I’d take Lord Curzon over Gandhi – and so would many Indians

In India last week I found myself thinking about Mohandas Gandhi and his famous quote when asked what he thought about western civilisation. ‘I think it would be a good idea,’ he replied.

When I first heard that story — probably about the time of the Richard Attenborough biopic majoring on British colonial oppressiveness like the Amritsar massacre — I don’t doubt I reacted in the way I had been culturally programmed to do. ‘Well, that certainly put us arrogant, colonial Westerners in our place,’ my carefully indoctrinated brain almost certainly went.

And it’s not as though I went through a phase in my life where I imagined the British empire to have been a bad thing. It’s just that in our formative years (Gandhi came out in 1982, when I was 17) there are certain narratives we are taught about the world so confidently and with such unanimity that they achieve the status of unquestionable verities.