Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (32 page)
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Authors: Niall Ferguson
BOOK: Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power
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Perhaps the most baffling statistic of all about British India was the size of the Indian Civil Service. Between 1858 and 1947 there were seldom more than 1,000 members of the covenanted Civil Service,
47
compared with a total population which, by the end of British rule, exceeded 400 million. As Kipling remarked, ‘One of the few advantages that India has over England is a great Knowability ... At the end of twenty [years, a man] knows, or knows something about, every Englishman in the Empire’. Was this, then, the most efficient bureaucracy in history? Was a single British civil servant really able to run the lives of up to three million Indians, spread over 17,000 square miles, as some District Officers were supposed to do? Only, Kipling concluded, if the masters worked themselves like slaves:
47
compared with a total population which, by the end of British rule, exceeded 400 million. As Kipling remarked, ‘One of the few advantages that India has over England is a great Knowability ... At the end of twenty [years, a man] knows, or knows something about, every Englishman in the Empire’. Was this, then, the most efficient bureaucracy in history? Was a single British civil servant really able to run the lives of up to three million Indians, spread over 17,000 square miles, as some District Officers were supposed to do? Only, Kipling concluded, if the masters worked themselves like slaves:
Year by year England sends out fresh drafts for the first fighting-line, which is officially called the Indian Civil Service. These die, or kill themselves by overwork, or are worried to death or broken in health and hope in order that the land may be protected from death and sickness, famine and war, and may eventually become capable of standing alone. It will never stand alone, but the idea is a pretty one and men are willing to die for it, and yearly the work of pushing and coaxing and scolding and petting the country into good living goes forward. If an advance be made all credit is given to the native while the Englishmen stand back and wipe their foreheads. If a failure occurs the Englishmen step forward and take the blame.
‘Until steam replaces manual power in the working of the Empire’, wrote Kipling in ‘The Education of Otis Yeere’, there would always be ‘men who are used up, expended, in the mere mechanical routine’. Such men were ‘simply the rank and file – the food for fever – sharing with the ryot [peasant] and the plough-bullock the honour of being the plinth on which the State rests’. Otis Yeere was the archetypal ‘sunken-eyed man who, by official irony, was said to be “in charge” of [a] seething, whining, weakly hive, impotent to help itself, but strong in its power to cripple, thwart, and annoy’.
As Kipling describes it, the ICS hardly sounds an attractive career option. Yet competition for places was fierce, so fierce that selection had to be based on perhaps the toughest exams in history. Consider some of the questions the candidates were set back in 1859. By modern standards, it is true, the History paper is something of a crammer’s delight. Here are two not untypical questions:
14. Enumerate the chief Colonies of England, and state how and when she acquired each of them.15. Name the successive Governors-General of British India as far as 1830, giving the dates of their Governments, and a brief summary of the main Indian transactions under each.
By comparison, the Logic and Mental Philosophy paper is more demanding – and more elegantly phrased:
3. What Experimental Methods are applicable to the determination of the true antecedent in phenomena where there may be a Plurality of Causes.5. Classify Fallacies.
But it is the Mental and Moral Philosophy paper which is the most challenging, and revealing, part of the ICS exam:
1. Describe the various circumstances of situations which give birth to the pleasurable sentiment of Power.
If ever there was a trick question, that is it (presumably any candidate who acknowledged that Power
did
induce a pleasurable sentiment would be failed). Nor is the next question much easier:
did
induce a pleasurable sentiment would be failed). Nor is the next question much easier:
2. Specify, as far as you are able, the particular duties coming under the general head of Justice.
Finally, just to separate the cream of Balliol
48
from the rest, comes this:
48
from the rest, comes this:
7. State the arguments for and against Utility, considered as (1) the actual, and (2) the proper, basis of morals.
Things had certainly changed since the days of Thomas Pitt and Warren Hastings. Then, jobs in the East India Company had been bought and sold as part of an elaborate system of aristocratic patronage. Even after the creation of Haileybury College as a school for future Indian civil servants in 1805 and the introduction of the first qualifying exam in 1827, the company’s directors still regarded ICS places as being in their gift. Only in 1853 was patronage replaced by meritocracy. The Government of India Act of that year did away with Haileybury’s effective monopoly on ICS posts and introduced instead the principle of open competition by examination. The Victorians wanted India to be ruled by the ultimate academic elite: impartial, incorruptible, omniscient.
