The Private Services Commission

Abstract

A public services commission had been travelling from administrative town to adminstrative town up and down India for some months past, hearing testimony on the subject of the employment and treatment of natives in the administration of India. Kipling’s paper tended to regard the business without sympathy, on the grounds that the jealousies, cliques, and intrigues of native servants — public or private — made any attempt at rational inquiry and just reform quite impossible. As Kipling wrote of the Commission, after it had been largely neglected by the officials in Calcutta:

this side-show which is performing up and down the country, is a native side-show for the benefit of Anjuman-i-Sabahs, Associations, native newspapers, Subordinate Judges, Munsiffs and so on. The Great Indian Nation clamoured for and got it; and now the very metropolis of the Nation seems to have left it severely alone. The Civilian never had any connection with it from the beginning, because his hands were full of work, and unless he had a ‘fad’ to ventilate, or a mark to make, he did not trouble his head about the business. No man can help to govern a country and help to show how that country should be governed, at one and the same time (CMG, 29 January 1887).