Did you know that British colonialism survived for two centuries because of the Indian Civil Services (ICS)? Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, known as “The Iron Man of India” and who served as India’s first Home Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, called the ICS “The Steel Frame of India.” He argued that independent India ought to continue this colonial administrative machinery.
How did the Bible reform the corrupt British East India Company and build a trustworthy system of administration?
Initially, the British rulers were as corrupt as many of today’s civil servants and police. Most voters believe that many of our politicians use civil servants to loot our tax money and to extract bribes from helpless citizens. In some states, they are also using the police, courts, and civil servants to persecute political opponents, the free press, and religious minorities. For that reason, some viewers may find it hard to understand why India’s first Home Minister called colonial civil servants the “Steel Frame” of justice and fairness that held India together.
Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel fought against the British Raj but praised the colonial civil servants before India’s Independence. On April 21, 1947, at Metcalf House in Delhi, Patel argued that after independence, the Indian Civil Services (ICS), created to keep India as a colony, should continue serving Independent India. The only change was renaming the ICS to the Indian Administrative Services (IAS). Patel’s phrase “the steel frame” came from a 1922 speech by British Prime Minister David Lloyd George.
Management guru Peter Drucker described the colonial Civil Services as a model of public administration and management. Many of its staff were sons of British pastors, whose parents and churches prayed that these young men would serve India with diligence and integrity. Their prayers were answered. Drucker does not defend colonialism and acknowledges that the British Raj was marked by muddled policies, indecision, misdirection, and failures. It survived for as long as it did only because the Bible-based Evangelical movement built the Indian Civil Services. Drucker calls the ICS Britain’s “supreme administrative accomplishment”:
[The Civil Servants] were younger sons of poor country parsons, with no prospects at home and little standing in English society. Their pay was low; and such opportunities for loot or gain as their predecessors had enjoyed in the swashbuckling days of the East India Company a hundred years earlier had, by 1860, been eliminated by both law and custom. These untrained, not very bright, and totally inexperienced youngsters ran districts comparable in size and population to small European countries. And they ran them practically all by themselves with a minimum of direction and supervision from the top. Some, of course, became casualties and broke under the strain, falling victim to alcohol, to native women or—the greatest danger of them all—to sloth. But most of them did what they were expected to do and did it reasonably well. They gave India, for the first time in its long and tragic history, peace, a measure of freedom from famine, and a little security of life, worship, and property. They administered justice impartially and, at least as far as they themselves were concerned, honestly and without corruption. They collected taxes, by and large, impartially and equitably. They did not make policy; and in the end they foundered because they had none. But they administered and administered well (Drucker. Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, Ch 32, Pg 403–404. Emphasis added.).
Robert Clive, initially a clerk in the Madras office of the East India Company, laid the foundations of the British Raj in 1757 by defeating Bengal’s Nawab, Siraj-ud-Daulah. Clive supported the appointment of the new Nawab, Mir Qasim, who ruled until 1763. In 1762, Mir Qasim described British corruption in a letter to the Governor and his Council:
And this is the way your Gentlemen behave; they make a disturbance all over my country, plunder the people, injure and disgrace my servants…They forcibly take away the goods and commodities of the peasants, merchants, etc., for the fourth part of their value, and by ways of violence and oppressions they oblige the peasants to give five rupees for goods which are worth but one rupee. (Mason, 38-39)
Seven decades later, one of Britain’s greatest historians, Lord Macaulay, confirmed Mir Qasim’s testimony regarding the corruption of British rule. In his “Essay on Clive,” Macaulay wrote that the British East India Company was a “gang of public robbers” who had “spread terror through the whole plain of Bengal” (p.113). Its governance was:
Oppressive as the most oppressive form of barbarian despotism…strong with all the strength of civilization. It resembled the government of evil Genii, rather than the government of human tyrants. (p.74)
The British Parliament denounced Robert Clive as a corrupt “Nabob.” He was succeeded by Governor General Warren Hastings, who expanded British rule in India. Hastings also faced trial for corruption. During his trial, Edmund Burke, known as the Father of modern Conservatism, perceptively identified a root cause of the Company’s corruption. Accusing the British East India Company, Burke said:
. . . these Gentlemen have formed a plan of Geographical morality, by which the duties of men in public and private situations are not to be governed by their relations to the Great Governor of the Universe, or by their relations to men, but by climates, degrees of longitude and latitude. . . . As if, when you have crossed the equinoctial line all the virtues die. . . as if there were a kind of baptism, like that practised by seamen, by which they unbaptize themselves of all that they learned in Europe, and commence a new order and system of things.
Burke’s charge was that in India, a corrupt East India Company was practicing a ‘Geographical’—that is, relative—morality, which was not governed by God’s moral absolutes. God’s greatest command is that we must love, not loot, His children, our neighbors, as ourselves. In his influential work, The Men Who Ruled India, Philip Mason points out that this moral relativism was justified to maintain British rule and trade in India. Trade interests overruled God’s moral law. The Company presumed that “to be fair to Indians was to be prejudiced against the English.” (Mason, 39).
