On Lord Curzon - And His "Work"

As we confront our huge, completely dysfunctional The State, it is useful to go back in time when the government of India was much smaller and simpler, and things worked pretty fine. And to see where exactly matters went wrong.

Today, I want to take my reader back to 1898, when Lord Curzon came to Calcutta as Viceroy. Describing the then government of India, Philip Mason (who served in the ICS) says, in his The Men Who Ruled India:

... the provincial Governments consisted of perhaps a Lieutenant-Governor and three Secretaries, and the Government of India was on a hardly larger scale.

Yet, in 1898, with just this tiny government, British India was at the zenith of its glory. When Lord Curzon took over, Mason writes:

The structure was indeed mighty. A political unity had been imposed that had never before been equalled.... Roads, railways, bridges, canals were far ahead of anything else in Asia; there had been internal peace for half a century, the raids of bandits were no longer a feature of everyday life, and robber chiefs had one by one submitted.

Note what made the empire mighty: infrastructure and peace.

Then along came Lord Curzon, "trained for the Viceregal purple by years of self-discipline, study and travel" - and messed everything up. He was possessed of a personality defect - the inability to delegate. Thus, "when a political officer built a road from Gilgit to Chitral without sanction it seemed to Lord Curzon 'the irresponsible zeal of a petty captain'." It was Lord Curzon who centralised the government of India. Mason describes how this aristocrat spent his evenings in Simla, the "summer capital" he built to escape the white-heat of Delhi:

In long scarlet gowns trimmed with gold lace, the orderlies at Viceregal Lodge walked every evening in procession to the Viceroy's study, bringing his lordship's evening task. There might be a hunredweight of papers a night; sometimes there would be more. A cubic foot or so of previous references, weighing fifteen or twenty pounds, would come with quite a simple proposal.... "I have perused these papers," wrote Lord Curzon, ... "for two hours and twenty minutes. On the whole, I agree with the gentleman whose signature resembles a tombstone."

"But that was not really how this particular Empire did work," says Mason. Of course, there was a powerful central authority - who was himself controlled by higher authority in London - but this was "only one side of the truth and it was not the characteristic side, the side which distinguished this Empire from others." The actual fact is that there was plenty of leeway within the system for local knowledge and local conditions. Rather than top-down orders and bottom-up applications for approvals, what happened in British India was that:

... the Viceroy on the whole trusted his Lieutenant-Governors to get on with their work, but checked, encouraged and inspired them now and then, that the Lieutenant-Governors did the same by their District Officers and so on down to the patwari (land ownership recorder).

In was therefore for the first time in British India that, with Lord Curzon as Viceroy, "round and round like the diurnal revolutions of the earth went the file, stately, solemn, sure and slow; and now, in due season, it has completed its orbit... "

We can therefore trace centralisation in government as well as its corollary, the passion for circulating files on every minor matter, to Lord Curzon. His basic problem was that he "worked" - and worked damn hard, as the story of his evenings in Simla shows. There is a lesson in this: that the less work a government does, the better - especially at the top. I have only just drawn this very lesson from the "work" that chacha manmohan s gandhi does in Nude Elly nowadays.

Curzon may be contrasted with his predecessor by a few decades, another aristocrat who did not understand India, Lord Auckland, who had so little work that he was "always bored." Lord Auckland was so bored that, in order to relieve his boredom, he went to war - in Afghanistan. Of course, like all who have ventured to battle there, he lost - and lost badly - but that is another story, for another post. Yet, the lesson is the same: the less work the man at the top does, the better. Better that he is bored. Better that he is, like all the "lazy Asiatic chiefs" the Brits detested, perpetually stoned on bhang, attending to his vast harem. That way, it is not us - the people - who get screwed.

Lord Curzon always wanted to "do things" - take great decisions - and at least one of them was disastrous to the extreme: the Partition of Bengal on communal lines. This "work" that he did ought not to have been done. The Hindu-Muslim divide we still have to cope with in our troubled sub-continent - which was a united whole then - owes its origin to Lord Curzon. This was in 1905 - and the Indian Muslim League was established the very next year, in 1906, in Dacca. Then began the "nationalist movement" - which ended in the Partition of India, mass migrations, and millions of deaths.

And so it was that Lord Curzon was forced to take his capital from strife-torn Calcutta to Delhi, where he tried to re-establish his Indian Empire on the style of the Mughals. There, his crowning glory was a "Great Durbar." It was a grand event, a grand parade glorifying his The State. The ordinary people of Delhi were stupefied - and completely silent. None cheered. To Lord Curzon, the Durbar was meant to be an "overwhelming display of unity and patriotism." Of course, it was nothing of the kind. In reality, it was the sunset of the British Empire in India.

Lord Curzon, given his inability to delegate, paid close personal attention to every tiny detail of the Grand Durbar. Mason makes note of one of these details:

It is strange to read now that Lord Curzon rejected the hymn "Onward Christian Soldiers" - he must of course approve every hymn chosen for church services during the Durbar - not because the opening words were out of place at the proclamation of a sovereign most of whose soldiers were not Christian, but because it contained the lines: "Crowns and Thrones may perish, Kingdoms rise and wane" - an unbecoming note of pessimism.

In less than 50 years, the British Empire vanished. If Lord Curzon had not "worked" so bloody hard - if he had been as "bored" as Lord Auckland - history would certainly have been different.