The Men Who Ruled India
- New Delhi Rupa Publication India Pvt. Ltd. 1985
- xi, 368 p.
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.