by Vishal Mangalwadi, Samuel Davidson and Ishita Davidson
Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel (1875–1955), India’s first Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister, described the colonial Civil Services as “The Steel Frame of India.”
Who or what built that frame? The short answer is: the Bible.
Between 1765 and 1820, British rulers were as corrupt as today’s Indian civil servants. Most Indians feel that our criminal politicians use civil servants to loot our tax money and extract bribes from helpless citizens. Now they are also using the police to persecute political opponents and religious minorities. Why then did Patel, India’s “Iron Man,” describe colonial-era civil services as the “steel frame” of justice and fairness that held India together?
Vallabhbhai Patel, who fought against the British Raj, praised civil servants on 21 April 1947 at Metcalf House in Delhi. He argued that after independence, the Indian Civil Services (ICS), created by colonial rulers, should continue serving the new nation. Its name would change from ICS to IAS (Indian Administrative Services). Patel’s phrase “the steel frame” came from a 1922 speech by British Prime Minister David Lloyd George.
Management guru Peter Drucker described colonial civil services as a model of public administration and management. It was the reason, he asserted, that colonialism survived for two centuries. Many of its cadre were sons of British pastors. Their parents and churches prayed that these young men would serve India with diligence and integrity. Their prayers were answered.
Drucker does not defend colonialism. He knew that the British Raj was marked by muddled policies, indecision, misdirection, and failures. It survived for as long as it did because the Bible-based Evangelical movement built the Indian Civil Services. The ICS, says Drucker, was Britain’s “supreme administrative accomplishment”:
[The Civil Servants] were younger sons of poor country parsons, with no prospects at home and little standing in English society. Their pay was low, and such opportunities for loot or gain as their predecessors had enjoyed in the swashbuckling days of the East India Company a hundred years earlier had, by 1860, been completely eliminated by both law and custom. These untrained, not very bright, and totally inexperienced youngsters ran districts comparable in size and population to small European countries. And they ran them practically all by themselves with a minimum of direction and supervision from the top. Some, of course, became casualties and broke under the strain, falling victim to alcohol, to native women, or—the greatest danger of them all—to sloth. But most of them did what they were expected to do and did it reasonably well. They gave India, for the first time in its long and tragic history, peace, a measure of freedom from famine, and a little security of life, worship, and property. They administered justice impartially and, at least as far as they themselves were concerned, honestly and without corruption. They collected taxes by and large, impartially and equitably. They did not make policy, and in the end, they foundered because they had none. But they administered, and administered well. (Peter Drucker. Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, pp. 403-404. Emphasis added.)
Robert Clive, a clerk in the Madras office of the East India Company, laid the foundations of the British Raj in 1757 by defeating Bengal’s Nawab, Siraj-ud-Daulah. Clive supported the appointment of the new Nawab, Mir Qasim, who ruled until 1763. In 1762, Mir Qasim described British corruption in a letter to the Governor and his council.
And this is the way your gentlemen behave; they make a disturbance all over my country, plunder the people, and injure and disgrace my servants… They forcibly take away the goods and commodities of the peasants, merchants, etc., for the fourth part of their value, and by way of violence and oppression, they oblige the peasants to give five rupees for goods which are worth but one rupee. (Philip Mason. The Men Who Ruled India. pp. 38-39)
As mentioned earlier, seven decades later, one of Britain’s greatest historians, Lord Macaulay, confirmed Mir Qasim’s testimony regarding the corruption of British rulers. In his Essay on Clive, Macaulay wrote that the British East India Company was a “gang of public robbers” that “had spread terror through[out] the whole plain of Bengal.” Its governance was as “oppressive as the most oppressive form of barbarian despotism… strong with all the [military] strength of civilization. It resembled the government of evil Genii rather than the government of human tyrants.”
The British Parliament denounced Clive as a corrupt “Nabob.” He was followed by Governor-General Warren Hastings, who expanded British rule in India. Hastings, too, was tried for corruption. During his trial, Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism, put his finger on the root of a philosophical problem. Accusing the British East India Company, Burke said,
“. . . these Gentlemen have formed a plan of Geographical morality, by which the duties of men in public and private situations are not to be governed by their relations to the Great Governor of the Universe or by their relations to men, but by climates, degrees of longitude and latitude…. As if, when you have crossed the equinoctial line, all the virtues die… as if there were a kind of baptism, like that practiced by seamen, by which they unbaptise themselves of all that they learned in Europe and commence a new order and system of things.”
