Historic Alleys

British Governance - Calicut

There is a furor at Calicut these days resulting from the transfer of a benevolent collector popularly known as ‘collector bro’ and it appears that this resulted from the differences in opinion between bro and a member of parliament. I am sure much debate and argument will continue over this, but then again, it has always been like this. These positions of administrative bureaucracy though very important for any district are unfortunately at the mercy of the politicians. One only needs to look at the career of Malabar’s premier administrator William Logan. He was moved in and moved out of the Malabar Collector’s position no less than 7 times between 1869 and 1887 till he finally threw in the towel.