That’s something which greatly aided VP’s own career. The British never put any obstacles in the path of promoting you on the basis of your talent. There was also an implied understanding you wouldn’t be promoted beyond a certain point. If you did good work and were able to meet unspoken qualifications, you were promoted on the basis of your hard work and talent. That said, the British basically promoted you on merit. The top jobs were given to British officials.

That’s as much part of any revolution as leaders on the streets.ĭoes the Menon story suggest the British Raj reserved top jobs but was simultaneously meritocratic? You don’t think of men sitting at the Imperial Secretariat with piles of paperwork. These are men who often get overshadowed by political giants. They began to draft laws that guide this country towards a more structured form of constitutional progress. These are all ICS men who have faced huge moral dilemmas on serving the Raj while their countrymen were out on the streets protesting. That’s an aspect stereotyped as boring because it’s more exciting to think of revolution as fast-paced, grabbing you by the heart instantly. You don’t think of a revolution in terms of paperwork, a shortage in personnel, in terms of Viceroys and their bureaucrats sitting around a table and going over the same paragraph day in and day out. They’re the ones sitting there making reforms happen by simply drafting and redrafting clauses. But you rarely think of the more tedious technical aspect of it which is the ‘babus’ behind the scene pushing paper. When you’re talking about an Independence movement, you’re thinking of leaders who make wonderful speeches, of bloodshed, of people fighting back. The run-up to Independence had public servants in the background, but they impacted the way India evolved. It’s a mix of ambition, great good fortune and supervisors willing to let him step in and step up. They don’t really look at his lack of educational qualifications. He meets English supervisors who are incredibly supportive. It is only when he’s selling towels outside Victoria Terminus that he meets somebody who gives a letter of recommendation to join the home department in the government.

He does a number of odd jobs along the way. He then bounces around till he reaches north India. He is in Kolar Gold Fields as a coolie where he will stay for the next five years. He runs away from school at 13, after having set it on fire. It was a mix of drive, ambition and sheer good luck. How did he become the constitutional adviser? A recent biography ‘VP Menon: The Unsung Architect of Modern India’ by Narayani Basu explores one such story.

The transfer of power in 1947 from the UK to India was midwifed by an unusual set of Indian bureaucrats whose work provided the nuts and bolts of the governance architecture.

V.P.Menon by Narayani Basu