| Summary/Abstract |
This article examines the memoirs of Indian Civil Service officers as they continued to work in what became the Indian Administrative Service after independence. Rather than being understood solely as historical archives, these texts constitute a genre that can be called the ‘bureaucratic memoir’ which reveals masculinities that are both colonial and post-colonial. These memoirs, and their publication decades after independence reveal attempts by elites to preserve the power of the bureaucracy into subsequent decades. The texts hope to disavow but instead also reveal the patriarchal intimacies of these elites, even as these were challenged by charges of corruption and failure which emerged almost from the first moments of independence.
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