12

‘Let India Be My Judge’

GEORGE CURZON HAD a strong and palpable sense of history. He studied it, he wrote it, he sensed, felt and lived it. H.A.L. Fisher regarded him as more of a savant and an historian than a political man of action.1 But Fisher knew him at a later period when they were together in Lloyd George’s government. In India Curzon was as much a man of action as any ruler can be, yet at the same time he was obsessively aware of the past and of the imprint he would leave on it. As Lawrence said in his memoirs, his chief ‘was always thinking of the verdicts of history’.2 Sometimes he consoled himself with the thought that the misjudgements of the present would be corrected by the arbitration of the future. The British might be indifferent to his labour, he once sighed to Mary, as they had been to the work of Hastings and Dalhousie, but it would be ‘a different tale in history’.3

Unveiling his monument to the victims of the Black Hole, Curzon described Calcutta as a ‘great graveyard of memories’. Of nowhere did he feel this more than Government House ‘where shades of departed Governors-General hover[ed] about the marble halls and corridors’. He sat at the same desk as his predecessors, imagining their features, their triumphs, their frustrations and their sorrows. Self-pity was a close attendant of his reveries. When thwarted by the British Government and abused by the British in India, he thought of Lord Canning, who had suffered similar treatment without complaint and whose conscientious labour ensured an early death, ‘the usual fate of the man doing his duty for the Empire in foreign parts’. When he decided to carry on his work for a second term, he recalled Lord Dalhousie’s ‘exalted conception of public duty’ which had led him to accept an extension ‘even though he knew that he was signing his own death warrant by remaining on’.4 And when he was alone, separated from Mary, whose ill health once nearly resulted in her own death, he thought of both Canning and Dalhousie, who had lost their wives during their terms of office. Three Governors-General had died in India, three more had returned, worn out, to die in England, and others had had to suffer the bereavements so sudden and frequent in the Subcontinent. Most of them, like Curzon, came to view the pomp as empty and transient. All of them knew they could not have the palm without the pain.

In more positive moods Curzon reflected on those achievements of his predecessors which he hoped to emulate. He wanted to appropriate their most conspicuous strengths and synthesize them in his own leadership. He aspired to be the heir of Warren Hastings and Dalhousie but also to add the finer attributes of the others: the energy and vision of Wellesley, who had ‘reared the central edifice, lofty and strong, of British dominion in the East’; the architectonic skills of Lord Moira, who had done much to embellish Calcutta; the administrative ability of Lord Mayo, whose viceroyalty had been cut short by an assassin; the evenhandedness of Lord Lytton, who had campaigned for equal justice between Englishmen and Indians. Curzon identified with them so closely that, in a book written shortly before his death, he described some of his predecessors in terms that might almost have been autobiographical. His catalogue of Dalhousie’s characteristics – the rectitude, the administrative capacity, the devotion to duty, the magnanimity and the intolerance which existed side by side – were all attributes that he himself possessed. As for Wellesley, whose faults were magnified versions of his own, the words sound as if they might have come from a hostile critic of himself: ‘a man of noble conceptions and petty conceits, a prescient builder of Empire and a rather laughable person’.5 Curzon endorsed Edmund Burke’s theory of imperial trusteeship and believed his country had a mission to rule the Subcontinent for the benefit of its people. He confessed to being ‘an imperialist heart and soul’ but he was ‘very far indeed from being a Jingo’ and cared not ‘a snap of the fingers for the tawdry lust of conquest’.6 Like Lord Mayo, who revelled in ‘the magnificent work of governing an inferior race’,7 he believed the empire was justified by the benefits it conferred. Writing to the Liberal politician John Morley in the summer of 1900, Curzon set out his vindication of British India.

I do not see how any Englishman, contrasting India as it now is with what it was, and would certainly have been under any other conditions than British rule, can fail to see that we came and have stayed here under no blind or capricious impulse, but in obedience to what some (of whom I am one) would call the decree of Providence, others the law of destiny – in any case for the lasting benefit of millions of the human race. We often make great mistakes here: we are sometimes hard, and insolent, and overbearing: we are a good deal strangled with red tape. But none the less, I do firmly believe that there is no Government in the world (and I have seen most) that rests on so secure a moral basis, or that is more freely animated by duty.8

For him India was ‘the land not only of romance but of obligation’, and, if the obligations were shirked, Britain had no right to remain. As he told members of the Bengal Chamber of Commerce at a dinner in 1903,

If I thought it were all for nothing, and that you and I … were simply writing inscriptions on the sand to be washed out by the next tide, if I felt that we were not working here for the good of India in obedience to a higher law and to a nobler aim, then I would see the link that holds England and India together severed without a sigh. But it is because I believe in the future of this country, and in the capacity of our own race to guide it to goals that it has never hitherto attained, that I keep courage and press forward.9

