Synopsis:
Over the past hundred years,
India has held an enormous fascination for western
intellectuals and artists. Father Indiaexplores the
life-changing influence of the subcontinent on western ideas
and modernity by narrating the curious, spellbinding stories
of a succession of twentieth-century Europeans and
Americans--including Annie Besant, E. M. Forster, Carl Jung,
William Butler Yeats, V.S. Naipaul, Christopher Isherwood,
and Martin Luther King Jr.--who acted out their most secret
dreams in India. Gandhi's answer to the question "Why
now?" as he observed one westerner after another come
to his own ashram, is telling: The contemporary West had
misplaced its soul,and pilgrims to India were on a mission
to retrieve it. In the process, their unconscious
assumptions about politics, religion, and identity in their
own cultures were turned upside-down and laid open to
question. Father India tells the story of those
people who attempted to comprehend or even to perfect
western civilization through India, and of how their
successes and failures retunred to the modern West a changed
understanding of itself.
Excerpt from Chapter One
On the third Friday in May, 1923, George Curzon left London
for his country house in Somerset to await--curiously--a
telegram from London that would demand his immediate return to
the City. Not just any telegram; this telegram would make the
wrongs of a lifetime right. Its sender would be Lord
Stamfordham, the king's private secretary, proposing a meeting
in London, and at that meeting Stamfordham would on behalf of
His Majesty request Curzon to form a government in which he
would become Prime Minister of England. That history would
conform to this plan not only Curzon but practically no one in
England doubted.
Because of illness the old
Prime Minister, Bonar Law, had resigned unexpectedly. In
service, in ability, and in preeminence, Curzon simply had no
rival to be his successor within the Conservative Party. In
his Somerset villa, as the lights illumined the great columned
halls and cast a subfusc golden pallor over the exquisite
furnishings and priceless paintings, Curzon reined in his
impatience, waiting for the business of government to resume
on Monday and the telegram to come. Becoming Prime Minister
was the second great ambition of Curzon's life. When the
first, to be Viceroy of India, had been fulfilled--though
perhaps this was not the weekend for that analogy--everything
jinxed and cursed had ensued, as in a fairy tale where
misfortune follows from the wish fulfilled.
While he awaited the
telegram, Curzon may well have returned in reverie to those
glory days, those soul-trying days in India two decades
before. Certainly no other Englishman ever coveted the
viceregal crown so fervidly, none served as Viceroy of India
longer, and if any viceroy isremembered today it is Curzon.
Nor, as for that, did any other match his vision, for Curzon
instituted massive reforms in India that--while they would
have brought the country neither democracy nor
independence--might have achieved the streamlined economy, the
administrative efficiency, and some of the prosperity that
other Asian countries like Singapore or South Korea achieved
nearly a century later. "For the rest of his life,"
the newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook observed of Curzon's
tenure as Viceroy, "Curzon was influenced by his sudden
journey to heaven at the age of thirty-nine and then by his
return to earth seven years later, for the remainder of his
mortal existence."
And yet as in a mirage, the
harder he worked in India, the more his vision receded from
fruition. His policies, meant both to maintain the British in
India and to benefit the Indian populace, had the uncanny
effect of alienating both. When Curzon went to India in 1899,
everyone predicted that, as surely as day follows dawn, the
new viceroy would return to England to become its Prime
Minister. When seven years later he did return, his chances
for that high office were, in fact, reckoned in permanent
ruin. But, confounding all expectations, Curzon emerged from
purgatory, from his years in the wilderness, when he had
grubbed for minor and unworthy offices. His iron will and
paramount abilities were unstoppable, and by 1923 he had held
nearly every major office available to an Englishman, most
recently Foreign Secretary (equivalent to the American
secretary of state) and leader of the House of Lords. Every
major office except Prime Minister, and on Monday that would
be his.
If during that May weekend
Curzonneeded further proof that fate had finally turned
favorable, he had only to glance across the room at his wife.
Grace Duggan, his second wife, resembled his first: both were
American, both alluring beauties, and both rich beyond
reckoning. But Curzon's first wife had adored him and made her
life one long, unbroken service to his needs. Grace Duggan
adored Curzon's social position, and having married him for
it, she appeared hardly to require him further. When he
pleaded for her to join him at Kedleston, his cherished
ancestral home, she replied that, home being where the heart
is, she "would rather not go at all." When Curzon
mildly reproved her for not even inquiring about his health
after a serious illness, she replied that no good could come
of such charges and they should attempt to spend more time
amiably apart. But now that her "dear Boy" was about
to become Prime Minister, all that was changed, and she had
dashed back from Paris to be at his side and make it clear
that at his side is where she would ever remain.
Monday came round. Curzon's
old-fashioned sense of grandeur had not permitted that
newfangled contraption, the telephone, to be installed in his
home, and as luck would have it, the telegram delivery boy was
on holiday. But the local policeman surmised what the telegram
portended, and he puffed and panted on his bicycle all the way
out to Curzon's estate to deliver it. Not only the policeman,
but all England seemed to know. The newspapers were talking of
little else, and Curzon's progress to London, after receiving
Stamfordham's message, was lined solidly with curious gawkers
and well-wishers cheering and photo-cameras recording for
posterity every stop made along theway. When Stamfordham
arrived at Curzon's London house, punctual to the minute, he
began formally by recounting that the king's decision had been
delayed because he had not been informed in advance of Bonar
Law's intentions. On behalf of the king, whose new Prime
Minister he was to be, Curzon grew incensed that His Majesty
had had to learn of Law's resignation from the newspapers.
Quick as Curzon's mind was, however, he was slow to take in
Stamfordham's delicate message that he had been passed over,
and someone else, a lesser politician Curzon considered a
nonentity, junior to him in service and inferior to him in
abilities, had been selected. Curzon--who had suffered pain
every day of his adult life because of a spinal injury, who
had traveled the world on horseback and worked twenty-hour
stints in physical agony, and never breathed a word about
it--broke down and hung his head and wept. Being Curzon,
though, he recovered immediately and in rotund periods
lectured Stamfordham about the monstrous injustice and ill
logic of the choice.
Father
India: How Encounters with an Ancient Culture Transformed the
Modern West