Lord Curzon as a Tiepolo Ceiling

More Lord Curzon, and no apologies. In some sense, he is as distant from us as a Tiepolo ceiling (and yes, I have a soft spot for Tiepolo ceilings). As David Gilmour says correctly, his term in India was “a viceroyalty often seen as both the apogee of the British empire and the beginning of its decline.” And Gilmour is at his best assessing Curzon’s attitude towards India and the Indians:

Curzon has been much vilified for his alleged contempt for Indians … . He did not think Indians were congenitally corrupt and dishonest but regarded them as the heirs of a great civilization sunk in a decadence from which they must be rescued. …. Earlier nineteenth-century administrators—most notoriously Macaulay—had dismissed the entire range of Indian culture after no more than a slender acquaintance with it. Curzon admitted only that it was going through a bad stage. To think that the West had a monopoly of wisdom, he declared, was arrogant and foolish … . He did not want the Indians to become brown Englishmen but encouraged them to assimilate Western thought into their own culture. … [H]e resolutely opposed attempts to convert Indians to Christianity. … [H]e bluntly told [a Christian Bishop] that he did not want India flooded with missionaries; he did not believe the country would become Christian or that its loyalty would be increased if it did. …

Unquestionably [his service as viceroy] lacked an elementary dimension, a vision of what India might become or of what she might one day want to become. Curzon thought that what she needed was beneficent rule, a Roman proconsulship or an enlightened despotism, not sympathetic guiding towards constitutional development. He loved the people of India, as he claimed, but he did not love them as a parent who watches his children grow from dependant infants via stages of increasing independence to adulthood. He was like the headmaster of a school whose pupils are always the same age and whom he therefore treats in the same way from one year to the next. Such treatment, in India as elsewhere, may be good for certain people for a certain time, but it cannot last and cannot become a permanent system. At best, as in Curzon’s case, it may induce respect, but it brings neither affection nor gratitude.

David Gilmour, Curzon 170-171, 345 (Papermac Paperback ed. 1994)

“The chief objects of his rule,” Gilmour recounts, “were to make Britain’s administration equitable and her dominion permanent.” (171). Perhaps the most useful perspective to offer on that is that Curzon felt pretty much the same way about the British themselves—except, to his lasting disappointment and dismay, he never got the post of prime minister that he (and, to be fair, others) felt he so richly deserved.