Such sentiments no doubt sound quaint today, but they were sincere and widely held then. Later and more self-conscious generations might snigger at the opinion that ‘the British empire existed for the welfare of the world’, unaware that such views were not confined to Englishmen or that this particular remark was made by Gandhi.10 Belief in the emergence of a new patriotism, common to both British and natives in India, was not then an absurd ideal, and the survival of British Indian institutions into the twenty-first century suggests that the ideal was not entirely destroyed in 1947. The two races, Curzon believed, were tillers in the same field, jointly concerned with the harvest and ordained to walk along the same path for many years to come.11 The binding of India to England may have been an impossible dream but it was not an ignoble one, nor was it ignobly pursued. A previous Viceroy, Lord Northbrook, had declared during the tariff controversy a generation earlier that the Indian Government’s duty was to govern ‘for the best interests of the people of India, and not for the interests of the Manchester manufacturers’.12 Curzon fully endorsed the view and zealously advanced it. His first duty, he told Godley, was to the people of India, and he would resign rather than sacrifice their interests.13 He stood up for Indian rights even on minor matters, such as the bill sent to India for a lighthouse in the Red Sea, a waterway hardly confined to Indian shipping. When Lord Cranborne observed that India barely contributed to imperial expenses, the Viceroy sent him a reproachful list of the money and troops she had supplied in recent years.14

The British Liberal Party subscribed to the idea of imperial trusteeship but had no clear ideas about its eventual goal in India. Gladstone had declared that Britain had no interest there except the wellbeing of the inhabitants. Believing that Indians should be granted certain freedoms and privileges, he sent Lord Ripon out as Viceroy to implement this policy. But he did not think democracy could be transplanted to a non-Christian society and he insisted that Indians should not be given ‘unbounded freedom’.15 Gladstonian liberalism, doubtfully successful even in Italy, had no answer for India. Unwilling either to rule the Subcontinent as an autocracy or to relinquish it altogether, the Liberals were forced to muddle along, unconvinced about what they were doing or where they were going.

No such doubts had troubled the nineteenth-century Conservatives. Lord Mayo, appointed by Disraeli, had been determined to hold India ‘as long as the sun shines in heaven’,16 to do everything in his power for the good of the people, and to make no concessions whatever to the idea of self-rule. Curzon’s views, thirty years later, were identical. In his Persian book he had acknowledged that ‘the normal Asiatic would sooner be misgoverned by Asiatics than well governed by Europeans’, and in the House of Commons he had declared, on behalf of the Government, that the British task in Egypt was not to rule Egyptians but to teach them to rule themselves.17 He refused to accept, however, that these points should apply to India. While realizing that Britain’s international position required the retention of India, he genuinely believed that both countries would suffer from a separation. Egypt and Persia were after all two of the oldest nations of the world, whereas India, despite her ancient civilization, was only a collection of diverse peoples with different religions which from time to time over the centuries had been united under a powerful empire. The removal of the current imperial presence, believed Curzon, would lead – as it had led in the past – to internal dissolution. For that reason he refused to discuss the day when India would be self-governing. A prominent Indian once told Lawrence that his people did not ask for home rule then, or in ten or twenty years; all they wanted was for the Viceroy to keep open the door of hope, to say that perhaps in fifty years India would be self-governing. Lawrence went to see his chief and urged him to agree, but Curzon refused on the grounds that it might embarrass his successor if he raised hopes or expressed an opinion as to when self-government would come. When his secretary pointed out that it must come one day, Curzon replied, ‘It will not come in my time, and I cannot say what may happen in the future.’18

Educated Indians, the Viceroy uncharitably assumed, cared little for justice, equity or good government. What they wanted was a greater share of executive power, for which he thought them ‘as yet profoundly unfitted’ and which he insisted he would never let them have.19 He consulted Indians about subjects such as agriculture, commerce and industry, but he did not want their advice on politics. Asked why he did not appoint a native to his Council, he replied, absurdly, that in the entire country there was not an Indian fit for the post.20 His attitude to the provincial administrations was similar. Delighted though he was by the appointment of natives to bodies such as the Indian Educational Service, he did not want to see them in high executive positions in the ICS. Answering Sir William Wedderburn, an MP and former President of the Indian National Congress who had urged him to employ more Indians in the senior ranks of the ICS, Curzon said that in his experience, whenever there was an emergency, ‘the highly placed native is apt to be unequal to it, does not attract the respect of his subordinates, European or even Native, and is rather inclined to abdicate, or to run away’. He could give, he added, a dozen illustrations of such behaviour during his first year or so in India.21

