The Ring of Services

The Ring of Services explores the Indianisation of the British Raj in the years after World War I. The work travels inside the government with the Indians who came forward to staff the elite services of the Raj, just as Mohandas Gandhi was launching his epic campaigns against British rule. Middle class youngsters studied at Oxford and Cambridge and Sandhurst before returning to India to learn the ways of the Raj from kindly old British district collectors, as well as rough and gruff army colonels. They trained the next Indian recruits themselves, and by the eve of Independence had risen to the highest posts in the Indian Civil Service, Indian Army and Indian Police. Yet the future of the Indian officers of the British Raj was still uncertain when India’s eminent lawyers gathered to write a constitution for a new republic. It was the Home Minister, Vallabhbhai Patel who rose to assure the Constituent Assembly that the new constitution it was creating, and the unity of India in the decades ahead, would be defended by these very officers, and the centuries old institutions which they represented.