Kate's pretty outfits.

Byline: Rafia Zakaria

IT is the curse, perhaps, of every post-colonial condition. The rational rendition of the present tells us to drop the costumes of our subjugation and directs us toward a pre-colonial way of being that no one can recall.

Our instinctual tendency however seems to be servility, one which emerges especially when royal members of the white race alight on our doorstep. After all, if all the maharajas and nawabs of India were willing to bow before the crown at the Delhi durbar, held in honour of a Queen Victoria who cheekily did not attend, then why should those living now be any different?

Perhaps because of this legacy of bowing, everyone knows their role well: the elites and industrialists of our small struggling country flit about boasting of their knowledge of London shops and of meeting with royals of old, the religious ones bring out their prescriptions and jauntily - if predictably - condemn the West. The remainder, the large silent suffering, say nothing, continue to worry about their jobs and their lives and the pressure of family demands and the general torture of a country made for the few.

None of this is a problem, for as far as dissecting the royals is concerned, the British have done it themselves. In a lecture titled 'Royal Bodies' and published in The London Review of Books, Hilary Mantel, celebrated as Britain's most eminent living author, sums it up: 'Kate seems to have been selected for her role as princess because she was irreproachable, as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without risks of the emergence of character. She appears precision made, machine made' and 'a jointed doll on which certain rags are hung', 'a shop-window mannequin', with no personality of her own, entirely defined by the clothes.

Our instinctual tendency however seems to be servility, one which emerges especially when royal members of the white race alight on our doorstep.

In Mantel's view (and she was criticised for her comments) Kate and everything she represents is a tragedy; the pitiably predictable duties, ribbon-cutting and cake-cutting, fashion and frippery. All of this was on display as Kate and William took rickshaw rides and danced with the Kalash (one wonders if the Kalash's dutiful function as royal entertainment can become an argument for their preservation) and things back home in Britain remained submerged in a miasma of uncertainty.

The queen herself, ashen and leaden, was during...