INTRODUCTION

In deference to Indian demands for a greater share in the administration of the subcontinent, the white men who administered the British Empire in India were joined, during the last decades of the Raj, by a growing number of Indians. By the end of 1939 Indians numbered 540 out of a total of 1299 members of the Indian Civil Service, a figure that, with few subsequent appointments, would remain fairly static until independence (Noronha 61). These Indian members of the elite service occupied a strange position as the topmost functionaries governing their own land and people in the name of an alien monarch and empire. As the apex administrative service, the ICS managed complex cross-cultural relationships in the colonial space, based on radically unequal and racially based power relations. However, with the service itself becoming increasingly Indianised, the role of the ICS and the racial basis of power in the colonial space had to be re-negotiated on both sides. While the Indian element of the ICS had to come to terms with the basic ideology of colonial control, the British constituents of the “steel frame” had to manage a new identity forged out of a relationship fraught with apparently incompatible elements across the white/ brown, ruler/ruled divide. The memoirs of Indian ICS officers employed during the last few decades of British rule offer unusual insights into the way the steel frame managed the relationship with its brown element – an element that always remained incongruent since the basic character of the service remained British to the end.