Archiving the British Raj: History of the Archival Policy of the Government of India, with Selected Documents, 1858-1947 9780199489923, 0199489920, 9780199095582, 0199095582

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Archiving the British Raj

Archiving the British Raj History of the Archival Policy of the Government of India, with Selected Documents, 1858–1947

Sabyasachi Bhattacharya

1

1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries. Published in India by Oxford University Press 2/11 Ground Floor, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi 110 002, India © Oxford University Press 2019 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted. First Edition published in 2019 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. ISBN-13 (print edition): 978-0-19-948992-3 ISBN-10 (print edition): 0-19-948992-0 ISBN-13 (eBook): 978-0-19-909558-2 ISBN-10 (eBook): 0-19-909558-2

Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro 11/13 by Tranistics Data Technologies, New Delhi 110 044 Printed in India by Rakmo Press, New Delhi 110 020

Foreword

The process for establishing archives in India started during the colonial period with the process of dismantling ‘useless’ records. Preserving records of important activities for future use was considered a potent administrative tool by the British. The story of the institutionalization of the archiving system in India has been narrated by noted historian Sabyasachi Bhattacharya in this book. The book lucidly describes the reasons, directives, problems, and policies stipulated for the formation and final setting up of the ‘muniment room’ (central records room) during the colonial period. It also documents the process of the collection, documentation, and publication of the records by the British officials and their utilization for documenting the history of India, even before the setting up of an archival institution in India. This work provides a comprehensive documentation of records used by different historians and officials for their works and the process by which a wide-ranging periodical record of letters, official orders, and government proceedings were selected and published by the governments of the three Presidency towns in India. It also chronicles the policy, step-by-step growth, and development of the record-keeping system in Britain, and its application in India. The policies formulated and followed by the British Indian government for the management, disposal, and utilization of government records have thus been systematically narrated in this volume. Bhattacharya chronologically divides this seminal work into four chapters and presents the history of the setting up of the Imperial Record Department (IRD)—the precursor of the National

viii Foreword

Archives of India (NAI)—the Indian Historical Records Commission (IHRC), policies formulated for access to records, as well as changes in this policy over the years. The effect of the partition of the country in 1947 on archival assets has also been aptly documented in this book, which makes for an interesting read. The narrative continues into the independent Indian government and presents an analysis of various archival policies in their evolutionary perspective. This book is an outcome of painstaking research conducted by Bhattacharya among the holdings of the NAI as Tagore National Fellow of the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, from 2012 to 2014. I am sure the work would be welcomed not only by scholars, researchers, and other users of archives but also by administrators—both in the public and private domain of archives management in India. Pritam Singh Director General NAI, Government of India August 2018

Abbreviations

ICS IHRC IRD NAI PRO Progs RPC WBSA

Indian Civil Service Indian Historical Records Commission Imperial Record Department National Archives of India, New Delhi Public Record Office, London Proceedings Research and Publications Committee West Bengal State Archives

Introduction

Usually, the archives are sites where historians conduct research into our past. They are not the objects of research. This work addresses that task. This is a subject somewhat out of the ordinary for the general reader or professional historians who tend to take the archives for granted. By way of introducing this book, I would like to share with the readers some thoughts that crossed my mind as I launched into this project. Before the archives came into existence, there was a time when there was no such source of knowledge of the past. Jacques Le Goff takes us back to that past when he looks at a time when neither the church in Europe nor the state in the Western countries was active in creating an archival base in the form of written knowledge.1 The transition from oral to written knowledge at that time meant erasure of popular oral memory by the powerful establishments of the church and the state, Le Goff argues. Another important intellectual intervention was that of Foucault, who highlighted the involvement of power in the creation of historical knowledge.2 That intervention set in motion another train of thought: How to address the problem of bias in historical sources in the archives? In recent times, there have been illustrious exemplars of the art of ‘reading records against the grain’.3 In India, too, there have been attempts on the lines of the Italian historian Carlo Ginzberg.4 Parallel to that, there have been historiographic innovations in reinterpreting archival records as a project to archive and classify all knowledge in a universalistic framework.5 I have referred to some important intellectual interventions questioning the historian’s normal habit of accepting data in the archives as Archiving the British Raj: History of the Archival Policy of the Government of India, with Selected Documents, 1858–1947. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Oxford University Press (2019). © Sabyasachi Bhattacharya. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199489923.003.0001

2 Archiving the British Raj

if it was beyond question. This critique created a stir even in the placid discourse of archives. Consider, for instance, the influential writings of Thomas Richards, Anne Stoller, or Nicholas Dirks, which influenced the study of archives in relation to state-building and imperialism. The most important consequence that followed was an innovation in the use of archives. The practice of ‘reading documents against the grain’ allowed the use of archival material in unprecedented modes. Thus, there developed, on the one hand, an attitude of questioning the naïve faith in archival data and, at the same time, a robust practice of using archival data and reading them ‘against the grain’. However, these developments have little relevance to the history of nineteenthcentury archival policy in the following pages. What seems to be constantly relevant is the impact of political power on archival policy. Archival Science, a major journal of archivists, devoted two numbers in 2002 to the subject ‘Archives, Records and Power’.6 Every historian using British Indian records in the archives is bound to feel the involvement of political power in the production of historical knowledge. This feature of our archival records becomes particularly evident in the historical writings on the freedom struggle and the conflict between imperialism and all anti-imperialistic forces. What is more, sometimes the possession of political power led to deliberate suppression; an instance was the British Indian government’s intervention to prevent Captain J.D. Cunningham in 1849 from using official government records in his history of the Sikh wars. Thereafter, it became a settled official policy not to allow officials of the government, both civil and military, access to the records for any purpose other than official government work. The work of J.D. Cunningham on the history of the Sikhs and Anglo-Sikh relations, published in 1849, is of outstanding importance.7 First, like Grant Duff’s book on the Maratha kingdom published in 1826, this work was based on government records, which are cited in detail in the footnotes. Second, the Government of India took exception to the citation of official records (not yet made public, for example, through Parliamentary Papers) by the author and he was on that ground officially reprimanded and penalized. Cunningham believed that he was penalized chiefly because of some critical remarks he made about the British policy towards the Sikh kingdom and because of a perception that he was guilty of leaning

Introduction 3

towards the Sikhs. He wrote in his ‘Preface’ to the second edition (published after his death): He saw no reason for continually recurring to the duty or destiny of the English in India, because he was addressing himself to his own countrymen, who know the merits and motives of their supremacy in the East, and who can themselves commonly decide whether the particular acts of a viceroy are in accordance with the general policy of his government.… The wisdom of England is not to be measured by the views and acts of any one of her sons, but is rather to be deduced from the characters of many. In India it is to be gathered in part from the high, but not always scrupulous, qualities which distinguished Clive, Hastings, and Wellesley, who acquired and secured the Empire; in part from the generous, but not always discerning, sympathies of Burke, Cornwallis, and Bentinck, who gave to English rule the stamp of moderation and humanity; and also in part from the ignorant wellmeaning of the people at large, who justly deprecating ambition in the abstract vainly strive to check the progress of conquest before its necessary limits have been attained, and before the aspiring energies of the conquerors themselves have become exhausted.8

The independence of mind shown in these remarks was not welcomed by the Indian government. Official reprimand from the governor general and his council and being sent back to regimental duty was, according to Cunningham’s brother, a shock from which he never recovered. Two years after the publication of the book and the reprimand, Cunningham died very suddenly at a young age in 1851. Later his editor G.T. Garratt of Lahore College wrote: ‘The chapter contains many statements of an injudicious nature. Indeed, as the result of certain strictures upon the policy of the Government of India … the author was dismissed from his employment in the Political Department by the Honourable East India Company and sent back to regimental duty.’9 The Cunningham episode was a rare case where the Government of India virtually censored a work of history by one of its own officers. As far as archiving is concerned the case was hugely important because it became a precedent, set by the governor general himself, that put a bar on use of official records by government officers; as for outsiders or non-officials, they could not even read records in the Imperial Record Room.

4 Archiving the British Raj

Even a casual reader of this book will perceive that in this account the core issue that emerges is the freedom of access to the records of the Government of India in the archives. While there was, on the one hand, a section of British political authorities and even of the bureaucracy that favoured not only accurate archiving of historical events, but also some limited access to records for selected nonofficial researchers, the overwhelming opinion, on the other hand, in official circles was against such access. Among the British serving in India, there were very few proponents of the idea that the Imperial Record Office should be open to historical research. There was strong and consistent bureaucratic opposition to access by non-officials for research purposes. As we shall see in the following pages, Lord Curzon was virtually the only viceroy who spoke of the historical importance of the records of the Indian government and the desirability of facilitating research. He demanded information on ‘the facilities offered to the public for research in the records’.10 He soon learned from C.R. Wilson at the head of the Record Department that there were virtually no such facilities. Curzon apprehended that ‘the jealous attitude of government in this matter was a serious bar to research’. Due to Curzon’s initiative, the governor general in council’s letter to the secretary of state contained an admission that the absence of research facilities was ‘a state of affairs [which] cannot but be regarded as a reproach to our government’.11 Soon thereafter Curzon’s sudden resignation and departure from India put to an end to the initiative he had taken. The Indian government reverted to its usual position that archival research facility in Indian records was unnecessary (because there was no one in India competent to conduct historical research) as well as dangerous (because Indian researchers would abuse their access to records to mount political propaganda against the government). In contrast to this position of the civil servants in India, the secretaries of state in England consistently showed an awareness of the historical value of the Indian records and the need to create facilities for non-official historical researchers. How do we account for that attitude, and the difference between the authorities in India and in England? It is my surmise that this was the outcome of a complex set of factors. To begin with, the bulk of the members of the Indian Civil Service (ICS) had had scarcely any education beyond the grammar

Introduction 5

school or public school, while the secretaries of state were products of the best universities of the day. Moreover, unlike the members of the ICS, the secretaries of state were political people and this made them keenly aware of the political importance of the representation of Britain’s past record and British rule in India. Third, if there were indeed secrets in the Indian government’s records, which upon revelation would endanger the Indian government, political prestige, and even political stability, then the ICS officials would know about such things; the secretaries of state were outsiders, birds of passage without the knowledge of India’s past and present. Finally, the secretaries of state in London were aware of the trend in England in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Public Records Act of 1844, and so on. After decades of persuasion by the secretary of state when the Government of India eventually appointed Record Keeper George Forrest in 1892, it was again the Secretary of State Kimberley who took the initiative to create the post.12 It is interesting to recall that the practice of opening the archives began with the French Revolution when the citizens’ right of such access was vindicated. Many years later, in our days, access to historical records was included in the charter of human rights, as, for example, in the declaration of the European community. ‘Knowledge of the past constitutes a cultural human right. It follows that any restrictions on access to archives, in the name of the protection of public and private interests, should not be imposed without a time limit.’13 This was the principle accepted by the Council of Europe in 2000 and this became the basis of an intergovernmental standard on archive access policy adopted by 48 member countries of the Council of Europe. The theoretical basis of this is explained by Keckskemeti, director of the Intellectual Council of Archives from 1962 to 1998, as follows: the archives potentially have a role ‘in reinforcing cultural identity, diversity and democracy’ in the European Union.14 While the human rights aspect has thus been recognized in the European countries’ intergovernmental understanding on archiving practices in India, the discourse of archives has shown no sign of similar practices or awareness. Similarly India is behind many countries in respect of opening records to researchers. In the USA the established practice is to open records about 30 years after the date of production of records,15 in most European countries records are opened, that is,

6 Archiving the British Raj

made publicly available, after an interval of 30 to 40 years. In India in theory the records are opened after 30 years, but actually this is not the practice because the official recognition of the lapse of 30 years is often awaited for many years. I shall be happy if the present work, preliminary in nature, opens up the possibility of further research in this relatively unexplored area of archival studies. This is particularly necessary because the study of research methodology has become part of higher training in historical studies at the universities. In conclusion, I would like to put on record my indebtedness to Yagati Chinna Rao of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. Without his editorial inputs, particularly the bibliography he compiled after meticulously scanning this book, and his energetic initiative, this project would not have seen the light of day. I am equally grateful to the authorities of the National Archives of India (NAI) for their kind permission to enable publication of this work, which was done in fulfilment of my undertaking to produce it as the Tagore National Fellow of the Ministry of Culture, Government of India. I am personally grateful to the director general, NAI, for the ‘Foreword’ he has kindly written. I would like to thank the team at Oxford University Press, who was extremely helpful in expediting the publication of this book. I would also like to acknowledge the help I received from the learned archivists at the NAI during my tenure as the Tagore National Fellow. My secretary, Amiya Kumar Baul, was of immense help in recovering material that had been scattered and in consolidating it along with all the references to documents and historical publications for my use. Finally I come to an indebtedness of a different order altogether: being the victim of a dreaded disease in the last few months I would not have been able to put this volume together without the help of my wife, Malabika Bhattacharya. Notes 1. Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, trans. S. Rendall and E. Claman (New York, 1992). 2. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York, 1994 [1971]); Michel Foucault, The Age of History (New York, 1994), pp. 218–21.

Introduction 7

3. Anne Stoller, ‘Reading the Records against the Grain’, in Refiguring the Archives, ed. Caroline Hamilton et al. (Cape Town, Dordrecht, 2002). 4. Carlo Ginzberg, The Cheese and the Worm (New York, 1976). 5. Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London, 1993). 6. Richards, The Imperial Archive; Anne Stoller, ‘Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance: On the Content and the Form’, in Refiguring the Archives, ed. Caroline Hamilton et al. (Cape Town, Dordrecht, 2002); Nicholas Dirks, ‘Annals of the Archives: Ethnographic Notes on the Sources of History’, in From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Futures, ed. Brian Axel (Durham, 2002); Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook (guest editors), ‘Archives, Records and Power: The Making of Modern Memory’, Archival Science, vol. 2 (2002): 1–19. 7. J.D. Cunningham, The History of the Sikhs, from the Origins of the Nation to the Battle of the Sutlej, ed. G.T. Garratt (London, 1918 [1849]). 8. Cunningham, The History of the Sikhs, ‘Preface’, p. 31. 9. Cunningham, History of the Sikhs, ‘Preface’, p. 31. 10. Letter from J. Macfarlane, Viceroy’s secretary, to C.R. Wilson, 25 March 1904, Home (Public) Progs, No. 98, September 1904. 11. Govt of India to Secretary to State St John Broderick, 1 September 1904, Home (Public) Progs, No. 98, September 1904. 12. Secretary of State to Govt of India (Public Branch), 15 September 1892, Home (Public), No. 113, October 1892. 13. Charles Keckskemeti and Ivan Szekely, Access to Archives (Council of Europe, 2005). 14. Keckskemeti and Szekely, Access to Archives, p. 13. 15. Department of State, USA, Public Availability of Diplomatic Archives (Washington, DC, 1985).

1

Absence of a Definite Archives Policy 1858–71

It is a paradox that an endeavour to demolish records was the beginning of the organized system to preserve documents in India after 1858. After the termination of the East India Company administration, there was an attempt to put in order the records of the Government of India. The original motivation seems to have been the destruction of old records to save space and expenditure on record preservation in the offices of the Indian government in Calcutta. The Finance Commission and the civil auditor (he was like the later-day comptroller and auditor general [CAG], and the military audit was done by a different auditor) recommended that to save unnecessary expenditure files may be sorted out to identify those which were not likely to be useful and thereby could be sold as ‘waste paper’. Since the issue of expenditure and financial stringency comes up repeatedly in the discussions on this matter, it will be useful to briefly note the nature and extent of financial stringency that formed the background to the first steps taken by the Government of India in respect of records after the termination of the East India Company’s rule. The uprising of 1857 brought home the point to the British that— as Warren Hastings had said long ago—they had to maintain their control over India ‘by the sword’.1 More specifically, the perception of Archiving the British Raj: History of the Archival Policy of the Government of India, with Selected Documents, 1858–1947. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Oxford University Press (2019). © Sabyasachi Bhattacharya. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199489923.003.0002

Absence of a Definite Archives Policy 9

the British officials that the threat posed in 1857 to British dominion in India was due to the fact that the British forces in India, that is, soldiers of British origin, were small in number compared to the numerical strength of the Indian sepoys employed in the army. The proportion of white men serving in the British Indian Army to the Indian sepoys was about 1:6 in early 1857, and in many cantonments only a few officers were white men of British origin, while the troops under them were almost entirely ‘native’. Whereas one out of seven soldiers in the British Indian Army was white in 1857, the statistics indicate a huge change in the next few years. In the years 1858–60 the ratio radically changed in favour of white soldiers and officers: their ratio to the soldiers of Indian origin became about 1:2. Certain units, such as the artillery, were deliberately designed now for reasons of British security to consist only of white soldiers. Maintaining troops brought from Britain in the ratio of one white person out of three employed in the army in India was expensive. The overall result of all this was that while the charges paid by India in England on military account was £0.34 million in 1856–7, it became 1.62 million in 1860–1, and kept rising thereafter. To sum it up, the British reaction to the uprising of 1857 was to burden India with an enormous military expenditure. The second impact of the 1857 uprising was the increasing levels of public debt, and consequent annual burden of service charges or interest. Indians had to pay for the suppression of their rebellion. In the five years between 1857 and 1861–2, the total debt of the British Indian government (mainly debt incurred in England) swelled from £59 million to about £108 million. By 1872 it had reached 122 million. This was largely due to military expenditure as well as auxiliary items in the budget such as military public works, that is, expenditure on barracks for the European soldiers. The third impact of the crisis of 1857 was on the so-called home charges, that is to say the expenses incurred in England by the British Indian government. Initially this increased during 1857–8 due to military costs. The soldiers and officers brought from Britain to serve in India were paid for by the Indian taxpayer and the War Office in London exacted every penny spent on that account.2 The consequence of this financial crisis was the Indian government’s drive to reduce expenditure, and an eminent economist of those times, James Wilson, the founder of the journal The Economist of London, as well as officials of the Treasury in England were

10 Archiving the British Raj

brought to India and two finance commissions were appointed to check expenditure on the military and the civil departments. As a part of that drive to reduce expenditure wherever possible in the early part of the year 1860, Mr. H.D. Sandeman, then Officiating Civil Auditor, suggested to the Civil Finance Commission the propriety of destroying all useless records in the several Government Offices in Calcutta, and disposing of them as waste paper, and proposed the adoption of some effective means to prevent the re-accumulation of worthless documents. The Civil Finance Commission, after consulting the heads of the various Offices at the Presidency, laid the matter before the Financial Department of the Government of India, and recommended that a Committee of experienced and cautious men should be appointed to treat the question in detail. The Commission remarked that the benefit of the proposed destruction of useless records would not be fully obtained without the substitution of one grand central archive office for the existing record-rooms attached to each Office, for the purpose of transferring to it, for safe preservation, all old records that might be of value—the Offices concerned only keeping such records as would be required for current use.3

Initially, the Finance Commission was assigned the task of pruning record collections and, probably due to the magnitude and complexity of the task, the commission admitted their inability. Thereafter, in April 1861 the Government of India appointed the Records Committee ‘for the purpose of superintending the scheme for the destruction of all useless records in the Public Offices, after carefully selecting such as might be statistically or historically valuable for preservation’.4 This Records Committee became the body that framed the archival policy and made recommendations to the government in that regard. Activities of the Records Committee It will be useful to introduce to the reader some important personalities in archival policymaking in the early days. Who were the people interested in and responsible for the organization and preservation of records in the first decade after the takeover of the Indian government from the East India Company by the Crown? Were persons

Absence of a Definite Archives Policy 11

who had historical interest appointed to serve as members of the Records Committee from 1861–72? The record of the National Archives of India (NAI) do not contain any clue except for the names in the files, but those familiar with nineteenth-century Indian history can identify several members with historical interest and attainments in historical research. The first secretary of the committee was Rev. James Long (1814–87), who was known for his knowledge of Indian languages and his publication of old records Calcutta in Olden Times (1852); we shall see later that in the middle 1860s he edited, as a member of the Records Committee, a selection of government records. The first president of the committee was James C. Erskine (1821–93) of the ICS, who edited and published his father William Erskine’s (1773–1852) work History of India under Babur and Humayun (1852); he was also the vice chancellor of Calcutta University and director of Public Instructions in Bombay Presidency. The third member was Richard Temple (1826–1902), who later biographized James Thomason (Rulers of India series, Oxford, 1893) and showed some historical interest in his more well-known work India in 1880 (London, 1881). Among those who joined the committee in the next 10 years, there were some who had historical works to their credit. James Talboys Wheeler (1824–1897) came from a humble background as a bookseller in England, worked as the editor of Madras Spectator, and edited old Madras records under the title Madras in Olden Times, 1639–1748 (Madras, 1882). While serving as assistant secretary to the Government of India in the Foreign Department from 1862 to 1870, he was drawn into the Records Committee. He was the only paid secretary of the committee from 1863 to 1869. Among his historical works, India under British Rule (1886) was quite well known as a textbook. He was also the author of Early Travellers in India (drawing upon S. Purchas and J.H. Van Linschoten, published in 1864) and Early Records of the British in India (London, 1878). While Wheeler or Rev. Long from outside the ICS served as secretaries of the Records Committee, the president was always a distinguished civil servant. For example, the last one among them was W.S. Seton-Karr, ICS, who edited Selections from Calcutta Gazettee, 1784–1823 (six volumes, 1864–9), and Marquess of Cornwallis (Rulers of India series, Oxford, 1893). As has been mentioned earlier,

12 Archiving the British Raj

the files at the NAI contain not a clue as regards the scholarly interests of the persons in the Records Committee. However, the Records Committee probably drew to itself men with such interests. Members inducted in the late 1860s included ‘A. Colvin’, probably Auckland Colvin who served in the ICS in the North-western Provinces (later to became lieutenant governor of the North-western Provinces and Oudh from 1887–92) and wrote a biographical account in the Rulers of India series of history books edited by Sir William Hunter. ‘Dr Mouat’ was evidently Dr Francis J. Mouat (1816–1897), who was a teacher in Calcutta Medical College. For a while James CaveBrowne served on the Records Committee; he is the author of a historical treatise Indian Infanticide, Its Origins, Progress and Suppression (London, 1857). Among the higher authorities in India, A.O. Hume, ICS, played an important role from outside the Records Committee. He is chiefly known as one of the Englishmen who lent support to the Indian National Congress, but he is also to be remembered as an important supporter of the cause of archiving for purposes of historical documentation: that was his contribution as a secretary to the Government of India in the Revenue and Agricultural Department when the Records Committee was floundering for want of administrative support. Another friend of the Records Committee was Sir Charles Trevelyan, the finance member of the viceroy’s council; he helped in getting Wheeler the post of a salaried secretary to the Records Committee. Among those outside of the Records Committee, Sir William Hunter was an important personality in determining archival policy. He joined the ICS in 1862 in the Bengal Presidency and very soon he produced The Annals of Rural Bengal (1868), a historical account that is still cited. Then followed 20 volumes of the Statistical Account of Bengal (1875–7) and the Imperial Gazetteer (1881). He became an unquestionable authority and the ‘home government’ depended on his advice on recordkeeping in the 1870s. Hunter was a prolific author who moulded the outlook in colonial historiography. Many of the historical works mentioned earlier, written by Erskine, Temple, Colvin, and others, were part of the Rulers of India series edited by Hunter. He was instrumental in giving a colonialist turn to the archiving of records and the narration of the history of British India. At the same time,

Absence of a Definite Archives Policy 13

his academic acceptance and reputation was undeniable on account of his works The Indian Muslims (London, 1871) and The Earl of Mayo (London, 1876), as well as his contribution as chairman to the Indian Education Commission report (Calcutta, 1883) and his last major work Marques of Dalhousie (Rulers of India series, Oxford, 1895). Only some of the papers relating to the internal working of the committee in the early days have survived, but we have a fairly complete idea of how the committee pursued the task set for them by the Indian government. The Government of India recorded later that the Committee was requested to associate with it for the time being the head of the Office on the records of which it might be employed, in examining the records of the several Offices, and separating useless papers for disposal or destruction, having the papers selected for preservation, bound and catalogued, and placed in a separate recordroom accessible to all persons who might wish to consult them. A small establishment, consisting of clerks and peons, was also allowed to the Commission. The Committee was, in this instance, prohibited from concerning itself with the actual disposal or destruction of worthless records. Later, however, the Secretary to the Committee was ordered to arrange for the sale of such records to paper makers in Calcutta.5

As the volume of business increased, the unpaid secretary was replaced by a paid secretary who had expertise in the use of records. In 1863, Mr Wheeler, formerly of the Madras Educational Department, was appointed to be secretary to the committee on a salary of 500 rupees per month. Actually, the question of Mr Wheeler’s appointment was first raised by the Secretary of State for India who, in consideration of the satisfactory manner in which Mr. Wheeler had arranged and classified the records of the Madras Presidency, and prior to being apprised of the steps already taken by the Government of India for the attainment of the desired end suggested6 the desirability of availing of Mr Wheeler’s practical experience in the work of examining and classifying official records, in weeding the Government Offices in this side of India of all the mass of worthless papers with which they were unnecessarily encumbered.7

14 Archiving the British Raj

James Talboys Wheeler was originally employed in the Madras Education Service and there he acquired a reputation as a records expert since he helped arrange the records of the government of Madras. From 1863 to 1869, he served as the secretary to the Indian government’s Records Committee. The activities of the committee can be divided into three phases. In the first, 1861 to 1865, the Records Committee deliberated on the archival policy to formulate two alternatives: either the government should set up a central ‘muniment room’, that is, record room, or the different departments should have record rooms of their own and document selection for preservation was their concern. The first alternative was initially recommended in the committee’s report in June 1861. The second alternative was recommended by the president of the committee in August 1863. After some dithering, in 1865 the government decided to discard the idea of a muniment room, that is, a central record room; decentralized preservation of records was initially the alternative that was chosen by the Government of India. This is the summary of what happened, but in the story how it happened there is something more—we get to know in the details what were the motives and the policy of the government. Basically, the story below tells us that the Records Committee, which included scholars such as Rev. James Long, wanted to create a muniment room, or central archive, to facilitate historical research, while the bureaucracy—specially the veteran ICS officials in the viceroy’s council, were opposed to that idea because not only was it financially undesirable, since it would be an additional expenditure, but also politically undesirable to open the records to the scrutiny of readers outside the bureaucracy. In pressing for a muniment room facilitating historical enquiries, Rev. Long, the senior-most member of the Records Committee and in the beginning their honorary secretary, probably played an important role. Rev. James Long was ordained in London in 1839 and joined the Christian Missionary Society; he also pursued his own historical and literary interests in Bengal for many decades. He was known for his sympathy for the ‘natives’, and around the time of the Indigo Rebellion in Bengal had courageously published a Bengali play (written by Dinabandhu Mitra and translated into English by the poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt) on the oppressions inflicted by

Absence of a Definite Archives Policy 15

English indigo planters upon the Bengal peasantry; he was convicted in a libel suit leading to a fine of a 1,000 rupees and imprisonment for a month. Despite this vengeful reaction of the indigo planters, his reputation as a literary personality and editor was high enough to secure him a place in the Records Committee. As regards the Records Committee’s recommendation of a muniment room in a report dated 21 June 1861, they said: In dealing with this vast mass of records, the primary considerations are,—how the documents to be preserved may be best secured from injury, and rendered most readily accessible for reference. The greater portion of the papers has long since passed from the stage of practical official usefulness into that of purely historic and statistical interest. Though they continue to occupy the record-rooms of the offices in which they were prepared, the occasions on which they are referred to seem to be rare. Their real value consists in the fact that they contain a great deal of detailed information relative to the affair of the country which can be had in no other repository. It seems to be desirable, therefore, that these papers should be made available in Calcutta to all who may wish to consult them, and that such a published account of them should be provided as may enable enquiries to ascertain readily what documents are available.8

For the implementation of this proposal, the committee made several propositions of which the important ones are as follows: In order to effect these objects, the commission propose—(I) That a printed index be prepared to all valuable documents. (II) That such of the original documents as seem to be of any permanent interest in place of being scattered, as at present, over all Calcutta, should be preserved in a single muniment room. (III) That selections or précis should from time to time, be made of papers or more prominent interest or value in view to their publication.9

The amount of records awaiting archiving as estimated by the Records Committee was enormous, amounting in their estimate to over 16,255 volumes and 16,300 bundles of current files alone. Its recommendations to appoint a record keeper and archival staff in a separate muniment room was not acceptable to the Government of India on the ground that additional expenditure must be avoided.

16 Archiving the British Raj

The only position sanctioned by the government was, as we have seen earlier, that of J.T. Wheeler as the committee’s secretary, parttime, with a salary of 500 rupees per month. The Government of India was recovering slowly from the financial crisis and debt burden caused by the enormous increase in military expenditure during the uprising of 1857. That was the reason cited by the government for denying financial support to the Records Committee. The Records Committee was, in fact, entrusted with a responsibility without the means of discharging that responsibility. The government did not oppose the Records Committee’s proposals, but they took no action on it until 1863. In August 1863, the higher bureaucracy, opposed to the idea of collecting papers in one muniment room, engineered the rejection of the Records Committee’s proposals. It was virtually a coup d’état. The chairman of the Records Committee was Walter Scott Seton-Karr, a very upper-class man, a product of Rugby and Haileybury, who was in the ICS since 1842 and rose to the position of foreign secretary in 1868–70. A member of the viceroy’s council since 1861, he seems to have little regard for members of the Records Committee such as the clergyman Rev. J. Long or its secretary J.T. Wheeler. Seton-Karr wrote a memorandum on 8 August 1863 on his own rejecting the recommendation of the Records Committee he chaired. This episode was an example of artful manipulations within the bureaucracy. Seton-Karr writes in his memo: ‘I understand that the Government of India have, for the present at least, abandoned the idea of a central Muniment Room, or have not provided for such a Room.’10 Thus, when he rejected the Records Committee’s recommendation he already knew that the government was inclined to do so. Further, he asked J.T. Wheeler, the secretary to the Records Committee, to write another memo. Wheeler writes that Seton-Karr ‘invited me to express my own views upon the subject, when it was known that those views were strongly opposed to the recommendations of the Commission’11 (the Records Committee was sometimes called the Record Commission). Seton-Karr in his report began with an adverse observation about the Record Commission or Committee he chaired: Looking to the comparatively limited practical effect of the labours of the Commission hitherto, I assume that it is not too late to effect

Absence of a Definite Archives Policy 17

alterations in our plans, provided such can be justified, or seem expedient.… From the plan of a Central Muniment Room recommended by the Commission and since laid before Government, I must dissent. Its expense would be very great, and the advantages problematical and, it appears to me, quite incommensurate with the expense. A very large room or series of rooms would have to be erected or set apart; a special Officer would have to be appointed to the charge of the said Records; and I do not exactly understand to what Office such an Official would consider himself subordinate, or whether he would constitute a separate Department under the Government of India. But when the numbers of the Records to be conveyed to the proposed Muniment Room are estimated at 2,00,000, by the Commission, and these all unprinted, it may be conceived that no person is likely to be found who, in an ordinary life-time, could master one-half of their contents. The practical inconvenience of a removal of the old Records from such Departments as the Foreign and Home Offices and the Government of Bengal has, I think, been very much under-rated, as far as the smooth working of those really important Departments is concerned; and it is surely more likely that a separate Record-keeper in each great and permanent Office, gradually trained to and familiar with his business, would exhibit a greater amount of knowledge and ability to refer to any given subject, than would a single Record-keeper or Librarian placed in charge of an enormous number of unprinted volumes, comprising a wide range of subjects, and extending over three-quarters of a century.12

Instead of a central record office, or muniment room, Seton-Karr recommended decentralized record-keeping in different departments. He urged the propriety of selecting a certain number of Head Offices, such as the Secretariats and others, which, and no others, should be Permanent Offices of Record, [and] the propriety of retaining, in such Offices, the Records in bulk and in their present shape, instead of in a Central Muniment Room, care being taken, by the issue of a few Rules, that every volume be regularly inspected and preserved.… Of course, all documents that can be separated from others and are shown to be worthless after a year or two of their existence, can, even from such Offices, be removed as rubbish.13

Incidentally, it is interesting to observe that later when the viceroy and his council summed up the above-mentioned proceedings in

18 Archiving the British Raj

their dispatch to the secretary of state, they concealed the fact of difference of opinion between the members of the Records Committee and its president, Seton-Karr. The viceroy in council wrote that ‘in August 1863 the Records Committee submitted a series of revised propositions’, and then proceeded to summarize Seton-Karr’s proposals that they approved.14 Thus, they pretended to believe that after submitting proposals in June 1861 the Records Committee changed their mind. Actually, the committee’s opinion in favour of a central archive was rejected. The viceroy in council reported the matter the way he did probably because the secretary of state Sir Charles Wood was known to be in favour of a muniment room and, in fact, said so clearly in his dispatch to the Indian government.15 Seton-Karr also proposed, inter alia, that selected records be published from time to time. That was also the main point made by J.T. Wheeler in his memorandum.16 Both Seton-Karr and Wheeler emphasized the importance of publishing extracts from records, implicitly suggesting that publishing selected records was a substitute for archiving records in a muniment room. In fact, publication of selected records was already under way and may be counted as the main concrete achievement of the Records Committee. The first attempt, a calendar of State Papers, Secret Series, of 1774–5, compiled by a Mr Scott Smith, then secretary to the committee, was never completed due to the premature death of the compiler. Several volumes containing extracts from the old numbers of the Calcutta Gazette were published, but they were from a source generally available and not really rare government records. The only good publication sponsored by the committee was a work of historical documentation by Rev. J. Long, a member of the committee, who compiled and edited a selection of records relating to Bengal from 1748 to 1767. To revert to the main issue, whether a muniment room, or central archive, was necessary and desirable, the rejection of the idea by the president of the Records Committee, Seton-Karr, was seized upon as the decisive factor by Viceroy John Lawrence and his council in their resolution of 3 October 1865.17 This decision was taken in 1865, while Seton-Karr had given his opinion in 1863 and the Records Committee had suggested a central record office in 1861. The government was obviously dragging its feet and eventually rejected the creation of a central record room. The reasons appear to be

Absence of a Definite Archives Policy 19

bureaucratic inertia and the apprehension of increase in expenditure at a time when Viceroy Lawrence’s government was trying to tide over the financial crisis precipitated by the uprising of 1857. When the resolution in this regard was dispatched to London, the secretary of state, Sir Charles Wood, to his credit, commented: The preservation and arrangement of the public Records and the facility of access to them on the part both of the officers of Government and of persons desiring to consult them for historical or antiquarian purposes are objects of great importance; and although perhaps the latter object would be best promoted by the formation of a Central Muniment Room, I approve on the whole your decision to leave the Records, which are to be preserved, in the several Offices to which they belong.18

In this instance, Sir Charles Wood represented the enlightened opinion prevailing in England in respect of the value of historical records and the preservation of records by an appropriate archive policy. As we shall see later, the secretaries of state for India took this position fairly consistently while the majority of the British Indian bureaucracy tended to neglect the value of historical records except insofar as it served some utilitarian purposes of governance. In the second phase, from 1865 to 1869, there is no further discussion of a central record room. The secretary of the Records Committee, J.T. Wheeler, was engaged in preparing for publication some state papers but he was unable to complete the task till 1869 when he left the committee to join a higher post in the British Burma Commission. The post of Records Committee’s paid secretary thus fell vacant and was never filled up again. The Records Committee’s members visited some departments to begin the process of setting up departmental record rooms and to put the old papers in order. Since a regular archival staff was estimated to be expensive, the higher authorities in India and the ‘home authorities’ preferred the cheaper alternative of publishing selected documents. As secretary of the committee, J.T. Wheeler published a useful handbook and guide to records entitled Memorandum on the Records of Foreign Department (Calcutta, 1865). His selection of narratives of travellers was popular for many years.19 He also published selections from the records. One such collection published in 1878 became a success, Early Records of British India. It was an eclectic collection, for

20 Archiving the British Raj

he included British memoirs and travel accounts as well as government records. He was proud that he had ‘drawn directly from the fountain head, after a study of the records of government of India’.20 But there was not much appreciation of his work in official circles, and W.W. Hunter did not think that the expense of paying a salary to this former professor of History at Madras Presidency College was justified. In the last major book Wheeler published, his ‘Preface’ was somewhat bitter in tone: More than one British ruler in India has, sinned against history, and might well like to shut it up with confidential minutes and secret negotiations. Within the present century, India has been desolated by wars as cruel as those of the Heptarchy, and as unmeaning as those of the White and Red Roses. Within the present generation, it has been distracted and tortured by a military revolt, created by a scare about greased cartridges, but leading to crimes more horrible than those of the French Revolution. Yet Anglo-Indian statesmen have been known to ignore the past.21

The phase from 1869 to 1871 was the one when the government returned to the plan of publishing selected records and calendars and decisively abandoned the idea of a central record room. In this matter the advice of Sir William Hunter was decisive: there was, he said, no need for a public record office as it existed in England and elsewhere in Europe. Viceroy Northbrook was of the view that it would serve a political purpose to selectively publish some documents. Thus, the deliberations on an archival policy ended in this phase with a firm rejection of the plan for a central record room and prioritization of publication of selected documents of the imperial past. It seems that the majority of the members of the governor general’s council were averse to additional expenditure on account of archiving. A.O. Hume pointed out that ‘a great deal of money has been spent … and very little results have been obtained’. And yet keeping records in good shape was important. ‘Year by year records are decaying; and unless some measures be adopted, it will before very long, be found that like the defunct Commission [Records Committee, sometimes called Commission] the subjects of their investigations have dissolved themselves’.22 In writing, thus, A.O. Hume, later to become a founding member of the Indian National

Absence of a Definite Archives Policy 21

Congress, was in the viceroy’s council a lone voice defending the need for careful archiving. However, given the decision at the highest level in 1865 to abandon the scheme of a central muniment room, the only option that was open was to press for publication of selected documents and handbooks or guides to records. There is evidence that the opposition to the idea of a central record office open to the public was partly motivated by political considerations. The file noting of ‘E.C.B’ of the viceroy’s council on the question of muniment room are significant. Sir Edward Clive Bayley (1821–1884) had a long tenure as home secretary (1862–72) and he had also worked in the foreign and political departments. He did not mince words: ‘There are records even of the last century which it might cause inconvenience to throw open to the public.’23 Further, he said that selections from records were to be made carefully. The wily, old bureaucrat commented on Rev. Long’s selection, perhaps bearing in mind how Long, at one time, had been on the side of the peasantry in the Indigo Rebellion: I doubt if they [Long’s selected documents] would be equally satisfactory to the literary inquirer who wishes to trace the gradual growth and influence of English law, of English institution, or the intricate relations with early Native powers and the constitutional questions which arise out of them. The actual question as to what to print was sometime ago solved, and I never understood why the solution was abandoned by the proposal to print what are called the ‘General Letters’ in each Department.24

It was politically the safest course of action to publish the General Letters, which omitted details and summed up decisions the government arrived at. The political motive is not so openly visible in the position taken by Sir William Hunter, another ICS veteran. He was content with saying that a muniment room open to the public will bring in natives who worked for the press, if at all natives take any interest in historical records. In India, he writes in 1871 in a reply to a query from the Government of India: There is no class of men of letters and leisure to use such a Central Office [of Records].… Writers of considerable ability are to be

22 Archiving the British Raj

found … but they constitute a very small body, and their talents are devoted to the Press or other forms of current literature, rather than those greater researches which a State Paper Office in a European capital subserves.25

That was one part of Hunter’s argument against opening a central record office of the European type in India; the other part was that the Indian government need not spend money on a central record office of the European pattern that would cost over £30,000 per annum. Hunter’s opinion was decisive because he had a reputation as a scholar, and his opinion was that India was too backward to need a central record office open to researchers, nor could India afford it. Thus, in 1871 the idea of a central record office, or a muniment room, was totally abandoned. It was a step backwards. Historiography and Archiving Finally, we must turn to the task of considering the state of British Indian historiography and the government’s archiving policy, or rather the lack of an archiving policy. How did colonial historians address the issue of documenting their narratives before an archive came into existence? While it is obvious that it was a serious disadvantage for the historians to have no systematic access to organized and classified documents, one can observe in the historical works of the early nineteenth century various factors that aided the construction of narratives. These factors were (i) the authors’ personal knowledge of the times, places, and events they described, since the authors were generally veteran servants of the East India Company; (ii) the author’s access to protagonists in the narrative, the actual actors on the stage of history, their memories of the past, and their private papers and correspondence; and (iii) the availability of pre1857 East India Company and government records in the depositories and well-organized archives in England—in fact, for a long time these records were available more easily in England than they were in India. That is the impression one gathers from the early colonial historians’ life and work. Let us look at some representative historians who wrote their major works before the period we are considering, when the idea of the

Absence of a Definite Archives Policy 23

central archive in India began to be considered by the Government of India. Robert Orme (1728–1801) was an eminent eighteenthcentury historian, Sir John Malcolm’s (1769–1833) career spanned the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while the historical writings of Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779–1859) and James Grant Duff (1789–1858) are representative of early nineteenth-century historiography. We will also examine the work of Munshi Mohan Lal (1812–1879), whose claim to fame has not been recognized, but he was one of the earliest historians of Indian origin to write document-based history. How did these historians cope with the absence of a central archive in India where one could find the records of the British Indian government? And what were the documentary resources they could avail of to write history? Robert Orme (1728–1801)

One of the British historians greatly admired by Sir Jadunath Sarkar and his generation for his research into records was Robert Orme. Lord Macaulay, on the other hand, considered him pedantic and his excessively detailed narration unreadable. In his review of John Malcolm’s biography of Clive, Macaulay said that Orme ‘is minute even to tediousness’, so that ‘his narrative, though one of the most authentic … is now scarcely ever read’.26 Sarkar’s admiration and Macaulay’s distaste for Orme’s works were due to the same cause: Orme’s meticulous citation of documents and depiction of details. He seems to have been quite a remarkable man. He was a friend of Robert Clive and the famous literary personality Dr Johnson. After schooling in Harrow, at the age of 15, he had gone to Calcutta and joined the East India Company’s service. He rose to the position of a member of the Madras Council in 1754, and he was commonly regarded as the man who pushed Robert Clive to the leadership of the British operations in Calcutta in 1756–7. In 1758, he was on his way home when he was captured by the French, but he managed to obtain release and proceeded to London the following year. He virtually set up a private archive in London. Orme had acquired many manuscript sources while he served in India from 1742 to 1758, and after retirement he proceeded to build a collection of records and books on India in London. A friend of

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his writes that ‘Mr. Orme used frequently to lament the want of an Oriental collection of manuscripts’ and ‘the expense and labour of obtaining [them] which was oppressive in the extreme’. Therefore, In October 1760, Mr. Orme arrived in London, and soon afterwards purchased a house which was then building in Harley Street, Cavendish Square. Here he began to collect his elegant and valuable library, comprising the most choice editions of the Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and English authors; and also to accumulate materials, regardless of labour or expense, for the completion of his ‘History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan, from the year 1745,’ which he had long meditated. These materials, printed and manuscript, he had begun to collect soon after his arrival in India in 1742.27

Orme published his post-retirement research in 1782 entitled Historical Fragments of the Moghal Empire, of the Morattoes, and of the English Concerns in Indostan (London, 1782; second edition 1805). The foundation of his reputation was, however, the next work in 1803, History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan (London, 1803). Careful documentation enabled him to narrate events in detail and to enumerate date and place. The use of footnotes was not yet common; hence, Orme listed the ‘Authorities’, that is, his sources, at the end of the book. Apart from his own collection of contemporary sources, he states that he was allowed access to the East India Company records in London. In this regard, the work was unique until the publication of James Grant Duff’s history of the Marathas (1826), John Malcolm’s biography of Clive (1836), and G.R. Gleig’s work on Warren Hastings (1841), which matched Orme’s work in documentation. The work of James Mill (1773–1836), Orme’s junior contemporary and famous as the author of The History of British India, published in 1817–18 offers a striking contrast to Orme’s works. The series of volumes of Mill’s history, which he began to publish in 1817, was utterly lacking in the kind of documentation Orme provided. Since Mill was an important official in the East India Company’s headquarters in London, he had access to the company’s library. He founded his history on his limited readings of books and reports by European authors on India; he knew no Indian language and never

