British Administration in India: Services, Police and Courts

British rule in India rested on four services: a civil service that collected the revenue and ran the districts, a police force that kept order in them, an army that held the country, and a court system that applied a new written law. Examiners treat the whole machinery as one chapter and ask about the man, the Act and the year behind each reform. The pattern is easy to see once the chapter is read in order: Cornwallis built the service, the Charter Act of 1853 opened it to competition, the revolt of 1857 forced the army and the police to be rebuilt, and the codes drafted after 1833 gave India a single legal system.

The civil service

Lord Cornwallis is called the father of the civil services in India because he fixed salaries, forbade private trade by servants of the Company and made promotion turn on seniority rather than patronage. The service was divided into the covenanted service, whose members signed a covenant with the Company and held every higher post, and the uncovenanted service, into which Indians were taken for lower work. The Charter Act of 1793 reserved all posts worth five hundred pounds a year and above for covenanted servants, which shut Indians out of the administration for the next sixty years. Wellesley founded Fort William College at Calcutta in 1800 to train recruits, and the Company later trained them at Haileybury in England. The Charter Act of 1853 ended the Company's patronage and threw recruitment open to competition, and the committee headed by Lord Macaulay in 1854 settled the shape of the examination, the first of which was held in London in 1855. Satyendranath Tagore became the first Indian to join the Indian Civil Service, in 1864. The Aitchison Commission of 1886 divided the services into the Imperial, the Provincial and the Subordinate; the Islington Commission reported in 1917; and the Lee Commission of 1924 recommended that recruitment be shared equally between Indians and Europeans. A Public Service Commission was set up in 1926 under the Government of India Act of 1919, and the Act of 1935 provided for a Federal Public Service Commission with provincial commissions beside it.

The police

Cornwallis reorganised the police in 1793 by taking the duty away from the zamindars and creating a circle of thanas, each under a daroga, with the district magistrate above them. Lord Minto appointed a Superintendent of Police for each division in 1808. The modern force dates from the report of the Police Commission of 1860 and the Indian Police Act of 1861, which fixed the shape still recognisable today: an Inspector General for each province, a Deputy Inspector General for each range, a Superintendent of Police for each district, and the village chowkidar at the bottom. The Indian Police Commission of 1902 and 1903, known as the Fraser Commission after Sir Andrew Fraser, recommended training schools, better pay and a Department of Criminal Intelligence, which was created in 1903 and grew into the central intelligence organisation. The Imperial Police service was opened to Indians by competitive examination from 1920.

The army after 1857

The revolt of 1857 was fought largely by the Company's own sepoys, and the reorganisation that followed was designed so that it could not happen again. The Peel Commission of 1859 recommended a larger European element, and the ratio of Europeans to Indians was raised to about one to two in Bengal and two to five in Madras and Bombay. Artillery was kept entirely in European hands, Indians were excluded from the officer corps, and regiments were mixed by caste, region and religion so that soldiers would not combine. The doctrine of the martial races concentrated recruitment on Punjab, Nepal and the north-west. The Eden Commission of 1879 and the reforms carried out by Lord Kitchener between 1902 and 1909 merged the three presidency armies into one Indian Army with a single commander-in-chief. Indianisation of the officer corps began only after the First World War; the Prince of Wales Royal Indian Military College opened at Dehradun in 1922 and the Indian Military Academy at Dehradun in 1932.

The judiciary and the codes

Warren Hastings drew up the judicial plan of 1772, which gave each district a diwani adalat for civil cases under the collector and a faujdari adalat for criminal cases, with the Sadar Diwani Adalat and the Sadar Nizamat Adalat at Calcutta above them. The Regulating Act of 1773 provided for a Supreme Court at Calcutta, which began work in 1774 with Sir Elijah Impey as its first Chief Justice. The Cornwallis Code of 1793 separated revenue work from justice and created the post of district judge. Lord William Bentinck abolished the provincial courts of appeal and circuit in 1831 and set up Sadar courts at Allahabad for the upper provinces. The Charter Act of 1833 provided for a Law Commission, and Macaulay's work led to the Indian Penal Code of 1860, brought into force in 1862, the Code of Criminal Procedure of 1861 and the Indian Evidence Act and the Indian Contract Act of 1872. The Indian High Courts Act of 1861 replaced the Supreme Courts and the Sadar courts with High Courts, which were set up at Calcutta, Bombay and Madras in 1862, with Allahabad following in 1866. The Government of India Act of 1935 provided for a Federal Court, which began sitting at Delhi in 1937 under Sir Maurice Gwyer.

Reforms at a glance

The frame of provinces

Administration was also redrawn on the map. The Charter Act of 1833 made the Governor General of Bengal the Governor General of India and provided for a Presidency of Agra, which was carved out of the Bengal Presidency in 1834 and renamed the North Western Provinces in 1836. Sind was annexed to the Bombay Presidency in 1843, Punjab was made a chief commissioner's province in 1849, and Burma, Assam and the Central Provinces were added later in the century. The Ilbert Bill of 1883, which proposed to let Indian judges try Europeans, was withdrawn in the face of protest by the British community, and the episode taught the educated Indian middle class the value of organised agitation.