From the Nation’s ‘Steel Frame’ to Insubordinate Workers: Tracing Changes in the Figure of the Post-colonial Civil Servant from 1947 to 1966

Abstract

The Indian Civil Service, and consequently, the Indian bureaucracy, was reformed periodically, starting in 1854, then in 1966, and then later in 2007. Each process of reform generated a set of reports known as the Administrative Reforms Commission reports which provide us with an analytical picture of the mode of historical state-rationality espoused at that time. While, usually, these reports were aimed at reforming the bureaucracy, they also betrayed the anxieties of the Indian state itself. Primarily using these reports from the 1966 period, this article examines the post-colonial Indian bureaucracy through three facets, namely, aesthetic imagery, Public Administration, and the notion of the public. Ultimately, it attempts to track changes in state-ideology from 1947 to 1966, through the figure of the civil servant.