Curzon’s view of educated Indians was heavily influenced by his personal experience of Bengalis in Calcutta. In public he complimented them on their eloquence in the English language but warned them not to let their fluency run away with their powers of thought. In private he complained that the ‘incurable vice’ of the Bengali was his ‘faculty of rolling out yards and yards of frothy declamation about subjects which he has imperfectly considered, or which he does not fully understand’.22 The traditional British view of the Bengali ‘babu’fn1 was that he was cunning, perverse, garrulous and muddleheaded, in short among the least attractive of Her Majesty’s subjects. Viceroys and Secretaries of State had long been worried that the encouragement of native ambitions would lead to ‘the supremacy of Baboodom’, and Lord Salisbury had admitted in 1877 that he could imagine no more terrible picture for India than that of being governed by babus.23 Like two of his predecessors, Lord Lytton and Lord Dufferin, Curzon believed that the educated Bengalis were a tiny and unrepresentative minority which should not be allowed to exercise undue influence over the ‘real’ India. The interests of the peasant millions, they maintained, were far better served by their traditional rulers, the native princes and the British.

Curzon’s opinion of the Indian National Congress was coloured by its Bengali predominance, and it is perhaps significant that the only leader of the movement he admired was the Maratha brahmin, G.K. Gokhale. Founded in 1885, Congress had proclaimed its ‘unswerving loyalty’ to the British Crown and declared that the continued affiliation of India to Great Britain was ‘absolutely essential’ to the interests of national development; in the view of some of its leaders, British rule was a ‘divine dispensation’ for the wellbeing of India.24 Yet at the same time it was a nationalist movement determined to dilute the exclusive Britishness of that dispensation. Although Congress soon divided into a moderate, liberal, pro-Western faction around Gokhale and an extremist faction led by B.G. Tilak, which looked back to a romanticized Hindu past, it was united in pressing for greater Indian representation on the Councils and for the progressive ‘Indianization’ of the higher services.

During his viceroyalty Lord Lansdowne had realized that freedom of the press and freedom of assembly were bound to produce a body such as Congress, and he had recommended that it should be treated in a friendly manner.25 Lord Curzon disagreed entirely. Failing to see that Congress was producing a new nationalist élite, he dismissed it as a small, noisy, middle-class movement, and refused to consider it as a future partner in the administration of India. Although the organization seemed harmless, and its leaders applauded his early reforms, he believed it was a movement which ‘in the last resort [was] animated by hostile feeling’ towards the Government.26 Aware of the growth of nationalist feeling, he argued that nothing should be done to encourage it. If Congress was innocent, he told Lord Ampthill, Havelock’s successor as Governor of Madras, then it was superfluous; and if it was hostile or seditious, it was a national danger. His policy was thus to reduce the organization to impotence by making no concessions or even talking to its leaders, by carrying out reforms so as to deprive it of reasonable ground for complaint, and by showing such sympathy to the natives that the racial issue could not be revived.27 As he did not trouble to conceal these opinions, it was scarcely surprising that Congress should eventually, after years of rebuffs, convert itself into what he called a ‘gramophone of abuse’ against himself.28

Curzon has been much vilified for his alleged contempt for Indians, particularly for a speech he made at Calcutta University in 1905 when he unwisely remarked that ‘the highest ideal of truth is to a large extent a Western conception’.29 But the resulting outcry ignored both his qualifications and the context of the remark; his point that the great Hindu epics contain maxims such as ‘it is better to speak what is beneficial than to speak the truth’ went unregarded. 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. He found them childlike and often aggravating, but there can be no doubt that he liked them: they were ‘very gentle and sympathetic’, he told Ampthill, and should be treated with kindness.30 The view of Surendranath Banerjea, a hostile Congress leader – Curzon ‘loved the people of India after a fashion that they did not appreciate [and] which excited their resentment’31 – was perhaps true and regrettable, but it does not dispute that the affection was genuine.

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; the quality of Indian civilization could be deduced from the country’s architectural heritage, which he regarded as ‘the most wonderful and varied collection of ancient monuments in the world’.32 He did not want Indians to become brown Englishmen but encouraged them to assimilate Western thought into their own culture. ‘Adhere to your own religion,’ he exhorted Muslim students, ‘which has in it the ingredients of great nobility and of profound truth’: from its foundations they should ‘pluck the fruit of the tree of knowledge, which once grew best in Eastern gardens, but has now shifted its habitat to the West’.33 He was less sure about the noble ingredients of Hinduism: news of a child sacrifice to the Goddess Kali so horrified him that he was once tempted to share Kipling’s view that ‘never the twain shall meet’.34 But he resolutely opposed attempts to convert Indians to Christianity. His old friend Welldon, now Bishop of Calcutta, hoped that one day a native prince would declare himself a Christian and, in the manner of Constantine or Clovis, convert the Subcontinent to his creed.35 Curzon entertained no such hopes and bluntly told the 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.36 Welldon criticized the Government’s unsympathetic attitude to the missions, which the Viceroy regarded, in spite of their low rate of conversion, as dangerous and troublesome. When the Church of England Missionary Society urged an alteration in the laws of the southern states of Travancore and Cochin so as to enable converts to inherit property from their Hindu relations, Curzon argued that ancient laws should not be dismantled merely to provide an incentive to Christian conversion.37