Absence of a Definite Archives Policy 25

set foot in India. He made a virtue of his limited experience about India and wrote that it was possible to ‘obtain more knowledge of India in one year in his closet in England, than he could obtain … by the use of his eyes and ears in India’.28 In 1844, while editing a new edition of Mill’s work, H.H. Wilson pointed out, fairly courteously in editorial footnotes, a great many factual errors in Mill’s narrative. And yet, Mill’s history was very successful and influential. That was for two reasons. First, Mill’s history gave expression to the historical imagination of the ideology of utilitarianism. That ideology, transmitted through the influence of Jeremy Bentham, as Eric Stokes has demonstrated, dominated policymaking in British India.29 In the school for the training of civil servants of the East India Company at Haileybury, till around 1855, Mill’s history was compulsory reading for those about to leave for India. Second, Mill’s history reflected the cast of mind of imperial Britain in the years following the emergence of Britain as a superpower after her victory in the Napoleonic wars and her growing economic might after the Industrial Revolution. James Mill popularized a message of confident imperialism, which was what readers in England wanted to hear.30 Thus, James Mill was a successful author. But he scarcely merits notice in a discussion about the documentation of historical narratives and the use of archives. Sir John Malcolm (1769–1833)

Orme’s works were well-documented and scholarly, but not very popular. The biography of Robert Clive in 1836 by Sir John Malcolm was a very widely read book, one of the earliest in a long series of biographies in praise of empire builders written by British officials who served in India. The book attracted attention partly because Lord Macaulay wrote his celebrated essay on Clive in the Edinburgh Review in 1840 by way of reviewing the biography written by Malcolm. Further, it was also because Malcolm was a celebrity in contemporary India. Malcolm joined the East India Company’s military service when he was very young, about 15 years of age. He had an amazing talent for being there at important historical moments, serving the highest in the land. He was in the Siege of Seringapatam in Mysore under Cornwallis in 1792, later an emissary chosen by Lord Wellesley to negotiate with Persia in 1799–1801, and again

26 Archiving the British Raj

an officer serving under General Arthur Wellesley at the beginning of the Maratha War in 1803, and with Lord Lake in 1805 in the campaign that settled the fate of northern India; finally, as brigadier general in the army of the Deccan Malcolm successfully concluded the campaign in the Pindari–Maratha War of 1817–18. Moreover, he also had a reputation as a diplomat and was the architect of the political settlement of Mysore after the fall of Seringapatam in 1799, two commercial and political treaties with Persia in 1801, the treaty of Burhanpur after the Anglo-Maratha war in 1805, the treaties with Sindhia and Holkar in 1805, the surrender of Asirgarh to the British, and the arrangements leading to the abdication of Peshwa Baji Rao in 1819. He failed only twice in his career—once in 1808 when Lord Minto sent him to negotiate with Persia (the overwhelming French influence in the Persian court defeated him) and again in 1822 when antagonism in England denied him the governorship of Bombay. He retired to England in a huff, but he managed to get the governorship of Bombay in 1827. Upon finally returning to England in 1830 he had himself elected to Parliament in 1831–2, and that was when he tried to complete his project of writing the ‘official’ biography of Clive, based upon Clive’s private papers that Malcolm obtained from his friend Lord Powis, Clive’s son. It was an amazing career for a commoner that ended in burial in the Westminster Abbey. Inevitably, his book on Clive was very popular, though later historians such as Macaulay or Forrest were critical of that work. The book, in three volumes, was almost entirely written on the basis of Clive’s private correspondence with a few official minutes thrown in when they happened to be in Clive’s possession. Malcolm died before he completed his biography of Clive, and his widow wrote in his ‘Preface’: The present work was commenced in consequence of the possession of a body of unpublished documents, which, having been presented among the family records at Walcott, were thrown open to the author by the friendship of the Earl of Powis. These consisted chiefly of the whole correspondence of Lord Clive, containing the originals of nearly every letter which he had received from the time when he first filled a public situation in India, down to the period at which he finally quitted that country; with copies of answers to many of the most important of them. They contained also several memoirs

Absence of a Definite Archives Policy 27

regarding the chief enterprises in which he was engaged, and minutes of council on the leading measures of his government.31

Thus, Malcolm had access to plenty of private records, but his book had little of official records of the Government of India. Macaulay in his review in the Edinburgh Review was critical of the work on the grounds that the sources were not ‘skillfully worked up’ by Malcolm, and also because of the hero-worshippers’ bias in the biography. The effect of the book, even when we make the largest allowance for the partiality of those who have furnished and of those who have digested the materials, is, on the whole, greatly to raise the character of Lord Clive. We are far indeed from sympathizing with Sir John Malcolm, whose love passes the love of biographers, and who can see nothing but wisdom and justice in the actions of his idol.32

However, Malcolm’s biography of Clive set a pattern of biographizing empire builders till the end of the century, a pattern that saw the publication of dozens of books of that genre in the Rulers of India series edited by Sir William Hunter. That was Malcolm’s contribution to colonialist historiography, apart from his achievement in constituting a historical narrative on the basis of private papers in England regardless of the absence of support from a British Indian archive. Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779–1859)

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Mountstuart Elphinstone was undoubtedly the most eminent historian of India. His book on Indian history was a pioneering work of synthesis covering history from the ancient period onwards. Not notable for its archival content, the book refers rarely to records, but it was the book most widely read along with James Mill’s history. The first generation of graduates of Indian universities (founded in 1858–9), R.G. Bhandarkar in Bombay and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee in Calcutta, were prescribed this as a textbook. Elphinstone’s eminence as a historian was partly due to the quality of his writings and partly due to the fact that he was an important personality. He left behind no autobiography, but we have an outline of his eventful life by E. Colebrook (1813–1859), Memoir

28 Archiving the British Raj

of the Hon. Mountstuart Elphinstone (London, 1861). Born in a very old landed family (his father was the 11th Baron Elphinstone), he joined the ICS as a ‘writer’ or clerk, at the age of 16, in 1795. When he was only 25 he was appointed Resident at Nagpur, after having distinguished himself on the staff of Arthur Wellesley at the battles of Assaye and Argaum. In 1809, he was sent to Kabul as an envoy to dissuade the amir from joining the French camp in the ongoing Anglo-French contest for hegemony. Kabul did not join France eventually. From 1811, Elphinstone had a long tenure as Resident at Poona (Pune) when he defeated various efforts of the peshwa to challenge the British, and this course of events led to the annexation of his territory. Elphinstone’s brilliant record of service led to his elevation to the post of governor of Bombay (1819–27). After retirement, he was twice offered the position of governor general, but he declined and spent his last years in writing History of India (1841) and The Rise of British Power in the East, edited after his death by Sir Edward Colebrooke. As we have noted earlier, Elphinstone’s history is not notable for archival inputs and use of documentary sources. Its merit was that it departed from the pattern set by James Mill’s highly judgemental and anti-India tone. In his ‘Preface’ to the History of India, Elphinstone said that Mill’s history ‘left some room for doubt and discussion’. And further: ‘Hindus … even in their present state of depression … are on a footing of equality with any people out of Europe.… They must have attained a state of civilization only surpassed by a few of the most favoured of the nations.’33 As distinct from Mill’s denunciation of India’s ancient civilization, Elphinstone took great care to study and to narrate ancient India’s achievements in the study of astronomy, mathematics, geography, chemistry and medicine, fine arts, and so on; he paid attention to the ‘present state of knowledge’ and related that to the ancient knowledge system, that is, ‘the six systems of philosophy’, Vedanta, schools of logicians, ascetic sects, and so on.34 While James Mill had never set his foot in India or learnt any Indian languages, Elphinstone, having spent his whole working life in India, acquired an empathy with India and its civilization. The second remarkable feature of Elphinstone’s history was that he was the originator of the division of India’s past into three periods, that is, Hindu, Muslim, and British periods. After him this

Absence of a Definite Archives Policy 29

became a standard practice among historians of India. The fact that this division corresponded with the tripartite division of European history into ancient, mediaeval, and modern periods helped establish it as a standard practice of Indian historiography. A third thing in Elphinstone’s book that springs to the eye is regionalization. To James Mill, India was one undifferentiated land mass, to Orme it was ‘Indostan’, but Elphinstone’s experience in different regions of India made him aware of the different trajectories of history—in, for instance, Deccan as distant from northern India. Elphinstone revised his two volumes on the history of the Hindu and Muslim periods several times, but the third volume, published under the title Rise of British Power in the East, could not be completed with equal attention. Instead of state papers, published or unpublished in the archives, he depended on memoirs and histories written by some predecessors, and he drew upon his own memories. Colebrook, as editor of that last posthumous volume by Elphinstone, added a few references to the documents. Elphinstone did not care to take that trouble. Actually, Elphinstone’s protégé, Grant Duff, did a far better job in providing history with archival inputs. James Grant Duff (1789–1858)

Among the nineteenth-century historians, the first to show in his works an awareness of the need to base historical writings on documentation was James Grant Duff. In 1826, his History of the Mahrattas in three volumes was a pioneering work and he wrote a long preface to enumerate his documentary sources: On the subversion of the government of the Peshwas the most important of their state papers, and of their public and secret correspondence, were made over to me by Mr. Elphinstone, when he was acting under the orders of the Marquis of Hastings as sole Commissioner for the settlement of the conquered territory in the Deccan. Captain Henry Dundas Robertson, collector and magistrate of Poona, with Mr. Elphinstone’s sanction, allowed confidential agents employed by me, to have access to the mass of papers which were found in the apartments of the Peishwa’s palaces…. The records of the Satara government were under my own immediate charge, and many original papers of historical importance, the existence of which was unknown

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to the Peishwas, were confided to me by the Raja. Mr. Elphinstone, when governor of Bombay, gave me free access to the records of that government…. The Viceroy of Goa most liberally furnished me with extracts from the records of the Portuguese government; and the Court of Directors allowed me to have partial access to those in the East India House for some particulars from the Bengal correspondence, and for authenticating a variety of facts, originally obtained from Mahratta authorities, but of which there is no trace in the secretary’s office at Bombay. The gentlemen of the India House were on every occasion most obliging.35

Thus, Duff obtained almost all papers that the British acquired after defeating the Maratha powers. It has been pointed out that in the last decades, along with the spread of nationalist ideas, there developed in Maratha country a strong sentiment that the British had monopolized access to the Maratha documentary sources.36 At the same time, it needs to be conceded that Grant Duff’s effort to collect and preserve Maratha records saved them from neglect and destruction. He did not depend only on English and official Maratha sources, but also extended his project to Marathi sources in private collections. My intimate personal acquaintance with many of the Mahratta chiefs, and with several of ‘the great Bramin families in the country, some of the members of ’ which were actors in the events which I have attempted to record, afforded advantages which few Europeans could have enjoyed, especially as a great deal of the information was obtained during the last revolution in Maharashtra, when numerous old papers, which at any other period would not have been so readily produced, were brought forward for the purpose of substantiating just claims, or setting up unfounded pretensions. Latterly, however, I have to acknowledge many instances of disinterested liberality both from Bramins and Mahrattas, who of their own accord presented me with many valuable documents, and frequently communicated their opinions with much kindness and candour.37

Grant Duff’s work in 1826 was one of the first narratives based on archival records and state papers of indigenous origin. Although it displays some British prejudices of those times, his work was a landmark one in the development of historical writing based upon the archives of Indian princely states.

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Munshi Mohan Lal (1812–1879)

If we try to trace the origins of document-based historical writings by ‘native’ Indians in the nineteenth century, we must recognize the pioneering contribution made to that mode of historiography by Munshi Mohan Lal. Son of a Kashmiri pandit living in Delhi, Pandit Budh Singh, Mohan Lal was educated in Delhi College (now named Zakir Husain College, University of Delhi). He was an accomplished Persian munshi and was appointed as a munshi, or Persian secretary, by Lt Sir Alexander Burnes on his journey to Persia in 1832. Mohan Lal maintained a diary, which he published in English in 1834, recounting the journey through Punjab, Afghanistan, Turkistan, and Persia. During the First Afghan War (1838–42), he was again appointed as the Persian munshi attached to the British mission. Having come into possession of various documents, Mohan Lal wrote a book on the amir of Afghanistan, The Life of Amir Dost Mohammed (Longmans, London, 1846), which throws light on the disastrous First Afghan War. What was the book about? The amir of Afghanistan, Dost Mohammed, was suspected of pro-Russian inclination by the British. As Rudyard Kipling has described in the novel Kim, there was a ‘great game’ being played in West Asia at the time—the British object being the expulsion of the influence of Russia and her allies so as to protect British India’s northwest frontier. Russian incursion into Herat in Afghanistan was seen as a danger signal. In that context, it is understandable that the British would try to ‘protect’ Afghanistan, and Governor General Lord Auckland decided that Dost Mohammad should be replaced by an amir favourable to the British—Shah Shuja, the former amir who had been expelled by Dost Mohammad. In October 1838, Auckland sent British forces to Afghanistan and to protect his flank he entered into an alliance with Ranjit Singh, an independent ruler of the Sikh kingdom of Punjab. The British army captured Kabul, replaced Dost Mohammad with Shah Shuja, and the puppet regime came under the thumb of Sir William Macnaghten, the British political officer in Afghanistan, and the British Army stationed in Kabul. Till this point, the British met with success in what is known as the First Afghan War. However, under the leadership of Dost Mohammad’s son Akbar Khan, the independent spirited Afghans rebelled against this foreign incursion. The British were unable to cope with the uprising. In January 1841, the British Army

32 Archiving the British Raj

contingent of about 16,500 soldiers began to retreat and fell prey to the surrounding Afghan forces on the way. The entire contingent was eliminated except for one doctor who reached the British territory in Jalalabad to tell the tale of the disaster. As a result, Lord Auckland was recalled to England and his successor, Lord Ellenborough, mounted another British expedition to Kabul. Britain’s reputation for invincibility was restored; Kabul was captured in September 1842 and in a vengeful massacre thousands of civilians were killed. Dost Mohammad was, however, allowed to remain amir of Kabul till his death in 1863. Thus, the Afghan War ended in the reassertion of British might but the memory of the expulsion and elimination of a British army of over 16,000 soldiers in 1841 remained in popular memory and in the future may have inspired Afghan resistance to a foreign interference. The book by Mohan Lal was important. Here was an educated and knowledgeable native observer of events that were brought about by the British act of aggression on a sovereign country. It was a rare occurrence that a ‘native’ witnessed all that and was, as the Persian language secretary and interpreter, privy to the exchanges that took place between the British and their allies and enemies. Further, Mohan Lal’s book shows an awareness of the need to base a historical narrative on documentary sources. His bias in his book is obviously for the British who employed him. But his documentation was comparable to the best of the contemporary British historical narratives. Mohan Lal’s documents were not derived from any archive but from his own collection of papers. He included in his narrative copies or translations of many original documents that came into his hands as the Persian secretary to the mission in Afghanistan—for example, the letters that were exchanged between Lord Auckland, Dost Mohammad, Sir Alexander Barnes, Sir W.H. Macnaghten, the Russian ambassador to Tehran, Mohammad Shah, the monarch of Persia, and some Afghan tribal chieftains.38 As a translator he had access to such papers and sometimes he obtained them through his informers; for example, he says that the letter of instruction from the Persian king to his Kabul envoy came into his hands because the envoy’s ‘secretary gave a copy to my news writer Mohammad Taher’.39 When he was unable to collect such papers, he would collect information through conversation.

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Whilst in Afghanistan I had prepared the ‘Life of Dost Mohammed Khan’, both in English and Persian; and the information on which the MS. was prepared was supplied to me by his own courtiers and relations: but unfortunately all the MSS were plundered during the insurrection of Kabul, and delivered to Mohammed Akbar Khan, who refused to give them back to me on any account. Afterwards it was out of my power to collect such satisfactory accounts as would place the circumstances of the Amir’s life in a chronological series; and I therefore fear that these volumes will on many occasions be open to censure for misplacing the occurrences and the subjects contained in them.40

On account of his education at Delhi College, Mohan Lal was able to write his book in English. Though the language was English, the style was Persian, and he was aware of that. The whole of the work, is written after the Persian style. Purity of idiom and eloquence in composition, which are at the command of the natives of this civilized land [that is, England where he wrote the book during a short sojourn], are not to be expected from a foreigner of a limited education, like myself: The generosity of the impartial community at large will, on these considerations, forgive me for the blunders of every description which may disfigure the pages of these unworthy volumes.41

This exaggerated modesty was part of his Persian style and manners. He must have been an unusual man. Few Indians in those times would dare write directly to Queen Victoria. He wrote to her with an advance copy of his book and obtained her permission to dedicate the book to her. On the whole, Mohan Lal’s work is remarkable on account of the meticulous documentation of the narrative and in this respect, among Indian writings of the middle of the nineteenth century, his work was nearly unique. Mohan Lal merits more recognition than he has obtained from Indian historians. Lord Macaulay’s Legacy Lord Macaulay figures prominently in Indian history as the proponent of the policy of Anglicization of education in British India. However, it is not commonly recognized that he was equally

34 Archiving the British Raj

important as a trendsetter in history writing in British India. His strength lay in writing historical essays in an argumentative, coruscating style and a lucid manner, which enthralled the readers who wanted readable history. His weakness was a frequent failure to supply appropriate evidence and necessary documentation in support of his contentions. He was one of those who made history a form of literary writing in nineteenth-century England and created a genre that was distinctly different from the professional historians’ writing, which were read by fellow historians. The literary success of his essays on empire builders such as Robert Clive or Warren Hastings spawned a school of imitators, but they rarely had Macaulay’s command over form and content. In fact, Macaulay’s influence impeded progress towards sound archivebased historiography. Some characteristics of Macaulay’s historical writings on British Indian statesmen distinguished them from late nineteenth-century professional historians’ writings in continental Europe. First, he avoided reference to the sources accumulated in the archives, that is, the contemporary records in the East India Company’s and the British Indian government’s papers as well as private papers of contemporary persons. As a scholar, he was definitely aware of the sources and occasionally quoted some quotable portions. But citation of the records in the archives was avoided by him, and that made his writings easy and palatable for the average reader. Macaulay explained his view on this issue very clearly in his essay on Clive, which was written in The Edinburgh Review by way of a review of Sir John Malcolm’s biography of Clive, published in 1836.42 Macaulay wrote in his review of the book: ‘We have always thought it strange that, while the history of the Spanish empire in America is familiarly known to all the nations of Europe, the great actions of our countrymen in the East should, even among ourselves, excite little interest.’ He went on to comment on historical writings on India: It might have been expected, that every Englishman who takes any interest in any part of history would be curious to know how a handful of his countrymen, separated from their home by an immense ocean, subjugated, in the course of a few years, one of the greatest empires in the world. Yet, unless we greatly err, this subject is, to most readers, not only insipid, but positively distasteful. Perhaps the fault lies

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partly with the historians. Mr. Mill’s book, though it has undoubtedly great and rare merit, is not sufficiently animated and picturesque to attract those who read for amusement. Orme, inferior to no English historian in style and power of painting, is minute even to tediousness. In one volume he allots, on an average, a closely printed quarto page to the events of every forty-eight hours. The consequence is, that his narrative, though one of the most authentic and one of the most finely written in our language, has never been very popular, and is now scarcely ever read. We fear that the volumes before us will not much attract those readers whom Orme and Mill have repelled.43

Thus, Macaulay’s aim was to avoid the meticulous narrative based on sources, which Orme presented, or the frequent reference to private papers, characteristic of Sir John Malcolm, or James Mill’s heavy prose. Among Macaulay’s contemporaries, Rev. G.R. Gleig wrote one of the earliest historical works using documents, a biography of Warren Hastings in 1841. It seems that Sir Elijah Impey’s son attempted a biography, and according to Gleig he was allowed use of India Office records. Although that attempt came to nothing, Gleig was allowed by the directors of the East India Company to read and take extracts from India Office records: ‘Let me thank the Directors of the East India Company for the liberality with which they threw open for my inspection the voluminous records at the India House, and the consideration which induced them to afford me every accommodation and facility for making extracts from them. I am fully aware that mine is not a solitary case.’ However, Gleig depended more on the private papers of Warren Hastings, which were handed over to him by Hastings’s family in 1835: It will be seen that in the management of my work I have rendered Mr. Hastings as much as possible the narrator of his own acts and intentions. There can be no doubt in the mind of any thinking person as to the wisdom of this arrangement, more especially in cases where, like the present, consecutive series of letters have been even partially preserved.44

Another biography by Gleig of Robert Clive, published in 1848, was based mainly on printed sources because the private papers were given to another biographer, Sir John Malcolm.45

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Since Macaulay looked down upon his contemporary authors’ heavy tomes, studded with references and quotations, he himself wrote without reference to records as much as possible. Sir Alfred Lyall, about 70 years later, cited the adverse opinion of the famous historian Leopold von Ranke: ‘Ranke, the great German historian, said of Macaulay that he could hardly be called a historian, judged by the strict tests of German criticism.’46 Lyall contrasted Ranke’s approach with that of Macaulay and some other historians: ‘The principal English historians of the modern school, who revived what one may call the dramatic presentation of history, I take to be Macaulay, Froude and Carlyle.’ And Lyall said that they were open to the charge of ‘misquoting’ authorities, ‘grave exaggerations’, and failure to meet modern standards of critical history writing with reference to and comparison of various sources. Lyall’s opinion anticipates the opinion of professional historians in later times. As regards Ranke, his implicit criticism of the ‘dramatic presentation of history’ without the aid of records was stated in his own work on British history. If we turn to von Ranke’s history of England, we see that he was very critical of the absence of archival documentation in most of the works on English history written by Englishmen: If any one has ever attempted to reconstruct for himself a portion of the past from materials of this kind,—from original documents, and party writings which, prompted by hate or personal friendship, are intended for defence or attack, and yet are withal exceedingly incomplete,—he will have felt the need of other contemporary notices, going into detail but free from such party views.47

At the same time, Ranke praised the method in England: In no nation has so much documentary matter been collected for its later history as in England. The leading families which have taken part in public business, and the different parties which wish to assert their views in the historical representation of the past as well as in the affairs of the present, have done much for this object; latterly the government also has set its hand to the work. Yet the existing publications are far from sufficient. How incredibly deficient our knowledge still is of even the most important parliamentary transactions! In the rich

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collections of the Record Office and of the British Museum I have sought and found much that was unknown, and which I needed for obtaining an insight into events. The labour spent on it is richly compensated by the gain such labour brings; over the originals … hard to decipher, linger the spirits of that long-past age.48

Thus, the eminent proponent of positivism in history emphasized the importance of records and also their role in checking partisan points of view advanced without regard to facts in the records. In the light of today’s postmodernist criticism of positivism, Ranke’s position may seem naive but it was a necessary antidote to what Lyall called ‘dramatic’ history writing, uninformed about archive-based research.

Appendix J. T. Wheeler’s Report on the Indian Records in 1862

(James Talboys Wheeler was a historian of repute as well as the secretary of the Records Committee from 1863 to 1869. Among the papers he left behind when he quit the job was this report, the most comprehensive guide to the records of the Government of India until the compilation of handbooks for researchers by the Imperial Record Department in the early twentieth century. Hence, this report, found in the files of the Home Department, Public Branch, 12 October 1865, no. 19, has been added to this chapter as an appendix.) Memorandum on the Records of the Government of India by J.T. Wheeler, dt. 26 December 1862

Classification of the Indian Records,—Specifically Historically, and Departmentally. 1. One object only in view: to destroy what is useless and preserve what is valuable.—In submitting the following remarks and suggestions respecting the Records of the Government of India, I cannot but acknowledge the liberality and public spirit of the Hon’ble President of the Calcutta Record Commission, in having invited me to express my own views upon the subject, when it was known that those views were strongly opposed to the recommendations of the Commission. But in truth, whatever differences

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of opinion may prevail in matters of detail, there can be no disagreement as regards the two-fold object in view—namely, to devise the best method of clearing out the useless rubbish without destroying valuable material, and to render all Records of historical or statistical interest available to students, generally, both in this country and at Home. Before, however, entering upon the particular subject of destruction or preservation, I shall attempt to describe the nature of the Indian Records. Without this information it will, I think, be difficult to decide upon the relative value of different classes of documents, or the relative importance of those belonging to different periods, or to different Presidencies; and it would certainly be impossible for me to exhibit clearly my reasons for submitting recommendations which will be found to differ widely from those which have been made by the Calcutta Record Commission. I shall, therefore, proceed to classify the Indian Records according to two different principles of division, viz:- 1st, Specifically, as showing the characteristics of each series; 2nd, Historically, as showing the characteristics of each era. After which I hope to indicate the class of documents which appear to deserve the most attention, and the particular periods which seem to call for the more immediate action of the Commission. 2. Specific classification of the Indian Records.—The whole mass of Indian Records, vast as it unquestionably is, may be divided into four classes as follows:1st.—Diaries or Proceedings, sometimes called ‘Consultations.’ 2nd.—General Letters. 3rd.—Miscellaneous—viz., Special Proceedings, Returns, Reports, Journals, & 4th.—Accounts. 3. 1st Diaries or Proceedings.—Even the earliest period of British settlement in India, each factory was accustomed to keep a Diary of its proceedings, in which every transaction, every consultation, and even minutes, letters, petitions, and resolutions, were all duly recorded in extenso, and of which a copy was sent Home every year. This Diary is now represented by the Volumes called ‘Consultations’ or ‘Proceedings.’ From about the middle of the seventeenth century down to about the middle of the eighteenth,

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Surat, Madras, Calcutta, Bombay, appear to have each prepared one Diary Volume per annum; but about that date our Empire began to commences, and new departments were subsequently created, each having Proceedings of its own, until the aggregate number of Volumes increased something like fifty-fold. 4. 2nd, General Letters—In addition to the Proceedings are the General Letters. The yearly ships from England originally brought out one General Letter from the Directors, and carried back one from the Settlement. The historical and literary value of these General Letters has been very much overlooked, and does not appear to have attracted the attention of the Calcutta Record Commission. Those from the Directors were mostly penned by that class of experienced and practical men of high intellectual powers, who attained their position by sheer force of genius, but who, until a comparatively recent period, were more anxious to secure private fortunes than to acquire literary or political fame. On the other hand, each General Letter sent Home formed a lucid summary or precise of the year’s proceedings under appropriate headings. In fact the ‘To England’ letters might be called ‘Calendars’ of the Proceedings Volumes, only that they are infinitely superior to anything that could be drawn up in the shape of Calendars now-a-days,—being written, under the immediate eye of the President of Council, with the utmost brevity and clearness, and with an intimate and exhaustive knowledge on the part of the writer of the whole of the subject matter of the proceedings, of the year in question, as well as of previous years. (I may add that these peculiar qualifications of conciseness were insisted upon at every period in the history of the late company. I have found exhortations to this effect in several General Letters of the seventeenth century; and in a General Letters of 1830 I have noticed that the Directors are still urging the importance of the same attention to clearness and brevity.- (T. Wheeler) At the same time ‘From England’ letters embodied the views of the shrewdest men in England upon the transactions of the year; and frequently combined a purity of language, and vigour of thought and expression, which are almost without a parallel in English prose literature. 5. 3rd, Miscellaneous, viz., Special Proceedings, Returns, Reports, &c— The other documents deserving the notice consist of ‘Special

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Proceedings,’ as regards secret or peculiar cases which were not brought upon public record; Special Correspondence of a like character; ‘Returns’ and ‘Reports’ as regards trade, revenue, or foreign relations; besides a number of journals, political Narratives, Memoranda, Minutes of Committees, Registers of Grants, Memorials and Petitions, Histories of old Hindoo families, and other similar documents whose titles alone will indicate their subject matter. In addition, however, to the foregoing, I may mention a vast mass of rubbish, generally in the shape of Office Books, obsolete Memoranda about the receipt and despatch of letters, and similar documents, which can no longer prove of the slightest utility, and which nothing but mere sentiment would induce a private individual to preserve. 6. 4th, Accounts.—The class of documents needs no description. It will chiefly require consideration from the enormous mass of rubbish comprised under this head, chiefly in the shape of vouchers to old accounts, which might be destroyed at one swoop, to the great advantage of those public Offices which may be at present overburdened with such useless lumber. The Memorandum of the Calcutta Record Commission furnishes no information as to the bulk of these documents in Bengal; but I can state from personal knowledge that in England hundreds of tons of similar rubbish have, within the last few years, been sold to the paper-makers and ‘pulped,’ after having lumbered up highly rented rooms for many generations. At Madras, again, I found in one Office a mass of Pay-masters’ vouchers, to the number of four millions of papers, which, if bound up, would make 8,000 Volumes of a thousand pages each. These facts will sufficiently indicate the necessity for taking some prompt measures in this Presidency. 7. Historical classification of the Indian Records.—Having thus mapped out the Government Records according to the specific character of each class, it will be necessary to indicate the relative importance of the several periods to which the documents belong. For the sake of clearness I will now divide the history of British settlement in India into four eras, which I will venture to indicate by names significant of the more prominent character of each period viz:-

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1st Antiquarian ... ante 1750. 2nd, Old Military … 1750 to 1785. 3rd, Old political … 1785 to 1835. 4th, Current … 1835 to 1863. I am aware that the old Military Period might, with a better show of propriety, be brought down to 1805; but I contend that the advent of Lord Cornwallis in 1786 marks such a change in our general administration, and opens such an entirely new epoch in the political history of India, as to entitle it to be included under the head to which it is here consigned. 8. 1st, Antiquarian Period, ante 1750.—The documents of the Antiquarian Period commence at different dates in the seventeenth century, and are those which, from their perishing character and singular value, should, I think, engage immediate attention. Unfortunately, only one or two, if any, Records of this class exist in Calcutta, the whole having been apparently destroyed in 1756 at the plunder of the settlement by Shirajah Dowla in that unfortunate capture which has attained a sad notoriety from the Black Hole tragedy. The result has been that the Antiquarian Records, generally, have been apparently overlooked by the Calcutta Record Commission, when sending Home or elsewhere, for copies of missing Volumes of the existing series. Accordingly, I shall endeavour to submit fuller information upon this class than would have otherwise been necessary. 9. Antiquarian Records at Surat and Bombay, l612–1750.—The British settlement at Surat was founded by Captain Best in 1612, whilst to Bombay was ceded to us by Portugal in 1665. The English Factory at Surat was more than once attacked by the celebrated Maharatta hero, Sivajee, but, I think, was never plundered, so that the Records probably remain intact. The Bombay Records have likewise been preserved from foreign foes. Both those of Surat and Bombay are of great value, as illustrating the early history of British India and as tending to solve those problems which are still connected with the mysterious rise of the Maharattas. The Antiquarian Records of Surat will, I think, prove of special value from the comparative proximity of the place of Delhi, and also from the fact that Surat is not a modern town like the present capitals of British India, but is mentioned

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in the old epic of ‘Ramayana’, and was in all probability a great commercial city in the days of Tyre and Sidon. Then, again, the Antiquarian Records of Bombay must throw an interesting light upon the Parsee Community. In other respects the Records of both Surat and Bombay seem to correspond to those at Madras, with which I am more particularly acquainted, and which I shall now proceed to describe. 10. Antiquarian Records at Madras, 1639–1750.—Madras was founded by Mr. Day in 1639 but, unfortunately, the Records in Fort St. George do not date back earlier than 1670. It will be remembered that Madras was captured by La Bourdonnais in 1746, and was occupied by the French for more than two years, after which it was restored to the English Company by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. At present there is a tolerably complete set of ‘Diaries’ or ‘Proceedings,’ and of ‘General Letters,’ from about 1670 downwards; but all earlier documents are lost, including the original grant of the district, which was drawn out on gold leaf, and given to the English by the unfortunate Rajah of Chandraghery,—last representative of the once famous Hindoo Empire of Bijanuggur, which, in the days of the Plantagenets, stretched from Malabar to Coromandel. However, the want is to some extent filled up by the General Letters calendered in ‘Bruce’s Annals,’ to which book I shall have occasion to refer in a future paragraph. I also gather from the preface to Colonel Wills’ ‘History of Southern India,’ that many Madras Antiquarian Records were to be found in the India house which are not to be found in Madras and, vice versa, that many Antiquarian Records are to be found in Madras which have not been preserved at Home. Be this as it may, Madras possesses some valuable Antiquarian Records, which have now been rendered tolerably available to this public. I may add that these Records throw very much light upon the early status of the British in India. Every little event, foreign or domestic, was recorded in the earlier Volumes of the Diaries. The appearance of a ‘bazing star with a tail,’ the encroachment of the sea, the death and funeral of a reputed senior merchant, the scrapes of the younger servants of the Company, the quarrels amongst the Members of Council, the storms in the roads, the feastings of Dutch Governors or

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Mussulman Nabobs in the Consultation Room, the strikes of weavers or dyers, the profitable or unprofitable character of investments, the disputes between the castes, the evil doings of pirates and interlopers, together with scandalous stories and incidents of all kinds, were all dully recorded in the Diary Volume of which a copy was sent home every year to the Hon’ble Directors. After the close of the seventeenth century much of this quaintness of detail passes away, and the Proceedings become more dignified and gubernatorial. In the same way political relations underwent a change. In 1670 the Rajah of Chandraghery had fled to Mysore, and the little Settlement of Madras had been transferred to the Government of the Shah of Golconda, one of those Mussulman Kings of the Dekhan who had hitherto maintained sovereignty independent of the Great Mogul at Delhi. The English paid 1,200 pagodas a year rent to the Shah of Golconda, and kept a Vakeel at his Court to look after their interests and send them the news; all of which is, of course, recorded in the Diaries. Not unfrequently the political intelligence was of the utmost importance. At one time Sivajee, the Mahratta, poured out from Satara with an army of marauders, and traversed the whole Peninsula, plundering and destroying the villages close to Madras, and finally returning home via Tanjore and Mysore. A few years afterwards the Mussulman Kings of the Dekhan were conquered by Aurungzeb, and Madras fell under the administration of the Officers of the Great Mogul. But further description is unnecessary. It may suffice to add that the early history of the Carnatic and Dekhan is largely illustrated by the Antiquarian Records, which, moreover, strange to say, do not appear to have been much consulted by the Madras historian, Robert Orme. 11. Antiquarian Records at Home relating to Calcutta, ante 1750.—It has already been stated that no antiquarian documents, except a few isolated ones, are in existence in Calcutta; but I have sufficient grounds for believing that both Proceedings and General Letters must have been preserved at home, illustrating the history of the British settlements in Bengal for more than a century prior to 1750. At present that history is virtually a blank for though the General Letters both to and from England were calendered by Mr. Bruce down to the year 1707, yet this book is but little known

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except to historians, and thus seems to have escaped the notice of the Calcutta Record Commission. A considerable amount of information respecting Bengal, as well as the Settlements in the Indo-Chinese countries and Oriental Archipelago, is also to be found in the Madras Antiquarian Records; and I am prepared to state on my own authority that much of this information is of great value. I may instance the important Embassy dispatched from Calcutta to Delhi in 1713, during the reign of time unfortunate Emperor Ferokhsere, of which the fullest particulars may be found in Madras. Above all, I may quote the important war declared by the English against the Emperor Aurangzebe in 1687 of which little is known at present beyond the bare fact, that war, however, was in reality a part of a grand design formed by Josiah Child, a man whose heart may have been hard and whose temper was certainly imperious, but who possessed all the genius of a Statesman of the highest order, and who, but for the blundering of those to whom he entrusted the realization of his plans, would have laid the foundations of that British Empire in the East which were subsequently laid by Clive and Hastings. Having thus described in same detail the character of the first period in the history of British India, respecting which so little has been done, I have now to take a more rapid review of those eras which are more generally known. 12. 2nd, Old Military Period, 1750–1786.—I have chosen to give the name of the Old Military Period to the years between 1750 and 1786; but in truth it might be called with more propriety the period of experiment and error. In revenue affairs our several mistakes have become matters of history. Our diplomacy was stained with errors so grave as almost to amount to crimes; witness the revolutions in Bengal, the first Maharatta war, and the defensive treaty with Hyder. Our administration of justice was for a long time deplorable in the extreme. Our commerce was an anomaly, unjust alike to the Native traders and the European consumers. Our system of finance consisted partly in squeezing large sums out of Native candidates for a throne, and partly in procuring loans at ruinous rates of interest. Our battles when won at all were won by sheer pluck, without any strategy worthy of the name, and the details respecting them were thus

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barren in Military lessons. Meantime, our army administration was characterised by mutiny, cowardice, and corruption; whilst the Members of the Government at Bombay and Madras were either quarrelling amongst themselves or quarrelling with Calcutta, and even at Calcutta ignorance and violence were for a long time the order of the day. The whole period, therefore, may be pronounced comparatively worthless, and to be devoid of any interest, beyond that which pertained to personal character. At any rate, it furnishes few, if any, precedents which are ever likely to prove useful to Government; and I very much doubt whether a single reference per annum is made to the Records prior to 1786 by any Department under Government. At the same time more public Records have been published in connection with this Old Military Period than of any other in the history of India. The charges brought against Clive, the passing of the Charter, the trial of Warren Hastings, the enquiry connected with the arrest and death of Lord Pigot, the enquiry into the convention of Worgaom, and the impeachment of Rumbold and others, have combined to exhaust nearly all the historical material referring to this era; and now; very recently, all the speeches and proceedings connected with the trial of Warren Hastings have been discovered in England and published in extenso. As one of the public I cannot, therefore, but regret that the labors of the Calcutta Record Commission should have been hitherto restricted to this period; especially when the era preceding it, and even the one succeeding it, are infinitely more worthy of attention. 13. 3rd, Old Political Period, 1786–1835.—The half century, which followed the Old Military Period is in reality the most important in the history of British India and the one which, 1 believe above all others, demands the most active measures. The age of iron was followed by an age of silver. Lord Cornwallis and Lord Teignmouth discussed the subjects of revenue and justice in a masterly and exhaustive spirit, and introduced tangible and intelligible systems. The Marquis of Wellesley set his foot upon the absurd attempts to secure the peace of India by a balance of power, and inaugurated a truly imperial policy. It was emphatically an age of great men. The names of Arthur

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Wellesly, Mountstuart Elphinstone, John Malcolm, Thomas Munro and Richard Jenkins are still amongst the noblest in our annals, whilst the honor and prestige of the British power were never raised to a greater height in India. Meantime the spirit of enquiry was abroad in all directions, and munificently encouraged and fostered; and a large collection of journals, narratives, and authentic histories of the utmost conceivable value, are, to my certain knowledge, in Madras, and, for aught the public can know to the contrary, may be found in Calcutta. No information upon the subject has, however, yet been furnished respecting these Records, nor can any discovery be made of the hidden treasures in this invaluable mine until some report or hand-book of the Calcutta Records is drawn up. But upon this point I shall have to submit some recommendations in a future paragraph. It will be sufficient to say that the period under review closed with the administration of Lord William Bentinck, the last if not the greatest of the Indian Statesmen of the old political school. 14. 4th, Current Period, 1835–1863.—The Records of the current period require no description at present. It is, I think, generally understood that they will not come under the cognizance of the Calcutta Record Commission. It may be useful to intimate here that, in 1830, the series of General Letters which were then sent Home quarterly underwent a further change, and the correspondence connected with cases of any importance was ordered to be separately reported. Finally, in l859, the system of General Letters was brought to a close; but their place is sufficiently filled up by the Administration Reports from the Regulation and Non-regulation Provinces, which are published every year and which will form most valuable material to future historians. 15. Departmental Classification of the Indian Records.—I have now classified the Iñdan Records— 1st.—Specifically, viz :— ‘ 1st—Diaries or Proceedings. 2nd—General Letters. 3rd.—Miscellaneous—viz., Special Proceedings, Returns, Reports, &c.

48 Archiving the British Raj

4th.—Accounts. 2nd.—Historically, viz :— 1st.—Antiquarian ... Ante–1750. 2nd.—Military … 1750–1786. 3rd—Old Political … 1786–1835. 4th—Current … 1835–1863. But before submitting any recommendations respecting the Records, a further division must be indicated, which owes its origin to the formation of new Departments in consequence of the vast increase in the public business. This may be called a classification departmentally, but it was not made suddenly but gradually as occasions arose. The following are the dates on which the new Departments appear to have been formed at Madras; and I have no doubt but that similar changes were effected both at Calcutta and at Bombay on or about the same dates, excepting the Military. I am obliged to give the Madras dates, as no information respecting the others has been furnished in Calcutta— Military Department … from 1752 Revenue … 1774 Secret … 1796 Political … 1800 Financial ... 1800 Commercial … 1815 Law … 1815 Foreign …1816 Ecclesiastical … 1818 Marine …1838 Public Works … 1843 Railway … 1853 The foregoing classifications cum descriptions will, I trust, be found sufficient to explain the nature and relative value of the Indian Records; and accordingly I shall now submit those recommendations which have suggested themselves to my mind, as to the best mode of carrying out the two-fold object indicated in the opening paragraph, and my reasons for objecting to some of those which have been made by the Calcutta Record Commission.49

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Notes 1. Minute by Warren Hastings, Bengal Select Committee, 12 October 1772, cited in H.H. Dodwell, ‘Development of Sovereignty’, in Cambridge History of India, ed. H.H. Dodwell (Cambridge, 1929), vol. V, p. 597; and Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, The Colonial State: Theory and Practice (New Delhi, 2016), Chapter 2. 2. For a more detailed documented account of the financial crisis and consequent drive to curtail expenditure, see Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, The Financial Foundations of the British Raj: Ideas and Interests in the Reconstruction of Indian Public Finance, 1858–1872 (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2005), Chapter 3. 3. Record Committee Papers, Home Department, Public Branch, Nos 647–54, December 1872. 4. Record Committee Papers, Para 3, Home Department, Public Branch, No. 647, December 1872. 5. Record Committee Papers, Home Department, Public Branch, Nos 647–54, December 1872. 6. Secretary of State to Viceroy in Council, Public despatch no. 74 of 1861, 24 June. 7. Record Committee Papers, Home Department, Public Branch, Nos 647–54, December 1872, b. 1, p. 2. 8. Record Committee Papers, Home Department, Public Branch, Nos 647–54, December 1872. 9. Record Committee Papers, Home Department, Public Branch, Nos 647–54, December 1872, b. 1, p. 2. 10. W.S. Seton-Karr, President of Record Commission, to W.C. Bayley, Secretary, Home Department, Govt of India, 8 August 1863, Home Department, Public Branch, No. 16, 12 October 1865. 11. J.T. Wheeler, Memorandum on Records of Govt of India, 26 December 1862, Home Department, Public Branch, No. 19, 12 October 1865, Para 1. 12. Seton-Karr to E.C. Bayley, Secretary, Home Department, 8 August 1863, Home Department, Public Branch, No. 16, 12 October 1865. 13. Seton-Karr to E.C. Bayley, Secretary, Home Department, 8 August 1863, Home Department, Public Branch, No. 16, 12 October 1865, Para 14. 14. Govt of India to Secretary of State, Home Department, Public Branch, No. 95 of 1872, 13 December 1872. 15. Secretary of State, India Office, London, Dispatch (Public Dept) to Govt of India, Calcutta, Public No. 19, 12 February 1866, Home Department, Public Branch, No. 78, 12 October 1866.

