Malcolm Lyall Darling
Sir Malcolm Lyall Darling KCIE (10 December 1880 – 1 January 1969) was a member of the Indian Civil Service (ICS) who was appointed Assistant Commissioner of the Punjab, British India, in 1904.
Recognised as something of a maverick in comparison to most of his colleagues in India, Darling sought to improve the life of rural villagers and was an expert on the subject of peasant agriculture.
[2] His parents were the Reverend Thomas Darling, the Rector of the church of St Michael Paternoster Royal in London, and Mildred, née Ford, whose father, Richard, had been president of the Law Society of England and Wales.
[5] Darling later wrote about these early years in his book Apprentice to Power, in which it is apparent that his appointment as tutor and guardian to the 19-year old was a stroke of luck that significantly affected his future activities in the country.
[7]Somewhat in contradiction to this, Lynn Zastougil sees Darling as preferring Indian society to that of the "conservative, racist opinions" that prevailed in the ICS precisely because of his humanist upbringing, and says that he subsequently became disenchanted with the behaviour of his royal charge.
A variety of changes, such as understaffing by financial pressures after the World War and an increasing preference by talented people to seek opportunities in Britain rather than abroad, together with political changes in Delhi and London, meant that, according to historian Christopher Harding, "most civil servants in Punjab [were] striving simply to hold the provincial administration together and [were] generally cynical of any grand plans that harked back to the "good old days" of the early Punjab administrators".
[12] Tensions were high because the British authorities were desperately trying to stem the tide of nationalism with piecemeal reforms, and communal disputes between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs were increasing.
In the toxic environment, where the authorities were almost entirely concerned with maintaining law and order, Darling and a colleague, Frank Lugard Brayne, stood out as mavericks for their attempts to improve the conditions in rural villages.
[14] He believed that the perceived necessity of holding elaborate and expensive celebrations for life events such as birth, circumcision, marriage and death lay at the heart of the indebtedness.
[16] Darling thought that moneylenders were exploiting the situation and that the peasants were particularly exposed to problems should they suffer some natural or personal calamity, with debts sometimes doubling within a space of five years because of interest charges and families potentially being faced with repayments over several generations.
He want to expand the co-operative credit facilities to improve the situation as well as to set up courts for arbitration and to introduce measures to increase prosperity without recourse to debt, such as animal breeding centres.
[14] He estimated that the number of moneylenders and dependants in Punjab had quadrupled between 1868 and 1911, and the decline in prices for agricultural produce that followed the end of World War I made the repayment of debt even more difficult.
He agreed with Bryce Burt that it was desirable to preserve the way of life while nonetheless encouraging technological progress, but he added that in India any extra money that is made by improved cultivation tends to pass into the hands of the moneylender, the lawyer, and the factory owner ...
