CONTEMPORARY EURASIA VI( 1)
Viceroy of India, which he held from 1899 to 1905. As has been adequately documented, Curzon not only had a deep interest in preserving India’ s architectural heritage, he saw this as the fundamental, divinely ordained duty of the colonial government and thus outlined a clear line of archaeological policy to be pursued by the state. 5 In addition to using India’ s pre-colonial, Mughal public buildings to stage elaborate imperial rituals of state power, and vigorously insisting on the employment of the so-called Indo- Saracenic building style in order to create the illusion of British rule in India as a natural and legitimate successor to Mughal rule 6, he also radically restructured the department of archaeology. This last included a centralized department of archaeology and appointing a Director-General of Archaeology who would be responsible for this centralized policy and its implementation 7. The man chosen for the position was a young scholar of the classics and archaeology, aged twenty five and with no previous experience of, or family history related to, India. Nevertheless, he was the personal choice of the viceroy, who wished to entrust the task of India’ s monument management to a scholar of the classics and European archaeology rather than a philologist and orientalist. That man, of course, was John Marshall 8. Curzon also dramatically increased the government’ s
5 See, for example, the many speeches of Curzon on the subject, both in India and
in Britain. Probably the most famous, and certainly most often quoted of these is the speech he gave to the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1900, in which he rather grandly proclaimed that India’ s ancient, religious architecture was“ a part of the heritage which Providence has committed to the custody of the ruling power.” Lord Curzon, Speech before the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 7 February, 1900. 6 On Curzon’ s attempts to use India’ s architectural heritage for staging imperial
power( Metcalf Thomas R., An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’ s Raj, 2002, Oxford University Press, New Delhi).
7
For the restructuring of archaeology by Lord Curzon, Chakrabarti, Dilip K., A History of Indian Archaeology from the Beginning to 1947, Munshiram Manoharlal, New Delhi, 2001, p. 122; Roy Sourindranath, The Story of Indian Archaeology, 1784 – 1947, Archaeological Survey of India, New Delhi, 1996.
8
On the background to Marshall’ s appointment, see Lahiri Nayanjot,“ John Marshall’ s Appointment as Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India: A Survey of the Papers Pertaining to his Selection”, South Asian Studies, Vol. 13, 1997, pp. 127 – 139.
69