Ramachandra Guha: How the Indian frontier service worked selfless to build the new nation

The great founding figures of the Republic have each of their birth anniversaries commemorated in public and on social media. However, landmark anniversaries of less famous but nonetheless admirable servants of India often go unnoticed. This column is inspired by the birth centenary of one such patriot, named Har Mander Singh.

Born on June 27, 1926, he was an outstanding member of the Indian Frontier Administrative Service, a daring experiment in nation-building that should be better known than it currently is.

I myself first heard of the IFAS in the early 1990s, while working on a biography of the anthropologist, Verrier Elwin. Of British descent, Elwin spent two-and-a-half decades living with and writing about the tribes of central India. After Independence, he took Indian citizenship, and in 1954 was appointed Anthropological Adviser to the North East Frontier Agency, as the state of Arunachal Pradesh was then known.

Elwin had been handpicked by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru as “a recognised authority in regard to tribal affairs”, who, thought Nehru, would bring to his new assignment a “sympathy and understanding which is most unusual and most helpful”.

Five reasons Indians should know about a long-dead Englishman who lived with adivasis https://t.co/IQh5NyxmQL

The British-born Oxford scholar Verrier Elwin was a rebel against...

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