The chief objects of his rule, declared the Viceroy, were to make Britain’s administration equitable and her dominion permanent,38 and the keys to his success would be ‘a genuine but never exaggerated sympathy with native thought and ideas [and] a bold lead in everything else’.39 He had come to India, he announced on arrival at Bombay, ‘to hold the scales even’ between the different races and religions of the country, and his first commitment was to ‘righteousness in administration’. He would not connive at scandals, he told Alfred Lyttelton, or wink at fraud or hush up ill-doing in high places, because the British were in India to set an example, and all their actions should be open to inspection. Only by demonstrating ‘superior standards of honour and virtue’ could they continue to hold the country.40

No issue caused Curzon greater anguish than British maltreatment of Indians. ‘The racial pride and the undisciplined passions of the inferior class of Englishmen’ were, he believed, a danger to the survival of British rule.41 The difficulty of administering equal justice between Indians and Europeans had vexed earlier Viceroys, but with Curzon it became an obsession. When natives were beaten up or occasionally killed by drunken soldiers, the guilty men were almost invariably lightly fined or even acquitted. Godley agreed that the failures of justice were a scandal. ‘You may as well’, he told the Viceroy, ‘expect fair treatment for an Englishman from a jury of Boers as for a native of India from a jury of Englishmen.’42

The worst offenders were the soldiers and the planters. Curzon soon understood the wisdom of Lord Cromer’s warning that ‘uncontrolled militarism and commercial egotism’ were the two main enemies of imperial rule.43 The most selfish and rapacious members of the community, he found, were the tea planters who maltreated their coolies in the knowledge that the local magistrates were on their side. A coolie who threatened or committed a technical assault upon an Englishman would be given a year’s rigorous imprisonment, but the planter who thrashed a coolie almost to death might be fined a few rupees.44 The army’s behaviour was often worse. A few months after taking office, Curzon was outraged to learn that at least twenty men from the West Kent regiment in Rangoon had raped an elderly Burmese woman who subsequently went out of her mind and died in the following year. The discovery that the local military authorities had tried to hush the matter up increased his fury, and he vowed to expose the whole story and dismiss those responsible. As the West Kent’s officers had tried to protect the culprits, he proposed to punish the entire regiment. After Hamilton and the Commander-in-Chief had agreed, it was duly dispatched to Aden and condemned to stay in that inhospitable spot for two years without leave.

Whenever he heard of an incident involving violence or an injustice in the courts, the Viceroy did what he could to rectify the matter. ‘I have never wavered in a strict and inflexible justice between the two races,’ he told Hamilton. ‘It is the sole justification and the only stable foundation for our rule.’45 Nationalist leaders and the native press applauded him for his efforts to maintain British character in India, while at home the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister strongly endorsed his stance. Yet he was widely abused by his countrymen around him, especially those in the military and the commercial community; whenever he denounced British violence, he recounted, he was accused of injuring the prestige of his race.46 The reactions of his compatriots often bemused him. The Calcutta businessman was in his opinion normally ‘a good fellow’, but as soon as any question arose that he thought affected his standing as a member of the superior race, he became ‘an excitable fanatic, destitute of reason, fairness or even common sense’.47 Officials sometimes thought Curzon was too harsh. When he complained about the leniency of jail sentences of three and four years for two Travancore planters who had beaten a native to death, Ampthill countered that imprisonment in south Indian jails was a ‘terrible severity’ because their high walls and hot bare stones made them like ovens. Ampthill also objected to Curzon’s insistence that the captain in charge of the Madras camp at the Delhi Durbar should resign for his involvement in the accidental death of a coolie from a ‘push’. The inflexible Viceroy replied that a kick by a European resulting in the death of a native was always described as a push and that in his experience ‘angry Englishmen do not push with their feet when in a rage’.48 The officer resigned.

