George Nathaniel Curzon, 11th Viceroy of India, suffered from a congenital curvature of the spine that in time would condemn him to an iron corset and bring pain to his every step. But this did not stop him from traveling on foot and horseback halfway across Asia on several occasions. He began in 1887 with a slow circumnavigation of the world, by sea and rail, west to Canada and beyond to Japan, Hong Kong, India, Aden, and home. A year later he penetrated the khanates of central Asia, traveling overland from Moscow, crossing the Caspian Sea, moving by rail to Bukhara and Samarkand, and thence by horse-drawn cart to Tashkent and the Black Sea. In 1889 he traversed Persia, riding as much as seventy-five miles a day through searing desert sands, his precise observations filling hundreds of pages of notebooks that in time would yield a definitive two-volume account, Persia and the Persian Question, published to acclaim in 1892. His eye was that of a spy. Nothing, it seemed, escaped his notice.
In 1894, following a second journey around the world, Curzon traveled alone to India and, after a stubborn effort, secured permission from the Raj to embark on a diplomatic mission to visit the newly instated emir of Afghanistan. His route of approach was deliberately circuitous. He marched north from Gilgit to the Pamirs, beheld the savage beauty of Hunza, and continued northward to become the first Westerner to trace the Oxus River to its source in Russian Turkistan, a feat of exploration for which he would be later awarded the coveted Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society. When finally he entered Kabul, he did so in style, having arranged with a theatrical costume designer in London to outfit him with a dazzling uniform, complete with massive gold epaulets, a row of glittering medals and decorations, and a giant curved sword. The entire getup was a purely constructed fantasy, given meaning and power by the audacity of the man.
Moving through life with cold certainty, his awkward gait concealed by what one peer described as an “enameled self assurance,” Lord Curzon in many ways embodied the essence and contradictions of British rule in India. The scion of a seven-hundred-year-old aristocratic dynasty, he was the son of a distant father and the product of a sadistic nanny who once forced him to write the family butler to order a cane to be made with which he might be properly thrashed. At Eton and Oxford he acquired an air of “ineffable superiority.” In London society his libido was said to rival his intellect. He inherited lands and titles, but found wealth in marriage to a beautiful American heiress, Mary Leiter. His family seat in Derbyshire, Kedleston Hall, had inspired the architecture of the regal palace in Calcutta, and thus he slipped readily into the role when finally, in 1899, just short of his fortieth birthday, he achieved his political dream and became viceroy of India.
Like the entire British adventure in India, Curzon was at once pompous and vain, earnest, ruthlessly enterprising, and rigidly devoted to a mission of moral superiority. He wrote books on Indian carpets, restored the glory of the Taj Mahal, and preserved the Pearl Mosque of Lahore, the Mandalay Palace, and the temples at Khajuraho. He sought justice in the abstract and demanded accountability from the army, punishing entire regiments for the violation of a single Indian woman, even as his government stood idle while famines swept the land and the cadavers of children fed growing packs of jackals and wild dogs. Like his queen, whose only knowledge of India was derived from her dispatch box and the behavior of her servants—Victoria, empress of India, never visited the jewel of her realm—Curzon believed that he had a special feel for the real Indians, the colorful and quaint villagers, who were so unlike the educated classes he disdained. “There were no Indian natives in the Government of India,” he once observed, “because among all 300 million people of the subcontinent, there was not a single man capable of the job.” It was the idea of India, not its reality, that fired his imperial imagination.
As viceroy he sat alone at the pinnacle of a cadre of a mere 1,300 British men of the Indian Civil Service that ruled fully a fifth of humanity. The Indian Army was strong and well trained, but it numbered only 200,000, and only a third were British regiments, and these were dispersed from Siam to Persia. In much of the subcontinent, British authority resided solely in a single district officer, who spent each day in the saddle, moving from village to village, adjudicating disputes, levying taxes, enforcing the rule of law, and maintaining order across thousands of square miles with populations sometimes measuring in the millions. Mercantile zeal, severe military reprisals, and the subversion of local elites all played a role in the maintenance of the Raj. But what really held it together was the very audacity of the venture, the sheer gall of a small island nation that had never set out to rule the world, and yet did so with such flair.
