18. Phiroze Vasunia (Dept. of Classics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC, USA)
Classics and the Indian Civil Service

One of my main research interests is the relationship between Classics and the British Empire. Some of the main problems posed by the project on Classics and Empire can be illustrated by the example of the Indian Civil Service. When it came to ICS entrance requirements and the education of officers, racial fears and anxieties about British cultural solidarity and assimilation intersected with the study of Greek and Latin. For many years, the ICS was not open to native Indians and only to white Britishers. However, even when the ranks were theoretically opened to Indians, the number of natives who were able to gain admission was not high. One reason for the inability of natives to enter the ICS was the insistence on Greek and Latin as entrance requirements into the service. Even after the introduction of competitive examinations for the ICS in which Indians were able to participate, Greek and Latin were central to the education and training of ICS officers in the nineteenth century. Thus, it was precisely when the idea of British citizenship was in danger of becoming hard to define that the competitive examinations of the ICS stressed requirements in Greek and Latin. The consequence of these policies was that the ICS consisted mostly of British men who were often better trained in classical Greek and Latin and in Roman law than in local Indian languages or cultures. ICS men often looked at India through the lens of the ancient Graeco-Roman world, and they implemented policies on the ground that can only be explained in terms of their classical training. The research at the heart of this paper on the Indian Civil Service, then, has ramifications for Classics in Britain; and it also affects our understanding of nineteenth-century ideologies of class, race, and nationhood.

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