Curzon’s first year and a half in India was overshadowed by famine and plague. The drought which followed the monsoon failure of 1899 led to one the worst famines of the century; by the end of the year three and a half million people were receiving famine relief, a far higher figure than the Government had ever had to cope with before. The Viceroy had planned to spend his first autumn tour visiting native states in Rajputana and central India, where many of the most important princes lived. But as the famine spread and intensified, he decided to go to Bombay and other parts of western India suffering from hunger and pestilence. Ignoring Mary’s anxieties, he had himself inoculated with Haffkine’s serum and set off eagerly to visit hospitals and relief works. After months of inactivity at Simla, he was delighted to investigate the problems on the spot, and he was soon in a position to tell Queen Victoria that he had not only visited every plague hospital in Bombay and Poona but had personally seen almost every infected patient.49 The visit had an excellent effect, noted Lawrence, despite the Viceroy’s habit of upsetting people by complaining about trifling defects.50 A few weeks later, however, Curzon paid public tribute to officials of the ICS and other services who had risked their lives to relieve the suffering. He was less appreciative of native efforts. On a similar tour during the following summer he observed to Hamilton that responsible Indians were apathetic and indifferent, leaving all the work to British officials. It was a curious thing, he reflected, that the Hindu could be tender-hearted about saving peacocks and monkeys but was quite callous about the lives of his fellow humans.51

The energy and thoroughness with which Curzon handled the famine crisis considerably reduced the degree of suffering: by the spring of 1900 five million people were receiving relief estimated to have cost the Government £8,500,000, but the mortality rate had only marginally increased. Although he had channelled the budget surplus away from intended reforms to famine relief, he was determined to find extra funds to invest in irrigation works that would reduce the danger of future droughts. A visit in 1899 to the Chenab irrigation scheme, where 200,000 people were then settled on reclaimed soil, inspired him to expand the work of transforming the semi-desert wastelands of the Punjab. He wanted to concentrate more on canals than railways, he told Hamilton, although he characteristically did both, and indeed ended up building more railways than any other Viceroy. After increasing the annual grant for irrigation projects, he appointed a commission to travel through the country and report on the viability of future works. When the commission’s recommendations were accepted in 1903, an immense twenty-year programme, designed to irrigate six and a half million acres and employ 280,000 men, was begun. Two years later Curzon was able to report that, since his first visit to the Chenab Canal, the area watered by it had doubled while the settled population had multiplied by five.

An American millionaire, Mr H. Phipps, was so impressed by what he saw of the Viceroy’s work in India that he offered him £20,000 to spend on any project he fancied. When Curzon replied that he wanted to set up an agricultural research institute, Phipps immediately donated another £10,000. Agricultural projects were accompanied by agrarian legislation to safeguard the interests of the peasants. The Co-operative Credit Societies Act (1904) was the first attempt to solve the problem of peasant indebtedness, while the Punjab Land Alienation Act (1905) prevented moneylenders from taking a holding in settlement of debt. Curzon recognized that moneylenders were essential to agrarian life as it then existed, but he was determined to prevent them from becoming land-grabbers at the expense of the hereditary occupants of the soil. Politically active Hindus opposed the legislation on the grounds of free-market liberalism, while Muslims, who formed the majority of the Punjabi peasantry and whose religion proscribed usury, generally supported it. In spite of Hamilton’s fears that the Act might have damaging economic consequences – he was an ardent free-trader himself – it proved a success, and its principles were later extended to the settled areas of the North-West Frontier Province and to Bundelkund in central India. Twenty years later Sir Michael O’Dwyer, who had recently retired as Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab, saluted Curzon for legislation which had prevented ‘the finest body of peasantry in the East’ from becoming a ‘landless discontented proletariat’.52

Not everyone was convinced by Curzon’s pronouncements on agriculture. Romesh Chandar Dutt, a former ICS officer who during the viceroyalty became successively President of Congress, lecturer at London University and Revenue Minister for Baroda, wrote a series of open letters in the course of 1901 arguing that a major cause of famine was the high assessment of land revenues. The Viceroy decided that the Government of India would publish a resolution refuting Dutt’s points and asked an official to draft a reply. As the resulting draft was deemed inadequate, he decided personally to tackle the subject. Land assessment, he told Mary, was the most abstruse subject in the world, but because his experts were such bad writers, he had to compose the pronouncement himself. In fact it was the kind of dialectical exercise he relished. Shutting himself up in Viceregal Lodge in August, he mastered the question with the help of Lawrence and produced a magisterial, convincing and rather brutal rebuttal of Dutt’s arguments. Yet although he denied that the land assessment system was a cause of famine, Curzon himself was in favour of reducing the rate of assessment. In the early years of his viceroyalty the remission of land revenue had averaged £1,200,000, and in 1905 he issued a resolution providing for a reduction in times of bad harvests. Surveying the Government’s agrarian policy, Congress leaders not unfairly deduced that it was designed to win the goodwill of the peasants and prevent an alliance between them and the nationalist middle classes. ‘Remissions of land revenue,’ declared one of their publications, ‘institution of agricultural banks, revision of the famine code, inauguration of a new irrigation policy – all these are clearly meant to ingratiate the present rule and the present regime into the favour of the immense agricultural population of this country.’53 Curzon regarded such accusations as the best kind of compliment; the contentment of the governed remained his overriding aim.

