BookEnds: When India Was Britain’s ‘Jewel’

Benjamin Disraeli, the world-famous nineteenth-century British prime minister, once called India the “jewel in the imperial crown.”

Ever since, the name has stuck and the literary world has produced epochs devoted to the former British colony. For the most part, the British administrators in India have largely ignored in favor of anecdotes concerning life in the colony.

However, in “The Ruling Caste,” David Gilmour, constructs a portrait of India that is far different from those found in other works. As opposed to focusing on the lives of the Indians, Gilmour looks to the few thousand British civil servants who, for about a century, were in charge of running a country of over 300 million people.

Immediately the audience is captured by this world that Gilmour, the author of the engaging biography about Queen Victoria’s viceroy “Curzon: Imperial Statesman,” expertly recreates. He begins by talking about the “empress of India” Queen Victoria, who “never went east of Berlin or south of San Sebastian.”

Yet, Gilmour devotes just a small portion of the book to Victoria and Disraeli. The Indian Civil Service (ICS) becomes the preliminary focus of Gilmour’s book, which includes letters, pictures, and diagrams that encompass the British experience within their precious jewel of India.

An intriguing vantage for Gilmour is the schooling required for ICS. Since the families involved in the civil service were from the highest pedigree, it was not uncommon that sons of earls populated these “Etons of India”

The most famous of these centers of higher-education for the aspiring Indian official was Haileybury. All the candidates for the school were nominated by the directors from the East India Company. Those lucky enough to earn admission had “their time divided into four terms of twenty weeks” where they studied “mathematics and natural philosophy; classical and general literature, law, history, and general economy, and those oriental languages.”

Gilmour interjects amusing tales of the inept legacy students who were in over their heads in the rigorous environment of Haileybury. Another interesting anecdote concerns Haileybury’s most famous professor, the economist Thomas Malthus, who memorably encountered several of his students on the way to chapel with “tankards of beer.”

But Gilmour does not spend an excessive amount of the book devoted to the schooling required for the ICS. In fact, the meat of the book explores the intricacies of actually governing India.

With three quarters of the British civilians on active service stationed in the provinces of Bengal, Bombay, and Madras, much of the British experience concerns the frontier, where their Haileybury training did not come in handy. As Gilmour notes, “a raja and his court of noblemen were likely to be less impressed by a taciturn scholar from Oxford than by an ebullient officer who was, like them, a sportsman.”

Even though Gilmour’s literary scope only covers a small portion of this era in history, it is still engaging and informative.

Perhaps his most humorous story concerns Robert Clarke, “a young and promising Civilian in Kashmir.” The strapping young man became romantically involved with Mrs. George Howard, the widow of the chaplain from the Bengal Ecclesiastical Establishment. Clarke’s problems, however, stem from his relationship with Mrs. Howard’s daughter who was “decidedly big for her age and very good looking.”

The stories, like Clarke’s, are relatively interesting and Gilmour has a fresh wit about him that is matter-of-factly appropriate.

However, even though Gilmour’s writing is charming, one cannot help but want more explanation or motivation from this book.

Lastly, those hoping to find rich descriptions of the Indian culture or landscape should pick up Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book.”

Gilmour’s “The Ruling Caste” is strictly attentive to the infrastructure behind the country.

In fact, the reader often questions if there were actual Indians present in this era since they never appear in Gilmour’s book.

—Reviewer Jessica C. Coggins can be reached at jcoggins@fas.harvard.edu.
—Look for more book reviews in Friday’s Arts section and online at www.thecrimson.com/arts.aspx.

The Ruling Caste
By David Gilmour
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Out Now