The Men Who Ruled India

"The Indian Civil Service...were hardworking, incorruptible...celibate until middle age.... Above all, they were intellectuals.

--Clive Dewey, The Mind of the Indian Civil Service.

THE men who ruled India may have been foreign, but they were not faint-hearted. They travelled deep into rural taluqas codifying castes, preparing detailed land records, carrying out linguistic surveys, the smoke of woodfires in their nostrils and a horse between their knees. They chased "fanatical tribesmen" on the borders, sent men disguised as pilgrims to measure forbidden mountains, produced the first contour survey maps of the vast country they ruled, dispensing Anglo-Saxon rule of law to village communities whose languages they barely understood.

A tiny cadre ruled over almost a fifth of the human race. Each ICS officer had an average of 300,000 subjects. They have been compared to Plate's Guardians, brought up since childhood to shoulder the White Man's Burden. 'Collector sahib bahadur' was a paternalistic despot, an absolute ruler of districts which were sometimes larger than his own homeland, accountable to no one except the Crown, a scholar of Creek and Latin, swimming rivers and striding through forests to build bridges and align roads. "We were convinced," says David C. Elliot, deputy commissioner in Punjab in 1942, "that we were doing some good.

Elliot is part of a group of grey eminences-former ICS officers--who have come to India at the invitation of the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration in Mussoorie as part of its 50 years of independence celebrations..

Some of them are visiting India for the first time in half-a-century. At a function to discuss 'Administration in India', British ICS officers compared their experiences with their professional descendants.

Comments Robin Ross, who was posted in Bengal in 1942: "There are few jobs which can be measured in terms of human happiness, this was one." R.M. Harcourt, settlement officer in Kulu in the same year, agrees: "You're never completely honest with yourself, are you? But at that time, we thought we were doing great work." The "heaven-born"-as they were once called--are stooped with age, but their gestures are still expansive.

R.N. Lines, deputy magistrate of Patna, declares proudly: "You must remember that there were only three deaths in Darbhanga (the area under his control) during the rebellion of 1942. Only three."

A.J.V. Arthur, still tall and spare, was deputy commissioner, Attock, in 1943. He doesn't remember much of the Urdu or Gurmukhi he learnt but recalls a meeting with Jawaharlal Nehru. "During the communal riots in Multan, Nehru came down. We were a bit apprehensive of meeting him because he was the head of the interim government. But he was charming and we had a delightful time walking in my garden. Of course, we didn't talk politics."

Harcourt, who was born in Mussoorie and whose father was also in the ICS, is visiting India for the first time after 50 years. He exclaims: "There are no horse-drawn tongas on Delhi's streets anymore!" He remembers his time in Kulu: "We got water from a bhishti-wallah and for light we used a petromax bhatti . It was difficult having a close relationship with the people, we were in so much of a superior position."

The benevolent dictators of the pre-independence countryside were attended by zaildars, tehsildars and lambardars, kept cool by punkahwallahs and fed by khansamas. Their "power verandahs" were crowded with supplicants and they remained strangely secure even in times of political upheaval. Says C.M. Lloyd-Jones, who was city magistrate in Lucknow: "I never carried a weapon. I always had the feeling that people were opposed to the top government, to the viceroy and others. But at the district level, they accepted the rule of the district officer as inevitable.

NO wonder then that they quelled riots with a glare and silenced subordinates with a word. Whether in the sawalkhana or while taking the annuary (the crop estimate in annas), the presence of the Queen Empress brooded over her loyal servants. Remarks M. Muthuswamy, professor of political science at the Academy: "The ICS went about looting India in a sophisticated way. But they had a heart. They were committed to field work and to justice." It's been said that the Guardians were so good at their job that they created a native class in their own image, and so wrote their own death warrants.