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16. J.T. Wheeler, Memorandum on Records of Govt of India, 26 December 1862, Home Department, Public Branch, No. 19, 12 October 1865, Para 1. 17. Progs of the Govt of India, Home Department, No. 2463 C 2472, 1865, Resolution of 3 October 1865. 18. Secretary of State, India Office, London, Dispatch (Public Dept) to Govt of India, Calcutta, Public No. 19, 12 February 1866, Home Department, Public Branch, No. 78, 12 October 1866 (emphasis mine). 19. J.T. Wheeler, Early Travels in India (London, 1864). 20. J.T. Wheeler, Early Records of the British in India (London, 1878), p. 4. 21. J.T. Wheeler, India Under British Rule (London, 1886), p. viii. 22. A.O. Hume’s noting of 31 January 1871, on file, Home Department, Public Branch, No. 647, December 1872, p. 10. 23. Home Department, Public Branch, No. 647, December 1872, p. 10. 24. Home Department, Public Branch, No. 647, December 1872, Note by ‘ECB’, that is, Home Secretary E.C. Bayley, 19 December 1871. 25. Home Department, Public Branch, No. 649, W.W. Hunter to A.P. Howell, Govt of India, 17 November 1871. 26. T.B. Macaulay, ‘Lord Clive’, Edinburgh Review, January 1840, reprint in Critical and Historical Essays, vol. I. 27. C.S. Srinivasachari, ed., Selections from Orme Manuscripts (Annamalai, 1952). 28. James Mill, The History of British India (London, 1817; New Delhi, 1972 [reprint]), vol. I, p. 3. 29. Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford, 1959). 30. I refrain from repeating what I have said about James Mill’s role in colonialist historiography in Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Talking Back: The Idea of Civilization in the Indian Nationalist Discourse (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011), Chapter 1. 31. Sir John Malcolm, The Life of Robert Lord Clive, Collected from the Family Papers (London, 1836), ‘Preface’. 32. T.B. Macaulay, Lord Macaulay’s Essays (London, 1889); Macaulay, ‘Lord Clive’, p. 525. 33. Mountstuart Elphinstone, The History of India (London, 1843), vol. I, p. 202; I have discussed Elphinstone’s contribution elsewhere, in Bhattacharya, Talking Back. 34. Elphinstone, The History of India, vol. I, Book II, Chapter V; and Book III, Chapter I. 35. James Grant Duff, History of the Mahrattas (London, 1826), p. viii. 36. Prachi Deshpande, Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700–1960 (Delhi, 2007).

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37. Duff, History of the Mahrattas, p. x. 38. Mohan Lal, Life of Amir Dost Mohammad, Khan of Kabul (London, 1846), 2 vols, pp. 266, 269, 273, 282, 316, 319, 341, and so on. 39. Lal, Life of Amir Dost Mohammad, p. 273. 40. Lal, Life of Amir Dost Mohammad, p. ix. 41. Lal, Life of Amir Dost Mohammad, p. x. 42. Sir John Malcolm, The Life of Robert Lord Clive, Collected from the Family Papers (London, 1836), 3 vols. 43. Macaulay, Lord Macaulay’s Essays, p. 31. 44. Rev. G.R. Gleig, Memoirs of the Life of the Right Hon. Warren Hastings, Compiled from Original Papers (London, 1841), vol. I, pp. iv–vii. 45. Rev. G.R. Gleig, The Life of Robert, First Lord Clive (London, 1848), p. iv. 46. Alfred Lyall, Studies in Literature and History (London, 1915), 1909. 47. Leopold von Ranke, History of England, Principally in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1875), vol. I, p. 3. 48. Ranke, History of England, vol. 3, p. 3. 49. Memorandum on the Records of the Government of India, by J.T. Wheeler, 26 December 1862, Home Department, Public Branch, No. 19, 12 October 1865.

2

Developments Leading to the Creation of a Central Archive 1872–91

If one distances oneself from the details of the story in the previous chapter, one can see the fundamental issues for the Government of India on the question of archiving records. The colonial state was evolving a policy of record-keeping that tended to oscillate between certain polar opposites postulated implicitly in policy-level thinking. Individual policymakers were also adopting these different positions. The polarities between alternative models implicit in policy-level thinking were as follows: (i) There were two opposite models in the 1860s—that of archival organization on a decentralized departmental basis as opposed to the concept of a centralized record office, or muniment room. (ii) There were two different ideas about how to go about the business of documenting British rule in India: one idea was to collect, preserve, and calendar the documents in a permanent accessible collection; the other was to publish selections from the available documents, and in this view a low priority was accorded to the task of creating an archival collection for future research. (iii) There was another issue: a choice between a policy of limiting access to documents to those authorized by virtue of bureaucratic privilege (that is, Englishmen in the civil service) as opposed to allowing access to the Archiving the British Raj: History of the Archival Policy of the Government of India, with Selected Documents, 1858–1947. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Oxford University Press (2019). © Sabyasachi Bhattacharya. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199489923.003.0003

Developments Leading to the Creation of a Central Archive 53

interested public including historical researchers. (iv) The fourth area of conflicting policy perceptions was at the epistemological level: Is the object of archiving acquisition the preservation and dissemination of historical knowledge or is the objective something more limited, namely documentation as an instrument of governance? Implicitly, the question at issue was the relationship between knowledge and power. The inclination of the ‘hard-boiled imperialists’ was to opt for (i) departmental decentralization without centralized archiving; hence, leaving control in the hands of the heads of departments; (ii) selective publication and not a universalist agenda of preserving historical records for the posterity; (iii) excluding the public, including researchers outside of the bureaucracy, from access to archives, and (iv) an overall policy inclination that regards archiving mainly as an instrument for colonial governance. However, as we have seen earlier, the opposite point of view was not entirely unrepresented in the discourse of archival policy in the early phase we have studied. In the later phases, from the 1890s, these policy alternatives were articulated more clearly and the dialectics of policymaking became more pronounced as there developed a nationalist point of view about the colonial government’s archiving policy. In the years between 1872 and 1891 the crux of the matter was how to represent the imperial past in India, whether it was better to publish selected records or set up a central record office, or a ‘muniment room’ as it was called in England at that time. The year 1872 began with a firm and complete rejection of that idea of a central record office by an authoritative bureaucrat and historian Sir William Hunter as well as by Viceroy Northbrook and his council. As a result of the discussions from 1869–71, the Government of India called in Sir William Wilson Hunter (1840–1900) to deliver a final judgement. As a member of the ICS since 1862, he had distinguished himself and in 1871 he became the director general of Statistics. (Later in life he served as the governor general’s nominee on the Legislative Council from 1881–7, president of the Education Commission from 1881–3, and member of the Finance Commission from 1886–7, and was loaded with honours such as the Companion of Indian Empire [CIE], Civil Service of India [CSI], and eventually knighthood in 1887). The bureaucracy could trust him, and he also had to his credit several historical works

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based on government records. Hence, he was asked to evaluate the work of the Records Committee and to give his considered opinion on issues such as the need for a muniment room, the publication of selected records, and so on. The Government of India’s Home Department proceedings of December 1872 contain the long report submitted by Hunter; however, the report was circulated to members of the viceroy’s council several months earlier. The report begins with an endorsement of the point made in 1869 by Seton-Karr (which we noted in the previous chapter): the Records Committee had achieved very little and had spent a great deal of money. Then, Hunter goes on to plot future policy in respect of record-keeping. We may highlight only the main points that emerge from the lengthy report. First, Hunter warned the government that to attempt archiving on a scale equal to the European pattern would be very expensive: With regard to the proposal of the Commission, namely, the proposal for a central muniment-room and the formation of certain permanent offices of record, the following considerations suggest themselves. In European capitals, where a large lettered class exists, these proposals would be admirable in themselves, and capable of yielding much permanent fruit to the public. But even in Europe such institutions involve the annual outlay of a good deal of money. In India they would cost much more. I observe that the Committee estimates the charge for a Keeper of Records at Rs. 1,000 a month. A commodious and well-fitted building would also be required, and could scarcely be obtained under Rs. 500 a month. The establishment necessary for the permanent preservation of valuable papers in the Bengal climate would certainly amount to Rs. 750 per month, and the incidental charges for outside copyists, binders, &c., to Rs. 250 more. Assuming, therefore, that the whole work of sorting out the proper records for the Central Office were done free of expense by the existing establishments in the various Departments, the cost of the Central Office alone could not be estimated at under Rs. 2,500 per month, or Rs. 80,000 a year. It would probably very much, exceed this, and the above sum allows nothing for the printing or compiling of a series of selections, such as it would be the first duty of such an office to produce. It appears to me that a Central State Paper Office in Calcutta would yield no results commensurate with this outlay.1

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Second, Hunter was of the view that a central record office was redundant because the records would be best taken care of by the parent departments: The objects to be gained by such an office are the better preservation of valuable documents, and to assist historical researches by rendering absolutely accurate records available to the public. Now, in the first place, I do not think that it would preserve the old records much better than they are at present preserved in the respective Departments of Government, Since 1869 I have been attached more or less closely to the Secretariats, both of the Bengal and of the Supreme Governments. I have also, during the same period, had occasion to officially examine the records of the Governments of the North-Western Provinces, the Punjab, Oudh, the Central Provinces, and Bombay, with those of the Boards of Revenue in the North-West [Provinces] and in Bengal. I do not think that any Central State Paper Office could take greater care of really valuable documents than these Governments now bestow upon them, or rather that any increased attention which such a Central Office could bestow would be commensurate with the inevitable outlay. A very small increase in the establishment of certain of the above-named Departments or Governments would effect all that can be desired.2

Third, Hunter argued that the state of intellectual advancement in India did not justify the creation of a central record office. Evidently, the object of a Central State Paper Office is to render important historical documents available to the public. But so far as my experience goes, there is no class of men of letters and leisure in Calcutta to use such a Central Office. This, I think, is a statement which will commend itself to everyone practically acquainted with Indian literary life. Writers of considerable ability are to be found both in the capital and throughout the rural Districts; but they constitute a very small body, and their talents are devoted to the Press or other forms of current literature, rather than to those graver researches which a State Paper Office in a European capital subserves.3

The fourth point made by Hunter was that more benefits would accrue from publication of selected documents than from a central record office:

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The first and most important function which the Indian Government has to discharge in connection with its records is, not the establishment of a State Paper Office or any similar institution, but the publication of a series of selections from documents of really historical value. This forms one of the objects of Record Commissions in Europe, indeed, so far as the public is concerned, their most conspicuous and principal object. No better example of such selections could be found than Mr. Long’s volume. It should never be forgotten that the lettered class who would chiefly make use of Indian historical documents is to be found, not in India, but in England and Europe.… [A] series of selections, similar to that of Mr. Long, would render the gist of all really historical documents available to the public, both in India and England, to an extent that no Muniment Office in Calcutta could accomplish.4

Finally, Hunter turned to the question of useless records. Just as he had recommended decentralized record-keeping in each department, he also recommended the decentralization of the task of identifying and destroying useless records: With reference to the destruction of old records I think there can be no doubt that the Departments themselves are the bodies best able to pronounce what is worthless and what is not.… At the same time, it would be well to have some competent officer to ascertain that old records (which may have been condemned by a Department to destruction) are really not worth preserving; although the natural conservatism of a Department renders anything like injudicious or needless destruction of old records as a rule improbable. The Foreign Office, for example, announces [in a communication to the Records Committee] at the outset that it has no archives whatever that could with propriety be destroyed.5

The above-mentioned extracts show that Hunter supported the position taken in 1869 by Seton-Karr (in opposition to the Records Committee’s recommendation for a central record office), which was most welcome to the senior secretaries of the chief departments in the governor general’s council. The latter promptly wrote up a policy statement in a dispatch to the secretary of state. There were two main points of policy settled by this dispatch: First, there was no need to take records away from the departments they belonged

Developments Leading to the Creation of a Central Archive 57

to; decentralized record-keeping was adequate and there was no need of a central record office, or muniment room. This decision had been made by the Government of India resolution of 3 October 1865 (as we saw in the previous chapter), and the government of Viceroy Northbrook in 1872 saw no reason to change it. Second, a consequential decision was to focus on publication of records. The government clearly states a political agenda in the dispatch to the secretary of state: We cannot but be sensible of the importance of the subject and of the inadequacy of measures which have had for their object the collation in an accessible form of information bearing on the early days of British Administration in India. We are of opinion that the publication of old records is a matter of political importance, and would do much to prevent misconstruction of the policy and motives of Indian Governments.6

However, having decided to reject the idea of a central record room and to publish records, the question remained: Which records and selected by which agency? The new policy that the government of Northbrook embarked upon was based on Hunter’s report, with some variations. What did Hunter recommend? First, he said that coordination with India Office would reduce the Indian government’s expenditure and also solve the problem of getting trained men to do the job of selecting and editing records. Before doing anything in India, I think it would be wise to carefully ascertain what can most economically be done here, and what could best be accomplished in England. I had occasion to study the India Office archives when bringing out my first volume of Annals in 1868. [The reference is to W.W. Hunter’s historical work The Annals of Rural Bengal.] Its Record Department is much more liberally managed and infinitely more complete than anything I have seen in India. A large and very important section of our archives could be most quickly, most perfectly, and most economically dealt with at home. For example, all letters to and from the Court of Directors fall under this head, and such letters from the cream of Indian records. It is unnecessary to enter into further detail on this point; but a little consideration will convince anyone acquainted with Indian archives that … it must be by a two-fold organisation, acting partly in England and partly here.7

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Second, as regards who would select and edit records, Hunter differed from most others, for example, A.O. Hume had suggested that undersecretaries in different departments would do the job, while the Records Committee had suggested that individual editors would choose themes, periods, and proceeds to select records for publication. Hunter rejected these ideas with good reasons: What is wanted is not a volume here and there—upon an isolated cluster of papers, or upon a detached set of years—but a regularly developed series of selections commencing with the earliest records and going steadily forward to 1832, or to whatever period Government might affix as the limit of the operations. Such a series could only be accomplished by a number a separate workers, but by separate workers acting under a central guiding authority.8

Hunter’s plan was that departmental officers would compile descriptive lists of records and then an editor would select and compile or guide the compilation of records: The central guiding authority, or editor, would know exactly what materials he had to work upon, and a little personal investigation would enable him to arrive at an estimate of their comparative importance. He would then lay out the entire area of his labors into proper sub-divisions, some of which he might possibly be able to deal with himself, while he would assign the others to competent assistants. The sum allotted by the Records Committee, namely, Rs. 2,500 a volume, would probably suffice, although this would depend a good deal upon the individual merits of the gentleman selected, and the amount of actual labor which each volume might involve. Thus, some periods present a coruscation of historical documents, which should be printed in extenso; others, on the contrary, contain little more than a multiplicity of papers dealing with uninteresting facts, of which a bare abstract would suffice. Such an abstract, to be really well done, requires a much higher degree of historical discrimination, and involves a much greater amount of actual labor than the mere selection and publishing in extenso of the more memorable State Papers.9

Hunter was a considerable expert in archival matters and he did not allow modesty to inhibit his flair for showing off his expertise. For instance,

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I have had occasion to use the results of similar efforts in Paris and in London, and more cursorily to consult the Vienna archives. About forty years ago Mr. Guizot inaugurated a system for preserving and rendering available all important historical documents of France, whether in the Departments or in the capital [The reference is to Francois Pierre Guizot (1787–1874), a French historian and political leader.] Practically, almost every French State Paper which an historian or a man of letters could desire is, or was when I was last in Europe, to be found in the State Bibliotheques in Paris.10

And further, he had been the talk of the town in Simla when he, at the age of 31, was picked up by Viceroy Lord Mayo in 1871 to be the first director general of Statistics. Hunter created a deep impression among the decision-makers at the top and his recommendations were accepted, with one exception. The exception was that Viceroy Lord Northbrook and his council preferred to focus on just one series of records, the General Letters, rather than Hunter’s plan to probe for important records in all departments. The General Letters were exactly what it says, letters between the court of directors in London and the governments of Bengal, Bombay, and Madras as well as the governor general covering in a general and comprehensive way all matters of concern and action. The decision of the Indian government, which was conveyed to the secretary of state for his approval in 1872, was in favour of the plan of publishing the General Letters to and from the Court of Directors.… These General Letters … afford ready made such a foundation for a systematic publication, as the records of no other Government in the world probably afford. Those addressed to the Court of Directors consist of a summary of events, of all business, in fact, transacted by each Government in India, and those written by the Court contain commentaries on such proceedings. The former were illustrated by ‘collections’ which gave the actual details of each subjects and they were themselves often the production of the ablest officers of Government. Here, then, are the requisite historic data. The General Letters require only illustration by appendices or occasional special volumes of Minute or selected papers, and excision of routine and uninteresting or merely personal matters to be ready as they stand for the Press. With such a guide no very high order of literary ability would be required in an editor. And the collection,

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once completed, would embody admirable material for the future historian of India.11

Publication of Records Since the Government of India’s policy from 1872 was to abandon the idea of a muniment room, for example, a central archive of their records, and to opt for publication of selected records, indexes, and so on, this is a convenient point to review the government’s performance in respect of such publications. We noted in the previous chapter that the Records Committee sponsored some publication efforts before its activities were suspended in 1869.12 These included a calendar of the Foreign Department, Secret Papers, 1774–5; the premature death of the editor, Scott Smith, secretary of the committee, left it unfinished and that truncated version was published. Next came the project of Seton-Karr, president of the committee, comprising three volumes of extracts from Calcutta Gazette of the years 1784 to 1805, followed by two more volumes by Sandeman, who replaced Seton-Karr. Hunter rightly remarked later that this was scarcely the archival record that should be the business of a Records Committee.13 The only worthwhile publication was that of Rev. James Long covering social history from 1748 to 1767. The other publication projects remained incomplete as of 1872, for example, J.T. Wheeler’s project of 1863 concerning the selection from General Letters and a project of 1868 to publish selection of minutes written by Warren Hastings. But none was completed for want of secretarial assistance since the government was unwilling to spend a penny more than 500 rupees—the allowance the committee’s secretary was paid. As regards the preparation of calendars, that is, annotated list of abstracted records, Wheeler as secretary of the Calcutta rejected that, preferring to publish the General Letters, which contained a synoptic review of the government’s proceedings on record. The idea of focusing on the General Letters prevailed in 1872 in the policy resolution adopted by Viceroy Northbrook and his council.14 However, while having decided to publish the General Letters seriatim, the Government of India evidently did not contemplate any actual action in a hurry. First, they said that the publication project would be very expensive, about 25,000 rupees per year; it would

Developments Leading to the Creation of a Central Archive 61

also take many years, perhaps 30 years to complete the project. They added that ‘the expenditure might be spread over a long series of years. It might even be suspended in years of financial pressure.’ The impression of reluctance all these statements create is confirmed by their own statement that ‘the early publication of those records … is a matter of no very pressing importance’.15 Further, the Government of India almost ensured that no money be spent or action be taken for records by making certain demands on the India Office in London, that is, a complete list of General Letters available at the India Office, and advice whether the publication project can be foisted on the India Office. This is the purpose behind writing as follows: But before we can take in hand any such scheme of systematic publication, it is necessary to know what materials exist in the Record Department of the India Office in London, and whether the proposed plan could be worked out more easily and more economically at home either partially or entirely. We accordingly beg that Your Grace will furnish us with a complete list of the volumes General Letters to and from the Court of Directors which are now preserved among the records of the India Office, together with an approximate estimate of the cost of printing them in England. We refer of course to the General Letters relating to all the Presidencies in India, and not merely to the correspondence with the Government of India. And we also beg Your Grace to consider whether the publication of these General Letters could be accomplished under the supervision of an efficient officer of the India Office.16

The dispatch of 13 December 1872 to the secretary of state was a well-crafted letter that creates doubts regarding when the publications would come out, how the expenses would be met, and what will be the agency for doing it. In fact, virtually nothing was done for the next five years to push forward the publication of records. In 1878, the Government of India sponsored a selection of records made by J.T. Wheeler, The Early Records of British India, which included a good deal not from government records but from travellers’ accounts and newspaper reports. That was the only published outcome of the government’s resolution on the records of 1872.

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The Indian government’s torpor was broken, as one would expect, by the intervention from London. From the days of Sir Charles Wood, the first secretary of state for India, many English politicians who held that position urged the Indian government towards a modern and responsible archival policy. A man of politics elected to the Parliament who became the secretary of state had a natural inclination to be alert to the image of the British as rulers of India and the importance of the interpretation of history in forming that image. On the other hand, except for some intellectually inclined individuals, the overwhelming majority of the members of the ICS in the middle decades of the nineteenth century were men who had no university education, little familiarity with the notions of political responsibility, and limited academic interest. Macaulay provides a description: [The] great majority of the members of the services here seem perfectly willing to pass their lives in India; and those who go home talk with very little pleasure of the prospect before them. This is not strange. For they generally come out at eighteen or nineteen.… A lad who six months before was under strict discipline, who could indulge in few pleasures for want of money, and who could not indulge in any excess without being soundly scolded by his father and his pedagogue, finds himself able to feast on snipes and drink as much champagne as he likes, to entertain guests, to buy horses, to keep a mistress or two, to maintain fifteen or twenty servants who bow to the ground every time that they meet him, and suffer him to kick and abuse them to his heart’s content.… If he does not take his furlough—and not one civil servant in three takes his furlough,—he remains in India till he is forty five or fifty, and is then almost unfit for England.17

In contrast to this, the secretaries of state who urged the Indian bureaucracy to improve their system of record-keeping were men such as Earl Gathorne Cranbrook, secretary from 1876 to 1880, and Lord Richard Cross, secretary from 1886 to 1892. The former was educated in Oriel College, Oxford, Member of Parliament for Oxford from 1865 to 1878, home secretary, secretary of war, and so on in the British cabinet. Lord Cross was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, a Member of Parliament from 1857 to 1862 and 1868 to 1886, home secretary in the British cabinet from 1874 to 1880

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and 1885 to 1886, and so on. They were alert to the advancement made in record-keeping in England in contrast to the backwardness of the Indian government’s practices, as well the need to represent the past and the present of the Indian empire in a favourable light so far as historical records and current statistics were concerned. The latter were reported to Parliament periodically in Moral and Material Progress Reports. Hence, there was pressure from England on the status quoist civil servants in India. The advancement of record-keeping practices in England was quite remarkable since the 1840s. The enactment of the Public Records Act of 1838 by the Parliament was evidence of concern for records among public men in England and there began a series of calendars and indices of records in the custody of the master of rolls. The British Model of Record-Keeping This is an appropriate place to briefly notice the long tradition of record-keeping in England, which is relevant because it influenced the attitude of the ‘home authorities’ and the secretaries of state regarding government records. In a book published in 1873, A.C. Ewald, a former ‘senior clerk in Her Majesty’s Public Records Office’, recorded the history of record-keeping since the appointment of the first keeper of the rolls of the King’s Chancery at the Wardrobe in the Tower of London in 1295. The first public interventions in the matter were in 1703 when the House of Lords appointed a committee to consider the methods of record-keeping in offices and again in 1800 when the House of Commons appointed a Select Committee, which led to a Record Report of 1800 on all depositories of government records. There are many reasons why the history of the public record system of England after 1800 is relevant to the present study of the Indian archives. First, the very language of the British Indian bureaucracy’s discourse of archiving contains many words that are peculiar to the history of public records in British bureaucracy; for example ‘muniment room’ (place for the preservation of records, derived from ‘munimentum’, or defence of privileges on the basis of records thereof ), or ‘master of the rolls’ (the person responsible by royal appointment for keeping records in their custody, originally in

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the Tower of London), or ‘calendaring in Paper Office’ (compiling annotated list of records, with a synopsis of each, in the State Paper Office), and so on. These concepts were borrowed from England. Second, the archiving experience of England was upheld by the British Indian government as the model to be followed. Sometimes this was counterproductive, for example, in the 1870s the English pattern of calendaring documents was considered the ideal to be aimed at by the Indian government, and at the same time the prevailing opinion was that in India the necessary skills were not available; the result was that calendaring was not done in the central government’s records while a provincial government such as the Madras Presidency calendared their documents successfully. Third, the whole the organization of the Indian archives followed the pattern of the Public Records Office in England, and more closely the pattern in the India Office—for example, a keeper of records at the head, departmental classification of records according to the office of origin, the method of indexing records, and so on. Needless to say, the India Office was far ahead of the Record Department in India in many ways—in allowing historical researchers access to records, in producing calendars and guides to records and press-lists, and in supplying documents for publication, chiefly in the form of ‘Command Papers’ or Parliamentary Papers. Despite the much-vaunted antiquity of English record-keeping, there was no continuous and unified system till the early nineteenth century. The Record Report of 1800, which we mentioned earlier, was a landmark. The report pointed out that the records of different courts of law and the Treasury and different departments of government remained scattered in different office premises, often in a neglected state, and thereafter King George III appointed Record Commission. This commission (somewhat like the Record Commission in India appointed in 1860) laboured for 36 years and printed some selected records but did little beyond that. In 1836, the House of Commons returned to the question and recommended the abolition of the Record Commission: Our experience of them furnished but one additional and almost superfluous proof of the folly of expecting efficient labour and systematic care at the hands of a numerous body unpaid for the discharge of its duties, and occupied by other avocations of a more important,

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more imperative, and a wholly foreign nature. The defect being in the system, it is the system which must be altered; and your committee can expect no substantial or permanent improvement of the present state of things until it sees the present Commission replaced by one constituted on an entirely new principle.18

The newly instituted system was to place records of different offices in the custody of one man, the master of the rolls, who by the Public Records Act (Vict. C. 94) became the head of the Public Record Office (PRO). Thus, ‘our ancient muniments were consolidated in one common repository’, that is, the PRO, as late as 1837; prior to that ‘for centuries, notwithstanding the solicitude of sovereigns and parliament, no well considered plan was formed for the proper care of the records’.19 The point of outlining in the aforementioned account a part of British history is that although the tradition of preserving records in Britain goes back very far, systematic archiving and unifying scattered collections began only in 1837 with the Public Records Act. From 1858, British India went through a trajectory that is reminiscent of some features of the course of events in England in a series of mimic actions: the appointment of a Record Commission, failure of the commission to deliver a policy leading to a ‘muniment room’, or central record office, cursory attempts to publish print and selected records, abolition of the Record Commission, and eventually the appointment of a keeper of records in a position equivalent to the master of rolls and later the head of the PRO in England. One aspect of the archival policy in England merits special attention—the control of access to the records. While the PRO in England gradually moved towards a policy of keeping public records secret, the colonial state in India was reluctant to follow that model. The State Papers having always been looked upon as the library of the Secretaries of State, their contents were regarded as strictly private and confidential. The keeper was bound by oath ‘to let no man see anything in the office of His Majesty’s papers without a warrant from the king’ excepting always ‘what is wanted by the Secretaries of State, Privy Councillors, and other officers of His Majesty’s Government’.20

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The rule of secrecy was so strict in the early days that Ewald in his history of the PRO has recounted that even the prime minister Lord North had to beg ‘the king’s approval to have free access to all correspondence in the [State] Paper Office’.21 About a 100 years later, the restrictions were removed at the initiative of Lord Romilly, the master of the rolls. In fact, Ewald dedicates his book to Lord Romilly, who ‘has won the thanks of men of literature for removing those restrictions which formerly attended the inspection of our national archives’.22 The access the master of the rolls, Romilly, allowed to scholars in general was selectively given in the earlier years of the nineteenth century to some scholars. However, the Indian Government stuck to the principle of secrecy much longer, till the 1930s, as we shall the later in the following pages. The office of the master of the rolls in England was elevated to that of the head of the PRO by the Public Record Act of 1837, but there was no Public Record building in England. The construction of a records repository building had been proposed by the Record Commission in The Project of Building a General Record Office, and the master of the rolls requested the Treasury for funds in 1835.23 The Treasury demurred and delayed a decision till 1851, when the construction of the PRO building began. We have a report in 1896 that construction was still going on. The consolidation under one roof of public records scattered in different offices was being slowly accomplished according to the report in 1896: Within the walls of the stately, albeit unfinished Record Repository, … are now collected together all the muniments of the Superior Courts of Law anciently preserved in their respective Treasuries and subsequently in the several Record Offices established in the Tower of London, the Rolls Chapel Office the Chapter House at Westminster, the King’s Mews at Charing Cross, Carlton Ride, and other places of deposit, as well as those of Special or Abolished Jurisdictions from all parts of the country. To these have been added the entire contents of the State Paper Office at Westminster, which was amalgamated with the Public Record Office in 1854, and the Books Papers, and Documents of the various Government Departments to a comparatively recent date.24

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Compared to the slow progress in England, the Indian government’s performance was not too bad. If we may anticipate a later development, when the first record keeper of the Indian government, George Forrest, was appointed in 1891, he could easily assemble all the major components of the Imperial Records because they were already located in Calcutta, in most cases in one building, the Writers’ Building. The volume of records was also less in India compared to that of the England offices which sometimes had records going back to the thirteenth century. Among the repositories outside of the Public Records Office was the India Office in England. It had a record collection that was parallel and complementary to the Government of India’s Imperial Records. As a separate department, the India Office Records was set up as late as 1884, but it had served as a record office for centuries before that; indeed, it was the only systematic consolidated archive of the governmental records of India until the creation of the Record Department in Calcutta under Forrest in 1891. The India Office Records served historical researchers throughout the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century, playing the role the NAI has played since Independence. William Foster, registrar and superintendent of records, India Office, wrote a brief history of the India Office Records in 1919, which shows that no one was employed to take care of records till 1816 when a ‘searcher of the records’ was appointed by the East India Company. As regards the India Board of Control (which preceded the council of the secretary of state for India in supervising Indian affairs), since 1784 their papers were no one’s responsibility till in 1811 a ‘librarian and keeper’ of the papers was appointed. That was the beginning of the India Office Records establishment.25 In the 1860s, we find that the official view in the Government of India was that old records that were no longer of any use or did not have any importance from the statistical, commercial, or administrative point of view must be destroyed. That was the first task assigned to the Record Commission in Calcutta. This echoed the watchword of the day at the India Office is London. In February 1860, Sir Charles Wood, the secretary of state for India, appointed a committee to identify records for destruction, and soon after that 300 tons of paper were sold as waste paper in 1860. In 1858, another 23 tons were

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similarly destroyed. How much of that was of historical importance is unknown. Foster remarks: ‘It is clear, however, that some series of real importance for historical purposes were discarded…. The only consideration that was really taken into account was whether or not the documents were likely to be referred to for official purposes’.26 What sometimes saved documents of historical interest was the opinion of individuals such as Sir George Birdwood, who brought to public attention the significance of the Factory Records, or Sir Henry Yule, a member of the secretary of state’s council, who edited published records from the India Office archives. Archiving on modern lines really began in the India Office in 1884 when Fredrick Danvers was appointed the first registrar and superintendent of records, heading a new department called Registry and Records Department (from 1874 to 1884, there was no separate office; the record maintenance being done as an additional duty by the staff from the Statistical Department). Danvers, educated at Merchant Taylors’ School and King’s College, London, was more highly educated than the average ‘writer’ or clerk who joined the East India House, and he rose to the position of registrar in the Records Department (1884). He rapidly produced reports on India Office papers relating to Java, China, Japan, the Persian Gulf, and India between 1887 and 1891. One of these was published as Parliamentary Papers, and another on India was printed by the order of the secretary of state for India. He was quite forthright in commenting in his report to the secretary for state on records of the India Office in 1889: It is much to be feared that, in the endeavour to get rid of only useless Records, those destroyed—especially in the earlier years of destruction—had not been sufficiently examined before being condemned, and that thus documents of historical interest shared the fate of others which had ceased to possess any sufficient value to justify their preservation. At no time hitherto does there appear to have been undertaken a critical examination and comparison of the Records of this Office, such as would enable them to be properly classified, and put away in systematic order. Indeed, up to the present time, there exist volumes of which no record has ever been made, so that, in the event of their being lost, no evidence would be forthcoming that they had ever existed. Until a careful examination,

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comparison, and proper classification shall have been made of all the Records now in existence, it will not be possible to state with confidence what are now missing or what still exist. A commencement of such a critical examination has now been made, and the results, thus far, have been most satisfactory, many of the loose unbound papers having being found to supply, to a great extent, existing vacancies in the bound Volumes.27

Let us anticipate future developments after Danvers in order to complete the story of archival organization in England. Danvers, apart from classifying and organizing and listing records, also started to publish the early records of the East India Company and this project was continued by his successors Arthur Wollaston and William Foster. This effort in the India Office supplemented the PRO, particularly by means of the Calendars of State Papers, East Indies, edited by W.N. Sainsbury in 1870 and by Ethel Bruce Sainsbury in 1909.28 The remarkable thing about the India Office archiving projects from F.C. Danvers to William Foster’s administration was the greater attention to the historical significance of records as distinct from the previous regime’s emphasis on the utility of records for official purposes. Foster stated in his justly famous guide to India Office records (which hundreds of students accessing Indian records in London, like myself, have used) that his guidebook was different from the earlier India Office publications on records: The present handbook is largely a summary of the India Office press lists already mentioned, which were only printed for official use and hence are not generally available…. The arrangement too is different, the object being to meet the needs of students who are not familiar with the subject. For the same purpose a considerable amount of explanatory matter has been inserted … it will not escape notice that, while attention has been devoted mostly to the records relating directly to India, the collection itself makes a much wider appeal to historical students.29

It was left to Malcolm Seton, in his monograph on the India Office, a few years after William Foster’s guide to records, to comment thus on the role of the India Office Records in facilitating historical research:

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The old General Records are open to students, while access to the older ‘Secret’ papers kept in the Political Department, dealing with the conduct of Indian foreign policy, is allowed under special conditions for purposes of serious historical research. Much has been done in the way of calendaring, and the textual publication of, the East India Company’s letters to its servants in the East; while a series of writers on Indian history, among whom may be mentioned Sir George Birdwood, Mr. F. C. Danvers, Mr. Sainsbury, Mr. S. C. Hill, Sir George Forrest, and Sir William Foster, have given to the public the results of their researches in the India Office Records.30

The British Royal Commission on Public Records of 1914 observed: ‘After the transfer the records were for a time neglected and in disorder, … they are now housed in suitable rooms in the basement of the India Office, several excellent lists and calendars have been printed, and historical students receive every assistance in consulting them.’31 Another important observation of this Royal Commission was regarding the professionalization of the archival personnel and a permanent Record Commission: For the proper keeping of the records it is also essential that the officer responsible should have an adequate staff of skilled subordinates; it is not sufficient that he should have only the temporary services of a large number of unskilled persons engaged in other work for most of their time.… Knowledge of the old records of a Department and of the past history of the branch of the administration with which it is concerned is of considerable practical value, and it can be perpetuated and transmitted only by adapting the organization of the Department and specialising the functions of some of the staff…. Finally, we beg to repeat our recommendation for the appointment of a permanent Commission (however it may best be constituted) for, the government of the Public Record Office.32

Although the Record Department in India did not come within the purview of the Royal Commission in UK of 1914, its recommendations may have had an effect in India as well as in hastening considerations leading to the appointment of an Indian Historical Record Commission. As regards professionalization, the commission’s observation had no impact on the Indian government’s policy. We shall return to this theme in Chapter 4.

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Was the British Model Feasible in India? There were two big questions facing the Indian government in the phase we are considering in this chapter, from 1872 to 1891. First, was the British model feasible in India? If the publication of records and calendars and index to records was the priority, as Viceroy Northbrook and his council had decided, as we have seen earlier, how was that to be implemented, given the British model outlined above? Second, would a policy of publishing records suffice or was it necessary to revert to the idea of a central record office under a keeper of records, corresponding to the head of the PRO in England? The greater part of the years from 1872 to 1891 was spent in dithering about how to reproduce the British model of calendaring and publishing documents, and at the end the government opted for the latter alternative. One of the models for the Indian government was the Calendar of Treasury Papers (London, 1868) prepared by Joseph Redington, under instructions from the master of the rolls. These instructions were indeed formidable; for example the following: The Master of the Rolls considers that, without superseding the necessity of consulting the originals, every Editor ought to frame his Calendar in such a manner that it shall present, in as condensed a form as possible, a correct index of the contents of the papers described in it. He [the master of the rolls, UK] considers that the entries should be so minute as to enable the reader to discover not only the general contents of the originals, but also what they do not contain. If the information be not sufficiently precise, if facts and names be omitted or concealed under a vague and general description, the reader will be often misled, he will assume that where the abstracts are silent as to information to be found in the documents, such information does not exist; or, he will have to examine every original in detail, and thus one great purpose will have been lost for which these Calendars have been compiled.33

The Indian government soon found that it did not have trained and experienced personnel to carry out the complex task laid down in the protocol prescribed above. The correspondence of the Government of India in the years following referred time and again to another model: the calendar of Indian papers in the PRO in England prepared by

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W. Noel Sainsbury of the PRO in London produced in 1870.34 Sainsbury was proud that his calendar was adopted as a model in India and he says in his ‘Preface’ to his volume: It will not be out of place to say, in conclusion, that fifty copies of the last volume of the Calendar of East India Papers were voted by the late Secretary of State for India in Council for distribution among the four Presidencies in India; and that the present Governor-General, the Earl of Mayo, before sailing for India, inspected both the original documents and this Calendar of them, so far as it had then advanced, and requested that he might have a copy of the Calendar already published and proof sheets of this, to take out with him to read on his voyage.

However, in practice the idea of producing calendars of Indian records based on the India Office model proved to be impossible because there were neither any staff nor central archive corresponding to what the India Office possessed. In the Indian officials’ world the type of calendar produced in England was supposed to be the acme of archival work. There were few calendars of archival records produced in India, but they were not along the lines outlined earlier. For instance, in 1864 Scott Smith attempted a calendar, but his premature death led to the publication of a truncated version.35 But that was just ‘an experiment, on the recommendation of the Record Commission’, according to the ‘Preface’ by the chairman of the commission, W. Seton-Karr. The experiment was not followed by further efforts of that kind by the Government of India. And it was supposed by the Indian officialdom that a work of that standard was unattainable in India unless a specialist was imported for that purpose from England. Almost 50 years later, in 1911, E. Denison Ross, then the record keeper of the Government of India, began to publish calendars of Persian documents.36 Before that there was no project to produce a calendar, such was the dread of falling short of the standard of calendaring in England. The failure to follow the British model of calendaring records persuaded the British Indian bureaucracy and the viceroy’s council to focus on the alternative—to publish ‘selections from records’ and to look around for an archivist who would undertake the job of classifying and arranging and selecting documents for publication. In 1889,

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almost by coincidence, the Government of India identified a person who could be trusted to head a central record office, or to begin the process leading towards that end. The man thus identified was G.W. Forrest (1846–1926), destined to be the head of the Imperial Record Office in future; the unstated premise of this line of action was to abandon the policy recommended by Sir William Hunter and accepted by Viceroy Northbrook’s government in 1872 to refrain from setting up a central record room. Forrest was first a school teacher and eventually a college professor in the Bombay Educational Service who acquired a reputation after publishing in 1885 a selection of documents of the Bombay government. In 1888, he was deputed by the Bombay government to put their records in proper order, which had been in a chaotic state due to negligence. In 1889, the Bombay government resolved to record their appreciation of ‘the progress made [by Forrest] in the arrangement and classification of the government records in the new Record office’.37 The example of the creation of the new record office by a subordinate government in the Bombay Presidency as well as the urgent need to respond to Secretary of State Lord Cross’s pressure led the Indian government to institute a central record office of its own. Forrest, a relatively young man of 45 (and a teacher in the low grade of 750–1,000 rupees) was deputed by the Indian government to organize the records of Foreign Department in proper order, then considered the most important department. His work in that regard was found to be satisfactory, and the Government of India was impressed with his promise that if he were to be given an office and a building, he would create ‘a Record Office which will rank with any Record office in Europe’.38 Thereafter, the Government of India in their dispatch to the secretary of state reverted to the idea of establishing a central record office, an idea often urged upon them by a series of secretaries of state since Sir Charles Wood. The government now admitted that ‘the vast mass of records, indifferently housed [in concerned departments], which are seldom consulted and which are subject, as the result of exposure to damp and insects in this climate, to rapid decay’ unless preserved properly.39 As a result, the Secretary of State Lord Cross approved the creation of a post of ‘Officer in charge of the Records of the Government of India’ and G.W. Forrest thus became the founder-head of the record office of

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the Government of India in March 1891. That was the beginning of the Imperial Record Office, the predecessor of the present-day NAI. Thus, the year 1891 marks the beginning of a new stage in the evolution of the archival policy in India. Contemporary Historiography and Archiving There can be no doubt that the period we are considering in this chapter, 1872 to 1891, was dominated by Sir William Hunter (1840–1900). Early in life he devoted himself to the study of records. Speaking in an autobiographical mode, in the last book Hunter wrote, a book published posthumously, he stated: Thirty four years ago my attention was drawn to the historical materials in the record rooms of Bengal, and the inquiries then commenced have been continued from the archives of England, Portugal and Holland. I found that what had passed for Indian history dealt but little with the staple work done by the founders of British rule in the East, or with its effects on the native races. The vision of our Indian Empire as a marvel of destiny, scarcely wrought by human hands, faded away…. Yet if we bring down England’s work in India from the regions of wonder and hypothesis to the realm of reality … enough of greatness remains.40

Hunter indeed played an important role in giving archival records their rightful place in historiography. His education at the Glasgow University and in Paris and Bonn was different from the educational background of most of his contemporaries in the ICS. He came to India in 1862 and served in Bengal till 1887. In 1871, at a very early age, he was selected by Viceroy Mayo to assist the Indian government in its first attempt to produce a ‘statistical’ study of India. The outcome was a series of 128 volumes of District Gazetteers of India that Hunter edited, and 20 volumes that Hunter wrote on Bengal. These volumes were summarized by Hunter in 9 volumes of the justly famous Imperial Gazetteer of India published in 1881. While the Imperial Gazetteer was his chief claim to fame, Hunter’s own agenda of studies placed archival research at the top. His interest in old records began while he was a very junior officer in the ICS, a

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district magistrate in Birbhum, the western part of Bengal. He writes a report on archival research in 1874: At an early period in my service I was attracted by the manuscript records in the District Offices of Bengal. Between 1863 and 1866, Sir Cecil Beadon, then Lieutenant-Governor, gave me facilities for examining the older papers in the nine south-western Collectorates which constituted the Presidency and Bardwan Divisions. Similar opportunities were granted by the two succeeding Lieutenant Governors, Sir William Grey and Sir George Campbell, for an examination of the District records in Orissa and other Divisions of the Lower Provinces…. With the help of assistants, I went through the earliest manuscripts preserved in the Board of Revenue, Calcutta, and noted down a list of 17,000 letters illustrative of the District administration 1782 to 1812. The first 14,136 letters of this list, dealing with the quarter of a century from 1782 to 1807, are summarised in the four following volumes.

