The Machinery Around the Chair: Councils and How They Grew

No Governor-General or Viceroy ever ruled alone; the office was always embedded in a council structure that itself evolved substantially, and exam questions on "reforms" are really questions about how this machinery was reshaped.

• The Executive Council. Created in nucleus form by the Regulating Act, 1773 (which gave Warren Hastings a Council of four others who could outvote him — a famously unworkable arrangement that produced years of factional deadlock with Philip Francis), the Executive Council was the Governor-General's cabinet-like body of senior officials, each usually holding a portfolio (Home, Finance, Law, Military, and so on). Pitt's India Act, 1784 fixed its size at three, giving the Governor-General a casting vote and thus more real control than Hastings ever had. Over the nineteenth century its membership was gradually enlarged and an additional member for Law was added (from 1833), and eventually Indian members were inducted (the first Indian member, Satyendra Prasad Sinha, joined only in 1909 under the Morley-Minto reforms) — a slow but telling marker of how "Indianisation" crept into the highest levels of government decades before self-rule.
• The Legislative Council. The Charter Act of 1833 first added a Law Member to advise on legislation; the Indian Councils Act of 1861 created a separate Legislative Council for law-making with some nominated non-official (including a few Indian) members — the first, tentative step toward representative government. This became the Imperial Legislative Council proper under the Indian Councils Act of 1892 (enlarging membership and introducing indirect election in a limited form) and then the Indian Councils Act of 1909 (Morley-Minto reforms), which enlarged it further and — controversially — introduced separate electorates for Muslims. The Government of India Act, 1919 replaced it with a bicameral central legislature (a Council of State and a Legislative Assembly) with a measure of real elected representation, and the Government of India Act, 1935 went further still, envisaging an all-India federation with provincial autonomy (though the federal part was never actually implemented). Throughout, it is worth remembering that the Legislative Council's powers were consultative or, at best, only partially binding on the executive until well into the twentieth century — the Governor-General/Viceroy in Council could and did override it, most notoriously when Lord Chelmsford's government pushed the Rowlatt Act through in 1919 despite unanimous Indian opposition within the Council itself.
• In practice: the phrase "Governor-General-in-Council" that appears throughout colonial legislation refers to the Governor-General acting together with his Executive Council — a reminder that even at the height of autocratic Company or Crown rule, formal single-handed rule was rare; the real exam-relevant story is the slow, uneven widening of who sat at that table.