'Memoirs and Recollections of An Officer of the Indian Political Service' [‎22r] (43/156)

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CHAPTER 4: TRAINING IN THE ATTOCK DISTRICT, PUNJAB 1936 - 1937
By the time this article was written, I had already been five months in India doing
the 18 months stint in District and Administrative work which formed part of the
training of a junior officer of the Indian Political Service The branch of the British Government of India with responsibility for managing political relations between British-ruled India and its surrounding states, and by extension the Gulf, during the period 1937-47. . The District to which
I was assigned was Attock, the most northerly district of the Punjab, and separated
from the N.W.F. Province by the River Indus. My immediate superior, Edward Eustace,
I.C.S., the Deputy Commissioner, was, like me, originally recruited from the Indian
Army. Under his tutelage, and often in his company, I toured around the district
usually on horse-back, learning something of the life of the villagers, their problems,
their families and their customs. It was a purely agricultural territory with no
artificial irrigation to speak of to assist the villagers to grow their crops and to
feed their families. Everything depended upon the rains for, if they were deficient
or fell at the wrong time, the peasants faced want and even starvation. Nevertheless
the Punjabi farmer (in Attock they were nearly all Mohammedan) came of a hardy, hard
working and very likeable race. In the more remote regions the Deputy Commissioner
representing the Great Government (the Raj) was the people's "Manbap" (Father and
Mother). Seated in their midst he would listen to their problems and complaints and
take note of them for action once he got back to head-quarters.
In Campbellpur itself I sat as a junior magistrate in court dispensing justice as far
as possible between the litigants, who delighted in bringing their enemies to court,
often on trumped-up charges of trespass or molestation. The only class that seemed
to benefit from this unseemly feuding was the Indian pleaders or lawyers, who extrac
ted a handsome livelihood from the fees they charged their clients. More interesting
were the criminal cases in which the police were involved as prosecutors. When not
in court, I studied for the examinations in law and administration, which we probation
ers were expected to take at the end of the first six months of our district training.
So, during the summer of 1936 I presented myself at Lahore for the written examinations
in the Indian Penal Code, the Criminal Procedure Code, the Law of Evidence and in
Revenue Law and practice. Once these examinations were behind one, there came a
six week period of training in a district Treasury. In my case, as it was now the
height of the hot season (Attock was notoriously hot climatically, and temperatures
in the shade often reached 110°F), I was sent to Murree, a hill station in the
neighbouring Rawalpindi district where the days were tolerably cool and the nights quite
cold. Thereafter, following a few days leave in Kashmir, I was instructed to report
for further political training in the Foreign and Political Department at Simla. Here,
in the company of four or five probationers of my year, we were given the files of
decided cases to study involving decisions of accepted political practice, affecting
the Indian States as a whole. This was a fascinating and highly instructive exercise
as some of the cases we saw had gone up as far as the Viceroy for decision. The