These volumes are The Bengal Manuscript Records.41 In his first publication, The Annals of Rural Bengal (1872), he focused on Birbhum and the western region of Bengal. He discovered many hitherto unknown records. He writes of this chance discovery: Four years ago, in taking over charge of the District Treasury, I was struck with the appearance of an ancient press [that is, book case], which, from the state of its padlocks, seemed not to have been opened for many years, and with whose contents none of the native officials was acquainted. On being broken open it was found to contain the early records of the district from within a year of the time that it passed directly under British rule. The volumes presented every appearance of age and decay; their yellow-stained margins were deeply eaten into by insects, their outer pages crumbled to pieces under the most tender handling, and of some the sole palpable remains were chips of paper mingled with the granular dust that white ants leave behind. Careful research has convinced me that these neglected heaps contain much that is worthy of being preserved.42

Being a keen archivist, Hunter was anxious to supplement the official records with private papers, but he found an insufficiency there: ‘English history owes much of its value, and still more of its pathos, to the stores of private documents which the strong individuality of

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bygone Englishmen has left behind; but in India, one rural generation dreams out its existence after another, and all are forgotten. Not many family archives of importance have passed into my hands.’43 Hunter speculated that perhaps the nature of rural society was different in India. Among the elite landed families there was no ‘strong country feeling which knits together the magnates of an English shire’. In his book Annals, Hunter depended on district records in Birbhum, Burdwan, and so on, the Board of Revenue in Calcutta, and India Office Records in London. But the bulk of his archival research was in the remote district offices and his labours described his work in isolation: No one can be more sensitively conscious than the writer of the imperfections of a work written in the jungle, eight thousand miles distant from European libraries, and the changes and daily exactions of an Indian career. But this isolation, while productive of sufficiently obvious defects, has enabled him to essay several things not attempted before. The manuscript Indian archives in London, in Calcutta, and in the provincial offices of Bengal have for the first time been compared, and their information brought to a common focus.44

Hunter seems to have been motivated not only by an interest in records, but also by a deeper sense of commitment, rare among colonial historians: ‘Eloquent and elaborate narratives have indeed been written of the British ascendency in the East; but such narratives are records of the English Government, or biographies of the English Governors of India, not histories of the Indian people. The silent millions who bear our yoke have found no annalist’.45 While as a young man Hunter was thus motivated, in old age after years of service in the ICS, he entertained little sympathy of that kind for the Indians who might try to study their own past. Indeed, as we shall see later in these pages, he said archives are redundant in India for there are no Indians worthy to take part in historical enquiries in the manner of the European learned men. Perhaps in the decades he spent in Indian administration the iron had entered his soul, but in his early years in India Hunter was a pioneer in archival research and archive building. Other than the sympathy with the ‘millions who bear our yoke’, there was a second motivation. He sought in the records the secret of England’s success in empire building. He looked

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at the early British Indian records with that perspective, an approach typical of colonial historiography: They impartially retain the evidence of low motives and official incompetence side by side with the impress of rare devotion and administrative skill. But taken as a whole, they reveal the secret of England’s greatness in the East. They exhibit a small band of our countrymen going forth to govern an unexplored and a half-subdued territory. Before the brave heroism and masterful character of these men the native mind succumbed. Our troops originated for us a rude Mahratta-like supremacy; but the rural records attest that the permanent sources of the English ascendancy in Bengal have been, not their brilliant military successes, but deliberate civil courage and indomitable will.46

We have focused here on Hunter’s contribution as an archivist— and his stolid defence of Britain’s imperial image—but he was a considerable historian as well. He wrote biographies of the viceroys Mayo and Dalhousie, and edited a popular history series, The Rulers of India. However, he was best known as the author of A Brief History of the Indian Peoples (Oxford, 1883). In the ‘Preface’ to the 21st edition, he wrote: I am grateful to my critics in many countries for the reception which they have given to this book. It has been translated into five languages, including a literal rendering in Burmese, and a poetical version in Urdu. The English issue alone has reached its eightysecond thousandth copy, and from 1886 onwards for many years the Calcutta University prescribed the work as a textbook for its Entrance Examination…. Although compressed into a small size, it essays to embody the latest results of Indian historical research, and of that more critical examination of the Indian Records which forms so important a feature of recent Indian Work.47

Hunter’s success as a textbook writer came along with his growing reputation as an educationist—he chaired the Indian Education Commission (1882–3) and became the vice chancellor of the University of Calcutta in 1886. Hunter was a prolific author who moulded the colonialist ideology in the historical works in the late nineteenth century. Many of

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the contemporary civil servants’ historical writings mentioned elsewhere in these pages, for example, Erskine, Temple, Colvin, and others, were part of the Rulers of India series edited by Hunter. He was instrumental in giving an imperialist turn to the archiving of records and the narration of the history of British India. At the same time, his academic acceptance and reputation was undeniable if one considers his works such as The Indian Muslims (London, 1871), The Earl of Mayo (London, 1876), as well as his last major work Marquess of Dalhousie (Rulers of India series, Oxford, 1895). He pursued research in historical records with a missionary zeal, and we reproduce his memorable words on this in the appendix to this chapter. Utilization of Records in Writing History As regards works of history based on government records in the 1870s and 1880s, some authors tried in a cursory way to include records in the biographies of empire builders. Some of them were part of the series Rulers of India. In the absence of easily accessible records in a central archive—the records being in a dispersed state in the different departments of the Indian government—very little archival input was available; the biographers depended mainly on memoirs and private papers. There were only a few works soundly based on government records in this period. Two of them engaged in an elaborate debate: Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (1829–1894), formerly the law member of the viceroy’s council, and Henry Beveridge (1837–1929), member of the ICS and the Positivists’ Society of England, a radical group in England that were influenced by the French thinker Auguste Comte (1798–1857). The debate illustrates an important aspect of archival research. An example of the variety of interpretation made of records in the archives is the difference in various historians’ interpretation of the records of Nanda Kumar, known in the records as ‘Nuncomar’, who was tried and hanged during Warren Hastings’ administration. James Mill echoed the popular opinion of his times in his history of India, an opinion that was deeply influenced by Edmund Burke’s denunciation of Hastings during his impeachment. Mill wrote: ‘No transaction perhaps of his whole administration more deeply tainted the reputation of Hastings than the tragedy of Nuncomar.’48

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A few years later, Lord Macaulay’s judgement was that Hastings’ boyhood friend Elijah Impey, sitting as a judge, was complicit in a judicial murder: Of Impey’s conduct it is impossible to speak too severely. We have already said that, in our opinion, he acted unjustly in refusing to respite Nuncomar. No rational man can doubt that he took this course in order to gratify the Governor-General. If we had ever had any doubts on that point, they would have been dispelled by a letter which Mr. Gleig has published. Hastings, three or four years later, described Impey as the man ‘to whose support he was at one time indebted for the safety of his fortune, honor, and reputation.’ These strong words can refer only to the case of Nuncomar; and they must mean that Impey hanged Nuncomar in order to support Hastings. It is, therefore, our deliberate opinion that Impey, sitting as a judge, put a man unjustly to death in order to serve a political purpose.49

About 50 years later, in 1885, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen wrote an entire monograph on the Nuncomar case.50 He looked back at the historical accounts of Mill and Macaulay and wrote: ‘I have referred to a number of well-known books upon India, from which, however, I have derived little assistance…. I do not believe that he [Mill] or any other historian of India had read the trial of Nuncomar with any sort of attention.’ Stephen explains why he delved deeper into the matter: The most prominent part too in Nuncomar’s story is played by Sir Elijah Impey, and it is natural that a judge who has also held the office of Legal Member of Council in India should feel an interest in the history of a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Calcutta charged with judicial murder, alleged to have been committed in order to shield the first Governor-General of Bengal from detection by the majority of his council in corruption.

He was sceptical of the work of historians of India before him: I have referred to a number of well-known books upon India, from which, however, I have derived little assistance. They go into no detail and, appear to me to have been written with hardly any reference to the greater part of the large body of evidence to which I have referred.

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James Mill, for instance, devotes about four pages to the subject which omit all its difficulties. I do not believe that he or any other historian of India had read the trial of Nuncomar with any sort of attention. He dismisses it in eight lines to the effect that the evidence was contradictory and equally balanced.51

Stephen, like a lawyer that he was, took care to enlist all the records he consulted for evidence: Bengal Consultations in India Office, Reports of Parliamentary Committees 1772–86, Report of the Impeachment Committee in British Museum (now known as the British Library), Impey’s private correspondence deposited by his son at the British Museum, and so on. There were few works on Indian history so methodically documented with historical records, all collected from depositories in England; his contention that Impey was not guilty is, of course, another matter. Stephen examined judicial records and arrived at a judgement in favour of Impey and Hastings. However, the next year a completely contrary opinion was advanced by Henry Beveridge (1837–1929). A member of the ICS, Beveridge was different from the majority in the ICS in his outlook on account of his proximity to Comtean Positivism and its British exponent Richard Congreve.52 The Positivists were generally critical of the many aspects of Britain’s imperial past, and Congreve himself was notorious for his tract condemning British policies in 1857. Beveridge reviewed the Nuncomar case in a monograph entitled The Trial of Maharaja Nanda Kumar: A Narrative of a Judicial Murder (Calcutta, 1886). The records used by Stephen were re-examined by Beveridge and he found Hastings and Impey guilty of complicity in removing a thorn in the flesh for Hastings. This exchange between a former member of the viceroy’s council defending Hastings and Impey, on one side, and, on the opposite side, a member of the ICS was a celebrated debate in the 1880s. When the first imperial record keeper, Sir George Forrest, revisited the question and looked at the same records, his judgement was contrary to that of the dissident civil servant Beveridge. He commended Stephen’s book in saying that it is a work which exhibits a profundity of research and a clearness of understanding which would do honour to any historian of modern times. By a careful marshalling of the facts and a dispassionate

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criticism of the evidence the writer dispels a cluster of fiction which had gathered around the trial of Nundcoomar. I have freely availed myself of the results of his great learning and powerful mind. The load of obloquy resting on Hastings’ memory has in a large degree been removed by clearer and juster views of the events of his time and the character of the man, who did good service for his country and the land in which he toiled for five-and-thirty years.53

After the denunciation of Hastings by James Mill, Lord Macaulay, and Henry Beveridge, in the long run the view of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen and Sir George Forrest prevailed in official Anglo-Indian opinion. However, a significant feature of the debate was to open up questions beyond just the naive use of records, the question of bias in the records and further of the tendencies of interpretation. That was a sign of colonial historiography reaching a certain degree of maturity. We shall return to this theme in the last chapter of this work. In this context, it is worthwhile to note that perceptive historians such as Hunter were free of fetishism about records. We may recall Hunter’s words: If I have relied much on the official records, I do not ignore the dangers of their too exclusive use. Contemporary documents tend to foreshorten the perspective of history. They give a false simplicity of direct cause and effect to transactions which were in reality the results of converging sequences of causes. In untwisting one strand from the cable that binds age to age, we are apt to overestimate the part which the isolated fibre played in the making of the rope. There is the peril, too, of accepting as witnesses men who were parties to a cause. After all, the traditional view embodies the average opinion of the time. I have been careful, therefore, to compare the official documents with the contemporary literature; and when possible, the archives of the Dutch and Portuguese with our own Calendars of State Papers, and with the records in India and the India Office.54

The debate between Mill, Macaulay, Fitzjames Stephen, Beveridge, and Forrest was at a highly specialized level. Did record-based history reach the popular level? Perhaps, we have two exceptional examples. One was the very popular work produced by J.T. Wheeler in 1878, The Early Records of British India. He described the sources in his ‘Preface’ to that work as follows:

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History of British India is now given for the first time in the present volumes. It has been an entirely independent work, drawn direct from the fountain head, after a study of the records of the Government of India, official reports and parliamentary blue books, and of such current annals, memoirs, travels, or correspondence, as have been found to yield historical materials.55

On the whole, the works of authors such as Wheeler, Beveridge, Fitzjames Stephen, and, above all, William Hunter marked the beginnings of modern research-based archived records, although till the beginning of the 1890s the British Indian government did as little as possible to build a central archive of government records.

Appendix56

Four Years ago, in taking over charge of the District Treasury, I was struck with the appearance of an ancient press, which, from the state of its padlocks, seemed not to have been opened for many years, and with whose contents none of the native officials was acquainted. On being broken open it was found to contain the early records of the district from within a year of the time that it passed directly under British rule. The volumes presented every appearance of age and decay; their yellow-stained margins were deeply eaten into by insects, their outer pages crumbled to pieces under the most tender handling, and of some the sole palpable remains were chips of paper mingled with the granular dust that white ants leave behind. Careful research has convinced me that these neglected heaps contain much that is worthy of being preserved. For what trustworthy account have we of the state of rural India at the commencement and during the early stages of our rule? Eloquent and elaborate narratives have indeed been written of the British ascendency in the East; but such narratives are records of the English Government, or biographies of the English Governors of India, not histories of the Indian people. The silent millions who bear our yoke have found no annalist. (The author of ‘The Grand Trunk Road, Its Localities’, p. 16, states that Vir-bhumi ‘is quite unexplored.’ This was written scarcely ten years ago of a district lying within one hundred miles of Calcutta, and only a five hours’ railway journey from it. The extent of our information as to remoter provinces may be inferred.) The only extensive investigations into the rural statistics of India are those conducted by the Survey Department, and no witness

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could give more telling evidence in proof of our ignorance than this, the single one we have to cite in our favour. The important parts of Bengal Proper, from a historical point of view, are unquestionably those that lie around the three cities which three successive races fixed upon as the headquarters of their rule. The Origin and History of the district that has Calcutta for its capital are disposed of in rather more than one page, a considerable portion of which is taken up by a feeble account of the Black Hole, and the often narrated hostilities that ensued. The Origin and History of Moorshedabad, the ancient focus of Moslem magnificence, are dismissed with half a page; and Maldah, the Hindu metropolis of Bengal, with its long line of kings, its gigantic walls and arches, its once stately palaces now the kennels of jackals, and the vast untenanted city which has been left standing as a spectacle of desolation and warning to those who now are to India what its builders once were, is treated as if it had been a sandbank which the river silted up last October, and will swallow down again next June. In a thin folio, not a single page has been devoted to its history. This, too, with the richest and most authentic materials for rural history at our command. Valuable private stores of documents are indeed wanting; but for their absence the abundance of official records makes ample amends. In the chief Government office of every district in Bengal are presses filled with papers similar to those I have described. They consist of reports, letters, minutes, judicial proceedings, and relate, in the words of eye-witnesses and with official accuracy, the daily history of the country from the time the English took the administration into their own hands. Many of them are written in the curt forcible language which men use in moments of excitement or peril; and in spite of the blunders of copyists and the ravages of decay, they have about them that air of real life which proceeds not from literary ability, but from the fact that their authors’ minds were full of the subjects on which they wrote. We learn from these worm-eaten manuscripts that what we have been accustomed to regard as Indian history is a chronicle of events which hardly affected, and which were for the most part unknown to, the contemporary mass of the Indian people. On their discoloured pages the conspicuous vicissitudes and revolutions of the past century have left no trace. Dynasties struggled and fell, but the bulk of the

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people evinced neither sympathy nor surprise, nor did the pulse of village life in Bengal move a single beat faster for all the calamities and panic of the outside world. But these volumes, so silent on subjects about which we are already well informed, speak at length and with the utmost precision on matters regarding which the western world is profoundly ignorant. They depict in vivid colours the state of rural India when the sceptre departed from the Mussulman race. They disclose the complicated evils that rendered our accession, for some time, an aggravation rather than a mitigation of the sufferings of the people. They unfold one after another the misapprehensions and disastrous vacillations amid which our first solid progress was made. They impartially retain the evidence of low motive and official incompetence side by side with the impress of rare devotion and administrative skill. But taken as a whole, they reveal the secret of England’s greatness in the East. They exhibit a small band of our countrymen going forth to govern an unexplored and a half-subdued territory. Before the grave heroism and masterful characters of these men the native mind succumbed. Our troops originated for us a rude Mahratta-like supremacy; but the rural records attest that the permanent sources of the English ascendency in Bengal have been, not their brilliant military successes, but deliberate civil courage and indomitable will. Besides the value of these memorials as a groundwork for an accurate and a yet unwritten history, they possess a special interest to those who are charged with the Government of India at the present day. When the East India Company accepted the internal administration of Bengal, it engaged to rule in accordance with native usages; and the first step towards the fulfillment of its promise was to ascertain what these usages really were. To this end instructions repeatedly issued during a period of thirty years directing all local officers to institute inquiries, and even after the formal command was removed the habit of collecting and reporting information continued till 1820. The period at which the rural records open in the western districts is one of peculiar interest. It stands on the border ground between the ancient and the modern system of Indian government. The evidence on which to form a permanent arrangement of the land revenue was in process of being collected, and not a single subject of fiscal legislation nor a detail in the agricultural economy

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of each district escaped inquiry. The tenure of the landholders and their relations to the middlemen; the tenure of the cultivators, their earnings and their style of living, their clothing and the occupation of their families at odd hours; the price of all sorts of country produce; the rent of various qualities of land; the mineral products of the district; the condition of the artisans and manufacturers, their profits and their public burdens; the native currency and system of exchange; the native system of police; the state of the district jail; lastly, cesses, tolls, dues, and every other method of recognised or unrecognised taxation,—formed in turn the subject of report. In a word, the whole fabric of the rural life of Bengal, with its joys, sorrows, and manifold oppressions, is dissected and laid bare. The sweeping revenue reforms inaugurated at the close of the first quarter of the present century, and the demands for a more exact administration that every year has brought forth since, have left neither leisure nor inclination for such studies. The labours of a previous school of officers soon became a subject of indifference to their successors; the quick decay of a tropical climate began its work; and of the researches that had occupied the ablest administrators during the first fifty years of our rule,—researches that they had designed as the basis of a consistent system of Indian rural law,—the greater part has, during the second fifty years, been made over as a prey to mildew and white ants. What proportion has perished can never be known. What part survives can only be permanently preserved by the intervention of the State. Among a highly cultured people the writing of national history may well be left to private efforts; but in modern India no leisurely and lettered class has yet been developed to conduct such researches. (Dr. Buchanan, who was engaged in a statistical and historical survey of the districts north of Beerbhoom, 1807–1814, could not find a single antiquarian or a single historical document throughout the great province of Bahar.—The History, Antiquities, etc., of Eastern India, compiled from the Buchanan MSS., in the East India House, by R. Montgomery Martin, 3 vols. 8vo, 1838, vol. I, p. 21. This work would form an excellent basis for a history of rural Bengal, were it not confined to a few districts only). In truth, government among imperfectly civilized societies has to discharge many functions which, in a more advanced stage, may, with great wisdom, be made over to individual enterprise. No one can

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be more sensitively conscious than the writer of the imperfections of a work written in the jungle, eight thousand miles distant from European libraries, amid the changes and daily exactions of an Indian career. But this isolation, while productive of sufficiently obvious defects, has enabled him to essay several things not attempted before. The manuscript Indian archives in London, in Calcutta, and in the provincial offices of Bengal have for the first time been compared, and their information brought to a common focus Learned natives have been employed to compile district histories, and the Ancient Houses of Bengal have been induced, for the first time in the English annals of the Province, to open up their family record-rooms. The whole body of missionaries—Episcopal, Baptist, and American Dissenters—who labour among the lapsed races on the ethnical frontier, have heartily joined in the work, each favouring me with the results of his own researches into the languages and habits of the hill-men. If it were not invidious to particularize any single class of my coadjutors, it would be to these learned and reverend gentlemen that I should wish to return especial thanks. Whatever may be the shortcomings of this preliminary volume, the author believes that it will lead to the discovery, and he hopes to the rescue, of a vast store of materials from which an invaluable work might be deduced; materials which will enable the Indian Government to discharge two hitherto neglected duties; the duty which it owes to our own nation, of preserving the only circumstantial memorials of British rule in Bengal, and the duty it owes to other nations, of interpreting the rural millions of India to the western world. Notes 1. W.W. Hunter to A.P. Howell, Undersecretary, Home Department, 17 November 1871, in reply to letter from Howell, 3 November 1871, Home Department, Public Branch, No. 3771, December 1872. 2. W.W. Hunter to A.P. Howell, Undersecretary, Home Department, 17 November 1871, in reply to letter from Howell, 3 November 1871, Home Department, Public Branch, No. 3771, December 1872, Para 6. 3. W.W. Hunter to A.P. Howell, Undersecretary, Home Department, 17 November 1871, in reply to letter from Howell, 3 November 1871, Home Department, Public Branch, No. 3771, December 1872, Para 7.

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4. W.W. Hunter to A.P. Howell, Undersecretary, Home Department, 17 November 1871, in reply to letter from Howell, 3 November 1871, Home Department, Public Branch, No. 3771, December 1872, Para 8. 5. W.W. Hunter to A.P. Howell, Undersecretary, Home Department, 17 November 1871, in reply to letter from Howell, 3 November 1871, Home Department, Public Branch, No. 3771, December 1872, Para 9. 6. Govt of India to Secretary of State, Duke of Argyll, No. 95, 13 December 1872, Home Department, Public Branch, No. 654 (emphasis mine). 7. W.W. Hunter to A.P. Howell, Undersecretary, Home Department, 17 November 1871, in reply to letter from Howell, 3 November 1871, Home Department, Public Branch, No. 3771, December 1872. 8. W.W. Hunter to A.P. Howell, Undersecretary, Home Department, 17 November 1871, in reply to letter from Howell, 3 November 1871, Home Department, Public Branch, No. 3771, December 1872, Para 11. 9. W.W. Hunter to A.P. Howell, Undersecretary, Home Department, 17 November 1871, in reply to letter from Howell, 3 November 1871, Home Department, Public Branch, No. 3771, December 1872, Para 16. 10. W.W. Hunter to A.P. Howell, Undersecretary, Home Department, 17 November 1871, in reply to letter from Howell, 3 November 1871, Home Department, Public Branch, No. 3771, December 1872, Para 12. 11. Govt of India to Secretary of State, Duke of Argyll, No. 95, 13 December 1872, Home Department, Public Branch, No. 654. 12. See list in Home (Public) December 1872, Nos 647–54. 13. Hunter to A.P. Howell, 17 November 1871, Home Department, Public Branch, December 1872. 14. Govt of India to Secretary of State, Home Department, Public Branch, No. 654, 13 December 1872. 15. Govt of India to Secretary of State, Home Department, Public Branch, No. 654, 13 December 1872. 16. To the Secretary of State, Govt of India, Home Department, Public Branch, No. 654, 13 December 1872. 17. T.B. Macaulay, The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay, ed. Thomas Pinney (London, 1974), vol. III, pp. 703–5. 18. Resolution of House of Commons, quoted in Alex C. Ewald, Our Public Records (London, 1873), p. 10. 19. Ewald, Our Public Records, p. 11. 20. Ewald, Our Public Records, p. 115.

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21. Ewald, Our Public Records, p. 116. 22. Ewald, Our Public Records, p. 116. 23. Record Commission, Papers Relative to the Project of Building a General Record Office (London, 1835). 24. S.R. Scargill-Bird, A Guide to the Principal Classes of Documents Preserved in the Public Record Office (London, 1896), ‘Introduction’. 25. William Foster, A Guide to the India Offices Records, 1600–1858 (London, 1919), p. vi. 26. Foster, A Guide to the India Offices Records, pp. vii–viii. 27. Frederick Charles Danvers, Report to the Secretary of State in Council on the Records of the India Office (London: HMSO, 1889), ‘Preface’. 28. W. Noel Sainsbury, editor of the Public Record Office, Calendar of State Papers, Original Series, East Indies, China and Japan, 1617–21, Preserved in Public Record Office (London, 1870); Ethel Bruce Sainsbury, ed., A Calendar of the Court Minutes of the East India Company, 1640–43 (Oxford, 1909). 29. Foster, Guide to the India Office Records, pp. x–xi. 30. Sir Malcolm C. Seton, The India Office (London, 1925), p. 256. 31. Report to the Royal Commission on Public Records (London: HMSO, 1914), second reprint, vol. II, part I. 32. Report to the Royal Commission on Public Records, pp. 58–61, and Recommendation on p. 62. 33. Joseph Redington, Calendar of Treasury Papers (London: HMSO, 1868). 34. W. Noel Sainsbury, Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, East Indies, China and Japan, 1617–1621 (London, 1870). 35. See Scott Smith, ed., Calendar of Indian State Papers, Secret Series, 1774–75 (Calcutta, 1864). 36. Imperial Record Department, Calendar of Persian Correspondence, vol. I, 1759–1767 (Calcutta, 1911). 37. Bombay Govt resolution no. 4964, 30 November 1889, in the General Department, cited in Govt of India Proceedings, Home Department, Public, Nos 24–42, March 1891. 38. Home Department, Public Branch, Nos 24–42, March 1891, p. 16. 39. Home Department, Public Branch, Nos 24–42, March 1891, p. 98. 40. W.W. Hunter, A History of British India (London, 1919), vol. I, ‘Introduction’, p. 1. 41. W.W. Hunter, Bengal Manuscript Records (London, 1874), p. 2. 42. W.W. Hunter, The Annals of Rural Bengal (London, 1872), pp. 5–6. 43. W.W. Hunter, A History of British India (London, 1872), vol. I, pp. 4–5.

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44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56.

Hunter, A History of British India, 1872 edition, p. 11. Hunter, A History of British India, 1919 edition, p. 1. Hunter, A History of British India, 1919 edition, pp. 8–9. W.W. Hunter, A Brief History of the Indian Peoples (Oxford, 1883), p. 1. James Mill, History of British India (London, 1844; New Delhi, 1972 [reprint]), 3 vols, vol. III, p. 449. T.B. Macaulay, in his review essay on Memoirs of the Life of Warren Hastings, first Governor-General of Bengal, Compiled from Original Papers, ed. Rev. G.R. Gleig, MA (London, 1841), 3 vols, in Edinburgh Review, reprinted in T.B. Macaulay, Lord Macaulay’s Essays (London, 1889), p. 111. James Fitzjames Stephen, The Study of Nuncomar and the Impeachment of Sir Elijah Impey (London, 1885), 2 vols. Stephen, The Story of Nuncomar, vol. I, ‘Introductory’, pp. 2, 6. Beveridge’s letters to Congreve are my source; see S. Bhattacharya, ‘Positivism in 19th Century Bengal: Diffusion of European Intellectual Influence in India’, in Indian Society: Historical Probings in Memory of D.D. Kosambi (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1974), pp. 337–55. Sir George Forrest, Selection from State Papers of Governors General, vol. I, ‘Preface’. Hunter, A History of British India, pp. 12–14. J.T. Wheeler, Early Records of British India (London, 1878), ‘Preface’, p. 4. Extract from Hunter, The Annals of Rural Bengal, pp. 5–12.

3

The Imperial Record Department Objectives and Achievements, 1891–1926

The Imperial Record Department (IRD), formed in March 1891, owed its origins to circumstances that were different from those which prevailed 30 years ago when the Record Committee had suggested the formation of a central ‘muniment room’, but the idea was exactly the same. As we have seen in the previous two chapters, for 30 years the Government of India dithered over the question of a central record room. Now that it was at last decided to form the Record Department, there developed an interesting discourse on the objectives—in part this was a rerun of the old bureaucratic views that we noted earlier, and in part the discourse brought to light new approaches to old issues. What were the objectives and issues before the new Record Department in the first 25 years of its life, till it was shifted to its present location in New Delhi in 1926? Basically, we can seek two kinds of answers to the question regarding the objectives of archiving in the Record Department. First, the stronger voice from within the bureaucracy spoke of the archive as an instrument of governance. Second, there was another approach— often voiced by the ‘Home authorities’, politically conscious people in positions such as those of the secretaries of state or some governors general who came to India for a few years as nominees of the political Archiving the British Raj: History of the Archival Policy of the Government of India, with Selected Documents, 1858–1947. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Oxford University Press (2019). © Sabyasachi Bhattacharya. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199489923.003.0004

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party in power in Britain, as well as academic persons or journalists outside the bureaucratic circle in India. In this approach, the emphasis was on ideological issues, Britain’s imperial image, and the interpretation of the past of the Indian Empire. With regard to the use of records as instruments of governance, the most obvious point often made was that in the area of external relations the colonial state had to refer to records of precedents and past practices vis-à-vis other Asian countries, the ‘native states’, that is, the princely states, or European powers such as Russia or France whose interests impinged upon British Indian interests. Old records were of value to the government since it often felt the need to build policies and practices on the basis of past precedents. It is interesting to see from the correspondence that while administrators at lower levels were impatient with the mass of historical records in their departments,1 the policymakers at the top, for example, secretaries in the viceroy’s council, were keen to have access to old records. The latter wrote in their despatch to the secretary of state in 1889 that the old records must be kept in ‘a condition in which they can resist the ravages of time, and to make their contents available for reference in the discussion of current affairs’.2 The records most frequently consulted by bureaucrats were those of the Foreign Department because relations with hundreds of native princely states and chieftains— from Afghanistan to Manipur, and Kashmir to Travancore—were regulated by numerous agreements and protocols that went back to eighteenth-century records of the East India Company. Further, the frontiers of British India were determined according to agreements with the neighbouring states. (Even the post-Independence period saw the Indian government delving into these archived data to defend its position vis-à-vis the McMahon Line or India’s relations with the states on or beyond the Himalayan foothills.) Second, past records were also useful as an important source for precedents and conventions in respect of internal administration. How to deal with tribal groups in the North-Western Frontier Province? Among the local notables and landlords who were reliable allies for the British in the past, for example, during the uprising of 1857? Which ethnic groups were appropriate to be recruited as sepoys for the British Indian Army? Who were dangerous nationalist agitators or groups in the past? These questions were settled in what

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Rudyard Kipling once called the ‘departmental view of the matter’ with reference to records. In some other matters too records were consulted by the administrators. The most apposite instance of that necessity was the periodical assessment of land revenue demand in areas outside the Permanent Settlement; there were several methods such as crop-cutting, ‘eye-estimate’, and so on to gauge the increase in production to increase revenue demand, but the rule of thumb was to get information of the assessment at the previous revenue settlement operation, 20 to 30 years ago, and to jack it up by a certain percentage. Thus, to the district collector access to old revenue settlement records was essential.3 Apart from that, there was a statutory obligation to maintain records and statistics of revenue, commerce, population, education, and so on. Since the Crown took over administration from the East India Company in 1858, the British Parliament required the Government of India to periodically submit Report on Moral and Material Progress, which included these data collected from records. Apart from the above-mentioned reasons, which were pragmatic and related to the functioning of the colonial state, there were also ideological elements in the discourse of archives. Respect for precedents was an important feature of the political culture of the British. Their habit of founding contemplated action on precedents and conventions required reference to previous records of action on various administrative matters. Apart from the urge to defend government decisions, the fetish for precedents can probably be traced to British judicial tradition and the guidance sought from ‘court-made laws’ in the form of earlier court judgments. By analogy, in administration there developed the practice of referring to precedents—that almost amounted to an ideology. Second, there was another ideological element in their desire to secure their place in history, and to defend themselves against adverse judgement of posterity. This historical consciousness was enhanced by colonial historiography—James Mill’s History of British India, followed by works of Mounstuart Elphinstone, W.W. Hunter, Alfred Lyall, and others. Archiving of records mattered to policy-level thinking; hence, British statesmen very often urged the Indian government to apply themselves to archiving in a manner appropriate to a great empire. From Sir Charles Wood to Lord Cross, a series of secretaries

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of state kept reminding the Indian government of the grave importance of that objective; probably they were more keenly conscious of its importance because they were, as members of the Parliament and the cabinet, political persons, unlike the average bureaucrats in the Indian government. A few governors general such as Lord Curzon also shared the same approach. However, if the objective was to build a favourable image of the imperial past, the government would have to open access to records for the historical researcher—who was often part of the ‘public’ outside of the bureaucracy. This was a problematic issue. For instance, in the memoranda and noting on the files by Sir Herbert Risley, the secretary of the Home Department, we see apprehensions about the danger of opening access to records to nationalist critics of British rule; Risley, therefore, desired rules in the archives that would ‘prevent unscrupulous students from selecting and publishing those portions of records which tell in favour of their point of view’.4 Thus, a bureaucratic propensity to keep records closed to public access was often in conflict with the proponents of archiving for the greater glory of the Indian Empire. Given the diverse objectives instantiated above, the head of the new IRD had a difficult task. That task was particularly difficult in the early decades of that department. At this point, it may be useful to introduce the successive heads of the IRD. The Heads of the IRD, 1891–1947 The first keeper of Imperial Records, Sir George Forrest (1846–1926), was not only an archivist but also an accomplished historian and he was the only one among those who held that position in the Record Department to have been knighted. He began his career in the Education Service in Bombay, but the reputation he acquired when he was commissioned to organize papers in the Bombay Record Office secured him the position of the officer-in-charge of records of the Indian government in 1891. When he was in his thirties, he published selections from the Bombay Record Office papers; similarly he also published a series of selections from the state papers in the Imperial Record Office in Calcutta relating to the so-called Mutiny of 1857 and documented the administration of Warren Hastings and Cornwallis in two more volumes. That apart, he wrote fairly

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competent biographies of Clive and Field Marshal Lord Roberts. His most widely read book was undoubtedly his three-volume history of the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857. He was technically the head of the Record Department from 1891 to 1899 but he was in England on furlough from 1895 to 1898 and re-joined to retire in 1899. Thus, effectively, he was the head of his department only from 1891 to 1895 but he established an order in the records by classifying them in terms of the departments they belonged to and their chronology; he also obtained from the Foreign Department, where he had worked earlier, the Persian correspondence, which was later to be calendared by his successors from Denison Ross onwards. Forrest’s long tenure as the head of the Record Department of Government of India was followed by S.C. Hill’s short tenure from 1900 to 1902. Hill came from a missionary family. Samuel Charles Hill (1857–1926) is not to be found among the officials who usually find mention in standard biographical dictionaries; C.E. Buckland in his Anglo-Indian biographical dictionary omits his name and so does the British Dictionary of National Biography. Yet he played an important role in the history of archiving in India. His father as well as grandfather belonged to the London Missionary Society and worked in Berhampore in the Bengal Presidency. Young Samuel was educated at London University and joined the Bengal Educational Service in 1881. Thereafter he worked as a college teacher in government colleges in Bengal—Dacca, Krishnagar, Hugly, and Calcutta—till 1900, when his reputation as a historian secured him the position of record keeper in the IRD, as a successor to George Forrest. Hill had served for some time as a member of the Record Commission in an honorary capacity and was thus familiar with the task at hand. In 1902, Hill was persuaded to accept a higher post as director of public instructions in the central provinces. He was the editor of Bengal in 1756–57, selected documents from the archives.5 After his retirement in 1912, he worked on a catalogue of India Office Records in London; after his death in 1926, William Foster of had the volume published from the India Office.6 Hill’s successor as the head of the Record Department was Charles Robert Wilson (1863–1904), who served in that capacity from 1902 to 1904. Educated at City of London School and Wadham College, Oxford, Wilson joined the Bengal Education

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Service in 1887. The couple of years he served as record keeper were not remarkable for any special achievement. He pushed forward the work of preparing press lists of documents and filled up gaps in the Indian records with records obtained from the India Office in London. A scholar by temperament, he failed to secure his superior officers’ support. But as a historian he was successful with his selection from sources, The Early Annals of the English in Bengal. That book is reprinted to this day. He also edited the India Office collections of letters to the East India Company from agents in Bengal from 1685 to 1708. This was published—under the title Old Fort William in Bengal—after Wilson’s death in the India Records Series initiated by Viceroy Curzon, who was a great enthusiast in archival matters.7 One N.L. Hallward took charge when C.R. Wilson retired but that was an interim appointment for less than a year to be followed by the long tenure of Edward Denison Ross, a distinguished scholar (1871–1940). Educated at University College London, he studied ‘Oriental languages’ in Paris and Strasburg. After he earned a PhD, he was appointed the teacher of Persian language in London University (1896–1901). Perhaps to pursue Persian studies, he joined Calcutta Madrasa (1901–5) and, finally, the Indian Record Department of which he was the head from 1905 to 1914. During his tenure an administrative reordering took place: in 1910, the IRD was moved from the Indian government’s Home Department to the Education Department, but the status of the head of the Record Department remained the same, a rather low position of an assistant secretary. Ross’s greatest contribution was to set up in the Record Department a separate unit with maulvis well-versed in Persian in order to prepare calendars of Persian correspondence. This was an important aid to research because the bulk of the early British correspondence with ‘Native Powers’ was in Persian. The First World War took its toll on the supply of manpower from England to India. For some years a series of persons, deputized from other offices or promotees from the lower ranks of administration, were functioning as keeper of records, such as A.F. Scholfield (1914–19), R.H. Blaker (1919–20), and J.M. Mitra (1920–2). Scholfield’s main contribution was a comprehensive index of all press lists of the ‘public’ series as well as a manual on preparing an index,

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which was thereafter used in the department. From the administrative point of view his tenure saw two developments: the designation of the head of the IRD was changed from ‘officer in charge, Record Office’ to ‘keeper of records’; and in 1919 the Indian Historical Records Commission (IHRC) was instituted.8 However, the IHRC was far from being a policymaking body in the first decade of its existence; it was a meeting point for archives officials from different parts of India discussing minutiae of their profession. In 1919, Blaker—promoted from his position as superintendent in the Education Department—took over charge from Scholfield for about 15 months. Jamini Mohan Mitra of the Bengal Provincial Service was assistant secretary in the Education Department when he was given charge of the Record Department for a year and a few months. He and his two immediate predecessors had no interest in historical studies, but in 1922 a historian was again appointed, A.F.M. Abdul Ali. He headed the Record Department for a very long time, from 1922 to 1938. During his tenure, the IHRC began to advise the government in respect of policies of locating, acquiring, and preserving records and allowing access to records to researchers. Although Abdul Ali played an important role as secretary to the IHRC, the printed proceedings tell us that he was somewhat overshadowed in the by stalwarts such as Sir Jadunath Sarkar and Neelkanta Sastri. However, as the chief of the Record Department he was an important participant in policy discussions; he was also the author of some research papers, demonstrating his interest in historical studies.9 He also produced the first guide to the records of the IRD, later updated and expanded in 1959. During his tenure a subcommittee of the IHRC, comprising Sir Jadunath Sarkar, Rushbrook Williams, and H.E.A. Cotton, was appointed to consider the destruction of old and useless records. The committee endorsed the practice of dividing records into three classes: (A) of permanent value and (C) of no historical value or administrative use, with a class in between designated as (B) class records. As regards elimination of useless records, the most important recommendation the committee made was that regardless of the above-mentioned classification all pre-1857 records should be preserved; this saved for future historians many documents, which were useful sources from the point of view of social and economic historians of later times.

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Although this chapter ends with the completion of the shift of the capital and Indian government’s offices from Calcutta to New Delhi—and the construction of the building on Queen’s Way, or present-day Janpath, in New Delhi, for the IRD in 1926—let us complete the story of successive heads of the IRD till 1947. Abdul Ali presided over the important process of separation of the records of the central Government of India from the records of the provincial government of Bengal. That and the resultant transfer of records took about eleven years, from 1926 to 1937. Upon Abdul Ali’s retirement in 1938 his successor was an eminent historian, Surendranath Sen (1890–1962). After studying in the University of Calcutta up to the award of PhD, Sen taught at the same university to rise to the position of Sir Asutosh Mookerjee Professor of Modern Indian History. He specialized in the history of the Marathas, and his published monographs showed deep knowledge of the British Indian archives and administration and military records in the Marathi language. In 1938, he was persuaded to accept the headship of the Indian government’s Record Department. During his tenure, the Record Department began to admit researchers to study records, subject to strict scrutiny of their status as bona fide researchers, and also official scrutiny of excerpts from records taken by non-official readers. Thus in 1939, only eight years before India attained independence, the Indian government records became accessible to Indian non-officials. Generally speaking, from 1938 to 1949, the Record Room was slowly transformed into the NAI, and was so renamed by an Act of Parliament after Independence. After retirement from the NAI in 1949, Sen served in the University of Delhi as vice chancellor. Upon returning to Calcutta he wrote several books of history, one of which was 1857, written at the request of then minister of education, Abul Kalam Azad, on the occasion of the centenary of the uprising then being celebrated. Unlike Sen’s other works, this book was widely read: although Sen’s characterization of the Uprising was altogether different from the earlier colonial historians’ point of view, ultranationalists found fault with it since he did not acclaim all the leaders of the movement as nationalists and heroes. It is interesting to reflect on the fact that the first imperial record keeper, Sir George Forrest, was known for his history of the ‘Mutiny’ and the first

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director of the NAI, Dr S.N. Sen, for his work on the uprising of 1857 from an opposite perspective. Finally, what was the appropriate designation of the head of the Record Department? It is important to bear in mind the fact that the IRD (sometimes called the Imperial Record Office in the early days) was a relatively unimportant department under the Home Department. The head of this department had the low rank of assistant secretary and even his designation was left unsettled for a long time. The head of the department was originally called ‘the officer in charge of records’ in 1891, and we can see, in contemporary files and noting by officials, reference to the initials ‘O.R.’.10 Wilson, a scholar of Wadham College, Oxford, was the only man heading the department to have the confidence to bring up this matter officially in the last note he wrote on 21 May 1904 before demitting office: I should also like to add a word as to my designation. It seems to me that the title Officer in charge of the Records of the Government of India is very lengthy and cumbersome. I should prefer something shorter. Mr. Forrest used to call himself ‘Director of Imperial Records’ or something of the sort. I am not very much in favour of the title as it seems rather meaningless. How can I he said to direct records? What does directing records mean? ‘Imperial Archivist’ is quite short but the term sounds strange and foreign. Perhaps the best title would be ‘Keeper of the Imperial Archive’. This sounds dignified and English. But perhaps it suffices that I have called the attention of Government to the point, and they will think of some short and possible title.11

The designation was indeed changed later. To anticipate later developments till Independence, the designation usually appears in records as ‘keeper of records’ till 1944. A new designation was approved by the government in 1944: director of Archives; this was when the eminent historian Dr Surendranath Sen was holding this office, and on 30 August 1947 the department itself was renamed the NAI. Agenda of the Record Department, 1891–1926 To return to the period we address in this chapter, 1891–1926, what were the major tasks of the IRD? From 1891, the records of the IRD indicate that it was expected to perform some routine functions:

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(i) acquisition of records from government departments who sent to it records no longer considered useful, (ii) restoration and preservation of documents, and (iii) supply of specific documents to government departments as and when required by a government department. As we have seen earlier, the Record Department was also charged, in a somewhat confusing welter of instructions from the secretary of state and the Government of India from time to time, with additional responsibilities: (i) publication of selected records from the state papers in the possession of the Indian Record Department, (ii) preparation of press lists, that is, annotated lists of records in a classified form, and (iii) preparation of calendars of documents, that is, abstracts of documents enlisted chronologically for each segment of correspondence and records of the Indian government, in the format established by the PRO in England. If we may at this point anticipate the story that will follow, broadly speaking the problems encountered by the IRD in implementing the instructions in respect of press lists and calendars were as follows (while publishing selected records was quite unproblematic): (i) The press lists of documents roughly from the mid-eighteenth century were difficult to prepare because many documents were missing and had to be procured from the India Office in London; in fact, from 1891 to 1897 this work had not even begun and then it picked up pace under Forrest, Hill, and Wilson; (ii) The calendars could not be prepared until the press lists were completed; further, the trained manpower needed to prepare calendars on the English model as prescribed by the master of rolls, which was not available in India and, therefore, the Indian government throughout the 1890s preferred that the India Office should prepare calendars; (iii) The India Office was instructed by the secretary of state for India to undertake calendaring but the pace of work was exceedingly slow; (iv) Around 1904 the perception of this slow rate of progress at the India Office and the urgent desire of the Indian government under Viceroy Curzon to expedite publication led to the decision that the preparation of both press lists and calendars of records should be done by the IRD in India. However, while the work of preparing press lists was pushed forward quite well in the next two decades, no calendar was published except for calendars of Persian documents; (v) The preparation and publication of selections of records was one part of the agenda where success was most publicly visible and applauded.

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Selections from Records Upon assuming office George Forrest wrote an assessment of the Record Commission’s work: A Commission was appointed, and though a considerable sum of money was spent, no practical good resulted from their labours. Two or three volumes of selections throwing light on the social life of Calcutta in olden days were published and two reports written by the Secretary to the Record Commission dealing with the records in the Home and Foreign Departments were also issued. These reports give a list, of the volumes contained in the respective department but convey scanty information regarding their contents.12

Forrest was unjust when he thus dismissed decades of labour undertaken by the Record Commission from 1860, and there is also insufficient acknowledgement of several contributions, which we have mentioned earlier: five volumes of Selections from Calcutta Gazette, 1748–1823, edited by Seton-Karr and later Sandeman; Rev. James Long’s selections from unpublished records of the government for the years 1748–67, throwing light on social life in Bengal; and J.T. Wheeler’s Early Records of British India. Publishing selections from records began in a big way with the appointment of George Forrest. He had already produced, while he was working at the Bombay Record Office, a number of compilations: selection from state papers in the Bombay secretariat (1885–7) and selections from official papers of Governor Mountstuart Elphinstone (1884). Thereafter came his appointment in 1891 as head of the Record Department while he was on deputation to the Government of India to organize papers in the Foreign Department. Three volumes of selected State Papers in the Foreign Department, covering the years 1772 to 1785, were produced by him in 1892. Thereafter he produced a series of selections from other records. In 1893, he edited and published selections from dispatches and letters of the Military Department during the uprising of 1857–8. The next major collection of papers he published was about Warren Hastings’s administration, entitled Selections from State Papers of the Governor-General of India (Oxford, 1910), a work he completed in England long after his retirement. This work comprised of two volumes of which only the second contained records; the

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first volume was entirely an extraordinarily lengthy ‘Introduction’, an essay in defence of Hastings. Forrest made no bones about the purpose of publishing ‘selected records’. He wrote: It was Pitt’s Bill of 1784 which provided that a department of the Imperial Government should have full cognizance of, and power of control over, the acts of the Company; and the system of Home Government for India then established remained substantially the same till the Mutiny. It was the defects in the constitution and working of the Home Government which led in a large measure to the storm in which the Company perished. In the Introduction to the State Papers my chief aim was to prove, by means of the authentic materials exhumed from the Indian archives, that Hastings was not guilty of the crimes laid to his charge by unscrupulous opponents and political partisans, and that his foreign policy was worthy of a true statesman. But his merits as the director of foreign wars and diplomacies should not be allowed to eclipse his importance as an administrator who had a love for good, wise, and stable government.13

Another such collection of state papers edited by Forrest was about another hero he admired in British Indian history, Lord Cornwallis. That was published a few months after his death in 1926, Selections from State Papers of the Governor General of India (2 volumes, Oxford, 1926). Forrest wrote in his ‘Introduction’ to these volumes that he used the original records along with reports of Parliamentary Committees. It is significant that he published these selections in England after retirement, not while he was the head of the IRD in India. This was due to, one may surmise, the constraints on publication of public records in India and the ease with which they could be accessed in England. Forrest’s successor, S.C. Hill, edited and published in 1905 a selection of documents on a crucial period of the expansion of British rule in India, the years 1756–7, which witnessed the conflict between the Bengal nawab and the East India Company, the siege of Calcutta by Sirajuddaula, the arrival of Robert Clive, and the events leading to the battle of Plassey. His selection of documents from the archives, Bengal in 1756–57 (India Records Series, Calcutta, 1905), was a classic and formed a part of the India Records Series, which was conceptualized by Lord Curzon, who brought into a collaborative enterprise the Royal Asiatic Society of London.

