Servants who were masters
Jane Ridley
THE RULING CASTE: IMPERIAL LIVES IN THE VICTORIAN RAJ by David Gilmour John Murray, £25, pp. 383, ISBN 07619555345 ✆ £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 It is a remarkable but little known fact that in 1901 the entire Indian subcontinent with a population totalling 300 million was administered by a British ruling elite which consisted of no more than 1,000 men. Still more extraordinary, their rule rested neither on military force nor on terror or corruption. On the contrary, the rulers of the British Raj were renowned for being impartial, high-minded, conscientious and incorruptible. Yet this astonishing British success story has been largely ignored.
Historians have got their knickers in such a twist over the whole embarrassing business of imperialism that they have been blind to its strengths. Slaves to political correctness, they are fixated on Edward Said’s idea of Orientalism which, to put it crudely, brands all imperialists as racists almost by definition. Not since Philip Mason published The Men Who Ruled India 50 years ago has anyone attempted to write a full study of India’s civil servants. David Gilmour is uniquely qualified to fill this gap. He is the author of an acclaimed biography of Lord Curzon, the greatest Indian viceroy of all, and he has recently published a life of Kipling, the laureate of the Indian official. The Ruling Caste is the fruit of 15 years of research, much of it spent quarrying the treasures buried deep in the British Library’s India Office collections, the vast and little explored archive of Britain’s lost Indian empire. These materials have enabled Gilmour to look at the Indian Civil Service from the perspective of its members, and not the other way round.
The Civilians, as they were called the phrase civil servant derives from the East India Company’s civil as opposed to its military servants — effectively formed a hereditary caste. Names such as Nicholson or Lyall occur again and again over three or four generations. Often brothers served together, such as the Strachey brothers, James and Richard (father of Lytton), who dominated the Raj in the 1870s. Many of these families originated as poor Scots gentry, such as the Macnabbs, who served in India for five generations, returning at last to Perthshire, where they morphed into clan chieftains and became The Macnab of Macnab. Competitive examinations were introduced in the 1850s, and the social mix broadened slightly, but the old names still recurred.
Young Civilians fresh from home found themselves in lonely, isolated postings, living in unfurnished bungalows where the bathwater ran out of a hole in the wall covered by an iron grating to stop the snakes coming in. During the hot weather season, when temperatures climbed to well over 100 degrees, they sweltered through sleepless nights and rose at dawn to work long hours in court.
If you were lucky, you were promoted to be a District Officer, in charge of a million people and 4,000 square miles. These officers were the lynchpins of the system. Within their districts they were omnipotent, responsible for everything from administering justice to sanitary conditions. Crises such as the plague of snakes that killed 10,000 people in Bengal in 1878 were dealt with by District Officers. The greatest worry was famine, in respect of which the British record in India was remarkably good (compare Africa today). Sometimes diplomacy was needed as well as organisational skill. The starving people of one district prayed not to be relieved, believing that they were being given food to fatten them up before being sent off to Burma to be eaten by cannibals. District Officers spent much of their time on tour. Gilmour beautifully evokes their lives sleeping under canvas, travelling with a caravan of bullock carts at two m.p.h., dispensing rough-and-ready justice in shirt sleeves all day and shooting a brace of snipe for dinner.
Things changed with the coming of railways and telegraphs, which allowed the central Secretariat to exercise greater control over distant District Officers. The paperwork increased, and DOs spent less time in their shirt sleeves and more at their desks. By the end of the century it was a paper-obsessed empire. The Civilian Alfred Lyall confessed to a throb of pleasure on coming into his cool, quiet office with a mountain of paper scientifically filed on each side of his armchair. Curzon’s ability to deal with the stacks of files delivered to him each evening by breakfast time next morning was legendary.
The toughest jobs were on the frontiers, in the north-west, or north-east towards Burma. In the Punjab, John Lawrence ruled an area slightly larger than Great Britain. He was a hard, ruthless employer, obsessed by paperwork, and worked an 18hour day. Among the wild tribes of Baluchistan, an officer named Sandeman kept order by befriending the fierce tribesmen and employing them as his auxilaries. ‘We want lean and keen men on the frontier, and fat and good-natured men in the states,’ said one Civilian. The native states, which Britain controlled by a system of indirect rule, called for Civilians who rode well, were good shots and possessed the manners needed to win the confidence of princely rulers — whose sons, as Gilmour shows, were all too often corrupted by contact with the West into playboys and sots who spent their money on clothes, drink and vice.
Anglo-Indian social life was dire. Obsessed by status and protocol, Civilians endured dull dinners and worse food. Rigid rules of precedence determined a never-varying placement at dinner parties, where it was compulsory to be ‘cheery’, and you whiled away the tedious hours with endless games of whist. In the hot season the entire station would migrate to the hills, and the social round begin again.
This was the world that E. M. Forster pilloried so mercilessly in A Passage to India, where the ICS are caricatured as dull, blinkered social climbers. Yet, as Gilmour points out, Forster only observed these men at their clubs. He knew nothing of how India was governed; if he had been in charge he wouldn’t have survived a single day. Philistine though many of the Civilians undoubtedly were, they were superlatively good at doing their job.
The ICS is usually blamed for the deterioration in relations with the Indians which took place after the Mutiny of 1857. This, as Gilmour makes clear, is only half the story. The Indians were hostile too. It’s hard to socialise with people who wash their hands and change their clothes after meeting you, who refuse either to eat with you or invite you to their houses. ‘The British were not in India to be treated like Untouchables.’ Sexual relations between the British and Indians petered out too, less because of racial prejudice than because the British now tended to bring their wives. In Burma, where few memsahibs came because of the murderous climate, relationships between British men and Burmese women were commonplace.
Gilmour is the perfect companion to Victorian India — shrewd, funny, always a joy to read. He writes lean, elegant prose and wears his learning lightly — the book entertains as much as it instructs; but Gilmour is gently subversive of the sacred cows of political correctness. In David Gilmour, the British in India have at last found the historian they deserve. This is a marvellous book.
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