'Memoirs and Recollections of An Officer of the Indian Political Service' [‎23r] (45/156)

- 23 -
'll
minuting procedures of the Indian Government, which owed much to the meticulousness
and grammatical style of Lord Curzon, were laborious and often time-consuming, but
the system had the merit that in the process, no fact of importance was minimised
or lost sight of. The culmination of the course at Head-quarters was the presentation
to us probationers of several specific files in which the minutes of the Deputy
Secretary in the Department dealing with the case had been abstracted. We were then
expected, on the basis of the original facts and of the previous minutes, to produce
our own reasoned and logical submission, which would enable the Foreign or Political
Secretary, as the case might be, to reach a decision. I am glad to say that my
friends and I were adjudged to have surmounted this hurdle. So back to Campbellpur,
I went. I had now become a second class magistrate and junior civil judge, so I
heard and decided more complicated court cases. I was able to undertake village
touring on my own. In the cold weather of 1936, I was sent by my Deputy Commissioner
to an outlying village for six weeks settlement training where, under the direction
of skilled Indian Revenue officials, I was given the task of measuring and mapping
with somewhat primitive instruments the multifarious small holdings of the village
farmers. Having done this, one had then to suggest a suitable rate of land tax for
the ensuing year, or a number of years. Apart from learning about the way in which
the agricultural land tax was settled (a system which the British had inherited from
the Moguls and upon which the whole administration of British India was based) these
six weeks in the field did much to improve my knowledge of spoken and written Urdu,
for none of the villagers nor the Revenue officials knew English. The remainder of
my eighteen months in the Attock District passed quickly enough. When I had time to
spare I studied for the Interpretership examination in Urdu, which I finally passed
with Second Class Honours. My kindly and helpful D.C. continued to keep a watchful
eye on me and I was able to afford him what I hope was useful assistance. Once he
sent me on special duty to the great Sikh Religious centre of Hasan Abdul, where - during
the annual pilgrimage - there had been cases of cholera. On another occasion, we went
together into a district to a large township where serious communal trouble was expected
between Sikhs and Mohammedans on the occasion of a religious festival. It was a
ticklish situation, but the presence of a large force of armed police was enough to
avert rioting and bloodshed. Finally, just before the end of my eighteen months in
Campbellpur, I was detailed to go to the southern-most 'tahsils’ of the district,
which were inhabited by the more intractable Mohammedan* communities, to act as
Polling Officer in the first of the regular elections under the Government of India
Act of representatives to the Provincial Parliaments. For the first time ever, a
number of women were granted the vote, but whether they actually availed themselves
of it, was another question. I and my colleagues strongly suspected that many of
the figures who presented themselves cloaked in the impenetrable female 'burnoos'
with just slits for their eyes, were more male than female!