Thomas Malton the Younger, East India House. Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art
The Indian Civil Service was created by the Government of India Act 1858, to take over the administration and government of those parts of India previously administered by the East India Company. The East India Company was originally—and indeed remained until its demise—a private trading company, at one point responsible for half the world’s trade. From the Seventeenth Century it had stepped into Indian political affairs to protect its trade; additionally it was granted authority to act as tax collectors for the weakening Mughal rulers and also in other parts of India.
Defending, or more accurately advancing, its position with locally recruited armies in each of its three Presidencies (operating regions, based in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras), it increasingly developed as the principal political force in India through the Eighteenth Century. For the hundred years after the Battle of Plassey in 1757 the Company was the dominant governing power in India, albeit under increasing regulation by the British Government. The Indian Rebellion in 1857 and its aftermath caused the British Government to enact the Government of India Act in 1858, to bring the Company’s administration, army and Indian possessions under the direct rule of the Crown.
From then until independence in 1947, the ICS provided the top level of the civil service governing these parts of India, known as 'British India', which included the majority of the population of the sub-continent. There remained large areas, mostly more sparsely populated, that remained governed by the Indian princes; these princely states were semi-autonomous protectorates, with the princes closely advised (in some cases almost supervised) by the Agents of the Indian Political Service, many of whom were seconded members of the ICS.
The Khan of Lalpura and his followers, 1878. Political officer Captain Robert Warburton is in the second row, on the right of the Khan (seated, wearing a white turban). National Army Museum.
The ICS inherited from the East India Company an established culture of merit, rooted in education and applied training. The Company’s administration was based on open entry (from 1853 by open competitive examination), on competence based on training and on advancement by capability in the job. From the start, the ICS retained the open competitive examination and indeed this formed the template for entry into the British domestic civil service after the contemporaneous Northcote-Trevelyan reforms were implemented.
Partly because of this well established merit-based system, the ICS was regarded from its inception as an elite part of Britain’s governing establishment. In practice, the large degree of autonomy necessarily given to officers of the ICS gave the service an extra cachet and attraction for ambitious graduates of the universities. That necessity of autonomy arose, of course, from the fact that there were never more than one thousand serving members of the ICS who had responsibility for the government of the hundreds of millions who lived in British India. From an early stage in their careers, ICS members were typically alone in their district or sub-district, having total authority over administration and the application of justice.
During the early part of the Twentieth Century the provinces of India (which had originally reflected the East India Company’s divisions of its territory) were subdivided, which allowed for greater power to be devolved to the provincial governments, thus allowing for the increased involvement of an Indian political process in legislating for the laws to be administered by the ICS.
In retrospect the ICS was instrumental in creating the governmental infrastructure that made viable the partitioned states that took independence in 1947. By that stage Indian members of the ICS made up roughly one third of the service, compared to a couple of dozen in 1900. In 1947 the independent Indian governments of India and Pakistan disbanded the ICS, replacing it with their own administrative services; most of the British members of the ICS were replaced either at independence or in the years immediately following.
Drawing by Charles D'Oyly, 1813, Collector of Dacca. Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art.
By courtesy of Major General Syed Ali Hamid
The ICS (Retired) Association, from which the Indian Civil Service Association (ICSA) developed, was set up to safeguard the pensions of ICS members, their wives/widows and their unmarried daughters. However it always served a wider social purpose for former members of the ICS and evolved into an association of those who, by family connection or for other reasons, wished to remember and uphold the standards that characterised the ICS: of integrity, efficiency, initiative and a concern for the welfare of all the peoples of the Indian subcontinent.
The ICSA was wound up in 2025 and the ICS Society was formed that year by members who wished to continue to meet and remember the achievements of the ICS and extend the fellowship established by the ICSA to others with family links and associations with, or an interest in, British India.