Yet, they remain a paradox. They were agents of the empire but they produced works such as Sir Alfred Lyall's Asiatic Studies (1884), settlement reports, diligently compiled censuses and directories of castes and tribes. "We were often alone, you see, our wives and children were not with us," says Lines. "So we had a lot of time on our hands." Elliot tells of how the British trained Indian helpers to measure the mountains. "They'd travel through the high peaks chanting, with a paper hidden in their prayer wheels. They would come back after two or three years sometimes, with remarkably accurate notations on the Himalayas.

They were Britain's best and brightest, who earned salaries on par with the minor nobility at home but they sat amidst the heat and dust learning to govern an alien subcontinent. "The role of rumour was important in India," says Lines. "As was the importance of a local inquiry in a village. Indians may not have told the truth in court but they always did in front of their own village!" Is India an impossible country to govern? "Not at all," says Lines, "you just have to be subtle.

But how did they justify imperialism, reared as they were in the liberal traditions of Oxbridge? "I suppose we did have the feeling that we knew how to do things that the Indians didn't," says Lines. "We felt somebody had to do this job," offers Lloyd-Jones. "By the time of the war, adds Ross, with a dash of realism, "it became clear that the time had come for Britain and India to develop a different relationship. I wish we could have been more effective in dealing with crises like the Bengal famine. We did what we could. It wasn't enough.

Recalls Elwyn R. Evans, who served in Bijapur and Belgaum: "There was a partnership between us and the Indians who worked with us, like the patwaris. We learnt from people who were more experienced than us. I suppose we made some mistakes, but that's only human." Lloyd-Jones says that they never really questioned the Raj: "It was just there. But we knew it was going. We just did not know how quickly".

HOWEVER, Indian ICS officers like B.K. Nehru and T.N. Kaul say the British officers only wanted to perpetuate the Raj and that amongst them there were some nasty racists. "They worked among Indians," says Nehru, "but they socialised entirely amongst themselves. Socially, the Indians and the British inhabited two different spheres." Yet, Ikram Ahmed Khan, an ICS officer from Pakistan, says: "In the villages people were used to monarchical rule or the influence of the clergy. The ICS tried to bring in modern ways of thinking.

Today the Guardians miss their wards. The paternalists' children--the tribals, the servants, the soldiers, the simple people who liked them. "My khansama once showed me his jharan which was full of chits from former employers. One of them was from my own mother when my parents were in India!" Harcourt says.

Some even have memories of friendships across prison bars. "I remember in Mianwalli, some well-to-do young men were arrested," recalls L.P. Addison, who served in Punjab. "I thought the prison was quite unsuitable for them, so I used to lend them books and got them transferred to a more comfortable jail. It was all quite friendly." Lines remembers partying with his friend Hareshwar Dayal: "There used to be a Mrs Singh in Bhagalpur. She used to give delightful parties!" And Arthur says he was never threatened by mobs: "The crowds were really rather friendly. During the civil disobedience movements, we arrested the ring leaders but didn't know what to do with them. So they just came over to dinner at my place!"

They speak of loneliness, of frustration and of the artificial society in which they lived. "I recall there were two clubs in Lahore, one was the Punjab Club where we lived and the other was the Lahore Gymkhana where there were Indians and British, says Elliot. "I suppose our attitude was not all that friendly. Rut I had some great Indian friends. I knew Govind Ballabh Pant and Shastri very well," recalls Lloyd-Jones.

The ICS has been described as an extension of the Victorian intelligentsia exercising far more power than intellectuals normally enjoy. "It was difficult to start life again," says Addison. "I gave my solicitor's examination at the age of 40." Arthur and Harcourt went into business, Lines became a social worker, Evans a university registrar and Elliot and Ross emigrated to North America. They still read about India in the newspapers and note its successes. "India's done jolly well," says Arthur, as one might say of a favourite nephew. "Someone has suggested that the IAS be liquidated. I could never support that."

How would they like to be remembered? Himself an ICS officer, Philip Mason wrote in The Men who ruled India : "And if today the Indian peasant looks to the new district officer of his own race with the expectation of receiving justice and sympathy, that is our memorial." ·