The entire British presence in India, as Curzon fully understood, depended on the presumption of power, which in turn was reinforced on a daily basis by ten thousand acts of domination and will intended to inculcate in the Indian people a sense of their own inherent inferiority. This was the essence of colonialism. Image counted for everything. The summer palace at Simla employed three hundred domestic servants and no fewer than a hundred cooks. In a typical season, the viceroy would hold court at a dozen grand dinners for fifty, in addition to twenty-nine somewhat smaller affairs, which flanked the summer’s truly important events: the state ball, a second, equally sumptuous fancy dress ball, a children’s ball, two evening parties, two afternoon garden parties for a thousand, and six dances with 250 invited guests. A stickler for ritual detail and protocol, Curzon insisted that his servants dress in livery, white breeches and silk stockings, and he took precise measure of the length of the red carpets unrolled before him on ceremonial occasions.
Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, in 1898, was the most expensive event ever staged in the history of humanity, but for color and exotic opulence it was no match for the 1902 Durbar orchestrated by Curzon in celebration of the coronation of her son Edward VII. With the new king unable to attend and represented in Delhi by his brother, the Duke of Connaught, the entire two-week extravaganza became, in fact, a tribute to the viceroy, just as Curzon had anticipated. His moment came on New Year’s Day as a million Indians lined the streets of Delhi to behold the imperial procession as it moved from the city to the plain above, where five miles of railroad had been laid simply to handle the flow of the invited guests, who numbered 173,000. A great amphitheater had been constructed, and along the axis of the approach were magnificent pavilions containing the largest displays of Indian art ever assembled—acres of carpets and silks, pottery and enamels, priceless antiquities. Every region of India had its camp, identified with glorious silk banners that shone in the sun through the dust of the parade.
Flanked by a peacock array of ambassadors from some fifty princely states, the viceroy received all the native rulers of India, as prayers and hymns celebrated the investiture of scores of men and women being honored for their fidelity and service to the Raj. A yellow haze spread over the fields as the first of some sixty-seven squadrons of cavalry and thirty-five battalions of infantry, artillery, and engineers trotted or marched past in a military review that lasted for three hours. Finally a mounted herald approached the dais and throne and, with appropriate flourishes, proclaimed the coronation of the new king. The imperial salute of 101 guns still resounded as Curzon moved front and center to summon the multitudes in their loyalty to the unchallenged supremacy of the British Crown. “There has never been anything,” he would later write, “so great in the world’s history as the British Empire, so great an instrument for the good of humanity.”
THE BRITISH had indeed transformed the face of India, building thousands of miles of canals and railroads, bringing into being entire cities. But at a deeper level, the British presence was but an ephemeral veil over the body of a land that was more a state of mind than a national state, a civilization that had endured for four thousand years as an empire of ideas rather than territorial boundaries. India had yielded time and again to the onslaught of invaders, but had always won in the end, absorbing foreign impulses and, through the sheer weight of its history, prompting mutations that inevitably transformed every novel influence into something indelibly Indian.
At the same time, India was itself a British invention, an imagined place defined by the ever-changing and expanding boundaries of political and commercial interests, which, in turn, were woven into reality by the mathematicians and technicians of the Survey of India. Maps were the key to the very notion of India. They codified in two dimensions the geographic and cultural features of a subcontinent, even as they created the rationale for occupation. India the imagined landscape became concrete and meaningful when reduced to a map sheet. Thus it was not by chance that the greatest scientific undertaking of the nineteenth century was the literal measurement of India, or that through this endeavor would be discovered the highest mountain in the world.
~~Into The Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and The Conquest of Everest -by- Wade Davis
No comments:
Post a Comment