The Men Who Ruled India

This book is an account of the men who ruled India, whether they began as soldiers or civilians, written in the light of such memories as these: The scene is a mass of land the size of Europe; the period is three centuries and a half. There were something over four hundred districts in British India and a district officer in each. To write a full-scale history of the Indian Civil Service would be the work of a lifetime. This is no such book. It is a rapid survey, while memory lives, of the surface only of a great mass of material. If the episode is considered as a whole, it lasts from 1600 to 1947. Within that stretch of time there are five periods to be distinguished. There is the beginning; when the servants of the Company were suppliants to the Mogul; then comes a time of transition, the brief startling score of years that left them masters of India; then the long stretch of a century and a half in which they administered the continent. This again may be divided into two: at first, the sovereignty of Parliament was exercised through a corporation known as the Company; from 1858 onwards the Crown ruled direct. The fifth act is the thirty years during which power was deliberately transferred.