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This book, first published in 1936, provides a comprehensive description and analysis of every constitutional aspect of British rule in India from 1600 to 1936. Beginning with a description of the East India Company before Plassey, its constitution, administration of settlements, and relation to the Indian states, the book closes with an account of the reforms of the 1930s, the events leading up to the White Paper and an analysis and elucidation of the Government of India Act 1935.It was the aim of the greatest among the early British administrators in India to train the peoples of India to govern and protect themselves, as Sir Thomas Munro wote in 1824, rather than to establish the rule of a British bureaucracy. The method which they contemplated was doubtless that earned out with the most conspicuous success in Mysore, which, thanks in the main to the efforts of Sir Mark Cubbon as resident, was handed back to Indian rule in 1881 with the assurance that a tradition of sound government had been created which could be operated without detailed British supervision. Elsewhere this ideal proved impossible of accomplishment; the necessity of securing justice and order led to the progressive extension of direct British sovereignty and the evolution of that splendid instrument of government, the Indian Civil Service. That service, however, brought with it British political ideas and made English the official language of the higher functions of government. The result was inevitable; with steadily increasing strength the Indian intelligentsia has demanded the fulfilment of self-government, not in the form contemplated by Munro and his contemporaries, but in that of British Parliamentary institutions.
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ISBN : 9788121221764
Pages : 558
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