A History of India, Third Edition

THE PERIOD OF COLONIAL RULE

the Civil Procedure Code, the Indian Evidence Act, the Transfer of
Property Act. There were no great controversies about these Acts, which
were drafted by expert law commissions. Controversies arose when the
administrators passed Acts held to contravene such sacred principles as the
freedom of contract, which were thought to be blessings bestowed by the
British on India. The eviction or rackrenting of tenants and the growing
indebtedness of independent peasants to moneylenders who treated their
debtors like tenants-at-will alarmed the administrators. They feared that
the rather brittle imperial structure could never withstand a great wave of
peasant unrest. For these political reasons they were prepared to forget
about the freedom of contract and to enact restrictions on rent
enhancement and on the transfer of land to moneylenders.
Rural India was of great importance to the British administrator who
began his career in an Indian district as collector of revenue and district
magistrate and usually believed that, having been close to the grassroots,
he understood the masses. The British empire in India was a system of
foreign domination: India was certainly governed with British and not with
Indian interests in view. None the less, the individual British civil servant in
India was subjectively convinced that he was trying his best to work for the
Indian people in his charge. The British tradition of trusting the ‘man on
the spot’ encouraged and motivated the district officer whose service was,
indeed, the mainstay of the empire.
Senior administrators who rose to high positions in the Government of
India were deeply influenced in their views on Indian affairs by the
experience of their years in the districts which, of course, belonged to one
particular region and province. Imperial structure and its regional impact
were interrelated in this way as the Government of India always consisted
of administrators who had grown up in a particular regional
administrative tradition. This tradition reflected a curious blend of pre-
British practices and British adaptations and innovations. A survey of the
provinces of British India will illustrate this spectrum of hybrid traditions.

Differential penetration and hybrid traditions

The administrative penetration of India by the British was highly
differentiated in many ways. First of all, there was a time-lag of almost a
century between the acquisition of Bengal and the conquest of northwestern
India. Furthermore, there were significant differences in the intensity of
British administration, largely due to the manner in which the administrative
machinery of previous regimes had been geared to the exigencies of colonial
rule. Great tracts of the interior of the country were subjected to indirect rule
only. In those parts the patterns of British administration were copied by
Indian princes in their own peculiar ways. Even in areas under direct British
rule the Indian administrative staff carried on most of its earlier style of