The verdict on Indian hill stations — the one that an English-speaking visitor is most likely to hear — is that they are “gone” or “finished”. Of course, this is only the opinion of a certain class. What this means is that the old hill resorts, established by the British as an escape from the summer heat of the plains, have become too popular. Newly enriched Indians drive up to them now in cars and coaches, booking into new hotels and holiday homes and straining the capacity of roads and sewage systems.
The charm that came with the aspic of neglect has almost entirely vanished in places such as Simla and Darjeeling. Or Ootacamund, where in the 1970s I remember going to the afternoon show at Coronation Talkies to see Waterloo Bridge (Robert Taylor, Vivien Leigh, 1940) among an audience that found the film neither laughable nor particularly old. You felt the climb from the plain into this small collection of bungalows and churches had left the present-day behind. It would be difficult to feel that now anywhere in India, but perhaps Mussoorie, where I went last week, has retained more of its remote, hill-station atmosphere than many of its rivals.
The weather helped. Rain glistened on the twisting roads and turned tracks into mud. We felt withdrawn, cut off. From my little terrace I could look down on the clouds that came boiling up the valley and, when the weather cleared one early morning, see snow on the Himalayas away to the north.
Almost every piece of ground in Mussoorie is dizzyingly steep; it seems impossible that anyone would have wanted to build a town on these slopes, let alone actually managed to do it. And yet, by the end of the 19th century, more than 6,000 people lived here, doubling their number with the exodus from below every summer. Mussoorie had a library, an ice rink (with orchestra), a mall where Indians were forbidden to walk, and several grand hotels. The grandest, the Charleville, stood on a ridge in Happy Valley and boasted a stay by the Prince of Wales (later George V) and Princess Mary of Teck, who in 1906 could never have envisaged that 50 years later, everything devised for their comfort — the kitchens, the stables, the dining room, the linen cupboards — would be in the hands of the people banned from the mall. In 1959, the government of by-now independent India took over the Charleville and converted it into a college for its elite civil servants. It burned down 30 years ago, but now stands an ugly but capacious new college, which every year prepares hundreds of young men and women for the job of running India.
Everything has changed; nothing has changed. The era that produced hill stations also laid down the foundations of the Indian Administrative Service, the IAS, which, together with the Indian Foreign Service, used to attract (and arguably still does) the brightest from each generation. The IAS owes its structure to the British India Civil Service, the ICS, which administered the country as a colonial possession from 1858 until 1947 through the district-officer system, in which a young Briton, public school and Oxbridge educated, passed a highly competitive examination and after some tuition in Indian languages and customs was given charge of an Indian district as populous as an English county, where under various titles (collector, district magistrate, deputy commissioner) he took charge of law and order and land revenues and any other piece of government policy that needed enforcing.
Lloyd George called it “the steel frame on which the whole structure of our government and of our administration in India rests”, and the IAS has kept the steel frame pretty much intact. Its officers exercise enormous authority over a district population of between one and two million, sometimes barely familiar with the local language, apt to be lonely, forever facing the temptation of bribery. And they start so young, so terribly young. The new recruits in Mussoorie, the lucky thousand who have been chosen from 500,000 candidates by excelling in exams and interviews, are young enough to address visitors as Sir and Ma’am, but in a year or two, they will sit as rulers of their own small kingdoms, having been examined in Hindi, the constitution and the law. A young ICS man, setting out from Tilbury to India in 1910, would have felt no less blessed or anxious.
I went to the college as part of a literary entertainment. “Sirs, I come from Mumbai. Do you have any advice about coping with a posting to small-town India?” a woman probationer asked in our opening session. I made some light-hearted remarks about making sure she got back to Mumbai as often as she could, but my fellow panellist, the redoubtable journalist M.J. Akbar, said the question was a disgrace, and symptomatic of a metropolitan attitude that privileged Anglophone city life over that of people in the provinces, or mofussil, which despite accelerating citification is still where most people live. This drew applause: The IAS is no longer a seamlessly elite phenomenon, and later questions exemplified divisions between those who spoke English well or not so well and came either from the big metropolitan cities or the kind of town that still has bicycle rickshaws — a difference often summarised as “India v Bharat”.
So there was a tension here, but perhaps less than there might have been. One of the world’s greatest pieces of positive discrimination, possibly its very greatest piece, is the quota of government jobs reserved for the castes and tribes that successive Indian governments have identified as the least privileged: Those defined as belonging to the scheduled castes and tribes and “other backward classes” now make up 49 per cent of each year’s intake. Candidates belonging to the other 51 per cent can take the entrance exam four times; a member of the other backward classes seven times; someone from the scheduled castes and tribes as often as they want.
No doubt the system is open to abuse and complaint. There is no discrimination that favours women or religious minorities such as Muslims. No doubt, either, that corruption has enhanced many salaries; people constantly remark that the police and revenue services have eclipsed the foreign service as the place an elite Indian civil servant wants to be, because of their money-making opportunities (the size of wedding dowries that entrants to these services can command is said to be the clinching evidence). But for all that, the IAS still possesses a nobility that comes from its long and dutiful record of public service and the people who join it do seem touched by idealism.
On our last night, a company of actors came from Mumbai and put on a play in which an IAS bureaucrat becomes massively corrupt and only at the last minute renounces his dubious career. The audience cheered this resolution and not only because that was expected of them.
In a country that over the past 20 years has been transformed — some would say disfigured — by private money, the IAS has survived as a still-impressive public institution. As the college’s deputy director, Ranjana Chopra, said, speaking of the IAS’s ability to handle natural disasters better than George Bush’s Washington: “Everything may not work well in India, but here is something that does.” There are many worse legacies of empire.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