The idea was to attract university achievers into imperial administration directly after they had completed their first degree, ideally at Oxford or Cambridge, and then put them through one or two years of training in law, languages, Indian history and riding. In practice, the ICS tended not to attract the Oxbridge
crème de la crème
– the Scholars, Double Firsts and University Prize winners. The men who opted for the rigours of the subcontinent tended to be those whose prospects at home were modest: bright young sons of provincial professionals who were willing to cram for the sake of a prestigious job overseas – men like Devon-born Evan Machonochie. His greatuncle and elder brother had both been Indian civil servants and it had been their letters home which had convinced him that ‘Eastward lay the path to happiness’. In 1887, after two years of cramming, he passed the ICS entrance exam and set off for Bengal after another couple of years at Oxford mugging up and passing further exams in Indian history, law and languages. Nor was that the end of the selection process, since his first few months in India were spent preparing for yet more exams. After a preliminary test in Hindustani, Machonochie was formally gazetted as a Third-Class Magistrate. To his embarrassment, he managed to ‘bungle’ his first departmental exams in Gujarati, Indian Law, Treasury Procedure and Revenue Accounts (because his head was ‘full of much more interesting matters, my first horses, my fox terrier pup [and] the right range at which to down a quail’); but he scraped through at the second attempt.
crème de la crème
– the Scholars, Double Firsts and University Prize winners. The men who opted for the rigours of the subcontinent tended to be those whose prospects at home were modest: bright young sons of provincial professionals who were willing to cram for the sake of a prestigious job overseas – men like Devon-born Evan Machonochie. His greatuncle and elder brother had both been Indian civil servants and it had been their letters home which had convinced him that ‘Eastward lay the path to happiness’. In 1887, after two years of cramming, he passed the ICS entrance exam and set off for Bengal after another couple of years at Oxford mugging up and passing further exams in Indian history, law and languages. Nor was that the end of the selection process, since his first few months in India were spent preparing for yet more exams. After a preliminary test in Hindustani, Machonochie was formally gazetted as a Third-Class Magistrate. To his embarrassment, he managed to ‘bungle’ his first departmental exams in Gujarati, Indian Law, Treasury Procedure and Revenue Accounts (because his head was ‘full of much more interesting matters, my first horses, my fox terrier pup [and] the right range at which to down a quail’); but he scraped through at the second attempt.
Machonochie found the life of a magistrate (now Second-Class) and then a District Collector surprisingly enjoyable:
The early mornings were spent, in the absence of any special work, in exercising the horses, tent-pegging and the like, in the garden or with a camera. The day’s work occupied the middle hours from eleven to five, and, after that a game of tennis and a chat in the collector’s veranda carried us on to dinner time ... Imagine then, the young Assistant setting forth on horseback on a crisp November morning, after a good monsoon ... he has few cares, his heart is light and it must be a dull soul that does not respond to the vision. On the way there will be villages to inspect, perhaps, if time permits, a quiet shoot ... Many a clue as to what the villager is thinking is gained over a chat between beats or while watching one’s float by a quiet pool ...
But the life of an expatriate mandarin had another side to it. There was the tedium of hearing appeals against tax assessments, when ‘on a hot-weather afternoon, after a long morning round (in the camps) and a hearty breakfast, the effort to keep awake while recording evidence or listening to the reading of vernacular papers amounted almost to physical pain ...’ Then there was the loneliness of being the only white man for hundreds of miles:
When I first started out none of my office staff, but few of the Mamlatdars, and no one else in the Talukas, spoke English, and I rarely met another District Officer. For seven months I scarcely spoke English and was thrown very much on my own resources.
Worst of all was the responsibility of governing literally millions of people, particularly during crises like the plague that swept Bombay in 1896 or the famine of 1900. As Machonochie later recalled, ‘that time marked the end of happy irresponsible days. In the years that followed, they were rarely free from the haunting anxiety attendant on pestilence and famine’.