Burke’s charge was that in India, a corrupt East India Company was practicing a ‘Geographical’ or relative morality that was not governed by God’s moral (absolute) laws. In his influential work, The Men Who Ruled India, Philip Mason points out that this moral relativism was justified to maintain British rule and trade in India. Trade interests overruled God’s moral law.
The Company presumed that “to be fair to Indians was to be prejudiced against the English.”
Burke’s accusation, confirmed by Charles Grant and others, inspired British Evangelicals to reform the Company. Anglican Evangelicals were just beginning to emerge out of the Wesleyan revival of the late eighteenth century. They were called “Evangelicals” because they had individually repented of their sins and asked the Lord Jesus Christ to become their Savior. They were moral rebels, now reconciled to their Heavenly Father, dedicated to ensuring that God’s will was done in their lives and in his world. Historian Ian Bradley explains their worldview and mission in his book A Call to Seriousness: The Evangelical Impact on the Victorians:
The great obstacle to missionary endeavour in India at the beginning of the nineteenth century arose from the East India Company’s conviction that missionaries would only excite the natives and disturb its profitable trading activities. Because of this, it refused them entry to the subcontinent. In this situation, there was only one thing for the Evangelicals to do if they wanted to secure the triumph of vital religion in India, and that was to infiltrate the higher echelons of the Company themselves so that they could change its policy. Their takeover of the Company’s directorate in the early nineteenth century was spectacular: there was no year between 1807 and 1830 when either the Chairman or the Deputy Chairman of the Board of Directors was not an Evangelical. (Ian Bradley, “Mission to the Heathen,” in A Call to Seriousness, p. 74.)
Charles Simeon, the Anglican priest in Cambridge mentioned earlier, is considered the Father of British Evangelicalism. His response to the East India Company’s corruption was to mentor Cambridge students to go to India as missionaries. They had to be smuggled into India as undercover missionaries because, in 1793, the British Parliament had rejected the Evangelical Bill to allow missionary-educators into Bengal.
Rev. Claudius Buchanan, one of Simeon’s well-known protégés, shared the evangelical conviction that British rule in India was not an accident of history but God’s providential act. Buchanan took up the challenge to reform the Company by training the young men who governed India as the Company’s civil, police, and judicial servants. They needed to know Indian languages and be trained spiritually and intellectually to know God’s will and put it above their self-interest and the Company’s profits.
Edmund Burke had already lamented that the Company was sending to India the riffraff of British society. They had nothing to gain by remaining in Britain and much to gain by looting India, if they could survive the climate and tropical diseases. Buchanan decided to challenge Christians to send their sons to govern India with integrity. He organised essay-writing competitions in seven Irish, Scottish, and English universities and colleges on the topic of “How can Britain give good governance to India?”
As a Cambridge student, Thomas Babbington Macaulay was one of the winners of these competitions. He is famous for his 1835 Minute on Education and as the creator of the India Penal Code. During 1852–56, Macaulay played important roles in laying the foundations of th university movement in India, opening the doors for Indians to become civil servants, and ensuring that civil servants were recruited strictly on merit and not because of nepotism or bribes.
Transforming the moral character of the Company’s governance required Rev. Buchanan to make an important intellectual contribution. In 1805, he challenged the idea that separation of Church and State means separating business and governance from God’s moral law. His “Memoir on the expediency of an ecclesiastical establishment for British India; both as the means of perpetuating the Christian religion among our own countrymen; and as a foundation for the ultimate civilisation of the natives” provided the intellectual basis for the evangelical engagement with Bengal’s governance. The first part of Buchanan’s Memoir dealt with the degenerating morality of British rule in India and emphasised the need for a formal Anglican presence to minister to the Europeans in India.
Charles Grant had already emphasised the need for reforming the Company’s morality in his 1792 book, Observations on the State of Society Among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain. Buchanan offered practical suggestions on how to do it. His case was strongly supported by Lord Teignmouth through his Considerations on the Practicability, Policy, and Obligation of Communicating to the Natives of India the Knowledge of Christianity. Their books exposed the hollow prejudice of critics who claimed that missionary-minded evangelicals were religious fanatics who should not intervene in politics. Readers were able to see that the evangelicals had a better conception of the British Empire, in which the ruler and the ruled interacted beyond mere commercialism. Christians viewed the Indo-British relationship in the light of the Bible’s teaching on the covenant between government and those be ing governed. Their relationship was providential, bound by mutual moral obligations. Relativistic ‘geographical’ morality needed to be replaced by godly governance. God’s “Ten Commandments had no purely localised application.” They were binding upon the Company, which could not be allowed to remain a gang of public robbers. (See Mayhew, 25.)
