Interview: You have to be hard to be a princess

It takes me a moment to spot Shilpa Shetty. Although we are both standing in the same function room at one of those gilt and marble hotels, her outfit is so gaudy (leopard print, shoulder pads, heavy yellow jewels) that she is somehow camouflaged.

Then a tinkling sound rings through the air and I swivel around to see a beautiful head floating near some faux-Etruscan vases. “A-ha-ha-ha-ha,” goes the tinkle. It is Shetty, 31, and this grating sound is her laugh, which she trots out a lot. Before the hate mail pours in, let me underline that I’m not about to say that Jade Goody was right to racially taunt Shetty. Clearly not. It’s just that when you meet Britain’s Bollywood queen in person (sample anecdote: “I just got back from three days in India. Thankfully I had a friend with a private jet who said, ‘Yah, hop on’,”) you can understand why she wound up her housemates.

For one thing, Shetty is not your normal girl-next-door reality TV winner. She is aggressively glamorous in a way that perhaps only Joan Collins could understand. And it has to be said that as she takes a seat opposite me she really is beyond ravishing. Her hair is as glossy as a show pony’s, her hands smooth as butter, her eyes smoky. Safe to say our Shilpa is not a fan of the natural look. It’s heavy pan stick all the way to ensure that not even the finest line appears on her face. She drinks mineral water from the bottle like any other high maintenance women trying to keep their lipstick on and admits she spends two hours in the gym every day perfecting her — admittedly awesome — body.

Of course all this guff goes with the territory for a Bollywood “star” (I only say “star” because my Indian friends are forever telling me that Shetty is “total bloody C list” back home). But when coverage of the last series of Celebrity Big Brother, which Shetty won, moved from page 24 of the Daily Star to top of the hour on CNN International, you expect someone more, well, substantial.

“Oh, I’m not politically inclined at all,” she giggles. “I like movies, cooking. I love to dance.” Dance? “Yes. I was a terrible student and I’m so disconnected with what’s going on. Newspapers are so depressing,” she trills. “You don’t want to wake up to that.” Shetty’s mother believes differently. “She comes into my bedroom in the morning and reads out the headlines. She’s like, ‘You have to be aware, you cannot look dumb’. So if there’s a big event that happens — like 9/11 — she’ll be like, ‘I hope you’re aware this happened’. A-ha-ha-ha-ha.”

Right. Shetty is irritating, which is a big disappointment, because I loved her on Big Brother, even when she was being bossy and swishing around the house like an air stewardess-cum-minor royal. She performed a fantastic Miss World-style exit speech and gives wonderfully priggish quotes: “Come on guys, this is the country of Shakespeare and yet I was the only one speaking English in that house.”

If you didn’t catch CBB proper, surely you will have seen the news? Or prime minister’s question time where Tony Blair had to talk about her, or Gordon Brown’s message that a vote for Shetty was a vote for Britain during his leadership-building tour of the subcontinent, or the record 45,100 complaints to Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator, and effigies of Channel 4 executives that were burnt on the streets of Patna in India.

The issue? Racism. After some initial froideur between the usual CBB cast of no-hopers and has-beens, a series of fights broke out between Shetty and a trio of loud-mouthed British chavettes led by tabloid staple Goody. Some of it was unfairly represented (yes, they made fun of her accent, but she made fun of theirs too). Some of it was just awful. Footballer’s girlfriend Danielle Lloyd said she should “f*** off home”, Goody said, “She’s called Shilpa Pop-padom . . . Shilpa F***awallah”, while former pop star Jo O’Meara said, “No wonder they’re all so thin in India, they’re eating Shilpa’s undercooked chicken.”

All three were booted out of the Big Brother house and are now in various stages of “rehabilitation” (Goody chose the Priory, of course). Shilpa, on the other hand, triumphed and is on track to make £10m.

There are book deals, perfume launches, albums and a rumoured movie with Hugh Grant all in the pipeline. She’s also had one or two offers not normally extended to the winners of television game shows. She has been invited to parliament by Blair and Brown — “I was so humbled” (yuck). Next month she will have an audience with the Queen on Commonwealth Day. Meanwhile, Brits are falling over one another to embrace her and apologise to her in the street.

“They’re so shocked to see I’m okay,” she says. But those girls were horrible to you, and racist. “No,” she replies firmly. Shilpa, how can you say that? “I’ll tell you why. It came out of insecurity and jealousy. It’s a woman thing. It was silly.” She laughs again.