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Another set of selections from records was made by C.R. Wilson, who succeeded Hill at the head of the IRD. But as a historian he was successful with his selection from sources, The Early Annals of the English in Bengal. It put together records in Bengal Public Consultations of the first half of the eighteenth century. Thus, from Rev. James Long to C.R. Wilson, a series of scholars produced selections from old records otherwise inaccessible partly because till 1939 the rules in the Record Department prevented nonofficial access to records. Further, as anyone who has attempted to use the original records would know, these pre–nineteenth-century manuscript records are difficult to read on account of their peculiar calligraphy, old style orthography, and obscure names of people and places. After Wilson’s tenure at the Record Department, a few more selections were produced routinely, but the emphasis of the policymakers in the offices of the secretary of state, the viceroy’s council, and the secretary of Home or Education Departments was on the production of calendars and press lists. Calendars and Press Lists of Records We have already anticipated a few pages earlier the substance of the story that unfolded when the secretary of state began to insist on a project to prepare calendars on the English model for the Indian records. We may recall that the substance was that (i) preparing press lists in India took a long time due to the large volume of records and want of staff, (ii) without press lists calendaring could not begin, and (iii) an attempt to circumvent this problem by foisting on the India Office the job of calendaring failed because they too proved to be inordinately slow. While that was the substance of the story, the way it developed in policy discussions was a little more complicated. The preparation of press lists had been going on at a slow rate since 1897. In this regard no documentation is available except for the Guide to the Records in the National Archives compiled in 1959.14 It seems that in 1897 press lists began to be prepared under S.C. Hill for the Home Public records (from 1754 onwards) and continued under C.R. Wilson until the publication of the list of Home Department records in 1905; after that the records from 1859 to 1892 were taken

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up. In the meanwhile, work in the other departments led to the publication of several lists in the in the 10 years of Denison Ross’s tenure: a three-volume list of Foreign Department records, another three volumes for the Military Department, and one for the Finance Department records. Under Scholfield, a supplementary volume was produced to fill up gaps in the published lists and to fill in newly found documents. The routine and unexciting work of compiling press lists made reference to and requisition of records possible—an essential search engine for any depository. In the meanwhile, there developed a knotty problem in respect of the third objective, the calendars of documents. We have an excellent review of that course of development in the dispatch of the viceroy in council to the secretary of state: Lord Cross [Secretary of State for India] in the summer of 1887 … appointed a committee which advised that the practice of the Public Record Office of England should be followed in the treatment of Indian State Papers. The advice of the committee was accepted, and after some correspondence between the Secretary of State and the Government of India, the following scheme was evolved. The object to be attained was the publication of a calendar of all the more important early records, whether located in the India Office or in the record rooms of the Governments of India, Madras and Bombay. The work was to be divided into two stages: (1) the preparation of a press list— a complete list of documents with some indication of their dates and contents, and (2) the publication of a calendar giving a précis of nearly every document of importance or a reference to some publication in which it might be found. It was decided that press lists should be prepared both of the records in the India Office and of those at Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, and that an interchange of press lists and of copies of missing documents should take place with a view to complete the records in England and in this country. The committee appointed by Lord Cross contemplated that when the press list had been completed, either for the whole or for any convenient section of the records, the work of calendaring should be commenced, and the Secretary of State decided, after taking the advice of the Government of India, that this work should be carried out at the India Office.15

Thereafter, George Forrest was appointed in 1891 as the head of a new Record Department but the work of preparing press lists in India did not commence till 1897.

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The instructions with regard to the preparation of press lists of the Calcutta records appear to have been at first overlooked, and the work was not taken up until the receipt of the instructions contained in the despatch from Lord George Hamilton, No. 13, dated the 3rd June 1897. That despatch replied to a reference made by the Government of India in which they asked for instructions as to the part they were to take in the preparation of press lists, calendars, and special compilations or selections. As regards the questions with which we are now immediately concerned, Lord George Hamilton endorsed the earlier instructions that press lists of the documents at Calcutta, Madras and Bombay should be prepared in India and that they should be sent home from time to time for comparison with the India Office records, and that the calendars to be based on the press lists should be prepared in England. The preparation of the press lists of Calcutta records was then begun, but the staff employed was inadequate, and the form used was so detailed that the progress made was inconsiderable. In Dispatch No. 16, dated the 24th May 1901, Lord George Hamilton agreed to the use of a briefer form, the staff employed on the work has since been largely increased, and fair progress is now being made in preparing press lists.16

This was the status report of 1904. This review of previous performance, or lack thereof, led to a new decision in 1904: a reversal of the policy of exclusively entrusting calendaring to the India Office in London. The Indian government, urged on by Viceroy Curzon, reconsidered the Indian government’s decision of 1888 that the whole work of calendaring should be undertaken by the India Office. We consider that strong reasons exist for reversing this decision. The principal ground on which it was based was the consideration of expense, and we are now inclined to think that the work could be done more cheaply in India than in England. Their labours on the press lists have familiarised our records staff with the arrangement and contents of the records, and the officer who revises the press list for any period must in the course of this operation gain such knowledge of the correspondence as to render it comparatively easy for him to prepare, or supervise the preparation of, the calendar for that period. With the assistance of an officer trained in record work in England, our record establishment could be expanded to enable it to deal with calendaring without any great difficulty or heavy expense. A further advantage of our proposal is the more rapid progress which will result from it, since the work will be pursued concurrently in the

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India Office and in this country. When the India office has completed calendars up to the year 1748 a further distribution of the labour might be considered.17

Thus, in 1904 the Record Department in India was charged with the responsibility of preparing calendars of documents in addition to preparing press lists. While H.H. Risley, the secretary of the Home Department, accepted the task on behalf of the Record Department under him, the head of that department, C.R. Wilson, pointed to the difficulties in the way. Wilson said that this was a reversal of an old policy that calendaring was to be done in England and further that his department was not yet ready: It cannot be disputed that press lists must precede calendars. Hence it is our main duty to push on with that work as much as possible. But I understand that it is desired at the same time to do something to make the records here accessible to students and for this purpose to publish something of the nature of a calendar. To publish anything like a complete calendar is at present impossible. We have not got our records sufficiently in order, and we have not got far enough with the press lists.18

Wilson’s demurral must have annoyed his bosses, R. Nathan, deputy secretary, and H.H. Risley, secretary, Home Department, and perhaps in consequence of the resultant conflict and his poor health, he left India soon after. However, Wilson proved to be right eventually. Decades passed and no calendar on the English model was published by the IRD. In the Indian officials’ world the type of calendar produced in England was supposed to be the model, and it was supposed by the Indian officialdom that a work of that standard was unattainable in India unless a specialist was imported for that purpose from England. And yet while calendars of the records in the English language were not produced in India, calendars of Persian records were produced. In 1911, E. Denison Ross—then the head of the Record Department of the Government of India—began to publish calendars of Persian documents.19 His predecessors, George Forrest and C.R. Wilson, did not even try to produce a calendar, such was the dread of falling short of the standard of calendaring in England. By the early twentieth

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century, a calendar of non-English documents seemed feasible and Ross created a special unit for handling Persian documents. Among the maulvis he employed was ‘Amjad Hussain, a direct descendent of one of the Munshis of Warren Hastings’ time’ and Zail Muhammad, a graduate of Aligarh College.20 Ross’s calendar of Persian correspondence was a considerable achievement, the only calendar produced by the IRD. It was worthy of a man who became the first head of the School of Oriental Studies (later known as School of Oriental and African Studies) in London. Curiously, while the IRD was able to calendar only the Persian correspondence of the eighteenth century, the archivists in Madras produced calendars of the English records of the Madras government efficiently and rapidly. H.H. Dodwell (1879–1946), then the curator of the Madras Record Office, published A Calendar of the Madras Records, 1740–1744 (Madras Government Press, 1917). This was followed by his Calendar of Despatches, 1744–1765 (Madras, 1920–30) in two volumes, and thereafter came a whole series of guides to records in seven districts, namely Godavari, Trichinopoly, Madura, North Arcot, Chinglaput, Coimbatore, and Masulipatam, published between 1930 and 1935.21 Dodwell became eventually a historian of repute and rose to be the first professor of Indian History in Britain, after his appointment at the new School of Oriental Studies in London. Why did the IRD of the Indian government limit their calendaring to Persian records? We can only speculate why the Government of India was unable or unwilling to produce calendars of their vast stock of English records. Was it because the IRD was inhibited by the idealization of the calendars of the English model—a standard that was considered by the IRD as unattainable by native Indian clerks doing the basic job of selecting and giving synopsis of hundreds and thousands of records? Or was it because the colonial bureaucracy apprehended that publishing calendars, with abstracts of records and exact references to documents and hence a stamp of authenticity, would be against their consistent policy of exclusion of the non-official public from access to records of the Indian government? Whatever may have been the motivation, the outcome was an easier and politically desirable alternative: not to publish calendars of records, and instead to publish selected records from the glorious periods of empire-building.

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The Crucial Question of Access to Government Records That brings us to an issue that acquired prominence when a central archive, that is, the IRD, was set up: the crucial question of access to government records. We have seen earlier that from the early nineteenth century, the East India Company allowed many scholars, mostly retired Indian officials, access to their old records in their offices in London. This policy continued in the regime established after the end of the Company’s rule and, in fact, was strengthened with the reorganization of the India Office record-keeping establishment in 1884. The consequence was that many Indian government records were accessible to the public in London but closed to all nonofficials and scholars in India. As we have pointed out in the previous two chapters, the bureaucracy in India was apprehensive that the disclosure of some records may bring discredit to past policies and actions of the government; as years passed and an ‘English-educated’ middle class began to look critically at those policies and actions, in the bureaucratic mind there developed the fear regarding the political use of archival data. Apart from these apprehensions, was there any other factor? A hypothesis that seems plausible is that a deep-seated cause of hostility to the idea of opening records, as well as indifference to the prospect of historical research in India, was a cast of mind that denied agency or autonomy to Indians in historical enquiry and archival research, though they and their country’s history might be objects of research conducted by their rulers. Arguably, there was a view, perhaps the dominant view, among the British decision-makers making the education policy that education in India, to the extent considered necessary, was a process of transmission of knowledge, not a means of enabling the generation of knowledge, that is, a process of passing on the result of research in Europe but not engaging in producing knowledge through research in India.22 We shall return to this hypothesis in next chapter, but for the present it suffices to trace the continuation of the earlier policy of excluding the public and the non-official researchers in India from access to government records. In March 1904, the director of the Record Department, a mere assistant secretary-level officer, received a letter from Viceroy Lord Curzon’s office: ‘Question Addressed to C.R. Wilson: His Excellency the Viceroy directs me to say that he would like a note on the facilities

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afforded to the public for research in the records, more especially the early ones.’23 In this intervention from the highest level, the viceroy was reiterating a point made many times earlier by a series of secretaries of state; however, another factor was Lord Curzon’s strong historical interest—an interest that led to the foundation of the Archaeological Survey of India. Wilson’s reply to Curzon’s enquiry was succinct: What facilities have the public at present for studying the Records of the Government of India? (1) Practically none. (2) To give the public access for the purposes of study—(i) The Records of the Government of India ought to be all brought together in the Imperial Record Office. (ii) They ought to be properly arranged and listed. (iii) It ought to be settled what records may be shown to the public. (iv) There ought to be calendars of such records…. In India none of these things exist. The records of the Government of India are even now not all brought together in one office. There are no complete lists of them. No decision has been made as to what should be shown to the public. There are only press lists of a very few. There are no calendars.24

Wilson added that virtually the records are closed to non-officials: If a man now wants to consult the records of the Government of India in India there are two courses possible—(1) He may ask the office to undertake a search on a certain point and pay for an extra clerk or clerks.… Searches of this kind are slow and laborious. The enquirer has to spend a considerable sum of money often with no result. If the search brings to light any papers, these are first submitted to the Home or Foreign Department before copies are given to the enquirer. (2) If the enquirer is a Government officer or well known to Government, he may obtain permission to see the records. This is a hot and wearisome proceeding. There is no proper reading-room, the records are not properly listed or calendared. The enquirer must make the best he can of the written records with the assistance of the manuscript indexes. It is expressly stipulated that the enquirer is not to take up the time of any of the office staff. Under existing conditions I do not see how any other arrangements can be made. As has been stated more than once in the notes submitted below, it is objectionable to have outsiders rummaging in the old records of the last century.25

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Here Wilson was referring to the views of his official superiors, Deputy Secretary R. Nathan and Secretary Sir Herbert Risley of the Home Department, which we have documented elsewhere in this chapter. From the sequence of files on the IRD it seems that Curzon, upon being thus briefed by Wilson, spoke to Risley. I have spoken to His Excellency [Viceroy Curzon] who wishes to have a scheme prepared for expediting the process of calendaring. The points to be considered are—(1) The subordinate staff required. (2) The necessity for providing some one to assist Mr Wilson and eventually to succeed him. A young man from home trained in the [British] Record Office is suggested.26

Thus, the home secretary translated and reduced the historicist concerns of Curzon and Wilson to the issues of increasing office staff to begin calendaring and replacing Wilson with a new recruit from England. The question of public access to the records was bypassed. Wilson in his response pointed out that the function of calendaring was, by agreement between the secretary of state and the Government of India, given to the India Office: ‘This is to be done in England, because the records there are far more complete than ours can ever be, and because it is said that students of the records are more likely to be found in England.’ Thus, the matter had to be reopened with India Office if calendaring was to be done in Calcutta. In the meanwhile Abstracts prepared in Calcutta and press lists of documents may be opened to the public. To publish anything like a complete calendar is at present impossible. We have not got our records sufficiently in order, and we have not got far enough with the press lists. Besides we cannot formally undertake a calendar of all our records without referring to the secretary of state and the India Office. But we might, I have suggested, calendar or abstract certain kinds of records, preferably those which would give most insight into the history of the time, such as the letters to and from the Court of directors, or which form a well defined group, such as the Persian correspondence. ‘Such abstracts might after due consideration be published and public access allowed to the records concerned. Another step in this direction would be to consider whether we might not allow the public to see and use the

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press lists we have already printed, for which I am preparing indexes, and give them access to the records concerned.’27 In proposing that non-officials and researchers from the public domain should be allowed access to records, the historian C.R. Wilson confronted the bureaucracy. In a note dated 25 May 1904 Deputy Secretary R. Nathan (a superior officer above C.R. Wilson, director of the Record Office) made several observations adverse to Wilson’s performance. Perhaps the most important observation came at the end of the note: ‘It would probably be considered very undesirable to allow the public such free access to the records as Mr. Wilson appears to contemplate.’28 H.H. Risley, secretary of the Home Department, fully supported his deputy secretary against the director of the Record Office in his note of 23 June 1904 where he pointed to the political danger of allowing native Indians access to records: I am absolutely opposed to turning people loose to rummage in our records with the guidance of the press lists. There would, in my opinion, be very great danger of the materials thus obtained being unfairly used for political purposes. This danger can only be guarded against by producing complete calendars which will prevent unscrupulous students from selecting and publishing those portions of records which tell in favour of their point of view. Mr. N. N. Ghosh’s book ‘Memoirs of Maharaja Nubkissen’ contains a number of passages illustrating the danger to which I refer’.

This opinion was immediately endorsed by Sir Denzil Ibbetson as well, another member of the viceroy’s council.29 Apart from this point, both Nathan and Risley expressed their displeasure with Wilson’s failure to make progress with the press list of documents and the work on calendaring on the English model. Nathan observes: ‘Nothing has yet been done towards the process of calendaring.’ As regards the press lists, ‘the present press lists in themselves contain practically no information about the records’. There was also implicit criticism of Wilson in the remark that what the Record Department needed was ‘one good officer from home’, that is, from England, to assist Wilson and eventually to replace him.30 Soon after Wilson departed on a long leave for England, purportedly for health reasons.

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Though the bureaucrat Risley was able to set aside the recommendation of the historian C.R. Wilson in this episode, Viceroy Curzon himself—most probably unaware of the inner politics of the exchanges concerning the Record Department in the Public Branch of the Home Department—continued to urge that the Government of India must become aware of the historical value of the old records of the British in India, and, second, that records should be open to the ‘public’, in this context students of history. These points were mentioned in the dispatch of the viceroy and his council to Secretary of State St John Brodrick on 1 September 1904: We have recently taken under our consideration the question of the facilities offered to the public for research among the records of the Government of India, and particularly among the earlier records which are of special interest to students of history. Notwithstanding the considerable expenditure which has been incurred from the year 1880 onwards, we find that up to the present time very little has been done to render the records accessible to students or to present their contents in a convenient form. We consider that this state of affairs cannot but be regarded as a reproach to our Government.31

While the point was thus made about public access to records, this point was solely on Curzon’s agenda and the ICS heads of departments in his council reneged on it soon after his viceroyalty ended in 1905. Nevertheless, this dispatch of 1904 is remarkable for its review of previous policies of the government leading up to a critique and renunciation of the policy statement of Viceroy Northbrook’s government in 1872 (which we noted earlier in Chapter 2) and a revival of the original proposals of the Record Committee that worked from 1860 to 1869 (which we reviewed in Chapter 1 earlier). In the dispatch of 1904, the viceroy and his council said: ‘Lord Northbrook’s Government unfortunately abandoned the original proposal of the committee that a general calendar should be prepared of the principal contents of the valuable papers in all the Calcutta offices, and, in its stead, proposed to publish the General Letters to and from the Court of Directors. Nothing, however, appears to have come of this scheme.’32 A few months after this statement, Viceroy Curzon resigned and left India and thereafter his desire to open records to the students of history or ‘the public’ was quietly set

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aside and the focal point of the Government of India’s deliberations became the production of press lists and calendars of documents in India. In 1909, this question came up again. A German scholar, Johannes Voigt, has written on this issue in 1966 in a well-documented article, which merits quoting: When in 1909 the English Government in London was ready to allow scholars free access to all Foreign Office records prior to the year 1837, and limited access to all documents of the period 1838 to 1860, the Secretary of State for India had not the slightest objection to permit similar access to papers relating to India. In India, however, this suggestion roused a storm of opposition.33

On this occasion the place of H.H. Risley was taken by H. Claughton, another senior member of the ICS. ‘The argument that papers of over hundred years old’, he wrote in his note of 22 February 1910, ‘can have but little bearing on the politics of the day is a dangerous one in India. The political pamphleteer could make considerable capital out of ancient documents if he were allowed to select those which suited his creed.’34 In the previous two chapters we pointed out, with evidence from the archives, how there were many instances of a difference between the attitude of the Indian government, who opposed the opening of the records to researchers in India, and the approach of the secretary of state, who desired to open the archives to scholars to devise reference aids such as calendars to help researchers. Dipesh Chakrabarty has recently highlighted another instance of that in 1914. He cites the proposal of the secretary of state for India, Lord Crewe, in February 1914 that historical records which were already open in the India Office in London may be opened in India, leading to strong opposition from the bureaucracy in India.35 On this occasion, as in 1904 in H.H. Risley’s opposition to the same proposal from C.R. Wilson earlier, the main argument was that there was no historical researcher in India who would benefit from access to the archives. The head of the IRD, A.F. Scholfield, in a note dated 28 April 1914, opposed the proposal on this ground. There were similar reactions within the Indian government and also from the provincial governments so that

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the proposal to open the archives was decisively negatived by the Indian government. This course of events as well as the letters exchanged mentioned by Chakrabarty36 were commented on earlier also by J.H. Voigt in an article in 1966: A.F. Scholfield … held in 1914 that in India the public was different from that in England, and, furthermore that in India ‘historical research, scientific use of evidence, critical scholarship are barely understood’. The provincial governments were opposed to a liberalization of the rules of research into government records…. The proposal of the Secretary of State for India in 1915 to reconsider the former policy in connection with Government records fell on deaf ears in India.37

There persisted a discrepancy between the accessibility of historical records in the India Office and the PRO in England and their inaccessibility in India. Which were the records that were open to historical researchers, the so-called public, in this period? Sir Malcolm Seton in his compendium of information, The India Office (London, 1925), stated that for purposes of historical research the India Office records, formed as a department in 1884, were open to a very great extent: ‘The old General Records are open to students, while access to the older Secret Papers kept in the Political Department, dealing with the conduct of Indian foreign policy, is allowed under special conditions for purposes of serious historical research.’ Further, to facilitate historical research in India Office records, much has been done in the way of calendaring, and the textual publication of the East India Company’s letters to its servants in the East; while a series of writers on Indian history, among whom may be mentioned Sir George Birdwood, Mr. F. C. Danvers, Mr. Sainsbury, Mr. S. C. Hill, Sir George Forrest, and Sir William Foster, have given to the public the results of their researches in the India Office Records.38

On the other hand, as one would expect from the policy outlined earlier in these pages, the Government of India forbade all access to their records in India. Our present research led us to investigate the details in this regard in the papers of the IRD. The files concerning

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the internal administration of the IRD are at present not part of the Government of India records, nor are they open to scholars in the archives. The special files of the IRD are in a separate collection, which can now be accessed with special permission to be obtained from the office of the director of the NAI. While most of these files relate to administrative trivia, the files concerning request to see the files from scholars and non-officials are of interest. For instance, although till 1939 the Record Department was not open to nonofficials, we have a record of special permissions to some scholars, for example, Rev. W.K. Firminger in 1908, Kaliprasanna Banerjee in 1911, Rev. Hosten in 1912, and a few others. Except for such special cases of permission granted, no non-official person could access records, and we have an interesting document of 1904 regarding the punishment meted out to the clerks of the Record Department for ‘divulging … information’.39 It is quite remarkable how persistent and obdurate the bureaucrats’ opposition was in the aforementioned instances to proposals for the reconsideration of the past policy of keeping the records inaccessible to all except government officials, who needed to consult records for official reasons. The only instance when a viceroy sponsored a proposal for opening records was Lord Curzon’s attempt of 1904, and in 1909 and 1914 secretaries of state for India, as several times in the past, sponsored such proposals—and yet the opposition prevailed. Catastrophic events of the First World War put to an end the dingdong battle. The issue of non-official or public access was ignored in the official discourse until the IHRC brought it up again. Relocation to New Delhi The shift of the capital of British India from Calcutta to New Delhi, announced in 1911 along with the reversal of the decision to partition Bengal—a concession to Bengal’s long struggle to ‘unsettle the settled fact of Partition’—was a major event not only in Indian political history but also in the development of the archives. The announcement of 1911 could not be implemented for the IRD till 1926 when the department was shifted to the new building designed to house it—though completing the process of shifting took several more years. The commissioning of the building in which the present

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National Archives is located was a landmark and that is why we conclude this chapter at that point, 1926. The relocation of the Record Department was discussed earlier also, chiefly to relieve the space it occupied in the India government’s headquarters in Calcutta, the Writers’ Building. Earlier we have instances of effort to move the record office out of the administrative headquarters to some building in Calcutta. For example, in 1899, Sir J. Westland urged the government to shift the Record Department at least to the suburbs of the city: he pointed to the vast amount of costly space that is occupied by records in our expensive Calcutta Buildings. I speak feelingly and with some knowledge of the facts as regards Accounts offices. There are vast piles of ancient records which must be kept but are practically never referred to, and which might without the slightest inconvenience be housed, in the suburbs, in substantial, but inexpensive buildings. We have at present nowhere to keep them but the valuable space provided in the Calcutta offices. My own belief is that we could save any quantity of rent, and any quantity of new buildings if we were to send all these records away to the suburbs, and create an inexpensive department for looking after them.40

When in 1926 the department at last shifted to the present building, it obtained a lot of space away from but remained accessible to the government departments in the North Block and South Block of the secretariat in New Delhi. The present building of the NAI, earlier called the IRD, was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens himself—unlike many other buildings that were designed by his assistant, Baker. Lutyens (1869–1944) was an unusual choice for designing the new capital city: he had never been to school as a child because of frail health, nor did he finish his course of studies in architecture, and instead of working as an apprentice with an established architect he set up a firm of his own in London when he was only 19 years of age. He was, however, known for his original design ideas and was socially well-connected, and acquired a reputation for building country houses for the wealthy and some public buildings.41 His wife, Emily, was the daughter of Lord Lytton, who had formidable Indian connections as the viceroy of India. It may or may not be fortuitous that at a relatively young age

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of 42, Lutyens was asked in 1912 to lead a committee to make plans for the new capital of British India. From 1912 to 1931, Lutyens visited New Delhi 19 times and became the chief architect of the central area of New Delhi now associated with his name as Lutyens’ Delhi. The IRD building was located by Lutyens in the centre of New Delhi at the junction of King’s Way and Queen’s Way (presentday Rajpath and Janpath respectively). After Independence when the Indian National Museum was constructed, Jawaharlal Nehru placed the building just diagonally opposite the Record Department (or the NAI building) on the same road. Thus, two institutions embodying history, the archives and the museum, enjoy a symbolic centrality in the map of the city. When the idea of building a new city was mooted in 1911, there were many proposals and suggestions as regards the architectural design. For instance, E.B. Havell, the former principal of Government Art College in Calcutta and senior colleague of artists such as Abanindranath Tagore and others, wrote a letter to The Times, London, on 22 December 1911 arguing that India must not lose a ‘unique opportunity’ to uphold Indian principles of architectural design in recognition of India’s civilization. The Dawn Society, which had led the national education movement during the anti-partition agitation in Bengal, editorialized that the nineteenth-century approach of the Indian government must be reversed for it failed to recognize India’s art and culture.42 There was a conflict between the proponents of European designs and Indian models of architecture. Lutyens’s admirers believed that he had been able to combine a variant of European classical style with a style indigenous to India. The viceroy’s palace (present-day Rashtrapati Bhavan) was commonly regarded as a prime example. In the design he made for the IRD the front facade of the building, with grand pillars and assemblage of red and white stone, as well as some decorative details, resembles parts of the viceroy’s palace in some respects. Relocation of the archives to New Delhi took a long time. Our research in the present West Bengal State Archives (WBSA) indicated that in order to effect shifting of the IRD, there was a long process of separation of the Government of India record from Bengal government records. That took an inordinate amount of time, judging by the mass of files in the WBSA concerning the ‘transfer of records to

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the Government of India’. The Government of India kept on writing to the government of Bengal, drawing attention to actions needed in consequence of the shift of the capital and the IHRC’s recommendation of 1919 concerning separation of records.43 Some of the records dated back to 1780 and separation proved to be very time consuming. Record-Keeping in England as a Model The Royal Commission on Public Records of 1914 commended the efficiency of the India Office archive. On the whole the best of the systems we have described seems to us to be the combination of the duties of Registrar and Keeper of the records (which is the existing system of the India Office). The functions are closely allied, and their union makes one man responsible for all the documents of a public nature which the office contains.44

There was a guide to the PRO in London compiled in 1896 by Scargill-Bird of the office of the keeper of records, which indicated that by that time almost all the important state papers were collected in the PRO; it was the result of a long process of collection of muniments from 1851 onwards. All these papers were in the custody of the master of the rolls, as directed by the Public Records Act.45 An important report on India Office records was compiled by Fredrick C. Danvers in 1889, which chronicles a process in London similar to what happened in India between 1859 and his times. In 1859, an attempt was made to dispose of old and supposedly useless documents; about 20,000 volumes were discarded. Again in February 1860, Secretary of State Charles Wood desired to identify all useless records in the India Office and a committee was formed that recommended the destruction of 317 tons of records, which were sold as waste at a price of £3,000. Some of these papers were duplicate copies according to Danvers. In 1867 and again in 1877 many records were disposed of, usually after casual scrutiny within the India Office. Danvers observes: It is much to be feared that, in the endeavour to get rid of only useless Records, those destroyed—especially in the earlier years of

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destruction—had not been sufficiently examined before being condemned, and that thus documents of historical interest shared the fate of others which had ceased to possess any sufficient value to justify their preservation. At no time hitherto does there appear to have been undertaken a critical examination and comparison of the Records of this Office, such as would enable them to be properly classified, and put away in systematic order. Indeed, up to the present time, there exist volumes of which no record has ever been made, so that, in the event of their being lost, no evidence would be forthcoming that they had ever existed. Until a careful examination, comparison, and proper classification shall have been made of all the Records now in existence, it will not be possible to state with confidence what are now missing or what still exist. A commencement of such a critical examination has now been made, and the results, thus far, have been most satisfactory many of the loose unbound papers having being found to supply, a great extent and existing vacancies in the bound volumes.46

In 1884, the Record Office was set up and thereafter the mass destruction of old records stopped. The report of the Royal Commission on Public Records of England and Wales submitted and published in 1914 had some important recommendations that influenced Indian record-keeping in the long run. Particularly, it emphasized the professionalization of archiving and that record offices should be ‘entrusted to trained record keepers, with an adequate staff of skilled subordinate and not left in untrained hands’.47 Further, the institution of the IHRC in 1919 can be traced to the same British report: ‘We beg to repeat our recommendation for the appointment of a permanent Commission … for the government of the Public Record Office.’48 The most comprehensive report on India Office records was compiled in 1919 by William Foster, registrar and superintended of records.49 Foster observes: During the greater part of the [East India] Company’s existence little heed was paid to the value of its records for historical purpose and the preservation of any particular series depended chiefly on its practical utility in relation to current work. Fortunately, in most cases this was sufficiently great to ensure retention of those on which the student is likely to set chief store.50

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The East India Company did not create any post for keeper of records, except one isolated appointment of an extra clerk from 1814 to 1834. As far as the India Board of Control was concerned, there was, however, a librarian and keeper of papers from 1811 onwards. After the secretary of state for India took over in February 1860, he appointed a committee consisting of three former employees in the East India House, the chief clerk in the Correspondence Department, and Sir John Kaye, the political secretary. At this time over 300 tons of papers were discarded, some of these were duplicates. However, ‘it is clear that some series of real important for historical purposes were discarded, the only criterion applied being the probability or otherwise of their being needed for official use’. When a new building for the India Office was commissioned, more documents were discarded by applying the same criterion. In 1874, the former Record and Statistical Department was reorganized as the Statistics and Commerce Department with the additional charge of record-keeping. In 1884 the record section of the India Office began to resemble a modern archive, and the work of classification and publication began when Frederick C. Danvers was given the post of registrar and superintendent of records. In 1887, he prepared a report on the records of East India, particularly of Java and other countries; this was followed by more reports relating to Japan, China, Persia, and Persian Gulf countries. In the meanwhile, press lists of Bengal and India government papers were brought up to the end of the twentieth century. William Foster’s guide to India Office records was based on the press lists already made; his guide to records was remarkable for he, for the first time, gave importance to the need to serve historical research. He said that his object was to meet the needs of students.51 Thanks to the cataloguing and indexing done by F.C. Danvers, S.R. Scargill-Bird, and William Foster, the record offices in England became a model for the IRD in India. What is more important is that more records related to India were available to researchers in England than in India till at least 1939.52 Many researchers preferred using the record offices in England. Given the policy of exclusion of non-officials from the IRD in India, only a few were allowed to obtain copies of records in the IRD. Who were they? This question led us to investigate the details in this regard in the papers of the IRD.53

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Course of Developments Leading to the Creation of the Records Commission We have seen that when in 1904 Viceroy Curzon enquired, 13 years after the foundation of the IRD, about the facilities for scholarly research in historical records, the head of the IRD replied, ‘almost none’. The head of the IRD then happened to be C.R. Wilson, a professional historian who was keen to open the archives but he was not allowed to do so by the imperial bureaucracy. The IRD continued to follow the established principles, which we have reviewed earlier; these principles were reasserted in 1918 in the observation of A.F. Scholfield, keeper of records, that the department was for the use of government officials, exclusively for purposes arising out of their official duties. Scholfield had been promoted from the lower levels of the bureaucracy and he had no interest in historical research. He said that requests from the members of the public for information were negligible, indeed rare and numbered below 20 per year on average.54 No non-official person was allowed into the IRD or to read records. Their enquiries, negligible in number, into historical records were handled by the clerks at the IRD. The latter searched and copied documents if a ‘private’ or non-official request was received, for example, request for information on the ancestral history of AngloIndian families and rare historical enquiries, and a charge for that service was paid by the person who made such a request. Viceroy Chelmsford (viceroy from 1916 to 1921), known for the Montagu–Chelmsford constitutional reforms of 1919, represented a political culture that was different from that of the traditional British Indian bureaucracy and he tried to bring about a change in the policy of denying access to the public.55 His enquiries about the possibility of non-official and scholarly historical research led to discussions within the government of the need for a committee of historical experts who could be consulted regarding the bona fides of applicants for access to government records as well as other matters concerning historical records. The viceroy and his council decided to write to the secretary of state for India to ‘recommend a body that could be called the Indian Historical Records Commission consisting of not less than five or nine members with its headquarters at Delhi’.56 The idea probably originated in the recommendation of the

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British Public Records Commission of 1914 that a permanent body of historical experts be set up in Britain to advise the government. These developments led to the foundation of the IHRC. The terms of reference for this new commission were set out in the government’s resolution of March 1919. It was a consultative body that would make recommendations in respect of (i) action needed to develop archives for purposes of historical study, (ii) cataloguing and calendaring of records, (iii) funding needed to promote publication of records and connected research, (iv) selection of scholars for editing records, and (v) the issue of public access to records.57 In the second session of the IHRC in 1920, some rules regarding access were accepted with a view to regulate access to the records and to admit to the record office persons who desired personally to read the documents.58 From 1920, therefore, a limited access was allowed to applicants, who had to state their personal details and reasons why they wished to examine records. The requests in respect of records of the Political and Legislative Department as well as Military and Foreign Department were to be sent to those departments for clearance. Further, the extracts of documents copied were to be sent for clearance once again to the concerned department of the government. With these rigorous controls some selected members of the public, that is, non-officials, were to be allowed access to records. In the IHRC Proceedings of 1928, we find a copy of the rules then in force: at that time, the important departments—Finance, Army, Legislative, Political, and Foreign—were all included in the list of departments from which clearance had to be obtained individually on each application, and again clearance for copies of records obtained by the applicant later.59 These restrictive rules did not satisfy those who desired open access, chiefly historians. As we shall see in the following pages, the IHRC became a forum for the expression of their opinion. Who were the members of this body, the IHRC, which discussed the policy in respect of record-keeping? The changing composition of the IHRC is something that merits attention. From being a small committee of officials employed in record rooms and three historians nominated by the government at the beginning of 1919, it became a meeting place and forum for Indian academic historians. Sir Jadunath Sarkar, who was a member from the very beginning, reflects on that in the thirteenth session of the IHRC in 1930 at Patna:

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This Commission originated in a very small body of official Record Keepers and historical experts formed by the Government of India to advise it and the local Governments as to the best treatment of their records, the proper method of caring for, preserving, weeding out, listing and editing them and deciding the problems that arise from time to time regarding the work of Government Record Offices.60

The IHRC met every year from 1919 to 1930 but no more meetings were held till 1937 due to ‘financial stringency’. The Civil Disobedience Movement and the reaction of the bureaucracy to the political agitations might have been a factor, but it remains unmentioned in the correspondence files. When the IHRC met again in Lahore in 1937, Jadunath Sarkar observed: In 1919 the Government of India created a small consultative body under the name of the Indian Historical Records Commission. It was composed of the Keeper of the Central Records and the record officers of the three Presidencies, together with three historical experts from outside this department—among whom I happen to be the sole survivor. Its function was to advise the Government of India on the preservation, sorting, listing and calendaring of the records in its possession and to make suggestions about printing them and giving the public access to the manuscripts. We soon discovered that under the mediaeval conditions which had obtained in India until recently, many historical documents of a public character were in private possession and that these surpassed in volume, antiquity and value the documents in the public record offices. We also realised that Government funds could not provide the cost of editing and printing the imperial records with the desirable speed and efficiency and that it was absolutely necessary to enlist the aid of voluntary non-official workers in this task. Hence, in the second year, the Government of India expanded our Commission by adding to the limited and purely departmental original body a number of outside scholars under the names of corresponding and co-opted members.61

Within a few years, the co-opted members outnumbered the official members. In 1930, the printed proceedings indicate that the members of the committee were only six, including Sir Jadunath Sarkar as vice-president, and the head of IRD as secretary of the committee, while the co-opted members, both provincial officials and university

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representatives, numbered 46. In the next chapter we shall see that the Record Commission, strengthened by the participation of some leading Indian historians, began to assume the position of a policymaking body. Archival Policy Regarding Pre-British Indian Papers What was the policy in respect to records of pre-British powers such as the Marathas and various other ‘native’ potentates? This question became important from the end of the nineteenth century with regard to the state papers of the Marathas. This was not unconnected with the rise of political awareness and identity consciousness in Maharashtra. Such consciousness was coeval with a historical interest in the Maratha past. The Maharashtrian intelligentsia desired access to the records of that past and the government of Bombay Presidency was thus under pressure to open those records to research and to publish them. A large collection of the Peshwa Daftar records was under the control of the Bombay government’s Revenue Department officials in the Alienation Office at Poona. This became a bone of contention when Indian researchers demanded access to those records. That demand arose with the rise of what A.R. Kulkarni and Richard P. Tucker have called the ‘archival movement’ in Bombay Presidency at the end of nineteenth century—an endeavour to recover, preserve, and make available historical records to the Maratha readership.62 The leading figures in this effort were Mahadev Govind Ranade (1841–1901) and V.K. Rajwade (1863–1926), who led two major organizations, Deccan Vernacular Translation Society and Bharatiya Itihas Samsodhak Mandal. Among them Ranade was the more wellknown intellectual, apart from being a brilliant lawyer, a judge at the Bombay High Court, founder of the Deccan Education Society (1884), and a founding member of the Indian National Congress. His project to select and publish Peshwa Daftar records was hampered by the British officials’ reluctance to give scholars like him access to them, which was partly due to an official apprehension that the disclosure of some of those records might lead to a dispute about private property rights, and partly due to apprehensions that records might be ‘used against government, either politically or otherwise’.63 The officials also feared that access to old records

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might lead to litigation to reverse some of the decisions of the Inam Commission. Ranade’s persistent efforts for several years as president of the Deccan Vernacular Translation Society to obtain access bore fruit in 1897, but the government laid down the condition that there would be pre-publication official scrutiny of selected texts and editorial annotations. Ranade wrote ‘Introduction to the Peshwa’s Diaries’, which was censored and removed from the governmentapproved volume when it was published in 1901. The officials maintained that it was ‘coloured throughout with the personal opinion and bias of the author [Ranade]’ and compelled Ranade to publish his ‘Introduction’ separately.64 Ranade, in his own fashion, made this rejection a public issue. In 1900, he adroitly made it the subject of a speech at the Asiatic Society, Bombay, and he elaborated upon the value of the Maratha records: Our ordinary Bakhars  [indigenous chronicles of the past], and the works written by English historians like Grant Duff, content themselves chiefly with the narration of political events, and throw little or no light upon the condition of the people, how they lived and thrived, the pleasures which amused them, their superstitions and their beliefs, their morals, their manners and their customs. These histories do not also give a clear account of the way in which the work of Government was carried on under native rule…. State Diaries, kept by responsible officers in the Peishwa’s Daftar, are simply invaluable,  and, though they have their own defects, in the absence of better materials, they shed a flood of light upon the real movements  and the hopes and fears, the strength and weakness of the people for over a century, and for purposes of instruction and guidance, they far outweigh in value the narratives of wars and conquests, dynastic changes, and revolutions, which take up so much space in our ordinary histories.65

Thus Ranade, a man not easily deterred, appealed to a wider public when the bureaucracy declined to cooperate. He passed away the next year, in 1901, but in the long run his effort was successful. These events serve to illustrate, first, the stout resistance of the bureaucracy to opening the records not only of the British Indian government, but also those of pre-British regimes in their possession, and second, the equally staunch struggle of the Indian intelligentsia,

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inspired by a new identity consciousness, to recover their own historical records. The IHRC played an important role. In 1925, D.V. Potdar of the Bharatiya Itihas Samsodhak Mandal of Poona complained bitterly in the IHRC meeting that researchers were not allowed to see the Peshwa Daftar records; Sir Jadunath Sarkar, in the chair, tried to spread oil over troubled waters by saying that the classification of those records was being done and IHRC ‘cannot recommend any general access to Peshwa’s Daftar until the records are fully classified’.66 In the next few years, the Bombay government was persuaded to allow G.S. Sardesai and Jadunath Sarkar and a few of their chosen assistants access to some of the Peshwa Daftar records. In the session of 1930, Sir Jadunath Sarkar in his chairman’s address said: The recent examination of only a portion of the Peshwas’ Daftar in Poona has revealed a vast and virgin field for research in which British India and the Deccan States (Hyderabad and Mysore, no less than the Maratha principalities) can most usefully co-operate, for without such co-operation the exploration of such a vast and varied mass of documents cannot be satisfactorily completed within a reasonable length of time, nor can the results of the search be made accessible to scholars. This is a line of operation which this Commission, in the interests of history, may well recommend to the Bombay Government and the States concerned.67

The IHRC thus prepared the way, and in the 1930s a series of selections from Peshwa Daftar records compiled by G.S. Sardesai were published.68 In 1937, Sarkar, again in the chair, remarked: One thing at which this Commission had been hammering since 1924 has attained to fruition in this interval. The official records of the Peshwas in the Marathi language and the many thousand bundles of family records and village accounts brought together in the Alienation Office of Poona have now been completely explored by Rao Bahadur G.S. Sardesai and selections from them, running to 45 volumes, have been printed by the Bombay Government. It is a monumental work accomplished in spite of incredible difficulties and distractions, and on its completion we must thank the Government of Bombay and congratulate its learned editor, the doyen of Maratha historians, Govind Sakharam Sardesai.

