An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

In substantiation of his case, Fielding-Hall recounted the experience of an early Indian in the ICS, a ‘Mr Chetty’, who after an English education at Wren’s and Oxford, ranked high in the civil services examination and was posted to a district in India. But there the club—the centre of all social life for officialdom and other English civilians—refused to admit him as a member. This was more than a personal privation: it was an absolute handicap in his career, since so much official work, and so many professional relationships, were dealt with and processed over a drink at the club. Fielding-Hall, who did not disapprove of the racial discrimination practised by his fellow Englishmen, blamed it on the unwise policy of recruiting Indians for jobs only the English should do. He muses about ICS officers like Chetty: ‘Socially he belongs to no world. He has left his own and cannot enter the other. And you cannot divorce social life from official life. They are not two things, but one.’ He adds: ‘In the end Chetty shot himself. It was a sad end for a man gifted and likeable. And although such an end was unusual, the causes which led to it are universal. I have known several civilians who were Indians, and… I think they were all unhappy.’