Baffled, I ask her to define what she would consider racist. “For me racism would mean not wanting to have anything to do with someone because of their colour.” What about just thinking less of someone because of it? “No, that’s not racism to me. There are a lot of people who won’t go into an Indian restaurant, who won’t associate with people who are black or brown.”

What, like white supremacists or Ku Klux Klan members? Surely racism exists in less extreme forms? “I guess there are different forms of racism,” she ponders, “but if I had to hold a grudge it would be more over something like [the latter].”

I’m astonished. Is she being dim or just coy? Recently she told an Indian journalist that “every nonwhite is a victim of racism”. What did she mean by it? “That’s the feed-back I got when I came out of the house. Somehow it touched a raw nerve in the Asian community. The UK happens to be a place that is pretty multicultural. You have people from all over the world settling here and you welcome them with open arms, but it seems a lot of those people have been put through some amount of discrimination.”

So Britain is racist? “Oh, no,” she gasps, desperate not to offend. “Most of them [Indians] have done very well for themselves and it’s because they’ve been encouraged by the people here. They wouldn’t have been able to make it otherwise. Look at Lakshmi Mittal, an Indian with the most expensive house in England.”

It’s a terrible example (Mittal brought his first billions with him to the UK in the mid1990s and no doubt had an easier ride than most). But Shetty can’t bring herself to complain. It’s not in her nature.

She comes from a land where you don’t discuss your sex life, where actors don’t kiss in films, a land of arranged marriages and where the masses adore her. In Shetty’s world, open criticism isn’t “honest”, it’s bad manners. Her politeness is so ingrained that it makes her unbearably slippery to the British sensibility. I keep wanting a straight answer which just never comes no matter how hard I push her; and I certainly try to the extent that her people tell me to stop.

Shetty was born in Tamil Nadu, southern India, to affluent middle-class parents from the super-conservative Bunt community. “At 17 I was the first Bunt girl in Bollywood,” she boasts, but as a result her grandmother didn’t speak to her for three years and her father was also upset. “To be an actress you have to expose yourself in what you wear. When you come from an orthodox society you don’t want your daughter doing that.

“But my parents are very supportive,” she continues mistily. “Truly they are the wind beneath my wings.” Shetty is given to this kind of beauty pageant speak. “There was a time when I was a teenager and I was doing dance, karate, cookery classes, basketball, volleyball. They encouraged me.”

Did they push you? “No,” she says, unconvincingly.

In truth Mrs Shetty sounds like a tough nut. A self-proclaimed clairvoyant, she has masterminded her daughter’s career since year dot and takes all the money decisions — firing the first publicists and hiring Max Clifford, for instance — even though Shetty is hardly a spring chicken these days. “All my financial affairs are handled by mum because, honestly, I can’t be bothered.”

Shetty denies rumours that her parents employed mobsters to extract funds from a film director who reneged on his contract and numerous stories circulating Bollywood about her saucy love life. “If I go out for dinner with a friend’s husband the press say we are dating. It’s ridiculous,” she huffs, flicking that astonishing mane. Foolish is the wife who lets her husband dine with Miss Shilpa, I say.

But despite her playful front Shetty still sleeps in the same small room in her parents’ penthouse that she had as a child. It’s covered in silks and filled with pictures of Ganesh, the Hindu god of success.

“Coming from that, for me, Big Brother was really new. I’d never even come across people speaking to me like that. I’ve been an actor for 14 years and been very pampered.”

Should Channel 4 have broadcast the inci-dents? “Of course,” she cries. “At least it had a message.” Her support for the channel isn’t that surprising given she was paid about £300,000 to participate (reportedly the highest of all the “celebrity” housemates).

“But I don’t want it to be bad for those girls,” she says of Goody and co. “It’s enough punishment already.”

She laughs again, happy to smooth everything over. It’s what she was brought up to do. In one final attempt to crack the front, I say that while she may not be able to see it, those girls looked pretty racist from the outside. “Yes,” she says softly. Perhaps observers are better able to voice that opinion than you are? “Yes, yes,” she says, nodding. Then she starts another empty Miss World speech about tolerance. It sounds so unheartfelt that I’m not even sure that she really cares about racism. She only gets animated when she talks about the possibility of appearing in a movie with Grant.

The Times of India said Britain’s love affair with Shetty is “the epitome of the silliness of our times”. It is that, but our obsession with her stems from the deep-seated fear of difference, the fear that there is perhaps in all of us a touch of the Goody. We have made Shetty the pin-up girl for our collective paranoia about racism. We want her to be part of our multicultural melting pot, to be just like the rest of us. But here’s the truth. She’s not.

giles@sunday-times.co.uk