Il viaggio e la politica. Il Raj di George Nathaniel Curzon e la frontiera come “immaginario imperiale”

[Autom. eng. transl.] George Nathaniel Curzon (1859-1925), Viceroy of India, Secretary of Foreign Affairs and - in the first phase of life - a prolific traveler and writer, played a key role in the construction of the Frontier as a political problem and as a place of "imaginary imperial". From the trip to Russia and Central Asia in 1888-89 to the Romanes Lecture of 1907, his prestige and influence were central in merging the popular aspect of the problem with the constraints and needs of high politics. The rapid rise in power circles and the length of his stay helped to give authority to his vision and to increase its influence. Entering into a rich and commercially fortunate vein, born in the years immediately after the first Afghan war, Curzon's works have largely conditioned the last phase of Indian politics, before the outbreak of the First World War brought back to Europe the pendulum of the imperial interests. They are also linked to the idea of the radical ungovernability of the Frontier. Above all, they are linked to the idea of the Frontier as a world apart, governed by its own rules, and inhabited by a peculiar "race", radically different but, at the same time, worthy of admiration precisely because of the proud defense of this otherness. Despite the evolution of the international scenario, these ideas will prove to be lasting. Embodied in the separation of the territories of the Frontier from those of the Punjab, they would later be transferred from the British imperial imagination to a sort of "shared awareness", which continues to structure the narrative of the Afghan-Pakistani area and the peoples that the inhabit. More than the traces on the ground, the strength of this "shared awareness" attests to the weight of the imperial heritage. A legacy of which it is difficult to free oneself, both at the level of political choices and of the representations that these choices inform and subtend.