Anyone who studies Curzon’s outpourings over a particular period – the despatches, the resolutions, the letters to Hamilton and Godley, the minutes, the telegrams, the epistles to friends, the speeches, the admonitions, the communications to all parts of India – is likely to feel that they took less time for the Viceroy to produce than they do for the reader to study. Although he told Hamilton he had worked at least ten hours each day during August and September 1901, it is difficult to understand how the quantity of work could have been accomplished in less than twenty. Immediately after seeing off Dutt, he decided, singlehandedly, to run an educational conference. Sir Charles Rivaz, the Home Member, was technically in charge of both land revenue and education. But he had been of no assistance in the refutation of Dutt, and he now asked to be excused from attending the education conference. Curzon, who complained that Rivaz’s knowledge of education was as paltry as his own about motor cars, decided to do all the work himself.54 He spent two weeks drafting each of the 150 resolutions and then presided over the conference for sixteen days, talking much of the time and guiding the business so that all his resolutions were carried unanimously. By the end he was exhausted and ill, his right leg so painful he was unable to stand for more than two minutes at a stretch. A month later he was still an invalid, working from his bed with a pencil, incapable of walking more than a few yards without intense pain.55

In pursuit of his reforms Curzon successfully begged Hamilton to send out various experts to advise his jaded officials. Some came merely to investigate and report, others stayed to take up posts in fields of particular interest to the Viceroy. The experts were not always a great success and in some cases merely caused extra work for Curzon. He had recognized early on that the system of railway management was inefficient and indefensible, but he was so absorbed by reforms of the army, the frontier, the police, the currency, the land laws and education, that he felt he had neither the heart nor the time to sit down and puzzle out a scheme of reconstruction.56 Yet it was alien for him to tolerate an anomaly, and in 1901 he requested a railway manager from Britain to come out and make a thorough report on the state of the Indian railways. Following an extensive and expensive investigation, the manager duly produced a short, imprecise and very poorly drafted report which the Viceroy refused to accept. After spending several hours going through it and explaining its defects to the author, Curzon assigned the job of redrafting to an official of the Public Works Department.

An even more unsatisfactory expert was Mr Ransome, the government architect sent out at the Viceroy’s request by the India Office. Curzon had the traditional nabob’s taste for classical buildings and thought Gothic churches usually looked ridiculous in tropical lands.57 He also deplored the creeping vulgarity he observed both in Indian palaces and in recent government buildings with their flaming carpets, cut-glass chandeliers and ‘appalling Tottenham Court Road furniture’ reminiscent of Tooting or Sydenham.58 In India he wanted simple, functional and attractive buildings suitable for the climate. Ransome’s early declaration that he aspired to create a new Indian style, a sort of jumble of everything that had preceded it, understandably alarmed him.59 But the jumble style, as it turned out, was not the principal problem. Ransome had been appointed on the strength of a cottage he had built in Wimbledon for the Political Secretary at the India Office. The cottage no doubt looked very charming in its London suburb, but unfortunately its architect insisted on enlarging and adapting its forms for whatever he was building in India. He also attempted to put Saracenic features on a railway office in Lahore and on the High Court at Rangoon, which Curzon thought absurd in view of the fact that the Moguls had never reached Burma. Ransome continued to submit designs for public buildings in Peshawar and Dehra Dun, and the Viceroy’s Council continued to reject them as ugly and unsuited to Indian conditions. At the end of 1903 Curzon minuted his pleasure that he and his Council had hitherto prevented the architect from inflicting any of his schemes on India and added the hope that they would continue to do so. Ransome, who refused to be dismissed without an enormous redundancy payment, made little effort to understand his chief antagonist. On presenting his designs for Mr Phipps’s agricultural college at Pusa, the architect explained that his curvilinear pediments at the end of each wing were inspired by Wren, ‘an architect responsible for much renaissance work in England’. Curzon minuted tersely that he had studied architecture for twenty years, long enough to learn not only who Wren was ‘but also that he never produced anything remotely resembling the two wings of Mr R’s building’.60 A version of Ransome’s plan was eventually built at Pusa but was ruined by an earthquake in 1934.

