A History of India, Third Edition

THE PERIOD OF COLONIAL RULE

administration. The British district officer was sometimes completely in the
hands of his Indian subordinate staff, but there were also many instances
where astute British officers used their own Indian assistants in order to
break up the charmed circle of local administration. The fact that these
British officers were highly paid and thus above the temptations of
corruption, and that the pattern of communication among the elite civil
service was fairly open and not encumbered with feudal attitudes, helped to
establish an efficient administration—efficient at least with regard to the
limited purposes which it served, i.e. the maintenance of law and order and
the collection of revenue.

Eastern India: the hub of the colonial economy

The region which was exposed to the British impact for the longest period of
time was Bengal and Bihar, the area of the ‘Diwani’ and of the ‘permanent
settlement’. But the intensity of administration was in many respects rather
modest in this area. The permanent settlement had greatly limited the
revenue-collecting duties of the district administration: the district officer
worked more in his judicial capacity as a district magistrate and the British
impact made itself felt more by means of the ubiquitous law courts than by
the presence of executive government. Civil servants who grew up in the
Bengal tradition normally disapproved of all measures which demanded
executive intervention and tended to rely on the working of the courts.
At the same time the spread of English education produced a flood of
Indian lawyers who naturally sympathised with this point of view. Local Bar
Associations in every small district town with their Bar Library and their
professional solidarity became focal points of public opinion in Bengal.
Calcutta, with its High Court, its university and its famous colleges, became
the hub of this new political culture. Zamindars who enjoyed the fruits of
the ‘permanent settlement’ often became absentee landlords who built
palatial houses in Calcutta and sent their sons to the university.
This new elite, the bhadralok (people of good families), was highly
interested both in English literature and in a revival of Bengali literature. A
Bengali Renaissance was hailed by many who combined a new type of
philosophical Hinduism with a romantic nostalgia for some of the more
popular forms of religion. Some of the representatives of the new Bengali
elite looked exactly like the Indian ‘gentlemen’ whom Macaulay had
wanted to produce; now that they actually existed—well dressed and
polished and speaking better English than their British masters—the
colonial rulers were frightened and looked upon them with disgust. The
Bengali ‘Babu’ was so obviously ‘Unindian’ that he could not be respected
as a true representative of his nation. The humble peasant—illiterate,
honest and hardworking—was praised by the British instead. The educated
elite was, of course, very small and in Eastern India it was largely restricted