Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Fraser, Andrew Henderson Leith
FRASER, Sir ANDREW HENDERSON LEITH (1848-1919), Indian civil servant, was born at Bombay 14 November 1848, the grandson of an unsuccessful claimant to the Lovat peerage, and the eldest son of the Rev. Alexander Garden Fraser, D.D., Presbyterian missionary, by his wife, Joanna Maria, daughter of the Rev. John Shaw, a minister in Skye who came of a family of Dalnaglar, Glenshee, Perthshire. After a brilliant career at Edinburgh Academy and University, Fraser passed the open examination for the Indian civil service in 1869, and was posted two years later to the Central Provinces, where he served for the next twenty-seven years, holding almost every local executive post of distinction. He was also a member of the hemp-drugs commission (1893–1894). In 1898 he was about to retire after a prominent but not exceptional career, when his ready pen and his gifts as a public speaker attracted the notice of the viceroy, Lord Curzon, who appointed him first to officiate as secretary in the home department and shortly afterwards as chief commissioner of the Central Provinces. Three years later he was selected to be president of the commission on the Indian police; and in November 1903 Lord Curzon promoted him to the lieutenant-governorship of Bengal, having kept that great office without a permanent incumbent for more than a year in order that Fraser might fill it without being prematurely taken away from the commission. He received the K.C.S.I. on appointment.
More than three-quarters of Fraser’s Indian service was spent in the Central Provinces before their union with Berar (1903) and the industrial development of subsequent years had transformed that administration. Under the conditions then prevailing, though he sometimes laid himself open to the criticism of giving his confidence too freely, he undoubtedly acquired a very close first-hand knowledge of Indian village life and of the problems of district administration, a knowledge which was turned to account in the invaluable reforms which his commission was able to propose in the police systems of India. No branch of government touches more intimately the lives of the people; and the improvement in the efficiency and honesty of the police is Fraser’s most substantial claim to remembrance.
No part of India, however, was more different from the Central Provinces than Bengal, where in 1903 the lieutenant-governor ruled, single-handed and with an inadequate and inelastic revenue, a population of over eighty millions. Fraser’s personal charm was at a discount in a province so large that none but a minority even of his own officers could be in direct contact with him; and his anxiety to satisfy every claim that came before him gave more frequent offence than blunt refusals might have done. He lacked, also, the knack of dazzling the public eye. But the task before him was one to sap the health and expose the weak points even of the very strongest. Moreover, the partition of 1905, intended to lighten, increased the burden by the violent agitation to which it gave rise. Fraser did not originate the method of partition that was adopted; indeed, he criticized it to good effect before its adoption. But he probably hesitated to oppose a scheme which his patron, Lord Curzon, was believed to be promoting. He fully appreciated the strength of the vested interests affected, but he did not believe in the local nationalism which, as it turned out, those vested interests were able to exploit. The question was to him merely one of administrative convenience; personal modesty prevented him from realizing that the lieutenant-governor could be a symbol of national unity; his own mind was not liable to be moved by illogical sentiment, which accordingly did not enter into his estimate of the problem.
The partition became law: and in meeting the storm which arose Fraser was handicapped by a liberal dislike for all repressive measures: but he gave a fine example of personal courage in the face of repeated attempts on his own life, an example well followed not only by the British but also by the Indian public servants of the province. In 1907 Fraser was chosen moderator of the Presbyterian Church assembly in India, an honour particularly acceptable to him in view of his father’s sixty years of active missionary work in India. He retired in November 1908 and settled in the highlands of Scotland. He published a book of reminiscences, Among Indian Rajahs and Ryots (1911), was a frequent contributor to the reviews, and, especially during the European War, discharged numerous honorary administrative offices. In 1919 he gave in the press a qualified and hesitating approval to the Montagu-Chelmsford scheme. He died in Edinburgh 26 February 1919.
Fraser was twice married: first, in 1872 to Agnes (died 1877), daughter of Robert Archibald, of Devonvale, Tillicoultry; secondly, in 1883 to Henrietta Catherine Lucy, daughter of Colonel Harry Ibbotson Lugard, Indian army and Central Provinces commission. There were one son and one daughter of the marriage, and three sons of the second, all of whom, with his second wife, survived him.
[The Times, 27 February 1919; The Statesman (Calcutta), November 1908; Report of the Indian Police Commission, 1903; Blue Book on the Partition of Bengal, 1905; Sir A. H. L. Fraser, Among Indian Rajahs and Ryots; private information.]