The Rule of the 'Just': Review article on David Gilmour's The Ruling Caste

-- Pritam Mukherjee

David Gilmour, The Ruling Caste:Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj.New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

The British rule in India still remains one of the most hostile arenas for the historians. Contending and conflicting schools have been fighting it out ever since the late nineteenth century to claim their supremacy over other competing narratives. This battle for supremacy has reached a new high after the Saidian Revolution. Armed with a tempting model, a section of historians are now excavating archives to see whether a modular application of this is possible. Their opponents have also come out with their version of truth. David Gilmour engages himself in this crossfire with a view to rescue a tiny band of officials who held the key to the imperial rule in India. His book is a new addition to the already increasing history of colonial bureaucracy in India.

     David Gilmour sets his agenda right at the beginning of his book. The Saidian discourse for him is much too rigid. American historians following after the great man have been properly chastised in the 'Preface' itself. It looks as if Gilmour is in some kind of a religious mission to set straight facts of history which he finds to his dismay not in his side. Any book that begins in this fashion bounds to be magisterial rather than objective. And that's exactly what he does throughout the book. He sermonizes, repeats, hides ...and ultimately arrives at a predestined conclusion on the benefits of the raj and its machinery of governance.

       In The Ruling Caste, Gilmour tries to cover almost every aspect of a civilian's life from the days of his internship at the British universities to the life after retirement. Gilmour has explored various archival source materials, autobiographies, memoirs (both published and unpublished), other scholarly books. The book is quite extraordinary for its use of huge primary and secondary sources. But then these sources mean nothing, it is how they have been put together in the form of evidence that's what concerns most of us. By 'ruling caste' Gilmour means white-male-British ICS officers who came to rule here, there is hardly any place for those Indian ICS officers who came through trying condition to get into this high job. Their achievements, aspirations, dilemmas, dual loyalties, insecurities have been comfortably forgotten. Gilmour fails to recognise R. C. Dutt's intellectual achievements and even misinforms readers when he says: "Romesh Chandra Dutt...wrote a couple [of novels] in Bengali about rustic life in his province." Any decent reader of the nineteenth century Bengali literature would know that R.C. Dutt wrote four novels in his career, out of which three were historical novels. The casual nature in which Gilmour throws in the information about one of the most interesting intellectuals only shows his ability to front his ignorance without much shame. What we also know of R. C. Dutt is that he wrote an important economic history of India where he foregrounded the so called 'drain theory'. Gilmour carefully avoids mentioning this fact[p.250]. The way he circulates some of the old and much detested racial stereotypes is a matter of concern for any modern reader. [See pages:48,49,54,57,66.67,85, and so on]

        No effort has been made to nullify the prejudices that were gifts of the British colonial mind set. Written in a celebratory tone the book is primarily a salvage enterprise . The basic idea of the book is to reaffirm the superior nature of the colonial bureaucracy in India. Apart from this very general aim, the book makes no real effort to understand the nature, dimensions, aftereffects, changes and continuation of that rule. It lacks the perspective of those people who served under the yoke of the 'ruling caste'. As a result, the book from the very beginning has failed to take any inclusive approach. The final argument of the book has been announced right at the beginning of the book. The ultimate aim of the book is to justify, what in a different context Gilmour himself has declared, “...its[ICS] reputation for altruism and benevolent rule.”[p. xvi]

      If an author, after all these years, prepares a balance-sheet of colonial rule in the name of civilizing mission without taking into account co-ordinates of violence and power and passes a judgement in favour of a colonial bureaucracy there's little a reader can do. You cannot possibly have a dialogue with this kind of a person. The finality with which Gilmour articulates his position hinders a proper negotiation.