Curzon’s instincts to conserve and restore were as strong as his need to reform and instigate. Although unsentimental about animals and responsible for shooting a fair number himself, he did not want to see them suffer unnecessarily and insisted they were not cruelly treated in captivity. Ampthill was asked to explain the clubbing to death of mad dogs in Madras and urged to stop local landowners catching elephants in pits. MacDonnell was instructed to release some wild animals from a cage near Huseinabad. And Woodburn received a letter telling him Calcutta Zoo was a discredit to the city.61 The Viceroy approved of zoos so long as they were well-kept and humane, and he corresponded with Lord Cromer in Egypt about exchanging Indian and African animals for the zoos in their respective capitals. But the Calcutta Zoo, he asserted, was inferior to that of Karachi, and Lawrence was deputed to make a list of defects for the benefit of its president. He also conveyed Curzon’s view that a warmer house should be built for the lions to prevent them dying of rheumatism and arthritis.

Curzon was sensitive to the danger of extinction and refused to accept the argument that wild animals were destined to disappear in India as wolves had in England. Lions had existed in central parts until the time of the Mutiny but were now confined to the Gir Forest in Junagadh. Attempting to reverse the trend, the Viceroy obtained some of these beasts from Africa and persuaded the Maharaja of Gwalior to reintroduce them to his state. He also intervened successfully to save the Gir lions despite a warning from the Nawab of Junagadh that ‘their truancy from their ordinary haunts and falling upon domestic animals’ might induce villagers to shoot them.62 Although Curzon wished he could have done more for conservation, his Government did pass an Act for the protection of wild birds which prohibited the export of feathers torn from living birds to adorn ladies’ hats in Europe. He supervised the preparation of legislation for a game bill, which was emasculated under his successor, and he also intervened to prevent the spoliation of fine landscapes. Hearing of a scheme for taking water from the Gershoppa Falls, he refused to allow the Bombay Government to ‘sacrifice, for the sake of some miserable cotton mill, one of the great glories of the Eastern world’.63

Buildings were a higher priority for Curzon than animals, and his travels during his first year convinced him that urgent action was needed to preserve Indian monuments. The British were not so rich in originality themselves, he declared, that they could afford ‘to allow the memorials of an earlier and superior art or architecture to fall into ruin’; for him the conservation of India’s monuments was ‘an elementary obligation of government’.64 The poor condition of many buildings may have been caused by Indian neglect or by the depredations of Sikh and Muslim conquerors, but that did not excuse either contemporary indifference or the horrors erected by British engineers in the forts of Agra, Gwalior and elsewhere. Curzon believed his country had ‘purged itself of the spirit of stupid and unlettered vandalism’ which had in earlier days led it to turn disused palaces into barracks,65 but he was determined to atone for past crimes by a strenuous programme of restoration.

Inertia rather than barbarism was his chief foe. No Viceroy since Lord Northbrook, he observed, had been much interested in the subject, and few of his subordinates troubled themselves about it even now. Responsibility for monuments lay with the provincial governments which, without a central policy and a directing hand, did little to prevent their decay. Only MacDonnell in the North-Western Provinces spent appreciable sums on restoration. Ampthill had never heard of the official archaeologist of Madras, and no one on his Council was even aware of his existence – an ignorance, Curzon told the Governor, which illustrated the disrepute and obscurity into which archaeology had fallen in India.66 Adamant that such attitudes must be changed, he adopted an intractable policy that permitted no dissent. As he told the Asiatic Society of Bengal,

If there be any one who says to me that there is no duty devolving upon a Christian Government to preserve the monuments of a pagan art, or the sanctuaries of an alien faith, I cannot pause to argue with such a man. Art and beauty, and the reverence that is owing to all that has evoked human genius or has inspired human faith, are independent of creeds, and, in so far as they touch the sphere of religion, are embraced by the common religion of all mankind … There is no principle of artistic discrimination between the mausoleum of the despot and the sepulchre of the saint. What is beautiful, what is historic, what tears the mask off the face of the past, and helps us to read its riddles, and to look it in the eyes – these, and not the dogmas of a combative theology, are the principal criteria to which we must look.67

Curzon’s first step was to find a Director-General of Archaeology who would co-ordinate the Viceroy’s policy, his next to give grants to the provincial governments for the purpose of restoration, and his third to exhort them by letter or in person to carry out the duties he had prescribed for them. The practice whereby provinces occasionally appointed badly paid archaeological surveyors was in his view chaotic and futile. He wanted to revive the post of Curator of Ancient Monuments, which had existed for a few years until 1889, and relaunch it as the Directorate-General of Archaeology. Hamilton accepted his argument that the conservation of Indian monuments was an ‘imperial responsibility’ but, in sanctioning the appointment of Mr J.H. Marshall to the position in 1901, stipulated that large sums of money should not be spent on buildings which were in an advanced state of ruin, those which were of no more than local importance and those which had been desecrated by ‘natives’ generations earlier.68 Paying little attention to these restrictions, Curzon happily multiplied the grants to local governments by a factor of eight. Marshall was the best of the experts sent out by the India Office, and he and the Viceroy co-operated enthusiastically on their ambitious programme. The new official, however, fell far below his chief’s standards of penmanship and sometimes had to be reproved with preceptorial frankness. Curzon found part of one draft report was so long, contained so many unimportant details and was written in such an uninteresting official style that it should be entirely redone. The Director-General encountered an equally unsympathetic response to his claim that a bibliography of Indian archaeology would take up an exorbitant amount of his time. The Viceroy himself had once compiled a bibliography, Marshall was informed, and although it was a task requiring much patience and concentration, it was perfectly easy to do.69

