[Reader-list] Review of "The Ruling Caste"

[Rana Dasgupta]

this was in my Asian Age today.

i don't know if much comment is necessary.

her battle against "political correctness" [what an alibi this phrase 
has become; one no longer needs to address arguments because we all know 
we are against "political correctness"] is passionate but at the expense 
of many facts.  Starting with the first paragraph.

it's amazing how people can repeat all these dreary cliches with such 
passion, as if they were such fresh ideas.  the high-minded, embattled 
British civil servants trying to rescue the natives from a mind so 
benighted that it struggles against its own salvation.  she clearly 
feels that the "revisionist" trend has gone far enough and now it is 
traditionalism that needs heroes.  the world needs a single, clear, 
western story again for everything is getting a bit complicated.

R

THE RULING CASTE: IMPERIAL LIVES IN THE VICTORIAN RAJ
By DAVID GILMOUR
John Murray, £25, pp.383

BY JANE RIDLEY

It is a remarkable but little known fact I 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, highminded,-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 correttness, they are fixated on Edward Said's idea 
of Oriental ism 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 serv~d 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 imd became The 
Macnab of Macnab. Competitive examinations were introduced in the 1850s, 
and the social mix broadened slightly, but the old naines still recurred.

Young civilians fresh from home found themselves in lonely, isolated 
postings, living in unfurnished bungalows where the bathwater ran out 
ofa 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 
evo.kes their lives sleeping under canvas, travelling' with a cara.
van of bullock carts at two mph, dispensing rough-and-ready justice in 
shirt sleeves allday and shooting a brace of snipe for dinner.
Thing$ 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 
paperobsessed 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. Curlon'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 
18-hour 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 
mak~s 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.