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Sarkar himself took the lead in editing the English records of the company’s Resident at Poona: The English records once belonging to the Poona Residency, which also include letters from many other places than Poona, and which come immediately next in point of time to the Marathi Peshwas’ Daftar, have been typed and are in course of publication under the honorary editorship of Sardesai and myself. Four volumes of this series have been already printed and a fifth, dealing with the Bhonsle dynasty of Nagpur, is in type. This English series is expected to reach 25 volumes before the material is exhausted, because here we have not only the political and diplomatic correspondence as in the pre-British regimes, but also a copious fund of papers written by great British administrators like Elphinstone, Munro and their colleagues, giving much desired information and throwing the light of acute expert criticism on the economic, social and administrative system of the indigenous Maratha Government, on which the new British system was superimposed or grafted. In no other province of India have we this wealth of materials.69

The Residency records Sarkar referred to were published between 1936 and 1943 in 11 volumes, jointly edited by Sarkar and Sardesai. The support of the IHRC led by Sir Jadunath Sarkar, usually chairing their meetings, came to the aid of Sardesai. In Punjab, Sita Ram Kohli addressed himself to the task of studying and publishing Ranjit Singh’s records; his effort was once taken notice of by the IHRC70 but he did not receive any material support from them. Historiographic Trends in This Period In the period we are considering in this chapter perhaps the most popularly acclaimed among contemporary historians was Sir Alfred Lyall. For his archival work and historical writings based on government sources, Sir George Forrest had a great reputation. And the third historian with a reputation rivalling Lyall’s and Forrest’s was Vincent Smith, whose works are in use till this day. In an attempt to capture the historiographic trends in this period, we may focus on these three for they may be taken as representative of three sorts of historical writings: Lyall represents the analytical and reflective

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approach, Forrest the empirical approach often based on archival research, and Smith the synthesization of the current state of knowledge as available in published works and printed records. Finally, we must also note the impact of Leopold von Ranke’s contribution which shaped historical writings in many countries including British India and in particular attracted attention to the importance of basing narratives on authentic archival records. Sir Alfred Lyall (1835–1911), an alumnus of Eton and Haileybury College, joined the ICS in 1856 and served in the North-Western Province, in present-day Uttar Pradesh, as a young magistrate and distinguished himself as an officer during the uprising of 1857. Having served in Bulandshahar, Agra, Nagpur, and so on, he rose to the position of home secretary of the Government of India in 1873, foreign secretary in 1875, and lieutenant governor of the NorthWestern Provinces at the end of his career. After retirement, he was on the India Council of the secretary of state from 1888 to 1902. About that time his literary success as a historian was recognized in the award, honoris causa, of the degrees DCL by Oxford University (1889) and the LlD by Cambridge University (1891). While in service he wrote a number of essays on Indian religions and philosophy in contemporary journals; these were collected and published as a book under the title Asiatic Studies (London, 1882). Another such collection of essays was published posthumously, Studies in Literature and History (London, 1915). He was commissioned to write the book Warren Hastings (London, 1889) after his retirement, and a few years before his death he was persuaded by Lady Duffein to write The Life of the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava, in two volumes (London, 1905). However, his reputation really rested upon his Rise and Expansion of the British Dominion in India (London, 1894). Originally published under the title The Rise of British Dominion in India, it was a huge success and there were three reprints within a year, and next year he expanded the book under the title it presently carries. This success was partly due to the literary quality of his writings—in fact, he was also the author of some poems and wrote a book on his favourite poet Tennyson. The literary quality is most evident in his later writings, especially in his biography of Viceroy Dufferin. Lyall avoided the usual stuffy and pompous style adopted by authors of viceregal biographies. This pomposity was associated

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with another characteristic of many historians in his times, a dramatization of history and composition of plenty of purple passages. In 1909, he reflected on this in a lecture he delivered in London: ‘Now the principal English historians of the modern school, who revived what one may call the dramatic presentation of history, I take to be Macaulay, Froude and Carlyle.’71 Lyall thought that these three historians did their best to base their narratives on sound historical sources, but that was not true of their lesser followers and imitators. Though Lyall’s effort to develop a literary style of his own is evident, his success as an author was not so much due to the literary quality of his writings but because of originality in his approach. Lyall’s work is distinctive among historical works of that period for three reasons. First, he situated the history of the Indian empire in a global and long-term perspective. He looked at the relationship between the West and the East from Greco-Roman times as the relationship between civilizations. He also looked at the early history of the European powers as marine powers and the consequent growth of sea-borne trade. Above all, he gave importance to the mental outlook and the ideas that distinguished different civilizations and the countries therein. He believed that ‘commerce has invariably promoted free thinking in religion and politics all the world over’, and rationalism and liberal principles, in their turn, he said, helped commerce.72 Thus, he pointed to a culture that developed in England as the basis of the rise of her empire: ‘tolerant and progressive ideas … the calm and open temper of the English mind … the moral conditions that were advantageous to the East India Company in contending for supremacy in India’.73 This emphasis on the cultural and ideational background and the broader range of vision was an advance upon many other contemporary historians’ simple-minded narrative of soldiering and trading. Second, Lyall boldly looked at the ugly side of empire-building by the British in India—or at least some parts of the ugly side occasionally. For instance, he admitted that even decades after British rule in India the natives were excluded from important positions of decision-making in the business of governance. He compared with that the policy in the Mughal Empire where the Mughals in the beginning relied on ‘men of their own race’, but gradually other races were brought into higher administration.74 The lesson of history

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was, he said, that ‘foreign domination must necessarily be more or less autocratic for some time after it has been acquired’—but the persistent exclusion of natives was something Lyall questioned in the governance of the empire. Another example of Lyall’s broadmindedness was his criticism of Lord Macaulay’s well-known contempt for an open disparagement of Indian culture and knowledge system. On the subject of the triumph of the Anglicist point of view in Macaulay’s recommendations in respect to the education policy, Lyall commented: ‘Macaulay, with all his genius, lacked sympathy with the deeper and more delicate fibres of national sensitiveness.’75 These are precisely the points made, inter alia, by the Indian nationalist spokesmen—the Anglicist prejudices and the exclusion of the natives from higher positions in administration. While the majority of colonial historians focused attention upon the chronicle of conquest as the core of imperial history, he looked upon men such as Bentinck with admiration as builders of the empire. Bentinck’s tenure, as governor general, he said, gave India a period of tranquillity and ‘liberal and civilizing administration’.76 In Lyall’s works there are instances when he tried to maintain a historian’s neutrality in his judgement on some of the actions taken by the British empire builders. Some of his peers and friends appreciated his neutrality. But there was greater peer group pressure on him to induce him to refrain from passing adverse judgements in his historical works. He was considered important enough to be the subject of a biography, which was written by Sir Henry Mortimer Durand (1850–1924), an ICS officer junior to him and friend . This biography reproduces parts of Lyall’s private correspondence. We see from Lyall’s private correspondence that when he published his book on the rise and expansion of British rule he received comments, a few of which were supportive: ‘While you do splendid justice to Hastings and Wellesley, you do boldly mark also that which is censurable, in violation of principles.’77 But, by and large, the peer pressure was on the other side. It seems from some of the letters received by Lyall, and also Durand’s own comments, that in British Indian official circles Lyall was sometimes regarded as insufficiently patriotic. Durand reveals that some comments on those lines induced Lyall to alter some of his poems. Durand himself thought that Lyall in his book on Warren Hastings showed ‘a want of enthusiasm in the judgment

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he passes’ on the great man, that is, Lyall did not praise Hastings enough. Durand also sensed a ‘want of indignation [in Lyall’s book] at the vindictive cruelty with which Hastings was pursued’, that is, prosecuted by Burke at the impeachment.78 These were the very words of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen who, upon publication of Lyall’s book on Hastings, wrote to Lyall appreciating the book but added the comment that Lyall acquits Hastings of the charges raised against him, but does so ‘unenthusiastically’.79 Thus, Lyall departed in many ways from the approach of the average colonial official or colonialist historian of his times. Third, it seems that Lyall’s deep interest in Indian philosophy and religious beliefs saved him from falling victim to the usual bureaucratic insensitivity to the cultural experience of being in India. He developed a rather modern ethnographic sort of perspective and the essays in his Asiatic Studies bear witness to that. James Mill also wrote of such things in his History of British India (1817): in Book I, ‘Hindu Religious Beliefs’ (Chapter VI), ‘Manners’ (Chapter VII), ‘Arts’ (Chapter VIII), and so on. James Mill’s exploration into ‘Hindu’ culture and society served to confirm his prejudices about ‘the ignorance of the Hindus and the low state of civilization in which they remain’.80 The fact that Mill had never been to India, that he knew no Indian language, and that he depended on ex-colonials’ memoirs, which were somewhat like club gossip, were limitations that Lyall did not suffer from. Lyall’s sources were readings in Indological literature, which was well-developed by the end of the nineteenth century, and more often than that, his own observations during his long career in India, beginning as a district collector and ending in the lieutenant governorship of a province. While these three characteristics of Alfred Lyall set him apart from the average colonial historian of his times, he was essentially committed to the ideology of imperialism. While he respected India’s civilization, he believed that the British Empire was good for the Indian people. While he did not share James Mill’s view that India was in a very low state of civilization, he did believe that India, having progressed to a certain point on the track of development that one could see in Europe, failed to progress further. British rule, he thought, would bring India back to the path of progress. For a man who witnessed the uprising of 1857 and actually fought in a civilian

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officers’ contingent, he was free of the extreme anti-Indian prejudice of many of his colleagues. At the same time, he believed that India would progress under British rule. ‘The moral and material civilization of the Indian people has made more progress in the past fifty years’, he wrote in 1907, ‘than during all the preceding centuries of their history’.81 On the whole, one may say that Lyall was certainly one of the colonialist historians of India, but he differed in many matters from the more virulent imperialists among them. We have already touched upon the life and archival work of Sir George Forrest (1846–1926). Apart from his Selections from State Papers, which we have discussed earlier, he wrote a number of historical works of which the most popular was History of the Indian Mutiny in three volumes (Edinburgh, 1904–12). For this he drew upon the documents he was in charge of at the IRD and his book is full of citations of documents, but there was little that went beyond the earlier work of Sir William Kaye, who had first-hand knowledge and knew many witnesses of the events of 1857. Forrest also produced biographies of Field Marshal Lord Roberts (1915) and Lord Clive (1918), with plentiful citations and extracts from sources. These works secured for Forrest a front-rank position among historians associated with archiving in India. Forrest appears to possess the instincts of an archivist. In his long prefatory statement, ‘The Sources of the Narrative’, in his biography of Clive, he tells us of his search in Madras, in Pondicherry, in foreign archival collections, papers at the family seat of the Clives maintained by Lord Powis, and the papers left behind by the first biographer of Clive, Sir John Malcolm. Forrest was quite forthright in criticizing those who preceded him in narrativizing Clive’s life. For instance, his comment on the official biography by Sir John Malcolm states: The Introduction and early chapters, written during the leisure of a long sea voyage, are the best in the Life. But Malcolm did not continue to make sufficient use of the materials placed at his disposal…. He wrote to Sir Walter Scott: ‘I am toiling from dawn to sunset to bring to a good finish the labours of my public life.’… On his return to England, Malcolm allowed himself to be lured into the strife of politics, and he had a restless longing to write a great work on the Government of India. The Life of Clive was neglected, and only two more chapters were written when Malcolm died, in 1888. The work

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was finished by a friend, and published in 1838. It exhibits the defects of the author and the conditions under which it was written. The narrative is often dull, and intermingled with disquisition; the valuable matter is ill-arranged, the style that of the official report, and the biography remains an important work with intrinsic weaknesses.82

Forrest was the kind of archivist who can add to the new sources of archives. He discovered the diary of Ranga Pillai, Clive’s broker in Madras. During one of my visits to Pondicherry, General Macleod, R.A., the Consular Agent, informed me that Ranga Pillai, the chief broker who transacted business with the natives for the Pondicherry Government, and was on intimate terms with Dupleix and his wife, had left a most important diary. In 1892, General Macleod and myself brought to the notice of the Madras Government the existence of the diary, and it was suggested that the matter which it contained was of such interest and value that it was highly desirable that a copy of it should be obtained, and a translation made of this and published. The Madras Government, which was then presided over by Lord Wenlock, readily adopted the suggestion, and after considerable research the undoubted originals of volumes I and II and the last volume were discovered. They have been transcribed, and five volumes of translation published. This diary, from which I have often quoted, is of considerable historical value.83

Forrest’s chief strength was his command over sources. His biographical and historical works were not remarkable for their literary quality; in fact, they often appear to be editorial introductions to selections and extracts from records (for example, his selections of the state papers of Hastings and Cornwallis). To edit ‘selections’ was his forte and he set a pattern that was followed in the early decades of the twentieth century. Vincent Smith (1848–1920) was the author of a history of India that was influential because it was for decades, at least till the 1950s, compulsory reading in many Indian colleges and universities. Having entered the ICS in 1871, he served in the United Provinces, or present-day Uttar Pradesh, as a magistrate and judge till he retired in 1910. However, his administrative career was insignificant in his life compared to his scholarly pursuits, particularly his research in

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the periods of Indian history associated with the emperors Asoka and Akbar. After retirement he settled in Oxford as a fellow of St John’s College and curator of the Indian Institute and wrote the Oxford History of India. He did not claim to have based his narrative of the rise of British power in India upon archival sources and government records: ‘From the middle of the eighteenth century, the commencement of the British period, the mass of contemporary papers, public and private, is almost infinite.… In the composition of this work I have not attempted to explore the manuscript collections.’84 He depended, he said, on the records available in print, of which a major part were the selections from records we have mentioned in this and the previous chapter. He attempted a synthesis of what was already published, much like James Mill a century ago—a historian whom Smith praised in the introduction to his own work. The remarkable thing about the synthesis of knowledge he attempted was that it raised a big question: How was it possible to talk of a ‘history of India’? Did India possess a unity that makes that possible? His answer was that India did have a cultural unity but never the political unity that British rule brought about. The cultural unity transcended the innumerable diversities but political unity, Smith argued, was never fully attained. He emphasized the uniqueness of what he called the ‘British period’ in terms of unifying India. Vincent Smith, perhaps the last of a long line of historians who belonged to the ICS (barring the generation of Penderel Moon, who wrote after 1947), did not try to conceal his loyalty to the empire. Political union under subjection to one ruler never was enjoyed by all India until the full establishment of British sovereignty, which may be dated in one sense so recently as 1877 when Queen Victoria became Empress of India; in another sense from 1858 … and in another sense from 1818 when the Marques of Hastings shattered the Maratha power…. Very few rulers, Hindu and Muhammedan, attained sovereignty even as extensive as that claimed by the Marques of Hastings.85

Thus, political unity was a gift of British rule to India. But did India possess any unity other than that? Smith answered famously that there was indeed ‘unity in diversity’. This was a phrase

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that did occur in his ‘Introduction’ to his widely read Oxford History of India. It may be said to be Smith’s claim to fame. But was this notion of unity in diversity the same as the idea of a syncretic civilization, a composite culture, which was upheld by Gandhi and Tagore and Jawaharlal Nehru? It is a grave conceptual confusion to imagine the nationalist position on this and Vincent Smith’s thesis as identical. Smith writes: ‘The most essentially fundamental Indian unity rests upon the fact that the diverse people of India have developed a peculiar type of culture or civilization utterly different from any other type in the world. That civilization may be summed up in the term Hinduism.’86 That is obviously inconsistent with the position of Gandhi or Tagore. Further, ‘India beyond all doubt possesses a deep underlying fundamental unity.… That unity transcends innumerable diversities of blood, colour, language, dress, manners and sect.’ And the source of this unity is the religious unity within Hinduism. He speculates: ‘An Indian Muslim may be, and often is, far more in sympathy with an Arab or Persian fellow-believer than he is with a Hindu neighbour.’ And the few Christians who are there ‘are not concerned with most of the reasons which make all Hindus one in a sense’. And even Hindus in the south of India were not quite in it, for they retained ‘utterly un-Aryan social practices’ and ‘Dravidian culture’. It all boils down to this that the ‘Indo-Aryan Brahmanical culture of the north’ represent Hinduism in Smith’s conception.87 Moreover, caste, looked at broadly, unites all Hindus by differentiating them from the rest of mankind, ‘disintegrates them up into thousands of mutually exclusive and often hostile sections. It makes combined social or political action difficult and in many cases impossible.…’88 It is interesting to reflect on the fact that just eight years after Smith wrote this, the Khilafat and Non-Cooperation Movements were launched. If Hinduism was to be thus defined, excluding so many of the Indian people and itself divided so deeply by caste, what sort of binding and unifying role could be attributed to it? In fact, Smith’s emphasis on Hinduism as the only unifying element and on religion and religious communities implied that diversity was bound to prevail over unity. That serves very well Smith’s thesis that the British alone united the subcontinent, the Indian people had no autonomous will to unite, they never had any unity other than that of common subjection to one British sovereign. The implication was

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that if the iron hand of British rule was removed, India would dissolve into the innumerable fragments they originally were. Vincent Smith’s approach to the role of Hinduism was echoed later in some Indian historical and political writings. In essence it was, however, a somewhat biased reading of the past, ignored many facts and trends contrary to his view in the past and in his own times, and it constituted in a subtle way a defence of Britain’s imperial role in India. Among the lesser luminaries in the company of eminent historians such as Sir Alfred Lyall and Vincent Smith, both members of the ICS, Samuel Charles Hill (1857–1926) deserves mention. As the head of the IRD from 1900 to 1902, he was thoroughly familiar with records. Though his works were not as popularly known as those of Lyall or Smith, Hill represents the vanguard of the professional historians who drew their data from the records such as H.H. Dodwell or P.E. Roberts, who appeared later. Not only did he publish a selection of records mentioned earlier in this chapter, Bengal in 1756–57, but also other works of record-based research.89 These other works were based on records mainly in the Madras record office: The Life of Claude Martin, Major-General in the Army of the Honourable East India Company (Calcutta, 1901) and Three Frenchmen in Bengal; Or, The Commercial Ruin of the French Settlements in 1757 (London, 1903). Another notable and more innovative work was that of Ramsay Muir (1872–1941), the editor and compiler of a collection of documents under the title The Making of British India 1757–1858. He commented on historical sources: Much of this material has been already printed, in biographies, pamphlets, Parliamentary Papers, and Reports of Commissions. But vast masses still remain imprinted, both in India and in England, and the number of students at work on these materials is discreditably small…. The object of this book is to provide a selection of these contemporary materials ample enough the student to see the main events of Anglo-Indian history through the eyes of the principal actors, and yet not so full as to be overwhelming. The book is primarily designed for the use of students, and can be used to best advantage in conjunction with a good narrative history.

This was one of the earlier attempts to bring documents to students.90

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Finally, we must look at the impact of Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) in shaping Indian historians’ approach and methodology in the early decades of the twentieth century. Sir Jadunath Sarkar wrote in the essay ‘Development of History in Modern India’: The main sources for writing history are contemporary records; most of them remain unpublished; to discover, edit, explain them and their comparative study is the only method for putting history on a firm basis—that truth is now accepted in the entire civilized world. Although … von Ranke had declared this as an unquestionable principle, even in Europe this change in approach was relatively new and even Lord Acton seemed skeptical about unpublished documents,. In Europe from the beginning of the twentieth century historians have accepted this new methodology as beyond question.91

Sarkar also sensed the beginnings of this Rankean enterprise in all parts of India: ‘We must not fall behind in collecting the sources. Writers in all parts of India, in Hindustan and in Deccan, and all races [jati]—Bengali, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Gujarati, Tamil, Maratha—are in the endeavour to build the history of India brick by brick.’92 Sarkar was right about the general acceptance of the principle, associated with von Ranke in contemporary historical discourse, of basing historical writings on contemporary records. In a recent survey of historiography, The Oxford History of Historical Writing, several authors indicate that there was a similar trend in most countries in Europe in the early twentieth century. Georg G. Iggers asserts: ‘Ranke is identified as the founder of the modern tradition of scientific history.’93 Stefan Berger mentions: ‘Ranke’s influence on European historiography cannot be overestimated.’94 About the time the IRD was established in India, Europe witnessed a wave of enthusiasm for histories based on authentic historical records, a thought trend associated with the rise of the Rankean notions of objectivity and scientific history. Georg G. Iggers points to the fact that in England no less a historian than Lord Acton recognized the rise of the German school of history, and in 1886 the very first issue of the English Historical Review was dedicated to new German historiography. In 1885, the newly founded American Historical Association elected von Ranke, the ‘father of scientific history’, the first honorary member of the association.95 An interesting

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question Iggers raises is why German historiography took such a turn and von Ranke became a leader in historiography in the Western world. The reasons he points to are: the strength of the old tradition of historicism in the researches of Berthold Niebuhr (1776–1831) in sources of Roman history and the ideas of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835); the growth of the Gottingen School of history and the foundation of the University of Berlin (1809) where Ranke began to teach in 1825; von Ranke’s own training in historical philology and later research in the history of the Germanic and Latin races; and, above all, the development of a new German national spirit since the termination of Napoleon’s hegemony in central Europe. In his writings, Ranke put a lot of emphasis on his sources. For example, in his History of the Popes he devoted the first 15 pages to his search for sources in Germany and Italy. A man of his eminence was denied by the Vatican ‘the freedom of access which I would have wished’—Ranke hints that this was because he was not a Roman Catholic, but ‘a Protestant, a North German’. Yet Ranke says that ‘maintaining always the objective point of view’ and to eschew ‘such warmth of expression as arises from partiality or hostility’ was his aim.96 Despite some statements of this kind, Ranke was probably not entirely free of certain emotional attachments, for example, as a son of a Lutheran priest, attachment to the Protestant faith, or as a spokesman of newly awakened national identity consciousness. For example, in his evaluation of Frederick I and Maximilian II of Austria he eloquently generalizes about ‘the spirit of the German nation’, and the ‘genius of the nation which by a pure and spontaneous effort, had reawakened a deeper and purer form of religion’.97 You may easily excuse these lapses from the ideal of total neutrality because they lend some ‘warmth of expression’ to the otherwise spiritless and bland narratives that do not compromise neutrality. Leopold von Ranke’s famous dictum, telling history ‘as it really happened’, was not merely a slogan but an agenda statement backed by empirical research. The Rankean school of history swept all before it in the Western scholarly world at one time for it emphasized sound empirical methodology—basically, the critical and objective examination of records. One can understand why historians such as Jadunath Sarkar found much merit in the Rankean methodology. One cannot deny the fact that in the late nineteenth and early

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twentieth centuries in the discourse of history, objectivity, as a value, was endangered—given the tradition of glorification of dynasties of rajas and badshahs in court chronicles and prasastis, the blind adulation of the British rulers by Indian sycophants, the self-glorifying rhetoric of spokesmen of regional, religious, and ethnic fragments of India, and the absence of institutions to preserve and open authentic records for exploration by historians. Perhaps the greatest threat was pointed out by Sir Shafaat Ahmad Khan in 1935: ‘I dread the prospect of long lines of histories of India written by Muslims, Mahrattas, Sikhs, Bengalis, and Pathans, each from their own point of view.… Should history be tied to the chariot wheels of perverted sectionalism which … is now acting as the most serious obstacle to nationalism of India as a whole.’98 In the presence of such threats to objectivity, admirers of von Ranke insisted upon his recommendation regarding use of original sources and objectivity in narration. The Rankean approach appealed to the conservative cast of mind. While in England the long history of liberal democratic transformation and in France the ideology of the revolution left its mark on historiography—in Germany there was no such history. German society was characterized by absolute monarchy as in Prussia, a military and bureaucratic aristocracy that held an unassailable position, and dependence of the universities on the support of the government, and in the wars of liberation against Napoleon 1813–15 a strong sense of ethnic identity allied with traditional political authority. There was some affinity between that polity and the message in von Ranke, which was sometimes dubiously called ‘positivism’—an affinity in terms of resistance, on the ground of the violation of objectivity, to ideologies, theories, and ‘historical laws’ of the Hegelian kind. By the middle decades of the twentieth century, the Rankean point of view was outmoded by the development of new historiography in the hands of, among others, Fernand Braudel and the French ‘Annales’ school of history, and it was from the beginning unacceptable to those belonging to the Hegelian and Marxian approach to history. To the extent the Rankean methodology was elevated as a philosophy—in that it rejected recourse to theory and interpretation beyond the particularities immediately under study—what was a sound empiricism in method became indeed, as it is commonly recognized today, a kind of mindless empiricism. That did and would

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today impede generalizations which lead us to illuminating interpretation. However, it is self-evident that in historians’ practice the issue is not empiricism versus its opposite, but a balance between the two. Iggers points out that, in fact, Ranke himself was not averse to making large generalizations; when he talked of the spirit of Germanic and other ethnic cultures, or when he philosophized in his lecture to King Maximilian of Bavaria that ‘every epoch is open to God’, he enters the area of philosophical speculation, in a manner inconsistent with his much-vaunted empiricism. Perhaps lesser historians who claim to be Rankeans are more responsible for creating an exaggerated empiricism. However, on the whole, for historians in India, such as Sir Jadunath Sarkar in the early twentieth century, the rise of the Rankean school was welcome for it put to an end unfounded speculations of the kind James Mill popularized, and strengthened empirical research founded on authentic sources and archival records. We shall see in the next chapter how this trend impacted the archival discourse. Notes 1. Home Department, Public Branch, Nos 227–8, October 1899. 2. Home Department, Public Branch, Nos 24–42, March 1891, p. 98 (emphasis mine). 3. Of the vast literature on the subject, the best guide to the revenue assessment protocol is to this day a late nineteenth-century work: B.H. Baden-Powell, The Land System of British India (Oxford, 1972[1892]), vols I–III. 4. H.H. Risley’s note of 23 June 1904, Home Department, Public Branch, No. 98, September 1904, p. 12. 5. Forest Hill, ed., Bengal in 1756–57, India Records Series (Calcutta, 1905). 6. S.C. Hill, Catalogue of the Home Miscellaneous Series of the India Office Records (HMSO, 1927). 7. C.R. Wilson, ed., Old Fort William in Bengal: A Selection of Official Documents Dealing with Its History (London, 1906). 8. Govt of India, Department of Education (General), 21 March 1919 No. 77. 9. A.F.M. Abdul Ali, ‘Commercial and Social Intercourse between the East India Company and the Poona Court’, Bengal Past and Present, vol. 37 (1929): 19–34; A.F.M. Abdul Ali, ‘Phases of Early British administration in Bombay’, Bengal Past and Present, vol. 40 (1930): 18–26;

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10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

A.F.M. Abdul Ali, ‘Patna: Her Relations with John Company Bahadur’, Bengal Past and Present, vol. 41 (1931): 30–40. For example, a set of about 50 memos of 1896 in Home Department, Public Branch, of October 1899, Nos 227–8. Note by C.R. Wilson, 21 May 1904, Home Department, Public Branch, September 1904. Home Department, Public Branch, Progs A, Nos 24–32, March 1891. George Forrest, Selections from State Papers of the Governor General of India (Oxford, 1910), vol. I, p. vi (emphasis mine). K.D. Bhargava, director of NAI, Guide to the Records in the National Archives (New Delhi, 1959), pp. 3–7. Dispatch no. 313 of 1904, Finance and Commercial Department, Salaries, Establishments, and so on, Govt of India, to the Right Hon’ble St John Brodrick, His Majesty’s secretary of state for India, 1 September 1904. Dispatch no. 313 of 1904, Finance and Commercial Department, Salaries, Establishments, and so on, Govt of India, to the Right Hon’ble St John Brodrick, His Majesty’s secretary of state for India, 1 September 1904, Para 4 (emphasis mine). Dispatch no. 313 of 1904, Finance and Commercial Department, Salaries, Establishments, and so on, Govt of India, to the Right Hon’ble St John Brodrick, His Majesty’s secretary of state for India, 1 September 1904, Para 8 (emphasis mine). Note by C.R. Wilson, 27 April 1904, Home Department, Public Branch, September 1908, No. 98. Imperial Record Department, Calendar of Persian Correspondence, vol. I, 1759–1767 (Calcutta, 1911). See Ross’s Preface of January 1911, Imperial Record Department, Calendar of Persian Correspondence, vol. I, 1759–1767. A Calendar of the Madras Records, 1740–1744, ed. H.H. Dodwell (Record Office,  Madras Presidency, 1917); Calendar of the Madras Despatches (Presidency Record Office, India, 1920); Guide to the Records of the Godavari District (India). Guides to the Records of Trichinopoly District, 1800 to 1835 (Record Office, 1935); Madura District, 1790 to 1835; North Arcot District 1800–35; South Arcot District, 1708–1835; Chingleput District 1763–1835; Coimbatore District 1799–1835; Masulipatam District 1682–1835, published in 1934–5 by Madras Presidency Record Office. I have argued on those lines in: Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, ed., Development of Modern Indian Thought and the Social Sciences (New Delhi: Oxford University Press and PHISPC, 2007), pp. xxv–xliv.

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23. From J. MacFarlane to C.R. Wilson, 25 March 1904, Public (A) Progs, September 1904, No. 98. 24. C.R. Wilson to J. Macfarlane, 29 March 1904, Home Department, Public Branch, September 1904, No. 98, Notes (emphasis mine). 25. C.R. Wilson to J. Macfarlane, 29 March 1904, Home Department, Public Branch, September 1904, No. 98, Notes (emphasis mine). 26. C.R. Wilson to J. Macfarlane, 29 March 1904, Home Department, Public Branch, September 1904, No. 98, , Note by H.H. Risley, dated 19 April 2004. 27. Home Department, Public Branch, Progs, September 1904, No. 98, C.R. Wilson’s note, 27 April 1904 (emphasis mine). 28. Home Department, Public Branch, September 1904, No. 98, note by R. Nathan, Deputy Secy, Home Dept, 25 May 1904 (emphasis mine). 29. Home Department, Public Branch, September 1904, No. 98, Note by H.H. Risley, 23 June 2004, and by Denzil Ibbetson, 27 June 2004. 30. Home Department, Public Branch, September 1904, No. 98, Note by Risley, 23 June 1904. 31. Dispatch No. 313 of 1904, Finance and Commercial Department, Salaries, Establishments, and so on, Govt of India, to the Right Hon’ble St John Brodrick, His Majesty’s secretary of state for India, 1 September 1904; the dispatch was signed by Baron Oliver Russell Ampthill, who was a pro tem viceroy from April 1904 to December 1904 while Curzon, viceroy from 1899 to 1904, was in England awaiting renewal of his viceregal appointment, which came in December 1904 (emphasis mine). 32. Dispatch No. 313 of 1904, Finance and Commercial Department, Salaries, Establishments, and so on, Govt of India, to the Right Hon’ble St John Brodrick, His Majesty’s secretary of state for India, 1 September 1904, Para 5. 33. Johannes H. Voigt, ‘The British Policy towards Indian Historical Research and Writing, 1870–1930’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 3 (1966): 142. 34. Home Department, Public Branch, Progs, March 1910, No. 131, note by H. Claughton, 22 February 1910, arising out of note by R. Ritchie of 17 November 1909. 35. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Birth of Academic Historical Writing in India’, in The Oxford History of Historical Writing, vol. 4, 1800–1945, ed. Stuart Macintyre, Juan Maiguashca, and Attila Pok (Oxford, 2015), p. 529. It is a little confusing that Chakrabarty refers several times to ‘IRD Proceedings’ in the NAI; in the NAI there are no series called ‘IRD Proceedings’ of the Government of India—his references presumably are to the ‘Department of Education (General) Proceedings’,

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36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

Nos 1–2 of April 1914, Proceedings Nos 7–9 of February 1915, and so on. However, that is a matter of detail which obviously does not affect Chakrabarty’s argument in this excellent chapter. Chakrabarty, ‘The Birth of Academic Historical Writing in India’. Voigt, ‘The British Policy towards Indian Historical Research and Writing, 1870–1930’, 137–149. Sir Malcolm Seton, The India Office (London, 1925), p. 256. Imperial Record Department Papers, March 1904, File No. 23. Home Department, Public Branch, October 1899, Nos 227–8. Jane Ridley, Edwin Lutyens (London, 2003). The Dawn, vol. 16, January–November 1913. Records Branch, Political Dept, West Bengal State Archives, Bengal Govt, File No. 7D/20. Second Report of Royal Commission of Public Records of England Wales (HMSO, London, 1914), vol. II, part I, p. 86. S.R. Scargill-Bird, Guide to the Public Record Office (London, HMSO, 1896), ‘Introduction’. F.C. Danvers, Report to the Secretary of State on the Records of the India Office (London, HMSO, 1889), ‘Introduction’. Second Report of Royal Commission of Public Records of England Wales, pp. 84–8. Second Report of Royal Commission of Public Records of England Wales, pp. 73–4. William Foster, A Guide to the India Office Records, 1600–1858 (London, India Office, 1919). Foster, A Guide to the India Office Records, 1600–1858, p. v. Foster, A Guide to the India Office Records, 1600–1858, pp. x–xi. Seton, The India Office, p. 256. Imperial Record Department Papers, March 1904, File No. 23. Department of Education, General, April 1918, Nos 1–17. Department of Education, General, August 1919, Nos 1–21. The related discussions are on record in Department of Education, General, August 1919, Nos 1–21. Department of Education, Resolution no. 77, 21 March 1919. Indian Historical Records Commission Proceedings [hereafter IHRC Progs], 1920, Vol. II, Appendix G. IHRC Progs, 1928, Appendix C. Proceedings of the Thirteenth Session of the Indian Historical Records Commission, 22–24 December 1930, published by the Govt of India, New Delhi [hereafter IHRC Progs, 1930], Chairman’s address by Sir Jadunath Sarkar.

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61. Proceedings of the Fourteenth Session of Indian Historical Records Commission, 13–15 December 1937, Govt of India, New Delhi [hereafter IHRC Progs, 1937]. 62. A.R. Kulkarni, ed., History in Practice: Historians and Sources in Mediaeval Deccan and Marathas (Delhi, 1993). 63. Note by H.G. Stokes and H.A. Denison, 24 January 1910, Foreign Dept, Govt of India, cited in Kulkarni, History in Practice, pp. 139, 157. 64. Revenue Dept, Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai, vol. 90, 1901, p. 145, , cited in Kulkarni, History in Practice, pp. 132, 156. 65. M.G. Ranade, Introduction to the Peshwa Diaries: A Paper Read before the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (Poona, 1900). 66. IHRC Progs, 1925, Lucknow session, p. 238. 67. IHRC Progs, 1930, Chairman’s address by J Sir Jadunath Sarkar. 68. Selections from Peshwa’s Daftar, Series edited by Govind Sakharam Sardesai (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1930–3). 69. IHRC Progs, 1937, Chairman’s address by Sir Jadunath Sarkar. 70. IHRC Progs, 1939, Res no. II. 71. Alfred Lyall, ‘Remarks on the Reading of History’, in Studies in Literature and History (London, 1915), p. 55. 72. Alfred C. Lyall, The Rise and Expansion of the British Dominion in India, 5th edn (1911), p. 120. 73. Lyall, Studies in Literature and History, p. 111. 74. Lyall, The Rise and Expansion of the British Dominion in India, p. 387. 75. Lyall, The Rise and Expansion of the British Dominion in India, p. 311. 76. Lyall, The Rise and Expansion of the British Dominion in India, p. 310. 77. Henry Mortimer Durand, Life of Right Honorable Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall (London, 1913); Lyall, The Rise and Expansion of the British Dominion in India, p. 353. 78. Lyall, The Rise and Expansion of the British Dominion in India, p. 473. 79. Lyall, The Rise and Expansion of the British Dominion in India, p. 329. 80. James Mill, The History of British India (London, 1844 [reprint of New Delhi, 1972]), vol. I, p. 389. 81. Lyall, The Rise and Expansion of the British Dominion in India, p. 388. 82. G. Forrest, The Life of Lord Clive (London, 1918), ‘Preface’. 83. Forrest, The Life of Lord Clive, vol. I, ‘Preface’, p. vii. 84. Vincent Smith, The Oxford History of India (Oxford, 1919), p. xxi. 85. Vincent Smith, The Oxford History of India (Oxford, 1911), p. ix. 86. Smith, The Oxford History of India (1919), p. 10. 87. Smith, The Oxford History of India (1919), ‘Introduction’, pp. viii–xi. 88. Smith, The Oxford History of India (1919), p. 10.

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89. Samuel Charles Hill, ed.,  Bengal in 1756–1757: A Selection of Public and Private Papers Dealing with the Affairs of the British in Bengal during the Reign of Siraj-uddaula (London, 1905). 90. Ramsay Muir, The Making of British India 1757–1858, Described in a Series of Dispatches, Treaties, Statutes and Other Documents (Manchester, 1915). 91. Jadunath Sarkar, Adhunik Bharate Itihaser Vikash (The Development of Historical Writing in Modern India), 1935, reprinted in Nikhiles Guha, ed., Jadunath Sarkar Rachana Sambhar (Collected Works of Jadunath Sarkar) (Calcutta, 2011), pp. 131–8; it may be noted that in Bangla language ‘Jadunath’ as a samasa is a single word, while in English the word appears as ‘Jadu Nath’. 92. Sarkar, Adhunik Bharate Itihaser Vikash, pp. 131–8. 93. Georg G. Iggers, ‘The Intellectual Foundations of Nineteenth Century “Scientific” History’, in The Oxford History of Historical Writing, ed. Stuart Macintyre Juan Maiguashca, Attila Pok (Oxford, 2011), vol. 4, Chapter 2. 94. Stefan Berger, ‘The Invention of European National Traditions in European Romanticism’, in Stuart Macintyre et al., The Oxford History of Historical Writing, Chapter 1. 95. Iggers, ‘The Intellectual Foundations of Nineteenth Century “Scientific” History’, Chapter 2; and Georg G. Iggers, ‘The Image of Ranke in American and German Thought’, History and Theory, no. 2 (1962): 17–40. 96. Leopold von Ranke, The History of the Popes, trans. E. Foster (London, 1889), vol. I, Author’s Preface, pp. xi–xiii. 97. Leopold von Ranke, Frederick I and Maximilian II of Austria: An Essay on the Political and Religious State of Germany immediately after the Reformation, English trans. (London, 1853), p. 36. 98. Shafaat Ahmad Khan, ‘Presidential Address’, All India Modern History Congress, p. 15; this body was renamed later as ‘Indian History Congress’.

4

Anticipations of Freedom 1927–47

If there is any unifying theme connecting the developments in the domain of archiving in the last two decades before 1947, it is that of anticipation of freedom in various forms. To understand and appreciate that, we may look at the end of this period. In 1948, when the IHRC met in New Delhi, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru delivered the inaugural speech, and a scholarly speech from Minister of Education Abul Kalam Azad followed. Their presence signalled a change in the mindset of the government—till Independence no high-ranking person of the Government of India had visited IHRC’s meetings. Azad observed that in historical writings in the past, ‘there have been protagonists of the Empire who have sought to justify everything that the British did…. Political passions have on the other hand sometimes led Indians—to condemn the period outright…. Now however the chapter of British domination is closed and the time has come when Indians must study it without prejudice or passion.’1 While Azad went on to elaborate on the role of the Record Commission, Jawaharlal Nehru addressed the wider theme of the methodology and the approach to history: ‘I confess that being myself an amateur I feel a little overwhelmed when I meet a multitude of experts. Archiving the British Raj: History of the Archival Policy of the Government of India, with Selected Documents, 1858–1947. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Oxford University Press (2019). © Sabyasachi Bhattacharya. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199489923.003.0005

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Nevertheless, perhaps, even an amateur has a place in the scheme of things.’ The Record Commission with sources at its command, he said, was ‘essential for the building up of a proper history’ but there is more to writing history than collecting information. Any subject that you may investigate—although necessarily you investigate a particular subject—might generally be viewed in relation to a larger whole. Otherwise it has no real meaning except as some odd incident which might interest you. Because, if there is to be an understanding, there must be an understanding of every subject in that relationship. It has no meaning otherwise.2

Nehru’s remark—perhaps making an obvious point—acquires some significance in the present chapter because our effort to understand the course of the development in the Imperial Record Department (IRD) may be significantly related to the wider theme of the history of the two decades preceding the attainment of Independence. In the last two decades of colonial rule in India there were anticipations of freedom in many areas of the public sphere. In the domain of archiving these were felt in many ways, chiefly in the form of reversal of earlier policies. As we shall see in the following pages, these reversals affected archival practices in numerous ways. But the biggest change was that in these two decades the government’s mindset—the habit of looking at the records as resources exclusively to be used by the civil servants for purposes of governance—had to be abandoned. The resistance of the bureaucracy from the 1860s to the opening of the records to the Indian public was overcome. And, above all, the locus of policymaking shifted in the 1920s to the IHRC, an advisory body appointed by the Government of India in 1919, consisting of leading Indian historians from various universities who overshadowed and outnumbered the ‘official’ members who represented the government record offices. In what sense was the IHRC a policymaking body? It was an advisory body but its advice was as a rule accepted by the Government of India and the IRD and thus they played an important role in policymaking. This is clear from even a cursory scrutiny of an item that invariably featured in the agenda of the IHRC at each session: ‘A Conspectus of Action Taken by the Govt. of India, Local Governments, and the Native States’—the last term was replaced

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in the 1930s by ‘Indian States.’ The failure to act upon an IHRC recommendation by any official led to reminders and eventually communication to higher authorities. That was unavoidable since the authority of the IHRC with the departmental secretary at its head and eminent members such as Sir Jadunath Sarkar, Sir Shafaat Ahmad Khan, Diwan Bahadur S.K. Aiyangar, or Nilkanta Sastri allowed the IHRC to play a policymaking role, at least till 1947. The fact that IHRC brought together some of the leading historians of India made it a forum of academic opinion. Till the 1920s, the IRD was a poor relative of the family of government departments in Calcutta. The head of the department was merely of a rank equal to that of an assistant secretary, he had a temporary and uncertain hold over premises in the secretariat in Dalhousie Square in Calcutta, and his staff numbered less than 100.3 However, in the period following this phase, due to the transfer of the office to a central place in New Delhi along with the capital (1911–26), the recommendations in respect to Indian records in the Report of the Royal Commission of Records in England (1914), the appointment of the IHRC (1919), and the warming up of the political environment during the nationalist agitations, the IRD began to acquire importance. The political climate began to change after the Government of India Act of 1935 brought into existence elected provincial governments, mostly controlled by the Indian National Congress. The period of the World War II was an interlude that saw few actions in the domain of archival policy but in the years thereafter the anticipation of achieving Independence was palpable. From 1939 to 1947 the right of access to the government’s archives, hitherto denied, was extended to non-officials, that is, Indian scholars. The renaming of the IRD soon after Independence as the NAI was a symbolic act signifying the extension of that freedom to access the newly opened archives of the government. When we consider the IHRC as an advisory body participating in policymaking from 1926 to 1947, we might bear in mind the fact that a government ‘policy’ is not necessarily a deliberately made architectonic statement of guiding principles for the government and its agencies; a policy is also the aggregate of many small decisions and actions that construct a line of thinking and consequent action. It is chiefly in the latter sense that the historians and administrators in the IHRC

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participated in policymaking in the domain of archiving records. There were, however, some occasions when they entered the elevated level of policy statements touching the architecture of the government of which they formed a part. One such statement was a resolution the IHRC passed on the eve of Independence. The IHRC at their 23rd session in December 1946 recommended that the IRD be renamed ‘National Archives of India’.4 There is no record of the response of the government, probably it remained one of the matters ‘under consideration’; after the attainment of Independence, this recommendation from historians in the IHRC was acted upon by the Indian government. Apropos of that, although it is beyond the purview of this work, we may note another resolution soon after Independence: ‘This Committee recommends that an attempt be made to compile a list of important records, both published and unpublished, bearing upon the national struggle for freedom.’5 This was a declaration of intent, the documentation of the last decade of the freedom struggle was eventually done many years later; the larger project implicit in the above-mentioned resolution remained unfinished. A crucially important political role at the highest policy level was played in 1947–8 by the IHRC’s core members in their subcommittee that met often, while the IHRC met only once every year. (This was the subcommittee called the Research and Publications Committee, which was empowered by the IHRC directly to advise the government.) As the Partition process unfolded, when the time came to divide, among other resources, the historical records, the committee of the IHRC played an important role. It was resolved in February 1948: This Committee recommends to the Government of India that it is not in the interest of historical research to divide important series of records between two states in consequence of the partition. In any case, care should be taken that the integrity of the series remains intact. Should one of the Dominions stand in need of any record in the custody of the other, microfilm copies of the original should be supplied and all facilities should be given to bona fide scholars from the other Dominion.6

It was a momentous decision to leave the records of the Government of British India undivided. Many years later, dissatisfaction with this