49
Finally, in 1897, came respite: a posting to Simla as Under-Secretary in the Department of Revenue and Agriculture. It was there that he was able to appreciate that ‘you were not merely an individual of no importance ... but part of a great machine to whose efficiency you were in honour bound to contribute’.
49
Finally, in 1897, came respite: a posting to Simla as Under-Secretary in the Department of Revenue and Agriculture. It was there that he was able to appreciate that ‘you were not merely an individual of no importance ... but part of a great machine to whose efficiency you were in honour bound to contribute’.
Machonochie had no doubt about the importance of the lone District Officer in the eyes of the people in his care. ‘To the raiyat [peasant] the visit of a “saheb” or a casual meeting with one has some of the qualities of excitement ... It will be talked of for days over the village fire and remembered for years. The white man will be sized up shrewd and frankly. So take heed unto your manners and your habits!’
Yet between the lines of his memoir, a crucial, though tacit, reality can be discerned. Everything he and the other District Officers did was dependent on another, much larger tier of bureaucracy below them. This was the uncovenanted civil service, composed of Indians, and it was they who took responsibility for the day-to-day administration of each District’s local
talukas
and
tahsils
. There were 4,000 Indians in the uncovenanted service by 1868, and below them was a veritable army of lesser public employees: the telegraph clerks and ticket collectors, many of whom were Eurasians or Indians. In 1867 there were around 13,000 public sector jobs paying 75 or more rupees per month, of which around half were held by Indians. Without this auxiliary force of civil servants who were native born, the ‘heaven born’ would have been impotent. This was the unspoken truth about British India; and that was why, as Machonochie himself put it, it did not really feel like ‘a conquered country’. Only the Indian rulers had been supplanted or subjugated by the British; most Indians carried on much as before – indeed, for an important class of them British rule was an opportunity for self-advancement.
talukas
and
tahsils
. There were 4,000 Indians in the uncovenanted service by 1868, and below them was a veritable army of lesser public employees: the telegraph clerks and ticket collectors, many of whom were Eurasians or Indians. In 1867 there were around 13,000 public sector jobs paying 75 or more rupees per month, of which around half were held by Indians. Without this auxiliary force of civil servants who were native born, the ‘heaven born’ would have been impotent. This was the unspoken truth about British India; and that was why, as Machonochie himself put it, it did not really feel like ‘a conquered country’. Only the Indian rulers had been supplanted or subjugated by the British; most Indians carried on much as before – indeed, for an important class of them British rule was an opportunity for self-advancement.
The key to the emergence of a pro-British Indian elite was education. Though the British themselves were at first dubious about offering natives Western education, many Indians – particularly high-caste Bengalis – were quick to discern the benefits of speaking the language and understanding the culture of their new masters. As early as 1817 a Hindu College had been founded in Calcutta by prosperous Bengalis eager for Western education; offering European history, literature and natural sciences, it was the first of many such institutions. As we have seen, the proponents of modernizing as well as evangelizing India seized on the idea of giving Indians access to Western education. In 1835 the great Whig historian and Indian administrator Thomas Babington Macaulay – son of the abolitionist Zachary – spelt out explicitly what could be achieved this way in his famous Minute on Education:
It is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.
By 1838 there were forty English-based seminaries under the control of the General Committee of Public Instruction. By the 1870s, Macaulay’s vision had been in large measure realized. Six thousand Indian students had enrolled in higher education and no less than 200,000 in Anglophone secondary ‘schools of the higher order’. Calcutta had acquired a substantial Englishlanguage publishing industry, capable of turning out more than a thousand works of literature and science a year.
Among the beneficiaries of the expansion of Anglicized education was an ambitious young Bengali named Janakinath Bose. Educated in Calcutta, Bose was called to the Bar in the town of Cuttack in 1885 and went on to serve as Chairman of the Cuttack municipality. In 1905 he became Government Pleader and Chief Prosecutor, and seven years later crowned his career by being appointed to the Bengal Legislative Council. Bose’s success as a lawyer enabled him to buy a spacious mansion in the fashionable district of Calcutta. It also won him from the British the title of Rai Bahadur, the Indian equivalent of a knighthood. And he was not alone: two of his three brothers entered government service, one of them in the Imperial Secretariat at Simla.
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