The Jewel in the Crown

The British civil servants who ran India were enthralled with their domain and detached from it.

Reviewed by Shashi Tharoor

Sunday, March 26, 2006; Page BW09

THE RULING CASTE

Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj

By David Gilmour

Farrar Straus Giroux. 381 pp. $27

In a statement that has long encapsulated for me the essential premise -- and presumption -- of British imperialism, the College of Heralds in Victorian London once blandly declared: "The Aga Khan is held by his followers to be a direct descendant of God. English Dukes take precedence."

The quote does not, alas, appear in David Gilmour's dense and impressive new book on the civil administrators of Victoria's Indian Empire. But it could easily have, for The Ruling Caste paints an arresting and richly detailed portrait of how the British ruled 19th-century India -- with unshakeable self-confidence buttressed by protocol, alcohol and a lot of gall. Stalin found it "ridiculous" that "a few hundred Englishmen should dominate India." Gilmour's book helps explain how they pulled it off. He meticulously studies the lives and work of some of these Englishmen, the members of the Indian Civil Service (ICS), the elite corps of administrators who -- in the name of a distant queen who never set foot in her largest and proudest possession -- ruled a vast land that today comprises the independent states of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar.

The Ruling Caste is the most thorough study imaginable of the careers of the "Civilians," from recruitment to retirement. Gilmour describes the social backgrounds of the young men chosen to govern Britain's far-flung empire and takes us through their examinations, training, postings, social lives, professional duties, extracurricular (and extramarital) activities, until their retirements in English suburbs that became known as "Asia Minor" or "the Anglo-Indian Quarter." Though much of this is familiar ground -- trodden notably by the ICS's own Philip Mason in The Men Who Ruled India , published two generations ago -- Gilmour, also a biographer of Rudyard Kipling and Lord Curzon, has delved deep into private papers and unpublished correspondence. His account is thus enriched by an intimacy that humanizes the Civilians he depicts, particularly Alfred Lyall, whose long ICS career is featured in every chapter of the book.

The Civilians were in India to do a job: govern an empire in the strategic, commercial and political interests of their home country. One viceroy, Lord Mayo, declared, "We are all British gentlemen engaged in the magnificent work of governing an inferior race." Few shared Queen Victoria's "romantic feelings for 'brown skins.' " In Gilmour's telling, they had no illusions about preparing Indians for self-government; their view of Indians was at best paternalist, at worst contemptuous. (Well into the 20th century, they spoke and wrote of the need to treat Indians as "children" incapable of ruling themselves.)

Several generations of some families served in India -- some over three centuries -- sending their own children "home" to school and enduring years of separation from loved ones. Despite many privations, it was not all self-sacrifice and hard work: The ICS men earned the highest salaries of any officials in the world, with generous furloughs and a guaranteed pension, and some at least found it "quite impossible" to spend their income. The English political reformer John Bright called the empire a "gigantic system of outdoor relief for the aristocracy of Great Britain."

Gilmour is sound on both the mind-numbing routine of Civilian life and the exotic challenges of the job (one 24-year-old district officer found himself in charge of 4,000 square miles and a million people). He explains the tyranny of the "Warrant of Precedence" and the rigidities of protocol in a hierarchy-conscious society, the desperate importance of being able to play whist as an antidote to loneliness and the incessant social obligations of higher office (one lieutenant-governor hosted, on a single day, a boathouse lunch, a thé dansant and garden party, and a dinner at the club). In the summer capital of Simla, with its population of "grass widows" enjoying the cooler air while their husbands toiled in the hot plains, the "main occupations" were "gambling, drinking, and breaking the 7th Commandment." But many Civilians were voracious readers and prolific writers who produced invaluable scholarship on the history, ethnography, languages and religions of the parts of India where they served. One ICS man translated ancient Indian erotica, including the Kama Sutra.

As his capacious bibliography and multitude of footnotes attest, Gilmour is a serious historian. He writes accessibly and even wittily, with a wealth of anecdotage and an eye for the telling story -- an alcoholic judge who always acquitted defendants so there would be no appeal for his superiors to review, scandals involving gold diggers and nymphomaniacs, and a posting where the Civilians "had to employ a watchman from one of the criminal tribes in order to deter his relations from burgling their bungalows." He has read widely (though he seems to have missed the best book on a Victorian provincial administrator's life I have read, Iltudus Pritchard's 1870 satire The Chronicles of Budgepore ).

What is missing, though, is any sense of an Indian perspective on these men and their work. What did the subjects of their administration think of them? Gilmour does not tell us. He glosses over the prejudice and casual racism of many ICS men. The Civilians did little to advance the welfare of the people they ruled because foreign rulers tend to be more concerned with stability than change; their job was to ensure profit, not progress, which might undermine imperial dominance. Gilmour attributes "the slow pace of change" to "low levels of taxation" without mentioning that Britain's revenues from India vastly exceeded her expenditures, including the lavish ICS salaries: Britain took out far more than it gave India. It invested little and mingled less, keeping its Civilians living isolated from the masses they ruled. He writes that the duke of Argyll "was right to warn" that it would be "dangerous" to have Calcutta graduates ruling the "martial tribes" of North India, though that is exactly what has happened in democratic India, and tendentious British theories about "martial tribes" have long been discredited as more racism than sociology.

And yet there is no doubt about the heroic efforts of many individual Civilians, who dug canals, founded colleges, administered justice and even, in some cases, advocated Indian self-rule. Their names became part of the geography of the subcontinent: towns called Abbotabad, Lyallpur and Cox's Bazar, to say nothing of Jim Corbett Park and the Mcnabbwah Canal. As John Maynard, a rare left-winger in the ICS, explained, "ugly pallid bilious men" were able to "do great things in the very midst of their querulous discontents and unideal aspirations."

The British in India created little islands of Englishness, planting ferns and roses and giving their cottages nostalgia-suffused names such as Grasmere Lodge (in Ootacamund) and Willowdale (in Darjeeling). Then, after 25 or more years in the subcontinent, they retired to Cheltenham or South Kensington, surrounded by reminders and relics of the land they had ruled. One Civilian settled in Teddington on the Thames and named his last home "Quetta," for the capital of Baluchistan. Another, William Strachey, set his watch to Calcutta time even in England, "eating breakfast at tea-time and living most of his life by candlelight." It is a poignant image. But the candlelight has dimmed: Lyallpur, in Pakistan, has been renamed Faisalabad, for a Saudi king. The old ruling caste no longer takes precedence. ·