Thomas Gisborne, an Anglican priest and a member of the evangelical “Clapham Sect,” went further in challenging the entitlement mentality that pervaded the services. He wrote what became a textbook for civil servants, Enquiries into the Duties of Men, first published in 1795. It was a handbook for men who aspired to various callings: pastor, politician, civil servant, armed personnel, lawyer, doctor, tradesman, etc. In his chapter “On the Duties of the Executive Officers of Government,” he gave a detailed treatment of the moral composition that ought to constitute a civil servant and his behavior in various eventualities that may arise in his career.
Civil servants such as Sir James Stephen lived out these duties. His father, also named James Stephen, was also a member of the Clapham Sect. Ian Bradley writes about his impact upon the British idea of Civil Service:
“It was he who created the two grades of mechanical and intellectual in the Civil Service and who formulated the modern concept of civil servants as anonymous purveyors of impartial and expert advice to ministers. ‘You stand not in need of statesmen in disguise,” he told the Royal Commission on the Civil Service in 1854, ‘but of intelligent, steady, methodical men of business.” (Ian Bradley, “Serious Callings” in A Call to Seriousness, p. 163.)
Claudius Buchanan served as the Vice Provost of Calcutta’s Fort William College, which had been founded in order to educate the officers of the Secretariat. For three years the young men studied Indian history, law, Oriental languages, ethics, international law, and general history. Its education system was modelled along the lines of Oxford and Cambridge. It was not a commercial school that taught the art of governing. Its statutes were recorded by Andrew Mayhew, who served as the Director of Public Instruction in the Central Provinces of India. The Biblical worldview insisted that the living God governs the cosmos. Human governance in turn was God’s “Sacred Trust” given to his children whom he had called for that vocation.
This Bible-inspired idea of trusteeship continued to shape the mindset, even of Mahatma Gandhi’s generation a century and a half later. Mayhew writes,
“…the civil servants of the Company, no longer ‘the agents of a commercial concern’ but guardians of ‘a sacred trust,’ were to study the people and its languages, improve their morals, and fortify their minds (by science and the classics). Here they would be ‘guarded against temptation and corruption with which the nature of the cli mate and the peculiar depravity of the people of India will assail them.’ Then and then only will they learn ‘to diffuse affluence, happiness, willing obedience, and grateful attachment over every district.” The aspiring young civil servants were schooled in these reforming ideas at Haileybury College outside of London.
Historian Ian Bradley explains who these young men were:
“The civil servants of the latter part of the nineteenth century were predominantly from the middle class and often from Evangelical backgrounds. They had been brought up at home and at school to the discipline of hard work and regularity. They regarded their job as a vocation. For them, public service was not simply a source of personal gratification or gain; it was a matter of absolute moral duty. In fashioning this ethic of public service, which made the British administration the envy of the world, the Evangelicals had played no small part.” (Ian Bradley, “Serious Callings” in A Call to Seriousness, p. 163.)
Evangelical leadership in education made it much more than training in leadership skills. It refined the character and cultivated personal integrity. These servants became very different from the British rulers in the eighteenth century. They began to be noticed as men of upright conduct and benefactors of the public. They were not feared for brutality but revered for their intolerance for corruption, for upholding the rule of law over the autocratic dispensation of power at the hands of rulers, for being concerned about matters of justice and mercy, and for successfully installing an infrastructure for the benefit of the governed. They did more than create the “steel frame” that sustained India after Independence. After various Indian attempts failed to write a constitution for India—e.g., “The Commonwealth of India” Bill of 1925 and the Motilal Nehru Committee’s draft of 1928—it was British civil servants who drafted the India Act of 1935. That became the basis for independent India’s Constitution adopted in 1950.
What reformed a corrupt Company? The straight answer is the Bible. British civil servants had to govern a vast, illiterate populace who did not speak Sanskrit, Arabic, or Persian. They spoke vernaculars which had no grammar, textbooks or literature. How could civil servants themselves learn the languages of the people they were called to serve?
The college used the vernacular Bible to teach officers Indian languages. For this reason, Fort William College in Calcutta became the initial center for Bible translation. Missionary linguists such as William Carey teamed up with Pundits to translate the Bible into Indian languages. Later, the responsibility for translating Bibles was handed over to the British and Foreign Bible Society. Most of these vernacular Bibles were printed at the Serampore Mission Press. Aspiring civil servants studied those Bibles to learn Indian languages and also how God wanted nations to be governed.