taught in schools and are the subject of ongoing research. There isn’t a similar reckoning with the consequences of colonialism in the UK, especially in history classes at school. Over a Zoom call, Gemmell talked about possible ways to address this gap, joining the likes of Bill Clinton as a politician writing thrillers, and his time in India. Edited excerpts:

You've lived, worked and travelled extensively in over 30 cities across India. When and why were you here?

I got the life-changing opportunity to work in India in 2016, running the British Council, which is when I started travelling around the country.

I had visited India once before, very briefly and only (came) to Delhi. So when I came the second time (in 2016) to live there for three years, I said I wanted to travel around the country and meet all of these incredible staff who work for the British Council, because they had primary offices in Kolkata, Chennai, Mumbai. I did this really magical thing of spending weeks meeting chief ministers and artists and teachers.

Down in Chennai, I remember going to this school - it was a fair distance from the city - it was teaching an English programme. The lesson was about Rani of Jhansi. Here (we) were four or five British people who didn't know who the Rani of Jhansi was, and this brilliant teacher and her students were really teaching us a lesson. And that's when I realized the history that we share is absolutely alive in your country. It is part of your present story. And I felt it wasn't enough a part of our present story.

I wasn't taught much colonial history when I was at school. We spent a lot of time talking about the Second World War, a little bit about the Russian Revolution, but not really about our role in the world. In fact, there's been some recent research that said maybe only 30-odd percent of schools in Scotland have taught Empire.

One of our former first ministers said that we needed to do more to understand our role in empire. So all of that was coming together and I was going to enjoy an incredible country. And just thinking, gosh, there is another, more interesting story, which is what if (India were to rule the UK)?

Then I went back to the UK, Brexit happened when I was there. I was also seeing, if I'm being honest, that my country wasn't prepared for Brexit. We weren't prepared for it. And I saw these really brilliant Indian diplomats and politicians sort of running rings around us for a little bit.

Then I came back to Mumbai in 2018-19 in a different job, talking to businesspeople this time… During COVID, very, very quickly it became clear that the story I wanted to tell, that I'd always wanted to tell, was this one ('When the UK is India's 30th State').

Politicians have written fiction before, of course. Former US President Bill Clinton’s third political thriller, The First Gentleman, released worldwide around the same time as your book launched in India. But tell us where the idea for it came from?

I wrote it when I was in Mumbai, really (before the 2024 election). But when I was 11 or 12, I had this incredible teacher where I grew up, which is a little village called Girdle Toll at a school called Annick Primary. One day she came in and said she'd just finished a book that had imagined England as a colony of America. So she really planted the seed. I thought about that all the time.

I was in this lovely little village in Scotland, far away from the world. (Years later,) I was once in the northeast of India and someone said to me about America, they said, ‘You know, we thought America was the next hill over, which I thought was beautiful. I just loved that sentence. But there was a little tiny bit of that in my growing up (years) in Scotland, because it was a small place, it was a little village. Everybody knew each other. And then this brilliant teacher (did something) which is what great teachers do, planted this little seed about a different kind of world. I thought about it a lot.

Your book and its premise are entirely fictional and yet you’ve got kernels of truth in there. Important debates and milestones of our times. For instance, India’s growing stature as the fourth-largest economy in the world. You have Karan and Nisha in the 10 Downing Street, but we also had Rishi Sunak and Akshata Murthy there a few months ago. Those parallels are somewhere at the back of your mind even as you read the completely fictional story of '30th State'... 

I wrote the book in Mumbai, in 2020-21. Then I started pitching it in 2021. Some of these things hadn't happened yet.

Now that you are an MP in your country, are you also looking at how history is taught in the UK?

I'm so excited to have been published by Bloomsbury. It's really the people that I wanted to be published by and I'm excited that we started in India. I really hope that they'll publish the book in the UK and, and if I'm lucky, it would be part of a conversation that a lot of people are part of about our history. We've recently seen the very, very sad death of Meghnad Desai (in July 2025)... he and his wonderful wife spearheaded a partition museum (in Amritsar) which has been so successful. So I would be so delighted if the book came out in the UK and it opened up a conversation or it joined a conversation about how we can better understand our past. There's quite a lot of swearing at the start of the book. So maybe it won't end up in school libraries, but I would like it (to be released in the UK).

How did the British Museum get into your book? There is of course a lot of discussion in the real world now, around museums returning art to the rightful owners - whether those are countries or communities.

In both the British Council job in 2016 and in this job, was more questions about institution. When I was in Assam, in Guwahati, people (including politicians) talked about to me directly about the return of 'Krishna in the Garden of Assam', which is in the British Museum. That was very early on in my time with the British Council. People made that direct request to me, which I followed up to the British Museum, but sadly there hasn't been much movement there.