Burke’s accusation, confirmed by the Evangelical Christian Charles Grant and others, inspired British Evangelicals to reform the British East India Company. The Anglican Evangelicals were emerging from the Wesleyan revival of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. They were called Evangelicals because they had individually repented of their sins and asked the Lord Jesus Christ to become their Savior. Once moral rebels and sinners, they had repented and were reconciled to their Father. They dedicated their lives to ensuring that God’s will was done in their lives and in His world. Historian Ian Bradley explains their worldview and mission in his book A Call to Seriousness: The Evangelical Impact on the Victorians:
The great obstacle to missionary endeavour in India at the beginning of the nineteenth century arose from the East India Company’s conviction that missionaries would only excite the natives and disturb its profitable trading activities. Because of this it refused them entry to the sub-continent. In this situation there was only one thing for the Evangelicals to do if they wanted to secure the triumph of vital religion in India, and that was to infiltrate the higher echelons of the Company themselves so that they could change its policy. Their take-over of the Company’s directorate in the early nineteenth century was spectacular: there was no year between 1807 and 1830 when either the Chairman or the Deputy Chairman of the Board of Directors was not an Evangelical. (Ian Bradley, A Call to Seriousness, Ch 4, Mission to the Heathen, Pg 74)
Charles Simeon, an Anglican priest in Cambridge, is considered the Father of British Evangelicalism. He responded to the East India Company’s corruption by mentoring Cambridge students to go to India as missionaries. They had to be smuggled into India as undercover missionaries because, in 1793, the British Parliament had rejected the Evangelical Bill to allow missionary-educators into Bengal. The most famous of these was Henry Martyn, who lived in Kanpur and created literary Urdu through his translation of the New Testament. His Urdu replaced Mughal Persian as the court language of northern provinces, including Pakistan. His Urdu became the model for the development of the Hindi language.
Rev. Claudius Buchanan was another well-known protégé of Charles Simeon. He shared the Bible-derived Evangelical conviction that British rule in India was not an accident of history but God’s Providential act. Buchanan saw it as his duty to reform the Company’s rule by training the young men recruited to govern India spiritually, morally, and intellectually to know God’s will and prioritize it above their self-interest and the Company’s profits.
Edmund Burke had lamented that the Company was sending the dregs of British society to India—people who had nothing to gain by remaining in Britain and much to gain by looting India if they could survive the climate and tropical diseases. Buchanan decided to challenge British evangelicals to send their sons to govern India. To this end, he traveled, lectured, and organized essay-writing competitions in seven Irish, Scottish, and English universities and colleges. The topic was “How can Britain give good governance to India?” As a Cambridge student, Thomas Babington Macaulay was one of the winners of these competitions. Macaulay is famous for his 1835 Minute-on-Education and as the creator of the Indian Penal Code. First in 1833 and then during 1852-56, Macaulay played an important role in laying the foundations of the university movement in India, opening the doors for Indians to become civil servants and ensuring that civil servants were recruited strictly on merit, not because of nepotism or bribes.
Transforming the moral character of the Company’s governance required Rev. Buchanan to change the outlook of British thought leaders and policymakers. In 1805, he challenged the idea that separation of Church and State meant separating business and governance from God’s moral law. His Memoir on the Wisdom of Establishing a Church in British India became the rationale for establishing the Anglican Church in India. Buchanan argued that an immediate need was to meet the spiritual needs of the British in South Asia. The long-term effect of his proposal would make the Church, not the Company, a foundation for educating and civilizing the natives. Buchanan’s Memoir became an intellectual foundation for the Anglican Evangelical engagement with India, supporting the spiritual growth of the Company’s employees and building high-quality institutions for educating and healing Indians.
The first part of Buchanan’s Memoir dealt directly with the moral degeneration of British rule in India and emphasized the necessity for a formal Anglican presence to minister to the Europeans in India (See Memoir, p. 13).
Charles Grant had already highlighted the need for moral reformation in his 1792 book, Observations on the State of Society Among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain. Buchanan built on this by making practical suggestions on the Church’s role. His case was strongly supported by Lord Teignmouth, who served as the Governor-General of Bengal from 1793-1798. Teignmouth wrote, Considerations on the Practicability, Policy, and Obligation of Communicating to the Natives of India the Knowledge of Christianity. His arguments, along with those of Buchanan and Grant, exposed the hollow prejudice of critics who viewed missionary-minded Evangelicals as religious fanatics who should not intervene in politics.
Readers of these works saw that the Evangelicals had a deeper understanding of the British Empire. They believed that governance should involve more than mere commercialism, reflecting a biblical view where the ruler and the ruled interacted on a deeper level. Israel’s King David, who composed the Psalms, laid both material and spiritual foundations for the temple that became the center of Judaism. Evangelicals viewed governance through the Bible’s teaching on the “covenant” between rulers and the ruled, a political theology first articulated by the French Calvinists (Huguenots) in the 1570s, and later foundational to the Scottish Reformation and Democracy. This relationship was providential and bound with moral obligations. Relativistic ‘geographical’ morality needed to be replaced by godly governance. God’s Ten Commandments were not limited to ancient Israel but were binding on the British East India Company, which should not be allowed to govern as a gang of public robbers (see Mayhew, 25).
