Product Description

For nearly 200 years a small group of British officials administered vast areas of south Asia. In 1900 just over a thousdand civil servants ruled a population of nearly 300 million people spread over a territory now covered by India, Pakistan, Burma and Bangladesh. It was, as Stalin said with a misture of envy and annoyance, a 'ridiculous' situation. In its time, the Indian Civil Service was universally regarded as efficient, benevolent and incorruptible. Yet recent revisionist historians have questioned its competence and derided its altruism. Fascinated by the men who administeres the Empire at ground level, in the districts, in the courts and in the provincial governments, David Gilmour has worked for much of the last fifteen year in archives, public and private, examining the structure of power: Magistrates and Judges, Residents and Political Agents, Lieutenant-Governors and Members of the Viceroy's Council. His absorbing account traces their lives from recruitment to retirement, from jungle to Government House, from a bungalow in Burma to a residency in Rajputana. He describes their work and their leisure, their intellectual and their private lives. He explains why they went to India, what they did when they got there, and what they thought about it all. The result if a portrait more varied and complicated than that painted by their old admirers, and yet fairer and subtler than those routinely produced by their post-colonial detractors.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #160442 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Observer
`thoughtful, engaging work'

Robbie Hudson, The Sunday Times
'a brilliant overall portrait'

BBC History Magazine
`exceptionally wide-ranging, thorough, deeply researched and
always-readable ... a bountiful feast'

Customer Reviews

A window into a unique world
David Gilmour is a respected historian who wrote a massive and highly-regarded biography of Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India at the turn of the 20th Century, when the Raj perhaps reached its apogee. This book seems to be the by-product of the extensive research that Gilmour did for "Curzon" (see Amazon listing), but to call it merely that is to do it a grave injustice. Most people with an interest in India know that the civil administration of the Raj was undertaken by a tiny corps, little more than 1,000 strong, of British (and Indian) civil servants: indeed, the Indian Civil Service, or ICS. It was noted for its incorruptibility, and for the enormous responsibility given to young men fresh from training college or university. So profoundly influential was the ICS on the running of this enormous and diverse country that even today, with a population of 1 billion, India still has its successor, the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), that is little more than twice the size of the ICS under the Raj.

Now, you might think, and could be forgiven for thinking, that a book about any civil service would be mind-numbingly dull. Imagine reading a book about the Home Office. But with Gilmour's book you would be wrong. This is a fascinating insight into an extraordinary world. There is a good deal of detail about how the ICS was structured, but only enough to illuminate the lives of the men who comprised it, their careers, their frustrations, their loneliness, their elating successes, their scholarship, and their enormous power on a local level that was the heart of the British administration of India. Equally interesting is Gilmour's examination of the relationship between the Raj, as personified by the ICS, and the 600+ "princes" who ruled vast swathes of the Sub-Continent up to 1947. One is left with the thought that there were, are, hundreds of millions of Indians who were far better off under the administration of the Raj than the extravagant, capricious, often vicious and cruel rule of many of the petty princes.

Gilmour's prose is far from pedestrian, and many of the stories he relates are fascinating, even bizarre. Sixty years after Indian independence, at the hands of the last Viceroy, an egomaniac to outstrip even the extraordinary Curzon, it is perhaps politically incorrect to focus on the imperial period, but the Raj remains a fact of history, and India today is and will remain for a long time to come a product of the Raj. It is not a topic that will appeal immediately to a wide audience, nor is it a racy story in the mode of "Freedom at Midnight". However, for anyone interested in India during the three centuries leading up to independence, this is a most interesting and rewarding book.

A surprisingly interesting book
Any book about the Indian Civil Service is not likely to invite great interest amongst peers and friends. The very title has unfashionable ring to it: Ruling Caste mixes the India of old with a statement of pure fact, and that fact is, from the East India Company to the British government, 300million people in India were governed by British institutions. Whether you think this was a positive or negative, this book gives a vivid and humanist vista of the lives of middle class Britons (including Irishmen) serving Queen and Empire during the late 18th and 19th centuries. It often seeks to persuade us of the genorosity and benevolence of the men governing India, but does not dole it out in spades. It is an interesting and amusing tale of what happens to young, wealthy men when they are stuck in a foreign country without female companionship or varied social structures. Gilmour is critical of the "club" system operating in British India, and very sympathetic to young Griffins, seeking adventure and employment in India. Altogether, you will get a well painted picture of a country under Imperial rule, without gathering strong feelings either for or again Empire. A balanced book that merely seeks to tell the tale of (relatively) ordinary men (and occasionally women) away from home, trying to do their best for the people around them. If, like me, you have an interset in Imperial history, you will enjoy this tome.

View into a Vanished Past
I much enjoyed this picture of Civil Service lives in the British Raj. I'm currently trying to reconstruct the life of one of my ancestors, and this book gave me the real flavour of British lives in India.'The Ruling Caste' is extensively researched and explores the British Library's rich collection of manuscripts and government records to create a tapestry of stories from individual lives. Beautifully written,scholarly, entertaining and politically balanced,the book was only slightly marred for me by an irritatingly limited index.

Other books from David Gilmour:The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling; Curzon