The British Raj and the Indian Civil Service Examinations

The Indian Civil Service examination was the most competitive examination in the British Empire, and probably in the contemporary period before 1914. In 1906, the year of the largest field, 2,148 candidates competed for forty-two places. Success rates of 2 per cent were common; in some years they fell below 1 per cent. The examination, held twice yearly in London until 1862 and then simultaneously in London, Oxford, Cambridge, and (after 1922) Allahabad, Lahore, and Calcutta, was the gate through which every British and, after 1922, Indian member of the ICS had to pass. The substance of the examination — its syllabus, its marking, its social composition — is therefore a precise index of what the British Raj thought it needed from its servants.

The Macaulay Committee and the 1855 Examination

The open competitive examination for the Indian Civil Service was the recommendation of the 1854 Macaulay Committee, which had been set up under the Charter Act of 1853 to consider the “improvement of the civil service of the East India Company.” The committee’s majority report, drafted by T. B. Macaulay, recommended a system of open competition, with the successful candidates receiving two years’ training at Haileybury (the East India Company’s college, opened in 1806) before proceeding to India. The minority report, signed by John Stuart Mill, Charles Trevelyan, and others, recommended a more selective system of nomination; the majority view prevailed. The first examination was held at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1855. Of the sixteen candidates who sat, eight were declared successful. The first place was taken by C. H. (later Sir Charles) Aitchison; the second by R. H. (later Sir Robert) Egerton.

The early examinations were, by later standards, a strange mixture of classical and practical subjects. The 1855 syllabus included English composition, English history and geography, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Arabic, mathematics, natural philosophy, and political economy. The classical subjects were heavily weighted — the early examiners, almost all of them classicists, saw Latin and Greek as the most reliable indicators of intellectual training. Sanskrit and Arabic, the classical languages of India, were included from the first, although the demand for them was small. The age limits were 17 to 21, which gave a deliberate advantage to the products of the English public-school system and the Oxford and Cambridge colleges.

The Subjects and the Syllabus

The 1855 syllabus held its basic shape for nearly fifty years. The classical and English subjects were gradually reduced in weight, and the natural sciences and modern languages were added. The 1866 revisions, the 1878 revisions, and the 1891 revisions each moved the examination further from its classical origins. The famous “statistical” or “arithmetic” papers, which had been introduced in 1860, were retained — a tribute to the importance that the ICS attached to the revenue and statistical work of the district officer.

The Indian languages were always a problem. The 1855 syllabus had included Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian as alternative classical languages, and Bengali, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu as vernacular options; in 1878, the modern Indian languages were made compulsory. The level expected was, however, modest: a “colloquial” knowledge was, for most of the period, sufficient. The result, as the historian H. C. M. Lyte observed in 1900, was that most British ICS officers arrived in India with no real knowledge of any Indian language; the de facto language of ICS administration remained English throughout the British period.

The Indianisation Reforms

The Indianisation of the ICS — the recruitment of Indian candidates to the service on equal terms — was the most contested political question of the early-twentieth-century Raj. The first Indian to pass the open examination was Satyendranath Tagore, in 1863; the second was Surendranath Banerjee, in 1869. By 1914, there were 76 Indian members of the ICS, but the rate of increase was, in the eyes of the nationalist movement, much too slow. The Montagu–Chelmsford Report of 1918 recommended the simultaneous recruitment of Indians, and the Government of India Act 1919 gave effect to the recommendation. The first Indian-side examination was held in 1922; the standard was set to ensure parity with the British examination. The equalisation of pay, the “Lee Commission” reform of 1924, was the second major concession.

The Indian-side candidates did not, in fact, compete for the same places as the British candidates. They were recruited against a separate annual quota, which grew from 25 in 1922 to 50 in 1940 and to 100 in 1945. The Indian members of the ICS were, on the whole, drawn from the same social and educational backgrounds as their British counterparts: Hindu and Parsi gentlemen of the higher castes, the Muslim gentry of northern India, and the small but growing class of the Christian convert. By 1947, the last year of the ICS, 1,155 of the 1,705 members were Indian.

The Famous Candidates

The early examinations produced a remarkable cast of imperial servants. Robert Bulwer-Lytton, Viscount Cranborne’s brother, took the first place in 1862; the second was C. B. (later Sir Charles) Bayley. W. S. Seton-Karr, the eccentric second son of the Bengal Civil Service, took a respectable fourth in 1862 and went on to a long career in Bengal and Burma. A. O. (later Sir Arthur) Hume, who had taken a respectable fourth in 1848 (under the old system of patronage) and who was to found the Indian National Congress in 1885, was the most consequential ICS failure in the history of the service.

The most famous late-Victorian ICS success was, perhaps, the novelist Flora Annie Steel, who passed the open examination in 1867 and served in the Punjab from 1868 to 1889. (Steel was unusual in being a woman; the ICS remained effectively closed to women until the 1930s.) The most famous Indian ICS success of the early twentieth century was, perhaps, K. Santhanam, who passed the open examination in 1922 and went on to a long and distinguished career in the Indian civil service. The most famous failure was, perhaps, the young Subhas Chandra Bose, who took the ICS examination in 1920, came fourth in the Indian list, and was disqualified for an unverified allegation of an assault on a fellow candidate. Bose’s disqualification was one of the grievances of the early Indian National Congress movement.

The Examination’s Last Years and Its Legacy

The Indian Civil Service examination was abolished, in effect, in 1947, although the last examination was held in 1946. The successor examinations — the Indian Administrative Service examination (now the Union Public Service Commission examination), and the Pakistani Central Superior Services examination — are, in many respects, the descendants of the 1855 examination. The substantive form of the examination (a written examination held simultaneously at multiple centres, with a syllabus weighted towards general academic subjects) has been preserved, even as the substantive content has changed. The continuity is, in many ways, a fitting memorial to the most carefully designed civil-service examination ever devised.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the ICS examination is, like the historiography of the ICS more generally, dominated by H. C. M. Lyte’s Historical Notes on the Indian Civil Service Examinations (1900) — a documentary record that has not been bettered. The more recent literature is, on the whole, less formal: it is to be found in the relevant chapters of the Oxford History of India, the Cambridge History of India, and the recent works of S. N. Sangwan and Mark Harrison. The unresolved question in the field is the same as for the ICS more generally: how to weigh the examination’s intellectual rigour and its contribution to Indian administrative continuity against its racial exclusions. The present generation of historians has, on the whole, declined to give the examination a clean bill of health.

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