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The India Civil Services - and with that the bureaucracy, were the result of Lord Cornwallis’ ideas during his tenure and this he had done to bring about efficiency in the administration and its structure

Monday April 28, 2025 8:28 PM, Bhavuk

The India Civil Services - and with that the bureaucracy, were the result of Lord Cornwallis’ ideas during his tenure and this he had done to bring about efficiency in the administration and its structure. He, in 1785, created a professional cadre of the Company servants who were to govern the country for the Company, placing them in charge of each district with the title of collector since collecting revenue was their raison d’etre. [1]

The system thus ran like this - British India was under a Governor-General later called the Viceroy which was divided into presidencies under Governors and provinces headed by lieutenant-governor or commissioner. The province and presidency were divided into a number of divisions headed by a divisional commissioner. It was these divisions which were divided into districts forming the basic unit of administration which was headed by these collectors and district magistrate.

With the power they exercised and the system of nomination which prevailed till 1833 which is just before the peak stage of free trade is reached in Britain and thus, we are made to ponder over the fact whether it was in this sense only that Marx had made the following comment - “thus, the British government has been fighting, under the Company’s name, for two centuries, till at last the natural limits of India were reached. We understand now, why during all this time all parties in England have connived in silence, even those who had resolved to become the loudest with their hypocritical peace-cant, after the arrondissement of the one Indian empire should have been completed.” [2]

A Haileybury college was established in London in 1806 for the training of the civil servants. Due to the affluent lifestyle of the civil servants in India, John Bright called the empire a ‘gigantic system of outdoor relief for the aristocracy of Great Britain’. This was the aristocracy which was being exported in the qualm of civil servants to India. It was most of all paperwork and bringing everything down to the paper helped the British in India as can be made out by Cornwallis’ statement that- all rights had been reduced to writing.

John Stuart Mill, the Examiner of Indian correspondence too opined that the greatest success of British rule in India was that it was carried on in writing. There were only 31000 Britons in India in 1805 of which 22000 were in the army and 2000 in the civil services and so it was necessary for Indians too, to be inducted into the administrative structure.

Thus, from 1813 onwards the subordinated posts were opened to the Indians but were known as non-covenanted civil services mainly in the judiciary. During Lord William Bentinck’s era due to the expediency of finances and for orientating administration to local needs more inclusion of natives was called for. Without the top echelons being opened to Indians, the regulation of 1831 gave more power and responsibility to Indian judicial officers.

For this reason, British Labour politician Keir Hardie described British rule in India as a huge military despotism tempered somewhat by a civil bureaucracy. H. Fielding Hall after thirty years of service in the ICS commented - “there is a want of knowledge and understanding. In place of it are fixed opinions based usually on prejudice or on faulty observations, or on circumstances which have changed, and they are never corrected. Young secretaries read up back circulars, and repeat their errors indefinitely following precedent.” [3]

This bureaucracy was all-pervasive and unaware of how to benefit the millions it was presiding over and so jokingly Lord Lytton used to say that British governance in India was a despotism of office-boxes tempered by an occasional loss of keys. [4]

The decisions made were most of the times as strange as those making laws were to the people for whom the laws were made. With the charter of 1853, the gates of the civil services were thrown open to the Indians as well but that was more in letter than in spirit.

First Civil Services Exam

In 1854, Macaulay submitted his report to the select committee of the British parliament. Thereafter, the Civil Service Commission was established and the first competitive exam was held in 1855. The Indian Civil Services remained as un-Indian as they were before, since the examination was held in England, and despite the repeated pleas of the Indian nationalist leaders, the British simply sat upon the idea of simultaneously holding the examination in England as well as in India.

The requirement was also of Classical Greek and English literature. Satyendranath Tagore became the first Indian to pass this examination in 1864 and three more followed suit in 1867 but an Indian in the Indian Civil Services was a rare sight for a long time. Even if people like Surendranath Banerjee, Chetty and others made it through the exam, the white supremacy of the British ensured more hostility to them which forced them to quit the job in frustration and despair.

Statutory Civil Service

The government started the imperial forest department and to organize the affairs of the imperial forest department, the Imperial Forest Service was constituted in 1867. In 1870, a Statutory Civil Service was introduced which initiated the nomination of Indian men of ability to posts hitherto reserved for Europeans.

However, this played into the hands of people like Lord Lytton who preferred aristocracy and nominated men from such backgrounds to the service. Lord Ripon was the one who recognized the ill-effects of keeping the educated Indian middle class aloof from the services and argued for holding simultaneous examinations in England and India which would see an increased number of Indians in the civil services. His proposal met with opposition as there was a stir upon the prospect of having to share power with the Indians. The Aitchison Commission of 1887 recommended certain reforms in the services and the nomenclature of covenanted civil services was done away with to be now replaced by Indian civil services. It was divided into imperial, provincial and subordinate services.

The recruiting and controlling authority of the imperial services was the secretary of state who also recruited officers to the imperial police service, the first exam for which was held in 1893. The Statutory Civil Service was abolished and in its place the higher positions which had earlier been preserved for the ICS were now to be filled through promotions from the provincial civil services.

Union Public Service Commission

The attitude of most men in the service was paternalistic at best and condescending or contemptuous at worst towards the Indians. They wanted to keep the Indians informed that these were now to be considered the miniatures of their rulers of the past and so they should contact the bureaucrat only in times of need since he was their saviour.

No doubt some of them did exemplary work as well and their names have been etched to the very geography of the subcontinent like Abbottabad, Lyallpur, Cox Bazar, Corbett Park, Cotton Hill etc. regarding this “regenerative function” of the bureaucracy, the left-wing ICS wrote that ugly pallid bilious men were able to do great things in the very midst of their querulous discontents and unideal aspirations.

The Indians in the civil service were only 15 percent. The Government of India Act of 1919 made a provision for a separate holding of civil services in India and accordingly the first civil service exam in India was held at Allahabad in 1922. This started the inflow of Indians into civil services on an increased frequency.

Later, a Federal Public Service Commission was established. Till 1931 only 20 percent posts of superintendent of police were assigned to Indians which were increased in 1939. It was in 1950 that the Federal Public Service Commission was named the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC). [5]

References:

[1] Bhatia as quoted in Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India, Aleph Books, 2016, pp.59-61

[2] Karl Marx, The East India Company: Its History and Results in New- York Daily Tribune, July 11, 1853

[3] Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness, pp. 62-63

[4] Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness, pp. 62-63

[5] An Article: The Civil Services in The Hindu, 21st April 2022

[The writer, Bhavuk, is a PhD Candidate at The Department of History, AMU]

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