A more successful restitution story was around a request by the Maharashtra government just before I left, for items from the V&A and other collections in relation to a tiger-claw weapon and sword of Shivaji. I'd already written the book by then, but it was clear that restitution is a live issue. To make sure that I was well behaved, I went off to see the brand new and brilliant director of the British Museum, Nick Covenant. I went to Nick to say, by the way, I've got this book coming out, which says everything in the British Museum goes back home overnight. And I said to him, how long would it take? And he said it'll take five years for the Museum, for all of its collections. They're in the middle of working at how they reorient the museum.

For me, that moment in Assam, was instructive to me that there were items in the British Museum collection that people wanted brought back...

I was writing this in '21... (back then) the most symbolic thing (for restitution of artworks and cultural heritage items) were these Elgin Marbles. This year, we hear that the chair of the British Museum, George Osborne, has been negotiating with the Greek government to try and find a way to share these items. We have some laws that limit or prohibit national museums from - it's called - deaccessioning, returning objects. But there are ways to have clever ownership models or sharing items. And that's what the Victorian & Albert Museum has done for the Shivaji relics, which is a really good thing... You can build goodwill and trust and engagement through sharing or returning these cultural objects.

The story goes at a brisk pace, from the start. We see the city of London changing pretty quickly. Even the objects from the national museum are returned to erstwhile colonies overnight...

I needed to start the story with England in its worst possible place. So it starts in a bad place and it is surprised by how India acts. And the world descends from there, in a dystopian type novel. And somewhere in the middle of it, the British Museum has become an Ayurveda and yoga centre and all the objects have been returned to the places they came from.

The book is called '30th State'. Is that inspired by or an echo of Donald Trump's notions of acquiring a 51st state for the US in any way?

Not at all. I wrote the book in 2021, and that's been the title since. The book does talk a bit about hard power. The India in this novel isn't nice; colonizers aren't necessarily the nicest people to take out for a drink. In researching it, I tried to say what were the sorts of things that some of the big colonizing nations, including the UK, did in their empires and how could we turn that around? I also looked at the plots for some of those standard TV dramas that are slightly romanticized or at least told the stories from the British side, told stories about Britain's empire, and then just turned those on their head. And, and in the middle of that, things like hard power, people threatening countries with taking over their land came out and became a bit topical.

This is also an interesting moment in geopolitics, where we are seeing centers of power shifting around the world. What's your sense of this shift, and would you say the shift is relevant to how people should read your novel?

I hope that they read it as (a novel by) someone who really, really loves India.

I had this incredible opportunity to see maybe 26 states in my first avatar (as head of the British Council India). And the second time I got to see 40 second-tier cities. On both occasions, what I saw was the incredible dynamism of India - particularly in the second-tier cities. The India that I saw was one that was growing, that had enormous opportunities, that had enormous talent, that had new consumers, people with more opportunities. I'm not saying that everything in India is sorted. All countries are on the journey to reduce relative inequality and improve poverty. But what I saw, and it's what I was looking for, was I saw really good businesses treating their employees well and people investing in their kids' education and all of that gave me enormous confidence and excitement about where India would go in the 21st century.

How much are the politicians in your book based on real people that you know in the British Parliament?

None at all, none at all. Probably they are a mish-mash of all the people that I know. But they were sort of archetypes really. Back in 2020-21, they were just ideas in my head.

Tell us about the characters in your book, and how you dealt with some of the violence that is inherent in the acts of annexation and ruling over another nation.

I felt that India would have to be a bullying character (in the book). People said maybe you could do like a comedy. We had a thing called 'Yes, minister' in Britain, which was really about the power dynamic between ministers and civil servants. (But) I felt that it wasn't a comedy. I felt that there was another story to tell, which was a bit dystopian. Then I felt you needed to have a group of people that would become strong enough to battle the bad guy. Then I thought, well, maybe it's not just one person or two people, maybe it's four. And there should be some tension between the four. It shouldn't all be easy for them; maybe a bit of love or relationship tension.

Then I was trying to work out what kinds of people would you see in these stories? When you look at those TV shows or whatever that that we haven't written about colonial dramas, that there are some archetypes there. There's this sort of naive character who doesn't really like what they're doing and fall in love with somebody in India (or a colonial outpost somewhere). There's a little bit of that (in '30th State'), but in reverse, and politicians are a bit out of their depth really. Then this interplay between politics and business, which is real for all of us.

The story hasn't ended. If it does well, I'll write the second-half of the story. It will end one of the characters I really like, and I've got an idea I'm working on, with a spin-off for one of the characters.