The Indian Civil Service, 1858–1947

Abstract

In the eyes of those Britons who, in the age of Empire, were to an extent aware of — and, more relevantly, were actors in — imperial administration, and in the minds of most young men who had already set their sights on a career in administration overseas, the Indian Civil Service enjoyed pre-eminence in the ranking order. ‘The Civil Service of Pakistan is the successor in Pakistan of the Indian Civil Service’, proclaimed an official recruiting pamphlet in Karachi a few years after independence, ‘which was the most distinguished Civil Service in the world.’1 Half a century later, in advertising a retrospective memoir on the Sudan Political Service, the publisher found no difficulty in situating the topic for a possibly disoriented post-imperial readership by the reminder that the SPS ‘was of a renown comparable with that of the Indian Civil Service’.2 In between, too, Indian members of the former ICS have not hesitated in their claim that the District Officer was hand-picked for the most prized of all Britain’s imperial civil services.3 Nor, expectedly, have the former British members of the ICS, recording their memoirs of what by definition must be among the last of first-hand accounts, been slow to praise.4 In the intervening fifty years, as research has deepened into who Britain’s once-upon-a-time imperial administrators were and why they opted for that kind of overseas career, the evidence has hardened that among these aspirant Crown career graduates — and often their families — there existed in the opening decades of the twentieth century, unofficially yet palpably perceived, a preferred hierarchy in the status of Britain’s overseas civil services. The existence of that ranking is aptly condensed in the common graduate response of the time, still recalled in memoir, that ‘I didn’t think I stood a chance for the ICS, so I applied for the Sudan Political’ or ‘I wrote down the Colonial Service as my second choice — and got in’. Uniqueness may be unquantifiable, but in elitism gradations can comfortably coexist.