Thomas Gisborne, an Anglican priest and a member of the Evangelical “Clapham Sect,” went further in challenging the entitlement mentality pervasive in Civil Services, even in Britain. In 1795, he wrote Enquiries into the Duties of Men, which became a textbook for civil servants. It served as a handbook for various callings, including pastors, politicians, civil servants, armed personnel, lawyers, doctors, and tradesmen. In his chapter On the Duties of the Executive Officers of Government, Gisborne detailed the moral composition that should constitute a civil servant and how they should conduct themselves in various situations.
Civil servants such as Sir James Stephen exemplified the duties outlined by Thomas Gisborne. His father, also named James Stephen, was a member of the Clapham Sect. Ian Bradley writes about Stephen Junior’s impact on the British concept of Civil Service. Their role was to advise, not to make policies. Once statesmen made a policy, the civil servants’ duty was to implement it wholeheartedly:
It was he who created the two grades of mechanical and intellectual in the Civil Service and who formulated the modern concept of civil servants as anonymous purveyors of impartial and expert advice to ministers. “You stand not in need of statesmen in disguise,” he told the Royal Commission on the Civil Service in 1854, “but of intelligent, steady, methodical men of business.” (Ian Bradley, A Call to Seriousness, Ch 9, Serious Callings, Pg 163)
Claudius Buchanan served as the Vice Provost of Calcutta’s Fort William College, founded to educate the officers of the Secretariat. For three years, students studied Indian history, law, oriental languages, ethics, international law, and general history. The education system was modeled after Oxford and Cambridge, focusing on broad intellectual training rather than the art of governing. The statutes of Fort William College were recorded by Andrew Mayhew, who served as the Director of Public Instruction in the Central Provinces of India. His Evangelical worldview, shaped by the Bible, insisted that the living God governs the cosmos. Therefore, human governance was God’s “sacred trust” given to His children called for that vocation. This Bible-inspired idea of trusteeship continued to shape the mindset of Indian leaders for 150 years. My undergraduate curriculum included Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of governance as trusteeship, but my professors never told us the source of Gandhi’s philosophy.
Mayhew, the Director of Public Instruction, explains how British robbers were transformed into trustees:
…the civil servants of the Company, no longer “the agents of a commercial concern” but guardians of “a sacred trust”, were to study the people and its languages, improve their morals and fortify their minds (by science and the classics). Here they would be “guarded against temptation and corruption with which the nature of the climate and the peculiar depravity of the people of India will assail them.” Then and then only will they learn “to diffuse affluence, happiness, willing obedience, and grateful attachment over every district.”
British young men aspiring to become civil servants were schooled in these reforming ideas at Haileybury College outside London. Who were these young men? Historian Ian Bradley explains:
The civil servants of the latter part of the nineteenth century were predominantly from the middle-class, and often from Evangelical backgrounds. They had been brought up at home and at school to the discipline of hard work and regularity. They regarded their job as a vocation. For them, public service was not simply a source of personal gratification or gain; it was a matter of absolute moral duty. In fashioning this ethic of public service which made British administration the envy of the world, the Evangelicals had played no small part. (Ian Bradley, A Call to Seriousness, Ch 9, Serious Callings, Pg 163)
The Evangelical leadership in education made it more than just training in leadership skills; it refined character and cultivated personal integrity. These public servants became very different from the British rulers of the eighteenth century. They began to be noticed as men of upright conduct and benefactors of the public. They were revered not for brutality but for their intolerance of corruption, for upholding the rule of law over the autocratic dispensation of power, for their concern about matters of justice and mercy, and for successfully installing infrastructure for the benefit of the governed.
In conclusion, the unabashed corruption of contemporary civil services prompts us to ask: what reformed a corrupt Company that ruled and taxed vast amounts of land across India? The straightforward answer is—the Bible. British Civil Servants had to govern people who did not speak Sanskrit, Arabic, or Persian. They spoke vernaculars which had no grammar, textbooks, or literature. How could Civil Servants learn the languages of the people they were called to serve? To solve that problem, the college that trained them in Calcutta became the center for Bible translation. Missionary-linguists such as William Carey teamed up with Indian teachers to translate the Bible into Indian languages. Later, the responsibility for translating the Bibles was handed over to the British and Foreign Bible Society. Its founders included some of the governors of the East India Company who wanted to reform the Company and the British Raj. Most of these vernacular Bibles were printed at the Mission Press in Serampore. Aspiring Civil Servants studied vernacular Bibles to learn Indian languages and, in the process, they also learned how God wanted nations to be governed.
Corruption is growing in many parts of the world. The good news is that corruption can be and has been cured substantially. Nations such as India need the humility to once again learn the spiritual secret of transforming the depravity of the human heart and governance.