The preservationist mission was carried out with biblical fervour. The Viceroy ordered the royal palace in Mandalay to be cleansed of the English club, which was occupying the Queen’s chambers, and of a memorial chapel that had been erected in the King’s throne room. On finding a squalid post office built into a beautiful Islamic building, he ordered the entire staff to get up and leave.70 Hot, dusty hours climbing among ruins were followed by long nocturnal stretches listing his demands. Detailed instructions were left on his departure extending to such items as cracked plaster and cobwebs on a staircase; at Ajunta he ordered the bats to be driven out of the caves and the insect nests scraped away. Much trouble was taken to ensure that restoration was carried out with due skill and sensitivity, for he hated the practice of covering faded originals with brash modern colours. On discovering that the ancient skill of pietra dura inlay had virtually died out, he went to great lengths to acquire a Florentine mosaicist to repair the Red Fort’s marble panels that had been damaged in the Mutiny.

The Viceroy’s sightseeing was both tiring and trying for his entourage, because nothing was more guaranteed to make him lose his temper than a visit to a neglected or maltreated building on which he had earlier ordered repairs. Local ignorance and obstructiveness also upset him. He was horrified to find the Jain temples of Mount Abu whitewashed in honour of his visit, and was irritated by the refusal of the Hindu authorities at Bhubaneshwar to allow a Government engineer into the enclosure of the principal temple to see what repairs needed to be done; nor was he mollified by the temple committee’s subsequent offer to admit the engineer in exchange for a bribe.71 Most infuriating of all was the discovery that his own gifts had been neglected. Like his donations to Indian charities, these were often munificent and included a lamp for the Taj Mahal, a clock for the Golden Temple of Amritsar, and the Holwell Monument at Calcutta, where he was once disgusted to find his black marble covered in dust. Visiting Lahore in the spring of 1899, he was prompted to offer a pulpit to one mosque and a lamp to another, after which he discussed their designs with the head of the local art school. Three years later the unexpectedly early arrival of his train at Lahore gave him the opportunity to inspect his gifts in position. To his extreme vexation he found the pulpit covered with pigeon droppings while the lamp was so dirty it appeared never to have been cleaned.72

No site received more of Curzon’s attention than Agra, his favourite place in India. Believing the town to possess the most beautiful body of architectural remains in the world, he was determined to make them the best preserved as well. A skilled body of craftsmen was therefore trained to reproduce the original seventeenth-century work in marble, sandstone and, eventually, pietra dura. The Mogul mausoleums were repaired, the nearby town of Fatehpur Sikri was restored, the minarets of the gateway to Akbar’s tomb at Sikandra were rebuilt with white Makrana marble. Alterations that had been carried out to make Akbar’s fort more defensible were reversed, and the original battlements were reinstated; from the interior an unsightly army canteen was hurriedly banished. In the precincts of the Taj no work escaped the Viceroy’s supervision. He ordered the removal of scraggy trees and garish flowerbeds from the gardens. He rebuilt watercourses and fountains, planted cypresses, and advised MacDonnell to put up screens to protect them from gales and dust storms; he even objected to the dingy garments worn by the custodians of the Taj tombs and asked MacDonnell’s successor to change them. By the end of the viceroyalty he had spent nearly £50,000 on the Agra monuments alone, ‘an offering of reverence to the past and a gift of recovered beauty to the future’.73

The Viceroy’s speech in the Legislative Council on the Ancient Monuments Bill of 1904 gave him a chance to describe his work on Indian antiquities with the magniloquence he relished. ‘As a pilgrim at the shrine of beauty I have visited them, but as a priest in the temple of duty have I charged myself with their reverent custody and their studious repair.’74 The egotism was justified, and the achievement, though battered, survives. In November 1905 Curzon ended his last official speech in the Subcontinent with the words, ‘Let India be my judge’. Much of his policy over the previous seven years had been controversial, some of it had been mistaken, but of the value of his work of conservation there can be no two opinions. ‘After every other viceroy has been forgotten,’ Nehru remarked many years later, ‘Curzon will be remembered because he restored all that was beautiful in India.’75