Can we ever get India out of our blood? It is 58 years since the last British troops paraded past the Gateway to India landmark, boarded the steamer at Bombay and lowered the flag on the British Raj amid poverty, partition and bloodshed. But now we are back.

On the West End stage, red-coated officers toast Queen Victoria and the Empire as lovers nightly cross the racial divide to pour out their yearnings in the musical of The Far Pavilions. On Radio 4, The Jewel in the Crown, Paul Scott’s compelling drama of the end of British rule, is bringing alive again the confusion, prejudices and snobbery of two societies intertwined in hatred and in love. A new biography has been published of General Reginald Dyer, the “ Butcher of Amritsar”, whose order to shoot unarmed protesters in 1919 was the atrocity that, more than anything, made British rule untenable.

Museum exhibitions record the wary reactions of Britons and Indians to each other in the early days of European exploration. Travel agents tempt tourists back to the maharajahs’ palaces and the remnants of imperial glory.

For Britons, India, like the Second World War, is a bottomless well of nostalgia. But unlike the war, it is not simply an escape to a cause that was noble and a victory that was heroic. The Raj was far from heroic — and all the moral ambiguities, the opportunism, racism and anguish are wonderfully woven together in the BBC radio production, a series every bit as evocative as the majestic 1984 ITV version.

Yes, the Empire is a defining part of our history — but no longer one in which the jingoism of “Our Island Story” governs our reactions. Maybe instead it is the masochism that we now enjoy: we wince when we hear the references to “wogs” and “darkies”; we can see why so many Indians must have hated us in the 1940s. Yet we insist on returning to that confusing time when the old order was crumbling.

The current India obsession is odd. We have got over some of the colonial guilt. We travel to India in huge numbers. We have made Indian food, music, design and literature part of our culture. We live with Indians as fellow citizens, work in their firms and our children marry each other. But still the idea of India for Britons is the India of the past. We barely associate British Indians any more with India — and nor, increasingly, do they.

Modern India scarcely features in this picture. Of course there are the call-centres, Bollywood and its colourful extremes. We read about India producing the bomb and breaking out of its post-independence isolation, we respect Indian expertise in high-tech, but we barely know anything of its teeming, fissiparous society.

We treat India rather as the Americans treat little old England — a country deeply ingrained in our history, but one that exists mostly in the clichés of our mind. When we go there, we want the past — the Delhi of Lutyens, the Calcutta of Clive and the old steam train to Simla. We want to laugh at anachronisms and quaint Indian English, discover our influence in Indian tastes for whisky and cricket and wonder which was the greater disaster: 300 years of British rule or 30 years of socialism learnt at the LSE.

But just as Americans now factor in the Beatles, football hooliganism, Margaret Thatcher and the London theatre, so we are also trying to update our image of India. We assume we know about the country because we know our fellow Indian citizens. It is deeply misleading. British Indians are a successful, much admired influence: from balti houses in Birmingham and surgeons in the NHS to the Kumars, Lakshmi Mittal and the Indian nouveaux riches, their influence is pervasive. But Bend it Like Beckham is not modern India. It is modern Britain. And modern India has thrown away the British connection and looks to America.

So what of the attempts to marry our nostalgia for the Raj with today’s republic of one billion? Frankly, they fall flat. The re-creation of the past looks ever more absurd — and nowhere more so than at the Shaftesbury Theatre. As a film The Far Pavilions was a swirling, star-studded blockbuster; as a musical it is a clichéd extravaganza that crashes between two stools — neither Bollywood nor Empire nostalgia. The leaden lyrics contain such gems as “ An empire must be built on belief, an empire be built on its past”, “The Empire has its heroes, but none so brave as he”, and “With dignity and valour, we’ll civilise these lands”.

The cast includes every stock character from the Raj: the sneering English racist, the dewy-eyed Indian idealist and the cast of memsahibs, maharajahs and the gallant soldiers of the Queen. But when the order comes to march on Kabul and the assembled chorus wails “Afghanistan! I never thought they’d send you there!” audience credulity is badly strained. Not even Bollywood would be so crass.

How much better is the painstaking, understated radio version of Scott’s monumental Raj Quartet. That, too, contains a racist central character, Ronald Merrick. But he is a fully realised character, a swirling contradiction of high ideals, narrow horizons and repressed emotion. In part Scott based him on General Dyer, a man whose tragedy was that, brought up in India, he thought he understood Indian mentality but could never overcome the race and class divide.

Such nuances are too much for most India myths today, however. Nostalgia is a comfort blanket that shelters us from the cold realities of the past. The Jewel in the Crown was written in 1966; the further the Raj recedes, the more honeyed its treatment.

The real comfort from historical mistiness is that as old animosities fade, Britons and Indians again discover each other, here and in India, on a more equal, more humane basis. For either side, the attraction endures.

The Far Pavilions is at the Shaftesbury Theatre, WC2, until Sept 4 (Times box office: 0870 1603000); The Raj Quartet is on Radio 4 every Sun at 3pm (repeated the following Sat, 9pm); The Butcher of Amritsar by Nigel Collett is published by Hambledon & London at £25; offer £20 from Books First, 0870 1608080