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decision was expressed in Pakistan. As regards provincial records, the question of dividing the records arose only in respect of Punjab and Bengal, and the recommendation to the government was: ‘Resolved that the Provincial Governments be requested to follow the international practice in the appropriation by or allotment of records to seceding territories.’7 The years 1947–8 saw the country in turmoil, and communal riots, mass migration, and destruction of life and property threatened the polity in a manner which even the academic historian in their fabled ivory tower could not ignore. We find in the papers of the IHRC an important resolution on historical records passed in March 1947. Their subcommittee took notice of the endangered historical records, ‘the risks of destruction and dispersal to which they are exposed’. They feared that ‘the major portion of these invaluable treasures will be lost to the nation unless adequate steps are immediately taken for their preservation’.8 The course of action they recommended, in their wisdom—that the government must launch a programme to make the general public aware of the importance of historical records or undertake ‘comprehensive public record legislation for preservation of records of national value’, and institute ‘a National Register of records and historical manuscripts’—was not perhaps adequate to meet the enormity of the situation at that time in many parts of the country.9 Nonetheless, it was an attempt of the historians and archivists to think of a policy to cope, in their own fashion, with a national crisis. While the IHRC was a forum for the scholars and researchers in history, effective enough in its own way in expressing their grievances and suggestions, there was an attempt to push the development of a historians’ forum further forward. In the fourth session of the IHRC in 1922 the idea of creating an all-India body of historians—the Historical Association—was put forward by Shafaat Ahmad Khan. The IHRC responded positively to the idea and decided to send a circular letter to all universities and learned societies drawing their attention to the proposed Historical Association and seeking their response. However, this was one of the rare instances when the government differed; the Government of India ‘did not consider the formation of a Central Historical Association necessary’. Instead, the government desired that the provincial governments might organize the

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local learned societies for whatever coordination of activities that may be needed.10 Probably the government did not favour the idea because the proposed association had the potential of being autonomous, while the IHRC was a government-appointed advisory body. The proposal of an all-India association of historians in 1922 seems to foreshadow the idea of an Indian History Congress, which eventually developed in 1935 and Shafaat Ahmad Khan was its first president. Although the IHRC spoke on some major issues such as the renaming the IRD as the NAI or dividing the British Indian records between India and Pakistan, the majority of the policy interventions of the IHRC were, as we shall see, to secure access to government records for researchers in India and to ensure changes at the level of the quotidian practice of archiving. These interventions aggregated into a policy line that differed from the lines laid down by the government from the 1860s to the 1910s. The policy issues may be divided into three sets: (i) freedom of access to Government of India records, (ii) building a nation-wide regime of archiving, inclusive of all provinces and the Indian states ruled by princes, and (iii) aid to historical research in India through the publication of calendars of records, indexes, selection of records, and so on. The following pages address these issues in that order, so that the discussion is thematic. A purely chronological narrative would have lost the wood for the tree. *** Freedom of Access to the Archives Basically, the central theme in the phase from 1926 to 1947 is perhaps the transformation of the subjects of British India into citizens of an independent India, as reflected in the archival discourse. The issue at the core of that discourse, and in the course of the development in the IRD in the last two decades before Independence, is that of public access to the records of the Indian government. If one looks back, one can see that in the first phase we have studied, 1858 to 1872, the main issue was whether a central ‘muniment room’, or record office, was necessary; in the second phase, 1872 to 1891, the discussion was all about how to do without such a record office and

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how to deny non-officials the access to government records; and in the third phase we saw that since the central record room was set up in 1891, the issue of access to records figured prominently along with the agenda of publication of selected records and calendars of records following the English model. In the present phase, 1926 to 1947, we shall see the archival discourse focused upon public access to the historical records. In Europe the principle of opening access to archived state papers is usually traced to the acceptance of this principle in the early days of the French Revolution. In India that kind of dramatic background was conspicuously missing. The crystallization of that principle—recognizing ‘the public’ in India—took a long time when gradually the Indian nationalist movement, from the Non-Cooperation Movement onwards, transformed the political discourse, while the systemic changes through devolution of power and transfer of power in British Indian legislation in 1919, 1935, and 1947 and the emergence of the Indian Republic altered the constitution of the polity. The consequent change in the lineaments of state power is reflected in the archival discourse of the last two decades of the colonial state. In studying the history of what happened in the IRD, we have to bear in mind these changes in the scheme of things; however, in these pages it will be neither necessary nor possible to narrate the political changes that form the subject matter of standard political history. Those developments in the relationship between the colonial state and the people over whom it ruled are in a way reflected in a nutshell in the developments in the IRD and policymaking in the domain of archiving. In this context, one can appreciate the significance of the resolution passed by the IHRC at their 23rd session in 1946, recommending that the IRD be renamed ‘National Archives of India’.11 The point of these introductory remarks is that the issue of public access to the government’s historical records is not merely a matter of rules and regulations of the IRD on allowing public or non-official enquiry into records. There was a political issue—hidden as a subtext in the academic arguments of historians pleading for open access, and the bureaucratic arguments asserting the opposite—that links the archival discourse to the larger discourse of the Indian people’s movement for freedom. If we forget that link, we shall get bogged

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down in the administrative minutiae of the IRD and miss the significance of the exchanges between the bureaucracy and the historians. If we break down into its component parts the contents of the writings and statements of that period on the issue of access, we may identify three basic questions: (i) Who would be allowed among nonofficials to access records? Given the long-standing policy of the IRD to exclude non-officials, how would the government protect itself from ‘unreliable’ scholars who would abuse of the privilege of access to records, that is, how would the IRD satisfy itself of the bona fides of the researcher, his qualification, his probity, and his status as a reliable scholar? (ii) What records should be open to access? Records of which department of the government may be opened by the government, in this instance, the IRD, bearing in mind the sensitive nature of records in some departments such as the Foreign or Home Departments, the Political Branch, or the Intelligence Branch—and up to which period open access may be safely allowed? (iii) How is non-official access to be administered and regulated? That is to say, under what conditions are documents to be examined and copied by non-officials, how are copies of documents to be scrutinized and censored by IRD officials, how to empower the department where a record was generated to control misuse of its records, and so on? Changing Composition of the IHRC and Its Status

We have seen in the previous chapter how the composition of the IHRC changed in the 1920s. It began its life as a small committee of archives officials, but the co-optation of many professional historians at the suggestion of Sir Jadunath Sarkar brought in nonofficial academic opinion. By the end of the 1930s, the co-opted members included many eminent historians representing different universities: K.A. Nilkanta Sastri (Madras), K.R. Qanungo (Patna), Radhakumud Mookherji (Lucknow), Sitram Kohli (Punjab), K.K. Datta (Patna), Balkrishna (Kolhapur), Sri Ram Sharma (Lahore); the members of the core committee now included Father H. Heras, Jesuit (Bombay), and Shafaat Ahmad Khan (Allahabad). Given such a composition, the commission became a site for the formation and articulation of the opinion of leading historians. That was its significance, far exceeding the original official agenda of proposing

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rules and regulations for the IRD. From 1920, the inclusion of the representatives of universities, princely states, and so on, as described by Jadunath Sarkar earlier, was by means of co-option; this was later formalized by a resolution of the Government of India in the Department of Education in September 1941. Thus, the formal membership of the nominees of princely states, universities, and learned institutions was secured. The Government of India Act of 1935 brought about major decentralization or devolution of powers. After elections in 1937, the provincial governments began to share powers with the central government of India in matters concerning the Department of Education to which the IRD now belonged (earlier it was under the Home Department). The discussions leading to the enactment of the Government of India Act probably created conditions favourable to the relaxation of rules concerning access to records. The IHRC at that time included many prominent historians who were quite vocal in demanding more free access to records, for example, Nilkanta Shastri of Madras, Balkrishna of Kolhapur, Nandalal Chatterjee of Lucknow, D.V. Potdar of Pune, and so on. The vice-president of IHRC was Sir Jadunath Sarkar, who almost invariably presided over the IHRC meetings (in the invariable absence of the secretary to the Government of India in the Department of Education, the ex-officio president of the IHRC). He skilfully mediated between the historians clamouring for open access, on the one hand, and the official lobby led by the head of the IRD, A.F.M. Abdul Ali, on the other. Sarkar took a moderate position, which usually prevailed. The consensus that emerged in the 14th session of the IHRC in 1937 was ‘that the Government of India be requested to give the public unrestricted access to the records up to the year 1800’.12 Though the date 1800 may seem to be too far away, this was a huge advance upon earlier policies and we shall see later that in 1939–40 the restrictions on access were substantially relaxed in respect of the period and certain departments of the government. In January 1942, the composition of the IHRC changed when the government radically reconstituted it. When the IHRC met at its 18th session in Mysore it was chaired by John Sargent, education commissioner, Government of India; Sir Jadunath Sarkar, who had been regularly chairing the IHRC meetings, was absent

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from this session. Sargent and Surendra Nath Sen, the secretary of IHRC and keeper of records heading the IRD in Delhi respectively, announced that the IHRC had been expanded in order to reach out to many universities and learned institutions.13 While earlier there were about 10 members, now there were 21—12 from provincial governments, 4 from the oldest records rooms of Madras, Bombay, Calcutta, and Lahore, and historians such as R.C. Majumdar (Dacca University), Mohammad Habib (Aligarh), D.V. Potdar (Bharatiya Itihas Samsodhak Mandal, Poona), Sardar K.M. Panikkar (minister at Bikaner), and C.S. Srinivasachari (Annamalai). Earlier there were about 15 co-opted members from universities and learned bodies, now they were designated associate members and they numbered 46. These included T.G.P. Spear (Delhi), Bisheshwar Prasad (Delhi), I.H. Qureshi (Delhi), Tara Chand (Allahabad), Radha Kumud Mookerji (Lucknow), Jadunath Sarkar (Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, Calcutta), Father H. Heras (Bombay), G.H. Khare (BISM, Puna), C.S. Srinivasachari (Annamalai), C.V. Chandrasekharan (pro–vicechancellor, Trivandrum), and others. It seems that the south of India was rather thinly represented, and some veterans of earlier times were dropped or reduced to status of associate member. However, the IHRC meeting attracted a great many historians of repute and the papers they read occupied maximum space in the 500-page report on this IHRC session: for example, S.K. Aiyangar (Madras), B.A. Salaotore (Ahmedabad), K.K. Datta (Patna), George Moraes (Bombay), Hari Ram Gupta (Lahore), A.L. Srivastava (Bikaner), Pratul Chandra Gupta (Calcutta), Raghubir Singh (Sitamau House), Y.K. Deshpande (Berar), O.P. Bhatnagar (Allahabad), Anil Chandra Banerji (Calcutta), and others. The point of mentioning individual names and the universities or institutions they represented is to show the wide base of the IHRC. This base was sought to be further widened by establishing Regional Records Committees: in a major policy decision the IHRC resolved that the Government of India may write to provincial governments and the princes’ states that they should set up ‘local -committees in consultation with … members [that is, IHRC members] in those areas to conduct regional surveys’.14 Another policy level matter was just raised as a possibility by the secretary, S.N. Sen, the establishment of a journal to be published by the IRD with a view to discuss archival practices and

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methodology, and so on. In the long run, both of these policy decisions bore fruit. Three Issues in the Debates about Access

At this point, we may turn to the archival discourse that developed in the meetings of the IHRC. By and large, in western Europe citizenship implied entitlement to access to historical state papers, subject to certain conditions, which varied from being quite liberal as in France since the French Revolution or in England from the 1860s, to being very restrictive as in Prussia and the German states before 1871 and even thereafter. In 1873, Alex Charles Ewald of the PRO in London wrote that ‘there is no more difficulty in obtaining access to the State Papers than there is in consulting the books in the reading room of the British Museum’.15 He mentions that the Foreign Office records were open till 1760, of the Colonial Office till 1760, of the Treasury till 1820, and so forth. In India the colonial state did not allow such access—this was evident to the academic historians in India but the expression of the consequent dissatisfaction was somewhat muted till the late 1930s. Surendra Nath Sen of the University of Calcutta submitted a paper to the IHRC in 1937, complaining of the discrepancy between the archival practice in Europe and India. He pointed out that in London the India Office had opened all seventeenth-century records; while ‘permission to examine eighteenth century records was not so freely given’, on application to the authorities that too was obtainable. Similar practice prevails in the National and Colonial Archives of Paris and the Archives Ultramarine of Lisbon. The Public Record Office [in London] is more liberal in this respect.16 The difference between the system in Europe and India reflected the difference between the status of citizens of European countries and that of the British Indian subjects in India. A political awareness of this was in the subtext of the statements of Sen and other Indian historians. A dissatisfaction similar to Sen’s was expressed by many others in the IHRC meetings every year they met. As we have seen earlier, the main issues may be disaggregated into three: (i) Who were to be allowed access? (ii) What were the records to be opened to them? and (iii) How would the process of research in the record room be regulated?

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Who were to be allowed access?

The historians in the IHRC were usually ranged on one side, pleading on behalf of scholars in general, and on the other side were the head of the IRD, ex-officio secretary of the IHRC, and the officials representing various government depositories of records. Some examples of the views of historians may be appropriate here. From the University of Calcutta, Surendra Nath Sen (who later became the head of the IRD and then the head of the NAI) wrote a note for discussion at the IHRC: Preservation is the archivist’s first and foremost concern. It is an axiom of archives keeping about which there is no difference of opinion. Hence follows the corollary that indiscriminate admission into record rooms must not be demanded. So far, the student of history is at one with the record keeper. But there is a wide-spread feeling among responsible research scholars in this country that caution may go too far…. The record keeper may not treat the curiosity of the historian with undue suspicion; he may indeed find a useful ally and collaborator in that prying specimen of humanity…. [T]he record keeper may very well enlist the services of research students, to whom the privilege of examining the archives is granted, for indexing, transcribing and cataloguing the records in which they are interested. Such cooperation will be of mutual benefit to both the parties. The time has come when some of the existing rules may be conveniently relaxed.17

Sir Jadunath Sarkar partly agreed with this view: The records in the possession of the Central Government have this year [1937] been brought to Delhi. We can legitimately call upon the advanced students and professors of our numerous universities to make a better use of this matchless collection than in the past, for it is only the strenuous research of voluntary workers that can do justice to it. At the same time, we have a right to appeal to the Education Department to resume its long suspended activity in the publication of the imperial records and thus restore the honoured tradition of Forest and Hill, and also to adopt a new scheme of co-ordination between this office and the universities….18

Father Heras, a leading historian of western India and professor at St Xavier’s College, Bombay, observed:

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Once I asked one of my old research students returned from England what his impressions were, and he informed me that the most striking difference between England and India was that in India one stumbles against numberless difficulties while trying to do some research work; while in England great facilities are given to everybody. His impression was quite true. If the rules and regulations of some of our record offices or archives are modified, historical research will be made easier and even inviting. There is nothing to fear from bona fide historians. The spread of knowledge will never cause any harm.19

These extracts suffice to show the trend of opinion among professional historians. But the criticism of the IRD was stronger on the second issue—the period up to which records should be opened and their subjects. Which records may be opened to access?

The proceedings of the IHRC of 1937 contain an interesting account of a discussion on the period up to which the records ought to be open. Sir Jadunath Sarkar, in the chair, remarked that it was practically impossible for Indian students to make use of the records in India, while it was much easier and cheaper to get copies of records from the India Office [London] typed than to get them from Mr. Abdul Ali’s office [New Delhi]. There were two reasons for that difference: (a) The British Government are more liberal there with regard to home and foreign office records. They have set up a limit. All records down to the year 1853 are exhibited to the public without reserve. As time passes on, records of still later dates are thrown open to the public. (b) The objection in India to doing likewise was due to the fact that Indian States are far more touchy than the Continental Powers with whom England fought in the past. He pointed out that in official quarters it was feared that access to these records might tend to unsettle many settled facts; for example boundary disputes to be revived, claims of land would be made by one jagirdar against another jagirdar, etc., etc. He said this was what the Government wanted to avoid.

Sarkar suggested that ‘all records up to the year 1800 should be thrown open to the public’.20 This could not satisfy all the historians

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in the Record Commission. For example, Nilkanta Sastri of Madras University said: ‘The present rules do not give access to records of a later date than 1800; I think it is time that the limit was revised brought up to the year 1858 or thereabout. I do not know what the Commission would think about it, but should like to see the matter discussed. Can this be done?’21 In fact the time limit was then less restrictive in the Madras Record Office than in the Indian government’s IRD. Even Dewan Bahadur S. Krishnaswamy Aiyangar, the minutes of the meeting of December 1937 tell us, enquired the reason why there should be such a time limitation. 1800 was rather too backward. He said that European archives were thrown open up to 1875. The records were confidential in certain stages and when those stages were over they passed to simple history and the question of confidential matter or limitation then did not arise. Dr. Mookerji [Radha Kumud Mookerji, University of Lucknow] said that it should be recommended that no restriction should apply to records up to 1800, while Dr. Aiyangar suggested that the date be pushed up [that is, to a later date].22

The chairman, Jadunath Sarkar, was evidently in agreement with Nilkanta Sastri, K.S. Aiyangar, and Radha Kumud Mookerji but he advised a moderate line. The Chairman pointed out that the difficulty was that the Imperial Record Office dealt not only with historical records which were dead politics but with what were called current records. Under the circumstances the Imperial Record Office was not merely a historical body, but one of the branches of the active and actual Government of India, and that, therefore, it must move along with other Government Departments…. The Chairman remarked that the line of approach that was likely to bring them success would be to proceed cautiously starting with the limit of the year 1800.23

Thus, the IHRC resolved to recommend the date 1800; the resolution that was adopted after a long discussion was exactly what Sarkar had proposed: ‘Resolution 8—That the Government of India be requested to give the public unrestricted access to the records up to the year 1800.’24 This was an advance upon the then rules, but the advance was not enough in the opinion of many historians in the

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IHRC. Certain departments, for example, the Foreign Department, which had sensitive records concerning princely states, remained subject to restrictive access. How was non-official or public access to be regulated?

The conditions imposed upon non-official researchers working in the IRD who desired to take out transcripts of records were objected to by many non-official members of the IHRC. A few examples will suffice. A copy of a letter from Dr. R. C. Majumdar, Vice-Chancellor of the Dacca University, dated the 9th November 1937, and extracts from the applications of Mr. O. P. Bhatnagar of the Allahabad University, Dr. D. N. Banerji of the Dacca University and Khwaja Abdul Haye of the Islamia School, Quetta, dated the 6th, 11th and the 16th November 1937, respectively, and a copy of the revised rules were placed before the members. These research scholars raised serious objection to the following provisions of the revised rules. The imposition of an inspection fee of Rs. 5 (rule 3); examination fee of Rs. 2 per 10 typed foolscap pages of transcript with a minimum of Rs. 15 (rule 8); the cost at the rate of Rs. 7 and 8 annas per diem [an anna was 16th part of a rupee] (rule 9); and the regulation that all copies, extracts and notes must be submitted in typescript, the cost of typing being one anna for every fifty words (rule 17).25

Among other objections, Dr Balkrishna of Kohapur, who had to his credit research publications on the trade of the East India Company, made his point very effectively by citing his own experience: Dr Balkrishna said that the India Office did not charge anything for checking copies and there was no reason why they should pay for copies from Imperial Records in India. There was another point that the India Office had allowed several scholars to take typists on their own responsibility. He, for instance, said that he had employed a typist of his own, and the department did not object to it. They rather helped him. The cost meant only £2-0-0 (pound) per week to him. If he had gone to the Government of India Record Office, he would have had to pay six annas per folio page. What he wanted was that there should be no charge for checking and typing. He wanted

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that the scholars be left free to make their own arrangements for getting copies of records.26

There was a general impression, it seems, that the IRD levied high charges for typing and so on to discourage historical research. In 1937, the IHRC resolved: ‘Resolution 7.—That the Commission place on record their strong disapproval of the revised rules regulating the access of the public to the records of the Government of India and the Crown Representative in the custody of the Imperial Record Department in so far as they relate to the imposition of extra fees and the compulsory rules for typing documents.’27 Typing was expensive at the IRD and in 1926 the IHRC had recommended the introduction of photostat machines, but this was not done. Surendra Nath Sen pointed out the advantages of photocopying in words which make plenty of sense to researchers who have worked on manuscripts in the archives: The cause of historical investigation in India would undoubtedly be furthered if the Imperial and Provincial Record Rooms could see their way to supply photograph copies of their archives at a reasonable rate on application from genuine investigators…. There are some Dutch records at Calcutta. They were originally in the District Record Room of Hooghly and they relate mostly to the Dutch factory of Chinsurah. Of more interest are the Dutch records preserved in the Madras Record Room of which a descriptive list is available in print…. But Dutch-knowing scribes are not easily available at Madras. The Keeper of the Madras Record Room may not, therefore, be able to supply the Lahore or Calcutta student with transcriptions of specified records in spite of all the willingness in the world. A machine will be of immense use where man is helpless. Again, a photograph copy is always more reliable than a transcription, however careful. A man may unconsciously lapse into his accustomed spelling but a machine will unerringly reproduce the original. This is no small gain to the conscientious investigator, for sometimes a single alphabet may go a long way in the identification of a historical place or personage.28

There were also voices raised against the IRD on account of its rule that copies made of documents be sent back to the originating department for inspection, although a permission to see the documents was

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obtained in the first instance. Father Heras wrote against this practice in the IRD as well as Presidency record offices: It is well known to all scholars that occasionally extracts from a document and at times the whole documents transcribed are required to substantiate a controversial point, to prove a fact, to contradict somebody else’s statements; in one word, to fulfil the duty of the historian in, producing the documentary evidence and the apparatus criticus demanded by the strict criticism and methodology of our times. Yet after having found the documents for which lie was looking, the research scholar working in those record offices is once more to obtain another permission to be able to copy those documents or even those extracts. This is a great drawback. One cannot understand what the purpose of the first permission to work in the office is, if this second permission is also required.29

Sri Ram Sharma of DAV College, Lahore, took a more radical position that ‘when certain papers should be open to inspection, notes taken thereon need not be censored by any one’. Hence, copies of papers prior to 1800 may be free of censorship by the originating department and ‘when a student studies a document after the year 1800, then alone would this provision come in, otherwise he should not be asked to submit the notes to anyone in the Record Office or Political Department. He said that only secret documents or political papers should be required to be censored by the department and not others.’30 We have given a lot of space to the views of historians assembled at the IHRC—although they may occasionally appear to be comments on minor issues of archival administration—because these have been neglected in the literature on the development of Indian historiography and the growth of an academic community of historians. The evidence of these reports of the IHRC discussions, published by the government, indicates that on archival policy there was a convergence of views of historians from different parts of India—from Quetta to Madras and from Bombay to Calcutta—and that there was indeed a growing community of historians who were quite vocal within the limits set by their membership of a commission sponsored by the Government of India. In fact, from 1919 till the foundation of the Indian History Congress in 1935, the IHRC was the only forum

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for the academic community engaged in historical research. What was the official response to the comments, including dissent, from the historians who were struggling to secure access to the historical records of their country? The Official Opinion on Issues Raised in the IHRC

We have seen in the previous chapter how the British Indian bureaucracy time and again strongly resisted the idea of opening the archives to the non-official public, chiefly historical researchers. When nonofficial members and historians in the IHRC became restive about opening access in the 1930s, the official view remained what it was. This time the official view was voiced by the head of the Record Department, an Indian official, A.F.M. Abdul Ali. He said decisively that ‘the examination of the post-mutiny papers [that is, from 1860 onwards] for research work is not ordinarily allowed’. And he conveyed to the IHRC the decision of the government: Access to the records of the Government of India is given on certain conditions and that the question of throwing open the official records to research students under certain limitations was recently considered by the Government of India in consultation with the Keeper of the Records and Provincial Governments in response to a suggestion made by the India Office. It was decided that no change should be made in the procedure already laid down for regulating bona fide historical researches among the official records.31

He elaborated this statement as follows, in response to Father Heras’s comments on the poor facilities for research: It may be observed that it is admitted on all hands that access to the records is to be restricted to bona fide research scholars and is not to be extended to the general public. The question of throwing open the records up to a particular period as has been stated above has been considered and found impracticable. It may in this connection be also stated that the records in the India Office up to the seventeenth century only have been thrown open to students. But the bulk of the records in the Provincial Record Offices as well as in the Imperial Record Department belong to a much later date. In the India Office also the examination of records is permitted after the Superintendent

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of Records has satisfied himself that the documents asked for are such as may properly be inspected. As there are no separate classes of records which may be called historical it is necessary for the proper authorities concerned to examine the extracts from records before they are allowed to be taken out of the Record Office.32

Censorship was thus stoutly defended. No doubt in dismissing the opinion of the historians in the IHRC the keeper of records spoke for the Government of India, but probably he did not know what he was up against—the trend of politics in a country that was to attain Independence in a few years. As a followup to the discussions of the 1937 session, in 1938 the IHRC further resolved that ‘the Commission recommend to the Government of India the desirability of throwing open the records of the Public, Public Works, Legislative and Finance Departments between the years 1860 and 1898 to bona fide research scholars under certain conditions’.33 In the IHRC session of 1939, Sir Jadunath Sarkar observed caustically: We students have no concern with such records at Delhi as are needed for administrative purposes and are officially called Current. Nor are we keen on getting access to confidential papers in which important State secrets lie buried. But surely there is a time after which … a historical secret ceases to be an official secret…. Is it not safer that after that sterilising lapse of time, the old secret should become an ascertained public fact, correctly founded on documentary evidence? In England all historical documents have been thrown open to scholars if they are at least 70 years old. Here in India we have been crying for the same liberality in respect of documents 120 years old, but without success. May I, as a member of this Commission ever since its foundation and a worker in touch with historical research students in all parts of India, urge that historical records (as distinct from ‘live’ State secrets and, current administrative files) are not a miser’s hoard to be kept buried in dark cells.34

From a historian who was widely regarded as a conservative and establishmentarian these were strong words. In 1939–40 there was rethinking on the issues outlined earlier and the Government of India instituted new rules and regulations, virtually allowing free public access to a great number of government records. Thus, just

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seven years before Independence the records were declared open, with some restrictions in respect of some departments and date up to which open access was allowed. The IRD (Historical Research) Rules, 1940, made it clear that ‘records in the custody of IRD were not intended only for officials generating those records but also for students of history’.35 Surendra Nath Sen, the director of the IRD, wrote in 1944 in an article in a journal of his profession, The American Archivist: Even as early as 1900 the principle had been fairly established that— the record office should give as much information as it could to outsiders on matters of research. It was not until 1939, however, that the momentous step was taken by the Government of India of throwing open the portals of their muniment rooms. The immediate effect of this measure was to render available for research all records of the central government from the earliest times to 1880. The response created by this new policy among the scholarly public can be easily measured by the progressive increase in the number of research workers visiting the reading room of the department. Since 1940 no less than one hundred students have conducted research among the records in the central custody, and the excerpts released during this period exceed 43,000 sheets of type-scripts of foolscap size.36

Here the eminent historian and director of the IRD was being a little disingenuous about the ‘principle’ accepted by his predecessors from 1900, but he is right in identifying the changes instituted in 1939–40 as a ‘momentous step’. Some basic changes were brought about by the new regulations.37 A bona fide research student was to be allowed to inspect any record personally if it belonged to a period from the earliest time to 1880. The definition of bona fide scholars favoured those in the upper echelon of the academic establishment—members of the IHRC, and professors and readers of a recognized university of India—but it also included graduate research students of a recognized university, who must satisfy the IRD as to their bona fides by producing a certificate from the vice-chancellor or the appropriate professor of their university. Apart from such professionals, the rules also admitted government servants recommended by the applicant’s departmental head, applicants recommended by the educational commissioner and keeper of records, and the political officer in a

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princely state. According to the report of an officer who served in the Research Room in later times, the number of researchers allowed access substantially increased after the ‘liberalization’ of 1939–40 (the statistics of their admission to archives show an increase from an average of 39 per year in 1940–8 to about 100 in 1955).38 The pressure group of historians in the IHRC in the 1930s as well as the new political environment since the outbreak of the Second World War moderated the British Indian government’s staunch opposition to granting non-official members of the public access to records. Independence and the conversion of the IRD into the NAI in 1951 and the liberalizing trend in the archival discourse outside India after the foundation of the International Council on Archives (ICA) in Paris in 1948 led to further freedom to conduct historical research, but that story is beyond the purview of the present work. *** A Nationwide Archiving Regime An important policy objective in the two decades preceding Independence in 1947 appears to be to establish a nationwide archiving regime with the IRD in the centre, guided by the IHRC, building a network of historical record depositories in the provinces and the princely states, all working on mutually complementary agendas and uniform archival practices. Towards this end the IRD, relocated to the new capital New Delhi, was strengthened and the IHRC gradually pressured the provincial and princely state authorities to set up record offices where none existed, to appoint record officers where the record rooms had none, and to promote archival training. This drive to establish a new archiving regime with a chain of record offices spread throughout India was only partially successful. In the agenda of action of the Government of India and the provincial governments archive development was not a priority, and it mattered even less to the princes in their semi-feudal states. Thus, the grant of necessary monetary resources from them was niggardly, and still worse was the effect of the financial stringency following the First World War, the worldwide Great Depression that began in 1929,

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and finally the outbreak of the Second World War. Sir Girjasankar Bajpai, ICS, as the secretary of education and therefore the ex-officio president of the IHRC, lamented in 1938: When the axe of economy falls on Government expenditure, we are liable to be the first victims. And when prosperity revives—in my official experience, I must confess with much sadness, that is a phenomenon of rare occurrence—exiguous doles, not always readily dispensed, lend a transient liveliness to our activity. So I may claim with some degree of truth that we are perhaps the most neglected of the many Cinderellas to whom an indulgent tradition allows Governments in this country to pay simultaneous court.39

Persistent pressure from historians in the IHRC, monitoring by the head of the IRD, and the enthusiasm of some stray individuals in the ICS or in the durbar or the dewan’s office in a princely state helped to push forward the project to a limited extent. Centralization of Records in New Delhi

A top item in the archiving agenda was obviously the centralization of all records of the Government of India in the new capital, New Delhi. The construction of the building for the Imperial Record Office was completed in 1926. It was an ideal location compared to the half a dozen rooms given to the IRD in the Writers’ Building, that is, the Imperial Secretariat in Calcutta, from 1891. The head of the IRD reported later: The front portion of the building is an imposing two-storied structure of extremely strong and heavy construction in which are located the office, the laboratory, the reading, and the research rooms of the department. The stack area for the records is an adjoining threestoried building resting on a steel frame which also carries the weight of the steel shelves with which each story has been fitted. The windows in the area are furnished with wrought-iron grills and the main entrances with collapsible steel doors. As a precaution against fire the whole building has been provided with fire-fighting equipment which includes an automatic sprinkler system for the stack area.40

However, it took an inordinate amount of time to shift the records to that new building in New Delhi from where they were in Calcutta

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since the eighteenth century. This delay was partly due to the decision of the IHRC that before shifting the records steps for their preservation, for their proper classification, and also for the rigorous separation of the Bengal government’s papers from those of the Government of India should be taken. When the transfer of records from Calcutta to New Delhi became inevitable, Jadunath Sarkar and R.B. Ramsbotham, well-known for his work on land revenue history, formed a subcommittee of the IHRC to inspect the records; they wrote a note to the IHRC expressing their apprehension that company period records would be endangered in the transfer process unless the records underwent a thorough preservation treatment and were classified. In December 1927, the IHRC at their session in Rangoon resolved to allow the shifting of records to Delhi only after completing the necessary preservation processes, including flattening rolls of paper, casing records, and classification.41 Hence, although the building in New Delhi was ready, it took at least five years to shift the papers. There is an interesting exchange between the IRD officials and the IHRC in 1928: the officials pleaded that processes for preservation and eventually transportation of records from Calcutta would take a long time, about seven years; the IHRC said it should be done in three years.42 Actually, after shifting the bulk of the records to Delhi, the separation of Bengal government records from the Government of India records continued—the correspondence in this regard in the WBSA shows how it continued on a case-to-case basis. We find that in 1937 Sir Jadunath Sarkar announces in the IHRC meeting that the process was complete.43 Thus, it was only in the last 10 years of British rule in India that the IRD, with all its Indian records in its archives, was able to function in a manner appropriate to its role. A by-product of this exercise should have been the creation of a provincial record office separately for Bengal to accommodate the Presidency records after their separation from the Government of India records. Actually, that was not done. As Lord Lytton, the governor of Bengal, recalled while welcoming the IHRC to its session in Calcutta in 1923, as a temporary measure in 1912 the Bengal papers were put in what was called the Historical Records Room.44 No further progress was made till the late 1940s towards creating a proper provincial record office of the type Madras and Bombay possessed.

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IRD’s Services to the Government Departments

In the early pages of this book we have seen that old records were perceived useful so far as they aided governance. From 1891, the IRD was an important instrument of governance. Supplying records of the past on demand from various departments of the government was the main function of the IRD from 1891. These demands were called ‘requisitions’. Surendra Nath Sen, as director of the IRD, writes in 1944: Hardly less important than the duties connected with the preservation of records are those which the department has to discharge in facilitating their use in the day-to-day business of the central government. These duties, heavy as they are, are steadily on the increase…. Mention must also be made in this connection of the extensive research undertaken by the department on behalf of the official agencies searching for fresh facts to illuminate current administrative problems.45

In thus emphasizing the part of the IRD ‘in facilitating the work of administration’, Sen was repeating the point made by his predecessor, A.F.M Abdul Ali, in the handbook to the records of the archives he compiled in 1925, that is, the IRD was a department of the government whose function was to aid other government departments. Sen provides some interesting statistics: Requisitions from government departments, which the IRD complied, numbered about 6,000 in 1900, 11,000 in 1907, 20,000 in 1931, 24,000 in 1940, and 25,000 in 1942. This rise in the number of official requisitions was possibly due to the expansion in the functions of the government; the twofold increase in requisitions from 1931 onwards suggests that the exigencies of addressing administrative problems arising from the political agitations may have played a role. In the 1930s there developed a view among archivists that the Record Office may be made the final destination of records and should not be subject to requisition by government departments. For instance, H.L.O. Garrett, who was in charge of the government record office in Punjab, suggested the following: ‘The function of the Record Offices in India should be altered so that they may be repositories for papers deemed worthy of permanent preservation

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and the current proceedings should be the affair of the departments concerned. Papers once sent to the Record Offices would stay there permanently, only copies being allowed to go out.’46 The adoption of the suggestion by the government would have converted the IRD and other record offices into pure depositories, delinked from the demands of administrative departments. The head of the IRD rejected the idea totally in his note of 1930: ‘So far as the Government of India Departments are concerned it is hardly possible to observe this procedure, as important decisions cannot be arrived at without consulting the originals.’47 However, apropos of that an important suggestion was made by the IHRC: ‘Resolution 8—That in the opinion of the Commission legislation similar to that in existence in England should be introduced at an early date, both by the Government of India and the Provincial Governments, for the preservation, destruction, etc., of public documents.’ However, this resolution of 1930 was not acted upon by the British Indian government. A set of laws was eventually enacted some years after Independence.48 On the whole, the last decade before Independence witnessed a remarkable change in the IRD in the sense that in addition to serving the government departments as and when they requisitioned records or historical information, serving the needs of researchers was at long last recognized. This is evident not only in the liberalization of rules for public or non-official access to records in 1939–40, but also in the publication of indexes and research aids, purchase of photostat machines, and the promotion of studies in regional records. Coping with Technology

From 1891 the IRD was responsible for the preservation of records, and elaborate procedures were devised down to the details as to how to flatten rolled-up records, how to bind and what kind of paste and tissue paper or chiffon cloth were to be used, how to clean records, how to protect them against fire, and so on and these practices were set out in a manual. Further, to ensure preservation of the older records from the period of the East India Company the IHRC at their fifth session in 1929 laid down the rules for classification and preservation of such records.49 This manual was sent out to the heads of provincial record offices all over India.

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Although the record offices were somewhat insulated from the impact of new technology, the change in technology began to intrude even in those sleepy corners in the late 1920s. Thus, in 1926 the IRD began to think of installing a photostat machine. The technology was so unfamiliar that advice was sought from officials in the British Treasury Office in London. They described the machine and the process—exposure under mercury vapour lamp, submersion in the developing tank, processing in the ‘fixing tank’, the drier, and so on—and the cost was £300. The machine was at that time considered suitable for special tasks, not for long-run copying of a series. The IHRC recommended its purchase to the government.50 However, it is uncertain whether the expensive machine was actually purchased or not, because in the IHRC proceedings of 1937 we find Surendra Nath Sen complaining of the lack of a photostat machine.51 It is possible that if the machine was purchased, it was not made available to researchers. For copying for research purposes, the typewriter was considered good enough in the IRD. The IRD insisted on record copying by the typists on their own staff, while the few Indian researchers who were allowed to enter the Research Room preferred to copy by hand since typing was expensive. Microfilming was suggested in 1938. D.V. Potdar of Poona proposed in 1938 that ‘every record office be recommended to make arrangements for the micro-filming of documents, as that is the cheapest and in every way the best method for the purpose. It is recommended that wherever possible micro-filming apparatus be fitted up.’52 However, due to wartime financial constraints the introduction of that technology was postponed.53 There are also other matters concerning techniques (for example, the much discussed point about replacing Japanese tissue paper with chiffon sheets and eventually lamination, or the fumigation methods), but in this book we have focused only on big technological changes, excluding the details and the trivia. Some of the matters might appear to be unimportant but were potentially important in the long run, for example, the decision in 1946 to create a central agency for the preservation of documentary films of the Indian government.54 We have plenty of archived papers concerning the routine practice of cleaning, fumigation, binding, lamination, and so on, of which some are mere trivia. For instance, we get to know that when the Research and Publications Committee wanted

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more staff, there was the momentous decision of none less than the governor general in council to authorize the head of IRD to appoint two ‘dusting bearers’ for three months.55 We have focused only on discussions and decisions that are significant in terms of the making of archival policy. Extending the Archiving Regime to Provinces

Through the first two decades of the IHRC their chief function was to offer advice and scholarly assistance—in fact, recommending policies to be pursued in various matters, often initiating suo moto policy interventions—to the IRD, but the provincial archives were not left out. Many provinces did not have a record office. The persistent policy of the IHRC was to persuade the provinces, through the mediation of the Government of India, to set up provincial record depositories and to appoint officers to head the provincial archives. In 1858, among the Presidencies, Madras and Bombay had old and well-established record offices, Bengal had none of its own because the Bengal records were lumped together with those of the Government of India. Lord Lytton in his address to the IHRC in 1923 recalls that a ‘Bengal Historical Records Room’ was started as late as 1912, that is, after the announcement of the shift of capital to New Delhi.56 In fact, in 1910 a permanent post of the keeper of records was created in Bengal. That was a halfway house to setting up a provincial record office of the kind that Madras and Bombay had possessed for decades. Even as late as 1945 the IHRC, at the instance of the Asiatic Society, was compelled to resolve for the umpteenth time that it ‘recommends that a central Records Office be established by the Government of Bengal as early as possible’.57 (From the WBSA sources it appears that the sequence of administrative actions was as follows: in 1909 the Secretariat Record Room was established, in 1910 the position of ‘keeper of records’ was created by the government of Bengal, in 1937 the Secretariat Record Room was placed under the Political Department of the government of Bengal, in 1951 it was placed under the Education Department, and in 1962 the department was upgraded to the status of WBSA). The United Provinces attracted the maximum attention. In their fourth session in 1922, the IHRC passed a resolution urging the

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‘creation of a Records Department’ to ‘assist historical research in the province’.58 There were similar resolutions and communications drawing the attention of the government of the United Provinces to the need to set up a central record office of UP in 1922, 1923, 1924, 1928, 1938, and 1942. An example of the action of historians as a pressure group in IHRC vis-à-vis the provincial records was the initiative of Bisheshwar Prasad of Allahabad University to improve research facilities in the United Provinces in 1938. On that issue the IHRC observed: The question of the appointment of a keeper of records in the United Provinces was last discussed at the sixth meeting of the Commission in January 1924 (vide resolution 1). The Government of the United Provinces stated that they several times considered the question, but they could not take any action in the matter owing to financial stringency; they would, however, keep the matter in view…. This Commission recommend to the Government of the United Provinces the desirability of establishing a record office at an early date and that rules should be framed for the access of scholars to it.59

In 1946, the IHRC again resolved to draw attention to the fact that United Provinces had two record offices in Lucknow and Allahabad and it was desirable to put all records in one central provincial record office.60 The IHRC also pressured the Governments of Bihar and Orissa, the North-West Frontier Province, and Assam to create appropriate provincial record offices since none existed in these provinces.61 Since the governments of Madras and Bombay neglected to appoint an officer to head their record offices, the IHRC passed resolutions, duly communicated to those governments, urging such an appointment in 1924, 1927, and again in 1930.62 In some instances the recommendations of the IHRC, conveyed through their secretary, who was the head of the IRD, to the Government of India were not acted upon by the provincial governments and the reason cited was usually financial stringency. Archiving the ‘Native States’

Apart from the provincial records, another set of records that merited attention was the vast mass of records in the possession of

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the ‘native states’ or princely states, sometimes also called ‘Indian States’. The IHRC in its session of 1923 decided that the Political Department of the Government of India may be advised to write to all the ‘ruling princes’ requesting them to provide information regarding the records in their possession.63 However, whether this secured participation of the princes in an inclusive archival programme is doubtful. In the IHRC session at Nagpur in 1928, it was reported that some ‘Indian states’—a new euphemism for what used to be called ‘native states’, and what we have called ‘princely states’— accepted the offer of expert advice from the IHRC, but they backed out when the IHRC experts wanted to inspect their record offices.64 Representatives of the states were invited to the IHRC conference, for example, in the session of 1930 the director, Daftar-i-Diwani, Hyderabad; the inspector general of records, Gwalior; special officer, History Department, Indore; and the officer in charge, archaeology, Jodhpur, are listed as among those attending the conference. In later sessions more were invited—we find among them the member of a princely family, a historian by training, Raghubir Singh of Sitamau, and also the director of education, Kapurthala, principals and professors of some colleges nominated by the state durbars, and so on. However, the proceedings give us no clue as regards their participation in the commission’s deliberations. In the 1930 session of the IHRC the chairman, Sir Jadunath Sarkar, observed that the princely states’ participation was improving, but this may have been just a courteous remark: I am glad to have noticed in our sessions … a keen awakening in the Indian States as to the need of exploring the past achievements of their ruling dynasties and the history of their territory by rising above the stage of legends and bardic eulogies and securing an authentic basis of facts that would be acceptable to historians abroad. Nearly all the great States now send their delegates to our annual meeting. As a lifelong student of Indian history, I do hope that the cultural nexus thus begun between British and Indigenous India would be perfected, to the benefit of both sides, by the States organising their record offices on modern lines, arranging and cataloguing their papers, and throwing them open to genuine research workers of all provinces under the safeguards usually observed in the British Record Offices, and that on the other hand Record Officers and research students selected by the

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Indian States would be given by the British Government in its own archives, opportunities of learning the proper method of handling records and of exploring such records in British possession as relate to the history of their respective States.65

Contrary to the hopes raised by the aforementioned remark, Father H. Heras of St Xavier’s College, Bombay, and head of an institute of historical studies, found his experience of working in the record offices of princely states disappointing. While he appreciated the wealth of documents in many of the state archives, he encountered some problems. For instance, the Raj Daftardar in Baroda was strict in laying down the law: The strictest rule seems to be the Baroda rule: ‘No persons shall be permitted to make a copy of any document or part of it without reference to the departments concerned. No person shall take copies or extracts from the records out of the office building nor shall he make any use of the information gained from the records without the permission of the Raj Daftardar.’ According to this rule, whenever the research scholar finds a document useful for his purpose before copying it he has first of all to obtain permission for each record.

