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. One concerned the indisputably Mother-Teresa-like saintliness and Mandela-like wisdom of Mahatma Skinny-Nappy-Pants.

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Had I grown up in the era of G.A. Henty or H.E. Marshall, these narratives would have involved tales of quintessentially British pluck. And quite right too. You’re hardly going to head from public school to risk being speared to death in the Sudan or to succumb to malaria in some flyblown district of India if you think Henry V was a prisoner-murdering thug or Captain Scott was a prat who deserved what was coming to him because he should have used dogs not ponies.

By the time I was growing up, the imperial sun had all but set. We hadn’t yet reached the parlous state where Florence Nightingale has to be trumped by Mary Seacole for being insufficiently multicultural. But we’d begun our descent of the slippery slope, whereby we had to pay lip service to the idea that the foreigners who dismantled our empire were just as special as the Englishmen (well, Scotsmen, more often) who created it.