In an age drunk on decolonisation, I’ve often found myself struck by one of history’s more delicious ironies: that Lord George Nathaniel Curzon, an unapologetic imperialist, Orientalist peacock, and general nuisance to rising nationalism, remains something of a ghostwriter for India’s modern strategic imagination. It’s not nostalgia. It’s something more elemental. Geography. And perhaps more revealingly, it’s because the man thought in terms that our politicians rarely dare to.
I remember reading J.N. Dixit’s line about Curzon as “among the greatest of the Indian nationalists” with a mix of amusement and admiration. Was it provocation or praise? Likely both. But what Dixit captured was that Curzon, for all his colonial baggage, understood something foundational about the subcontinent: that it had to be whole to be safe, and it had to be buffered to breathe.
Curzon operated far beyond the ceremonial duties of a viceroy, indulging in ancient art restoration and imperial processions. He approached the subcontinent as a civilisational cartographer. His 1909 proclamation that “the master of India must, under modern conditions, be the greatest power in the Asiatic Continent, and, therefore… in the world” has a ring of geopolitical clarity. And “India,” for him, was no wafer-thin post-Partition figment. It was the whole swathe: from the Iranian plateau to the Burmese jungle, Kabul to Rangoon.
But Curzon didn’t emerge from a vacuum. The imperial doctrine he perfected had its scaffolding. Men like Charles Christie and Henry Pottinger, officers who made maps before they made policy. In 1810, Christie and Pottinger, disguised as humble horse dealers, slipped across Baluchistan and into Persia on an espionage mission worthy of Le Carré. Their objective was to chart the unknown, anticipate Russian advances, and quietly rehearse for the Great Game decades before it was named.
Christie, ever the imperial romantic, would eventually join the Qajar Iranian army, fight the Russians in pitched battle, and die sword in hand. More Persian than the Persians. Pottinger, cooler and more pragmatic, returned to draw treaties and borders, becoming the first Governor of Hong Kong and architect of British gains in the Opium War. Between them, they mapped the outer rims of what Curzon would later conceive as the subcontinent’s “defensive glacis.”
To defend that vision, Curzon carved out the North-West Frontier Province. Not for governance, but for leverage. He knew that to manage the plains, you had to control the passes. The tribal belt abutting Afghanistan wasn’t peripheral. It served as the fulcrum.
In fact, even Akbar Ahmed—Pakistani academic, former High Commissioner to the UK, with credentials from Cambridge and Harvard—makes a point in one of his books that for centuries, the northern tribesmen quite literally made a living raiding into India until the East India Company finally blocked their route. What he offers as anthropology, Curzon understood as strategy. I’ve genuinely forgotten which book he said it in, but I remember thinking: he may not mean to, but he’s just made Curzon’s case better than most British historians ever did.
Pakistan, in its way, is still fighting Curzon’s war. The names have changed, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa now, but the theatre, the logic, the dysfunction remain. Strategic depth in Afghanistan, a buffer against imagined Indian aggression, and fantasies of Kabul as a client state – empire-era ambitions running on the fumes of a failing republic.
And yet, in Delhi’s strategy rooms and think tank salons, Curzon lingers. The doctrinal DNA is obvious. SAGAR, Act East, Kaladan, BIMSTEC. Indian Ocean diplomacy. Soft power in Myanmar. Buddhist circuits as influence projection. The old design, just updated for a postcolonial world.
C. Raja Mohan once said it flat: anyone dreaming of a Greater India is invoking Curzon. He’s “a source of strategic inspiration.” Not because he was right about race or rule, but because he was right about scale.
What I find most compelling, personally, is Curzon’s ruthless clarity: he drew a firm line between borders and control, between maps and actual authority. He didn’t romanticise unity. He insisted on it because he knew the alternative was drift. Subcontinental statecraft today is riddled with sentiment and short-termism emerging from 1947. But Curzon planned in centuries.
Yes, the state uses violence. That is, after all, what makes it a state. And without the Indian state asserting that monopoly, the subcontinent would revert to the entropy from which it briefly emerged. In 70 years, the Indian state has been remarkably restrained. Not despite its history, but precisely because of it.
It’s that kind of statecraft India sorely needs again. Because what we have instead is a partitioned farce: three nuclear states, overlapping neuroses, and a subcontinent whose architecture resembles a family feud drawn in ink. India ends up managing the chaos—diplomat, policeman, creditor—while being endlessly provoked by neighbours too small to be threats but too dysfunctional to ignore.
It’s what led me to agree wholeheartedly with something my friend Priyank Chauhan once said. He nailed it: “A united subcontinent would’ve been a geopolitical prize, but its current architecture is unstable, like too many angry people sharing a plot of land. In the next 100 years, either Pakistan becomes Central Asian and Bangladesh becomes ASEAN, or Akhand Bharat, nothing in between.” There is, as Priyank put it, nothing in between.
But identity by subtraction requires demolition first- of language, memory, dress, even architecture. As Naipaul wrote with chilling clarity, the tragedy of Islamic societies is not what they become, but what they erase to get there. Pakistan is already midway through that forgetting.
If Curzon’s ghost still lingers, it is not to mock or haunt. It’s to remind. That geography has no ideology, only momentum. And that the subcontinent, fractured and exhausted, may yet find a shape that is less about flags, and more about form. What lasts in history is not outrage, but architecture. Not slogans, but structure. Curzon understood that. So should we.
