A Few Good Men

• Share

Perhaps the only time in history that a bureaucrat's job has been glamorous was during the British Raj. In the course of a typical day, an officer of the Indian Civil Service (ICS) might have been called upon to judge a case in which a jealous husband had chopped off his wife's nose, arrange for rice to reach a famine-stricken town, meet a local maharajah for tea, and then wind down by heading off into the jungle to shoot a panther. Then again, everything about the ICS was extraordinary—not least, the immense power wielded by an astonishingly small bureaucracy: in 1901, about 1,000 ICS officers administered a subcontinent of nearly 300 million people. Strangest of all, despite their vast power, ICS men had a reputation for being incorruptible. Far more than the pomp and circumstance of the Raj, it was the remarkable idea of these honest, fair-minded and able administrators that lent the Empire its mystique.

But was it all a myth? Revisionist historians have recently accused the imperial civil servants of sins ranging from selfishness to incompetence in dealing with famines. Now, British historian David Gilmour has risen to the defense of the ICS with his new book, The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj. Gilmour has already written monumental biographies of two of the most controversial figures of the Raj—the writer Rudyard Kipling and the viceroy Lord Curzon. His latest work aims to rebut the revisionist attacks and provide a more flattering group portrait of the men who ruled the Raj.

Lord Dalhousie, one of the Governors-General of India, observed that while a "member of the Civil Service in England is a clerk, a member of the Civil Service in India may be a proconsul." After passing an entrance exam in England when they were no older than 19 (the age limit, introduced in the late 1870s, was eventually raised to 23), ICS officers were soon shipped off to India's far-flung provinces to be part of what Prime Minister David Lloyd George called "the steel frame" that held the Raj together. The ICS officer was one part taxman, responsible for collecting the tolls and revenues due to the Raj from his district, and one part magistrate, settling his district's legal disputes, which might range from petty theft to murder. In addition, he was in charge of "forests, roads, schools, hospitals, fences, canals and agriculture," writes Gilmour. "And on top of all this, he also had to keep himself accessible, to allow people to come and sit on his verandah and 'pay their respects' and hand in their petitions." It was a tremendously diverse workload, and the ICS men had little formal training to prepare for it. They learned fast, and had to rely on instinct and common sense.

The professional life of the imperial bureaucrat could be extraordinarily interesting; his personal life usually was not. Unless they were lucky enough to be posted to a metropolitan center like Calcutta or Bombay, the ICS officers led a lonely existence in remote towns with few other Englishmen around, and yearned incessantly for the motherland. Their wives were even more miserable, and some naturally took to having affairs, especially in the hill station of Simla, where the thin mountain air was reputed to encourage promiscuity. As Gilmour notes, almost all the ICS men couldn't wait to retire, collect their pension and get back to Britain. Yet once home, a strange fondness for India would often afflict them, and they would spend their evenings sunk in a club chair with a gin and tonic, boring everyone with endless tales of the Punjab.

Gilmour is out to redeem the ICS, and the portrait that emerges in his book is of a bureaucracy that was as efficient, fair-minded and honest as its reputation suggests. This is probably an exaggeration. Gilmour does not gloss over the famines that ravaged India repeatedly during the British Raj, killing millions; yet he calls them failures of policymakers at the top, and seems too eager to exculpate the ICS men who were in charge of arranging relief for the stricken districts. Some of them clearly failed to do their jobs properly. But while the ICS may not have been quite as brilliant as Gilmour would have us believe, it deserves its mystique. Whatever their faults, the officers were honest. They had vast opportunities to be corrupt, but with very few exceptions, they did not abuse their power in order to enrich themselves. In the light of the staggering dishonesty of so many of the men who succeeded them after India's independence, the incorruptibility of these innocents abroad makes them worthy of some degree of nostalgic respect.