And further, in Baroda ‘in the case of records belonging to individual departments the Raj Daftardar shall secure the previous consent of the heads of these departments’. In Jaipur State in Rajputana the Registrar of Records laid down a delightfully simple ‘prohibition as regards the records of the Jaipur State’. In a letter addressed to the writer [Heras] by the Registrar, Mahakma Khas, Jaipur, it is stated: ‘The files in the Mahakma Khas Secretariat Office are all official records of the State, which, it is regretted, are not open to inspection by the public.’66

Heras also pointed out that the Government of India was especially unhelpful as regards access to records by subjects and residents of princely states. The rules stated that all applications from representatives or subjects of ‘Indian states’ should be submitted through the local political officer concerned to the Political Department. Research students from Indian states should produce credentials from the local political officer concerned about their bona fides. It was common

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sense that it was not easy for a research student or even a professor to approach the high and mighty political officer, and evidently the rule was meant to discourage research into records of the princely states in the custody of the IRD.67 There can be little doubt that the rise of the State People’s Movement from the 1930s, on lines parallel to the national freedom movement, made the princely states apprehensive that material for propaganda against them might escape from their record rooms to political agitators. The British Indian government officials connived in denying access to princely states’ records. In the 1940s, the IHRC and the IRD began to pursue the policy of archiving in the princely states more vigorously. The result of the efforts of the IRD and the IHRC to persuade princely states to set up record offices was surveyed in 1946 by the IRD: most major states such as Hyderabad, Travancore, Cochin, Mysore, Tripura, Gwalior, Patiala, Kapurthala, Mewar, and so on by then had their state record offices, while the creation of similar offices was underway in Kashmir, Bahawalpur, Jaipur, Jodhpur, and Bikaner, to name a few.68 This was a considerable achievement, given the state of affairs in the early 1920s when the IRD and the IHRC began their campaign to extend the archival regime to the ‘native states’. An allied initiative was to organize Regional Records Survey Committees in the princely states as well as the provinces. Having brought to the notice of Indian states, through the mediation of the Indian government, the desirability of setting up a records office for each state in 1940,69 in 1942 the IHRC passed another resolution requesting the Government of India to instruct the provincial governments and the Indian states to set up local committees to survey regional records.70 The remarkable feature of this scheme was that the Government of India agreed to bear the expenses. According to a report by director, NAI, S.N. Sen, before 1942 only Punjab had a Regional Records Survey Committee; between 1942 and 1949 such committees were set up in every province. Moreover, about 15 major states including Mysore, Travancore, Kolhapur, Patiala, Jodhpur, Bikaner, and so on also set up Regional Records Committees. On the whole the relocation and centralization of records in New Delhi, the creation of provincial and princely state record departments where none existed, the initiation of a programme to survey

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regional records, and so on created the foundations of a national archives regime in India after 1947. *** Advancing Research through Publications It will be recalled that in the previous chapters we noticed three kinds of publication enterprises by the IRD: first, publication of selected records; second, attempts to compile calendars of records on the English model, the exemplars being the PRO and the India Office in London; and third, the compilation and publication of indexes and handbooks as guides to records. Among the ones mentioned above, the publication of selections of records was generally favoured by J. Talboys Wheeler, George Forrest, and C.R. Wilson—as well as by the Government of India— who were keen to highlight the records left by the more prominent empire builders. As regards calendaring, the long history of abortive efforts came to an end in the early 1940s with a final decision to abandon the project. The work of indexing was the most successful plan to aid research from the 1920s. Policy of Calendaring Records Finally Abandoned

We have seen in the last two chapters that before the IHRC was created there was a perpetually unfinished project of calendaring of records. Though the Indian officials’ correspondence show that calendaring on the British model was upheld as the ideal, calendaring on that style was scarcely taken up by archivists in India such as Wheeler, Hunter, and Forrest. More than 50 years before the foundation of the IRD, Talboys Wheeler, we saw, was opposed to the idea of calendaring, on the ground that it was a waste of labour because publishing the General Letters between the court of directors and the Government of India would serve the same purpose. Hunter and Forrest supplied an alternative to calendaring, by publishing (i) guides or handbooks as an archival aid, and (ii) selections from records, sometimes with elaborate annotation and narrative to situate

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the selections in their context. At the India Office the calendaring of all the records was never completed, but excellent indexes and guides to records were produced. In England, William Foster provided a third alternative to conventional calendaring. That came in the form of what was, if you come to think of it as a method, an innovative hybrid format. William Foster’s series of volumes English Factories in India presented selections from factory records, along with extended calendar style editorial intervention, and sometimes material from more than one depository. Foster writes: ‘The documents taken from the O.C. [“Original Correspondence”] series at the Public Record Office, have been already calendared in Mr. W. Noel Sainsbury’s volume for 1630–34; but they are here abstracted afresh, on a different system, in which verbatim quotation is freely used.’71 In this hybrid form extracts with commentaries by the editor (as in the usual selections from records) and synopses made by clerks (as in calendars) coexisted. Selection in place of calendaring had the additional advantage of going beyond the collection in one depository; thus, Foster supplemented his major source, India Office Records, with documents from the Bombay Record Office, PRO, and the British Museum. Unfortunately, Foster’s manner of selecting and publishing records was not followed by his counterparts in India. In the early years of the IHRC their advice was to revert to the old programme of calendaring. In 1920, the IHRC resolved that ‘calendaring is to be preferred to printing’ of selected records.72 In 1922, they again recommended calendaring of General Letters to and from the court of directors.73 But in their meeting in 1926 they decided to ‘modify their previous decision in favour of exclusively calendaring’; they recommended to the Bengal government compilation of press lists instead.74 Nevertheless, it was far from being a consistent policy yet. As late as the 1930s, some IHRC members insisted on calendaring to be taken by the IRD to facilitate research. For example, the following letter, dated 15 October 1938, from Dewan Bahadur S. Krishnaswami Aiyangar, was circulated among the members: I should like to make a definite proposition that arrangements be made in the Imperial Record Office or in the various record offices for calendaring of papers in such a way as to give scholars scattered over India some idea as to the kind of information that is available in each

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record office for the purposes of work in various periods, on topics of Indian history, which may be engaging their attention.

That led to a resolution of the IHRC that steps be taken for the calendaring of records in record offices in British India and the Indian States (including the Imperial Record Department) where calendaring or printing in extenso is not being done and the Commission further recommend that the work may be speeded up by taking the help of the local university teachers and other competent scholars and suggest that handbooks of record collections (Provincial and States) should be prepared where they do not exist.75

To sum up the story, there were from the 1870s two schools of thought: On the one hand, there was a view, which is represented by Aiyangar, that calendaring on the English model was essential, and, on the other hand, J.T. Wheeler and others regarded calendaring as unnecessary because publishing the General Letters to and from the court of directors would provide an adequate summary of and references to records. Even in 1937–8, the IHRC in reverting to the idea of ‘extreme desirability of publishing systematic calendars’76 returned to the indecision between the options of calendaring and simple indexing. However, the high cost of hiring skilled personnel became a decisive factor when the World War brought about severe financial stringency. In Resolution II at the IHRC session of 1942, it was finally decided to abandon the project of calendaring the IRD records. It was decided that ‘as calendaring is more costly and takes longer time than indexing, and indexing will serve immediate needs of research students’ the IRD and provincial record offices should proceed with indexing and complete that work, already in progress; only in the case of Madras Presidency records, since calendaring had already been partly done, calendaring may continue.77 This decision put to an end a long history of indecisiveness and inaction since the 1870s in respect of calendaring the Indian government’s records. Alternatives to Calendaring Records

As we have seen earlier, in England William Foster provided a third alternative to conventional calendaring in his series of volumes,

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English Factories in India. His alternative combined the synopses made by clerks as in calendars with extracts that included commentaries by editor as in the usual selections from records. But Foster’s format had no followers in India. The only attempts that came close to it were a selection of records edited by H.H. Dodwell, Sepoy Recuitment in the Old Madras Army (1922), and another selection from ‘Lt. Col. Tod’s Papers on the Pindaris’, published as an appendix to the Indian Historical Congress Proceedings of 1937. Perhaps the most useful publication of the IRD in the 1920s was the Handbook of Records of the Government of India, 1748–1859, ably compiled by A.F.M. Abdul Ali and published by the IRD in 1925. Till 1959, this was the only guide to pre-1857 records. In 1942, a very ambitious scheme to prepare a consolidated guide to the archives in India was proposed by the IHRC.78 This was reiterated in another resolution in 1943.79 But later reports indicate that this excellent idea died for want of information and support from many provincial and state record depositories. There were, however, some regional handbooks: for Madras, Wheeler’s (1907) and Dodwell’s (1916) and a new one of 1936; there were handbooks for Bombay (1921), Agra and Oudh (1920), and for Bihar and Orissa (1933). Since no progress was made in respect of calendaring and that project was finally abandoned in 1942, the researchers were guided solely by the indexes to records. Indexing of land revenue records of the period 1830–7 and of 1838–59 was completed in two volumes published in 1940 and 1942. This was, incidentally, the reason why there was a sudden efflorescence of agrarian history in the Indian universities in the next two or three decades. The biggest record publication project in India in these times was from outside of the IRD, the Bombay government’s series of 45 volumes of Selections From Peshwa’s Daftar, published between 1930 and 1934, and edited by G.S. Sardesai. A parallel project produced 11 volumes of Poona Residency Records edited by Sir Jadunath Sarkar and Rai Bahadur G.S. Sardesai, published between 1936 and 1943. This was the outcome of the resolution of the IHRC at its session in 1930.80 The other big publication project was actually an aggregation of several ongoing projects of the IRD plus its new projects along with projectors to be undertaken in allied projects of universities and learned institutions. This collection of projects,

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entitled ‘Five Year Publication Project of the IRD’, was presented by the head of the IRD, S.N. Sen, to the IHRC in their 1942 session in Mysore. The project had three parts: (i) publication of General Letters, 1749–1800, which we have seen was on the agenda since the 1870s. Further, as the first instalment of selected minutes of governors general—another old project of which only a part was completed by Sir George Forrest in respect of Hastings and Cornwallis—the minutes of Sir John Shore were to be published. To this were added the projects of the publication of H.H. Dodwell’s selections from the Madras Record Office, selected Bengali documents to be prepared by the University of Calcutta, and Marathi documents prepared by the Bharatiya Itihas Samsodhak Mandal. (ii) The second part of the Five Year Publication Project comprised the travel accounts of Thevenot, Carreri, et al., which were not, strictly speaking, records, but valuable historical accounts. These were to be prepared for publication by the IRD. (iii) Finally, the publication of Persian correspondence begun by Keeper of Records Denison Ross, many years ago, would continue from the impending eighth volume.81 The IHRC approved this five-year plan but only a small part of it was to be completed before S.N. Sen retired from the position of Director, IRD. In 1949, he reported that several Indian universities as well as the Madras government declined to support the project.82 Another ambitious project floated by Sen was to publish from the IRD a journal concerning archiving practices. He had this proposal approved by the IHRC at the Mysore session in 1942.83 But due to the scarcity of paper during the World War the government postponed it till 1947. Transition in Historiography Needless to say, all historical periods may be looked upon as times of transition but the last decades of colonial India were marked by two important developments in historiography which, arguably, signalized a major transition. One was the rise of a nationalist school of Indian historians, and the other was a slow change in the approach to India’s history in the writings of contemporary British historians, marking a departure from the traditional colonialist outlook of James Mill, Alfred Lyall, or Vincent Smith. It will be our aim to briefly outline these two paths of development rather than to

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compile a bibliography comprising the vast number of historical publications in this period; in our judgement, an exercise in bibliographic enumeration will be pointless since the aim here is to trace the major trends in historiography in relation to the archival discourse of those times. From the beginning of the twentieth century there was perhaps new spirit inspiring Indian historical writings, and among intellectuals of those times Rabindranath Tagore was one of the earliest to appreciate the significance of that development. He wrote in 1899: Nowadays in the whole of India a new energy has been at work … and a hunger for history is one of the natural consequences. This shows that the movement led by the Congress etc. is not to be dismissed as something apart [from the cultural domain]. Sometimes I feel that all that effort each year to place before the rulers of the Raj submissions with monotonous regularity is fruitless.

But the awakening of a historical consciousness in India, Tagore said, proved that it was not fruitless, since the Congress had been ‘casting abroad the seed of certain ideas…. We shall now liberate history from alien hands and look at our Bharatvarsha in the light of our independent judgement.’84 The immediate aim of Tagore was to draw attention to the historical works of a historian of Bengal, Akshay Kumar Maitreya (1861–1930), but in talking of India as a whole Tagore probably had in mind other Indian historians such as M.G. Ranade (1841–1901) or V.K. Rajwade in Maharashtra where historical consciousness developed first. The Agenda of the Early ‘Nationalist Historians’

Earlier in this chapter we have seen that Mahadev Govind Ranade was the leader of the endeavour of Marathi intellectuals to open the records of the Maratha era in the form of Peshwa Daftar records, which fell into the hands of Bombay government officials. We saw that he was only partly successful in persuading the government to allow transcription and publication of some records under rigorous governmental supervision and censorship. His greater achievement was to write The Rise of the Maratha Power, published in 1900 shortly before his death. It was, as he said in a preface to that work,

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a ‘history from the Indian standpoint’ and implicitly a critique of the pioneering work of Grant Duff, History of the Mahrattas (1826), which we have noted in an earlier chapter in this book. Duff’s book was based on authentic records such as sanads, kaifyats, watan-patras, and Peshwa Daftar documents.85 Grant Duff’s book—reprinted in 1861, 1873, 1878, 1912, 1921, and so on—was regarded as a standard history textbook in Bombay Presidency. But there was a widely felt need for a reconsideration of Duff’s approach to Maratha history and that precisely was on Ranade’s agenda. He found Duff’s history wanting in the appreciation of the cultural roots of Maratha regeneration. In particular, Ranade emphasized the influence of preachers, ‘both Brahmin and non-Brahmin’, who called on people to ‘identify Ram with Rahim’ and to ensure their freedom from bonds of formal ritualism and caste distinction.86 Ranade attributed to Ramdas, message from Ramdas to Shivaji to uphold ‘the duty or dharma of a great rashtra or united nation’. Ranade saw in the Shivaji story the first beginning of what one may well call the process of nation formation is used by Ranade not so much in the European sense of the term but as a description of ‘an upheaval of the whole population, strongly bound together by the affinities of language, race, religion and literature’ aiming to bring about ‘solidarity by a common independent political existence’. He was aware that this solidarity was ‘wanting in that solidarity of structure which has characterized the great European nations’.87 There were parallel and independent efforts similar to Ranade’s elsewhere in India from the late 1890s. In Bengal, there was a junior contemporary of Ranade, Akshay Kumar Maitreya, who founded the first research society in Bengal, Varendra Research Society (1898)— the Asiatic Society of Calcutta was after all a European creation—and the first historical journal in Bangla (1898). Sirajuddaulla, the nawab of Bengal, had been a thorn in the flesh of the East India Company at its base in Calcutta till Clive defeated him and he was represented as a classic villain in contemporary as well as historical narratives by the British. In 1897, Maitreya contested that in a Bengali work Sirajuddaulla on the basis of the records of the government of Bengal then available and contemporary Persian chronicles. He also initiated in a contemporary English historical journal a debate with S.C. Hill, Rushbrook Williams, and other English historians’ account of the

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so-called Black Hole tragedy supposedly perpetrated by Sirajuddaulla when he captured Calcutta.88 Rajani Kanta Gupta wrote a fivevolume history of the uprising of 1857, Sipai Juddher Itihas, which was published part by part between the years 1879 and 1900. ‘Just as English writers have written the history of the sipai war from their nationalistic view point, I have written this book from our point of view, while utilizing materials collected by them’.89 Although Gupta put together a good deal of material from English language sources it was not as widely known as a work in English, V.D. Savarkar’s Indian War of Independence (1907), which was more of an interpretation than a documented history. In Punjab, Sita Ram Kohli (1889–1962) directed his early research in Lahore to the study and cataloguing of the Khalsa durbar records, which covered the period from 1811 to 1849, that is, till the year the records were seized by the British after the annexation of Punjab. Kohli edited the Catalogue of the Khalsa Durbar Records, published in two volumes by the government of Punjab in 1919 and 1927; in his later studies, especially the work The Trial of Diwan Mulraj (1932) and his history of the reign of Ranjit Singh (1933), he founded his narrative and judgement on authentic historical records. Men such as Kohli or Maitreya represented a generation of nationalist historians who contested certain inherent biases in the narratives and interpretations of British colonial historians, and in doing so they tried to use sources available to them, although the government’s record offices excluded them from access to records. In the domain of economic studies, a similar role was played by Dadabhai Naoroji (1825–1919), author of Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901), and Romesh Chandra Dutt (1848–1909) in his work Economic History of India (vol. I, 1902, vol. II, 1904). Neither of them used unpublished government records—the IRD was closed to them—but by utilizing published records they constructed an economic history that exposed the exploitative basis of the British Empire. Neither of them belonged to the domain of academic history writing in India. Their works were not recommended by the universities; they were regarded at best as authors of popular history. The literature in many Indian languages was greatly enriched by a crop of popular historical writings—not necessarily empowered by a ‘nationalist’ agenda—in the early decades of the twentieth century. Unless one is a superhuman polyglot, one has to depend

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on translations from different languages or histories of literature to get an idea about these historical writings. A very useful bibliographic aid is the Sahitya Akademi series of volumes by Sisir Kumar Das, who led a team of scholars covering 22 Indian languages who compiled a bibliography and ‘chronology of literary events’ from 1800 to 1910.90 We can mention here only a few representative works from there. The historical tradition in Maharashtra seems to have found expression very early in biographies of Shivaji and of Maharashtra saints, for example, Raja Ram, Ramkrishna Bhagabat’s Siba Chatrapatice Charitra (1889) and Sambhajiee Charitra (1892), a life of Sambhajiee, and so on. This was followed by other Marathi works such as Bharatiya Swarajya (1893) by Narayan Pavagi and Vidya Purca Itihas (1892) by the eminent Lokahitavadi, addressing the need for historical works in regional languages and from regional perspectives. In Delhi, Moulavi Muhammed Zakaullah produced Tarikh-e-Hindustan (1897), which is generally regarded as the first modern history of India in Urdu. He also wrote a history of Kashmir, Camanistan-e-Kashmir (1899). Zakaullah’s model of historical writings was the well-known history of India by Elliot. Shortly after that Kunwar Durga Prasad wrote, again in Urdu, a history of Awadh entitled Tarikh-e-Ajodhya (1902). In Bengali, a popular work was of the famous poet Mir Musarraf Husain, who wrote Madinar Gourab (1906). A good deal of writings by Muslim historians focused on early Islamic history in Arab and west Asian countries. Among them the most famous was the Arabic and Persian scholar Shibli Numani (1857–1914), who wrote the historical biographies of Numan, the great jurist, and Umar, the second caliph. Shibli Numani was careful about his sources: ‘We have not only to ascertain that the narrators were above suspicion, we have also to subject the matter narrated to a searching criticism to satisfy ourselves that it is in accord with general experience, human nature, the spirit of the age, and the civilization of the period.’91 While we mention here some of the early instances of historical writings in some languages, the same pattern evinced itself in publications, which regrettably remain unmentioned, in all Indian languages at different points of time in the early twentieth century. There are two characteristics of this genre of writing that demand our attention: first, that academic historians in those times and

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today tend to look upon them as laymen’s writings and therefore less worthy of attention. Second, as intellectual productions these are commonly identified as ‘nationalist’ histories. As regards the nonacademic status of the historical writings by Indian authors, in an insightful essay on the growth of academic history in modern India Dipesh Chakrabarty has remarked: It has recently been said that ‘the site of modern Indian socioeconomic and political thinking and contestation was not the university’ but public life in general because the colonial university, the argument runs, was an institution created primarily to ‘attribute cognitive authority to western civilization exclusively’ and to transmit, passively, knowledge produced in the West. Indian thought on society and the social sciences, it is said, was therefore moulded in the infirmity of public life.92

While this statement is broadly true, it can also be seen with little reflection that no academic subject worth its name could emerge in the modern world without the blessings of the institution called the ‘university’.93 It is certainly true that the advantage of ‘the blessings of the university’ was denied to the authors of the laymen or nonacademic authors of histories, and thus popular historical works might appear to be less worthy of attention; however, two points need to be considered. First, we have contrary instances in modern Europe in the influence exercised by non-academic public intellectuals in Europe such as Froncois Pierre Guizot (1787–1874) in France and Lord Macaulay (1800–59) in England. It is useful to bear in mind that, as Peter Burke has demonstrated, in Europe popular history or ‘lay history’ played an important role in many countries in shaping the historical imagination: ‘the majority of the images and interpretations of the past that reached ordinary people in Europe and the Americas in this period [1800–1914] did not come from the writings of professional historians.’94 Burke also points out that ‘the Cambridge professor John Seeley, for instance, who saw himself as a “scientific” historian, dismissed both Macaulay and Carlyle as “charlatans”’.95 However, 3,000 copies of the first volume of Macaulay’s history of England were sold in less than two weeks in 1848 and it was eventually translated into nine European languages while Carlyle provided a model of historical writing that

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influenced the historical imagination of his generation. There can be no doubt that in India, too, the ‘lay historians’, up to Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India (1946), were more widely read and had a greater impact on the public mind than the professional historians in the universities. Second, the point made here about non-academic writings demands attention, but the distinction between popular and academic history demands our attention. The line between the professional historian in the universities and the non-professional authors of historical works depended on the degree of institutional development. Even in Europe, Gabriele Lingelbach has pointed out in a recent essay in the Oxford History of Historical Writing ‘professionalization of history’ occurred as late as the ‘the years between the 1850s and the First World War’ when there was ‘a decisive growth of academic institutions for the historical discipline, old and new, inside and outside the expanding universities’.96 In colonial India, history was recognized as a discipline in the universities very late, as Chakrabarty has noted, and thus the boundary between professionals and those beyond the pale remained porous. The knowledge system that the colonial state sought to develop in India, as we have argued in the introductory pages of this book, was designed to attribute cognitive authority to the European sources of knowledge, and thus even when the colonial universities were founded they accorded no recognition to indigenous knowledge, inter alia, in popular histories. We have used the term ‘nationalist history’, and it needs to be defined. R.C. Majumdar makes an authoritative statement when he defines the term as follows in the survey of historiography that C.H. Philips put together in 1961: It is … difficult to draw a line between nationalist and other Indian historians. In a sense, it may be argued that some sort of nationalist bias may be traced among all Indian historians. But the same may be said of historians of all nationalities, when writing the history of their own country. We, therefore, restrict the use of the term to those Indians who are not purely or merely actuated by a scientific spirit to make a critical study … but whose primary or even secondary objects include an examination or re-examination of some points of national interest or importance, particularly those on which full or accurate information is not available, or which have been misunderstood, misconceived or wrongly represented.97

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There are two problems with Majumdar’s definition. First, it takes us into the realm of intentionality, the motivation of the author, which is usually difficult to prove or disprove. While the text of what the historian writes is there for all to see, what his intention or objective was is not—it can only be an inference, indeed only the reader’s subjective judgement. It is probably better to look at the text and not try to surmise what was the intention. The second problem with that definition is that the historical writings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that Majumdar considered—and those we have looked at—are characterized by a great deal of diversity in their approach to issues of ethnicity, cultural tradition, and ‘modernity’ as each saw it in his own light. The only sense in which we can aggregate them as ‘nationalist’ is the sense derived from their critique of British rule over India. R.C. Majumdar wrote his judgement half a century ago, but even today there is a tendency abroad to quarantine ‘nationalist’ historical writings in a category that lumps together all manner of writings located in diverse ideological positions. There is no doubt that in terms of their class approach and consequent ideological orientation, their accustomed registers of emotive appeals to ethnicity and tradition, their affiliation to ‘elite’ or non-elite elements in the polity, and in many other ways, there is such great diversity that grouping them all vaguely as ‘nationalist’ serves no purpose other than to construct a straw man for the critics of ‘nationalist history’ to knock it down. We have, therefore, tried only to point to one common defining characteristic of the wave of diverse historical writings by Indian authors from the 1890s in India—a contestatory position in criticism of British rule in India from the Indian point of view, accompanied by emphasis on what they perceived as anticipations of nationhood. That is the sense in which we have used the term ‘nationalist history’. There are complexities that are ignored in the indiscriminate use of the term ‘nationalist history’. A good example is provided by Prachi Deshpande in her perceptive study of historiography and identity formation in Maharashtra.98 When M.G. Ranade wrote The Rise of Maratha Power, he emphasized the inclusive philosophy of Ramdas and his disciple Shivaji. So did Ranade’s contemporary Rajaramshastri Bhagvat (1851–1908). They saw in the Bhakti movement the rejection of Brahminical values and caste hierarchy; they also saw in it the tolerance of other religious belief systems. Thus, they

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interpreted Bhakti movement and the political philosophy of Shivaji or as Ranade put it elements which ‘made the nation more humane, at the same time more prone to hold together by mutual toleration’.99 Contrary to that view Prachi Deshpande points out, V.K. Rajwade interpreted the message of Ramdas and the Bhakti movement and the history of Shivaji as the rise of Maharashtra dharma. Rajwade offered an interesting formula that encapsulates his approach: ‘Maharashtra Dharma (Hinduism in Maharashtra) = Hinduism in other parts of India + establishment of righteous rule + protection of cows and Brahmans + unity + leadership.’100 He focused on the fact that Ramdas was a Brahmin by caste and on the view that Shivaji’s agenda was the expulsion of the Muslim invaders. ‘If truth be told, during Aurangzeb’s reign … like the Marathas, other regions of Hindutva should have rebelled, established swarajya and protected cows and Brahmans’—but they lacked unity and leadership, so that later ‘leaders in Maharashtra sought to liberate’ other regions of India.101 While Ranade and Rajwade thus differed in their interpretation, in 1919 when Sir Jadunath Sarkar published Shivaji and His Times, he offered a third variant. Unlike Ranade, he emphasized the theme of Hinduism, and, unlike Rajwade, there was no room for Maharashtra dharma in Sarkar’s interpretation. Sarkar was admonished by Pune intellectuals of his times; he was sternly reminded by Bhaskar Varma Bhat that ‘Maharashtrians have been writing about their history well before Sarkar and other Bengali historians’.102 Sarkar defended his position that Shivaji’s history ‘taught the modern Hindus to rise to the full stature of their growth’ and proved that ‘the Hindu race can build a nation’.103 Prachi Deshpande has documented and reviewed these debates thoroughly to analyse the complexities of the discourse of identity. In our present context, differences between historians who may be broadly regarded as Hindu nationalists, on the one hand, and liberal nationalists, on the other, serve to instantiate the diversities within the category of ‘nationalist historian’. Apropos of the contemporary critique of nationalist historiography, it is necessary to bear in mind one obvious fact often ignored by those critics: nationalism in historical writings in India was not unique. European historiography had its share of nationalist historical writings. As Stefan Berger has recently commented on the European trends:

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The construction of national identity through history and the interpretation of ruptures in national development, such as revolutions, became the main concern of historians during the nineteenth century. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the invention of such national traditions was associated with the intellectual movement referred to as Romanticism…. Romantics pitted the idea of the specificity and uniqueness of national identities, and they defined the task of history as tracing those authentic and special national trajectories through time to a dim and distant past.

Berger points to the long-term political consequences of nationalism in historiography. European history thus became the history of national special paths— an idea which was to have major significance for the framing of national history throughout the modern period and up to this very day. History constructed national traditions which in turn justified existing nation-states and called for the creation of non-existent ones. It also began rapidly to legitimate notions of the superiority of some nations over others, including territorial expansion and discrimination against perceived external and internal enemies.104

Nationalist schools of history played an important role in historicizing the imperial ambitions of Napoleonic France, in the nationalist resurgence against Napoleonic domination in German states, and in providing intellectual support to Britain preparing for her imperial age. Stefan Berger’s argument in this regard sums up earlier studies in European tradition of nationalist historiography, but he makes a new point in his observation that the founder of the Germanic school of ‘scientific history’, Leopold von Ranke, helped promote the same trend towards nationalizing history. He argues that Ranke was deeply influenced by Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), a student of Immanuel Kant, and Herder’s thoughts on the volk (folk) representing the individuality of each national culture led to Ranke’s theory of national types and national histories: Ranke’s influence on European historiography cannot be overestimated. In particular, his belief in different national trajectories rooted in historically specific primeval national types (e.g., Celts, Germans, and Latin and Slavic peoples) became influential throughout Europe.

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Ranke wrote national histories in order to establish the specificity of those national types. Thus he can be described as a European historian of nation-states.105

On the whole, the ‘symbiotic relationship between historical writing and the construction of national identities’ in Europe is a useful corrective to the notion that the growth of ‘nationalist history’ in India uniquely advantaged or—as the critics of ‘nationalist historiography’ today would have it—disadvantaged historiography in India.106 Transition in Colonialist Historiography

From a global point of view, it may be said that since Britain’s victory in the Napoleonic Wars she dominated the world. However, after the First World War Britain’s position was reduced from being the great power in the world to that of a great power. To defeat the German challenge Britain needed all her human and material resources, and some more—and that came from the United States of America and other Allied Powers. This change in Britain’s position impacted the historical imagination of the generations that witnessed the World War as well as that of the generations that followed. Perhaps this was the most important factor in the transition from an old colonialist historiography of the series of authors we have looked at, from James Mill to Sir William Hunter, to a new approach in the writings of L.S.S. O’Malley, E.J. Thompson, G.T. Garratt, or T.G.P. Spear in the last decades of the Indian empire. We have touched upon the ideological lineage of mainstream colonial historiography in earlier chapters.107 The lineages have been traced to Benthamite or utilitarian political philosophy, which represented Britain’s role to be that of a guardian with a backward pupil as his ward. It may be said that Jeremy Bentham looked upon all people in that light, European or otherwise. That is partly true. But this attitude could find clearer expression and execution in action in a colonial possession like India. Another source of inspiration for the colonialist historian was Social Darwinism, as has been mentioned earlier. This gave an appearance of scientific respectability to the notion that native Indians were below par in the hierarchy of civilizations. One can also see Herbert Spencer’s ideas as a distant philosophical influence. He put forward an evolutionary

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scheme for the explication of Europe’s ascendancy, and his comparative method addressed the differences among countries and cultures in terms of progression towards the higher European form. While the historians’ ideological lineages differed, the colonial historiographic approach had one common element: It was an assumption that backward, non-European people in the colonies, particularly in India, benefited from imperial rule and they had an opportunity to follow the European evolutionary pattern, with a bit of assistance provided by the imperial power. In the heyday of mid-Victorian imperialism, the British gave free expression to these ideas while in later times such statements became more circumspect. (This ideological characterization applies to the dominant trend in colonialist historical thinking but we should bear in mind that it will be inaccurate to apply this without discrimination. It is well known that among the British officers of the Government of British India there were some such as Thomas Munro or Charles Trevelyan who were widely regarded as persons sympathetic to the subject people even when as officers they served an alien and exploitative regime; similarly, our characterization of the ideology at the root of colonial historiography may not apply in every respect to every individual historian. When we speak of colonialist historiography we are looking at the dominant tradition among the servants and historians of the British Raj who promoted, with official encouragement and sponsorship, a representation of the past calculated to uphold imperial authority.) For a number of reasons those old ideas suffered an irreversible obsolescence in early twentieth-century Britain. The self-confidence of the nineteenth-century imperialist was greatly reduced in the period following the First World War when Britain was no longer the great power in the world. T.G.P. Spear in an insightful essay on British historical writings in that period has pointed to another factor, ‘the changes in the ideas about history’ in Britain which impacted the view of some historians of British India.108 The change in Britain which Spear points out was an outcome of the rise of new social sciences such as sociology and anthropology as well as the study of comparative religions. The latter raised Hinduism and Buddhism, for purposes of comparison, on to a level with Christianity. Anthropology on the other hand tended to

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pull down western civilization from its pillar of separateness from barbarism by showing the common primitive origins of all civilization and blurring the old sharp distinction between barbarism and civilization. All these sciences tended to produce a new attitude of respect towards other cultures.109

Second, Spear’s account of intellectual development in Britain also suggests that post-Victorian Britain saw a decline in the faith in the unilinear progression of all humanity towards the acme of human civilizations represented by western Europe. I think we must regard the First World War of 1914–18 as perhaps a decisive factor. With it went, as an article of general credence, the belief in a law of progress whose operation was a western secret.… With the idea of progress went the old confidence in European superiority and with it the complementary disbelief in the significance of Indian culture.

Thus, there opened up a new line of thinking which ‘started British historians on a broader line of studying the impact of western influences on India rather than the mere rise of British political power in India’.110 Some British historians were persuaded to look at the cultural and socio-economic aspects of Indian history, going beyond the narrow focus on the empire’s political and administrative history typical of earlier times. However, the response of British historians and intellectual spokesmen to changes in the climate of opinion in Britain was, Spear says, rather ‘retarded’, so that the production of works of history ‘produced in the old spirit’ continued. Arguably, we may also hazard a conjecture that there was also a slow transition in Europe to a new philosophical position in respect of historical knowledge in general and research methodology in particular. We have seen in the last chapter that at the turn of the century Leopold von Ranke’s influence in historiography was very strong in Europe and that he had admirers in India as well, such as Sir Jadunath Sarkar. In the twentieth century, especially after the First World War, the scene seems to change. Perhaps in the war of words accompanying and following the First World War, the Rankean notion of an objectively attainable pure truth had received a battering. In any event after the World War for most parts of Europe adulation of a

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Germanic model was not quite acceptable. As far as the philosophical position was concerned, a historian’s claim to be impartial and totally objective was open to doubt, Harold Temperley, the new professor of modern history at Cambridge, declared in 1930. Harold Temperley (1879–1939) was the influential author of well-documented histories of British politics and diplomacy, and his book, co-authored with A.J. Grant, Europe in the Nineteenth Century (1926) was a textbook for decades in Indian universities. In his inaugural lecture he wrote: ‘Not only do we repudiate the ideal of Ranke that history should be colourless, new and impartial. We do not even suggest that to be desirable.’111 When Temperley said that ‘the theory that a historian could be really impartial seems to us today one of manifest buckram,’ that is, of little value, he condemned the historians’ philosophical claim to neutrality, but not the Rankean methodology in research. He went on to say that Ranke made ‘small appeal to our literary emotions’ but he had ‘the gift of imagination’ which historians need to piece together evidence to reconstruct history. In the past, ‘literary historians’ failed to be true to evidence: for example, because of Macaulay’s essay on Warren Hastings, ‘the good Governor General and his friend the Chief Justice are dyed black to eternity’. But no one believes, he said, ‘that Macaulay’s story of Warren Hastings represent the verdict of history’. The literary historians ‘obstruct the light of truth with the coloured glass of their imagination’.112 Temperley in his own works put an overwhelming emphasis on documentation; apart from his monographs, from 1926 to 1938 he edited with G.P. Gooch eleven volumes of documents on the First World War. Temperley, in recommending thorough documentation and examination of sources, echoed the Rankean dictum on research methodology, though he rejected as a philosophical position Ranke’s claim to total objectivity—and this seems to be the common-sense view of British historians of his generation. What remained of the Rankean impact was a staunch empiricism, which became the hallmark of British academic history. The multivolume Cambridge histories of Europe or India were examples widely followed by historians. In the early decades of the twentieth century, this created resistance to ‘theorization’ typical of the nineteenth century. The shades of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill and Herbert Spencer in historical writings on India became things of the past.

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This obsolescence of old ideas is a part of the transition in British Indian historiography. But it did not necessarily mean the death of the colonialist cast of mind in writing history. When we talk of a transition, needless to say, we are looking at continuities from the older trends in colonialist historiography and also the emergence of new trends. Instantiating the continuities is easy: the works of P.E. Roberts or H.H. Dodwell, and the volume in the Cambridge History of India on ‘British India’ would suffice. For the new trend one may look at the works of G.T. Garratt and E.J. Thompson, L.S.S. O’Malley, or Charles F. Andrews. It is commonly accepted that the authoritative version of British Indian historiography in the early twentieth century was the fifth volume of the Cambridge History of India, edited by H.H. Dodwell and published in 1929. The same work was also published as the fourth volume of the Cambridge History of the British Empire. That collection of essays was a bland narration of British victories over their European rivals and the ‘country powers’, and British India’s administrative history—totally leaving out economic, social, and cultural history; nor is there any trace of the influence of the ideology of utilitarianism or those later vintages. The narrative in every chapter was very conspicuously based on the officials’ memoirs or government records, mostly published records: the sources were not only displayed in the footnotes in each chapter, but also in an elaborate 50-page bibliography, providing details of ‘original manuscript sources’, ‘published documents’, and ‘contemporary tracts and memoirs’, which constituted a guide to the records. That was something the Rankean school would have approved. In fact, some of the authors took part in the business of archiving British India, for example, the author of the very first chapter, Sir E. Denison Ross, who headed the Imperial Department of Records and later became the first head of the School of Oriental Studies in London; another author Sir William Foster was at the head of the India Office Records department; and the editor H.H. Dodwell had headed the Madras Record Office for some years and later joined the School of Oriental Studies as Professor of the History and Culture of the British Dominions in Asia. Among the authors, Dodwell and P.E. Roberts figured prominently; they wrote 14 of the 32 chapters in that volume, and there were also several members of the Indian Civil and Military Services such as

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C.E. Luard, S.M. Edwardes, G.E. Harvey, and J.T. Gwynn. The civil and military servants’ outlook has been incisively evaluated by Eric Stokes.113 Indeed their writings have some remarkable features in the Cambridge History of India. Authors such as Col. Luard show a peculiar habit of identifying themselves with the British Indian government. For instance, Luard summing up the government position in respect of the native states: ‘Those parts of India not directly under our administration passed equally under our sovereignty; and our ascendancy as well as our indefeasible right to interfere if the peace and security of India was menaced, became henceforth unquestioned.’114 Moreover, some of the authors distinctly departed from the Rankean ideal of neutrality. For instance, P.E. Roberts in his forceful defence of Warren Hastings and Justice Impey along with condemnation of Edmund Burke and T.B. Macaulay depends on and entirely reproduces Sir Fitzjames Stephen’s opinion in his work on the case of Nuncomar or Nandakumar.115 Roberts completely ignores the arguments in criticism of Hastings’s conduct in the book on the same subject by Henry Beveridge, who regarded Nandakumar’s trial as a ‘judicial murder’. We have discussed both these works earlier in the second chapter of this book.116 Another interesting instance is the comment made by the editor Dodwell in the last page of the volume that the systematic effort of the British in India to exclude the former sovereign power, the Mughals, from sovereign rights and the effort of the Mughals to cling to an unreal claim to sovereignty was a matter of European versus Oriental character and culture. After all, he says, ‘the East India Company was not a purely Indian body,… it represented the sovereign of Great Britain and brought with it a European impatience of pretensions that had ceased to have a basis in fact’.117 As an inference from the well-documented study that precedes it, this judgement is odd, for Dodwell must have been aware that sovereignty was not merely a matter of exercise of power but also a matter of establishment the legal bases to it, that fictive claims are not especially Oriental and the disjuncture between power and authority occurs in all cultures and polities, that the East India Company lived with and protected the fiction of various potentates’ claims to be rulers, and that that the British sovereign’s claim of being, among other things, the ‘Defender of the Christian Faith’ was not consistent with ‘European impatience of pretensions’. Thus, behind Rankean

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methodology one could at times see in the Cambridge History of India remnants of the nineteenth-century colonialist mindset. In their individual works the British academic authors of the early twentieth century display the characteristics we have noted in the Cambridge History of India. H.H. Dodwell (1879–1946), who spent in India 14 years of his life, from 1908 to 1922, in the Indian Education Service and 24 years, from 1922 to 1946, holding a professorship in the School of Oriental Studies in London, was more devoted to the imperial idea than many a soldier or administrator of his times. He writes in his introduction to a rather pedestrian Sketch of the History of India from 1858 to 1918 that the task of the British in India was a Sisyphean one; India was always inclined to revert to the backwardness it was accustomed to, but for the British presence. The implication clearly was that India could not do without British rule. P.E. Roberts (1873–1949) in his only research-based monograph, India under Wellesley, consulted all the appropriate sources, but was he objective? Roberts wrote three historical works, a well-researched volume India under Wellesley, an obscure attempt at a general history in The Historical Geography of the British India: History to the End of the East India Company (1916), and the more well-known History of British India (1923), which he extensively reedited in 1938 and this became a widely used textbook in India; the latter was freshly edited and expanded in an edition of 1967 by T.G.P. Spear. In his work on Wellesley, Roberts stoutly defended the annexation of Oudh by Wellesley. It was a notorious instance of interference in the internal affairs of a princely state and, setting aside the moral issues, it was a violation of the letter and spirit of treaties and engagements made by the East India Company in the past; that action became a major instance of British infidelity utilized by the rebel princes and landed class in the uprising of 1857. Roberts, however, thought that the annexation was justifiable and wrote: the governor general ‘looked through the immaterial barriers of treaties and agreements to the wretched condition of the administration of Oudh, which he eagerly desired to rectify’.118 While considering the impeachment of Warren Hastings, Roberts’ judgement was that, after all, in cases like those of Chait Singh and the Begums of Oudh, Hastings’ motive was not personal aggrandizement: ‘His aim was the security and welfare of the Company and British dominion

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in India. But until we hold that mere expediency may override all considerations of ethical and political right, we must continue to regard his conduct on these occasions as a serious departure from the best traditions of British statesmanship in the East.’ Historians who came into the field later such as Edward Thompson and G.T. Garratt commented on Roberts’ defence of Wellesley: ‘No serious writer has ever pretended that the episode was from first to last anything but a bullying exercise of overwhelming strength.’119 Yet, to his credit, Roberts boldly criticized fellow scholars on some issues if the records did not justify their judgement. For example, he comments on the exoneration of Hastings recommended by Sir George Forrest: ‘A rather ill-judged attempt has lately been made to save Hastings’s reputation. The cruelty, says Sir G.W. Forrest, practised by the Nawab and his servants has been greatly exaggerated, but it was sufficient to have justified the interference of the Resident.’ Further, Forrest had said: ‘For what took place Hastings at Calcutta cannot be held responsible.’ Roberts disagrees and says: ‘Unfortunately for this comfortable doctrine it is quite clear from the extracts that Sir G. Forrest is editing that Hastings was the moving spirit throughout.’120 Here we see Roberts giving full weight to the records, true to Rankean methodology. However, to repeat the comment of T.G.P. Spear, which we cited earlier, notwithstanding such occasional departure from the colonialist position, Roberts’s or Dodwell’s writings represent the continued production of works of history ‘in the old spirit’. The new spirit, marking a transition to a new approach, is reflected in the writings of Christian missionary Indophiles such as C.F. Andrews, a few civil servants who could break away from the ‘official line’ of thinking such as L.S.S. O’Malley or G.T. Garratt, or exceptional college teachers such as E.J. Thompson. Among them, Charles Freer Andrews (1871–1940) was closest to the nationalist movement, being a follower of Mahatma Gandhi and a friend and confidant of Rabindranath Tagore at Santiniketan. Andrews’s monograph The Renaissance in India in 1912 showed an awareness of the cultural aspects of modern Indian history which marked him apart from the school of Dodwell and Roberts; he was the first among British historians to use the concept of ‘renaissance’ in the Indian context.121 L.S.S. O’Malley (1874–1941) was, like Sir William Hunter earlier,

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an intellectual fallen among bureaucrats serving the Indian empire. He developed a deep and abiding interest in the traditions and culture of the Indian people as the author of a new series of gazetteers that replaced Hunter’s series. O’Malley’s writings foregrounding the social and cultural history of India ran contrary to the mainstream colonial historiography represented by H.H. Dodwell. Particularly notable were O’Malley’s survey in Indian Social Heritage (1934) and a collection of essays he edited, Modern India and the West: A Study of Interactions between their Civilizations (1941). In that collection, O’Malley put forward an approach to the evolution of modern India which he explained as follows: his agenda was to examine the nature, extent, and effects of the influence which western civilization has had upon the life and thought of India since the beginning of the sixteenth century, to show what have been the reactions of different classes at different times and how they have been expressed in word and deed, and to trace the far smaller influence which India has had upon the West…. To many it seems that India has been taken in tow by the West and is going fast ahead in its wake…. There are still many, especially those of an older generation, with whom the idea of the unchanging East is almost an article of faith. Every endeavour has been made to keep an even balance between the two views and to give a just estimate of the evolution which has taken place.122

While Andrews or O’Malley did not produce a comprehensive history of British India, Edward Thompson and G.T. Garratt did and we may focus upon them as historians who represent a departure from the ‘old spirit’ and the transition to a new approach. Edward J. Thompson was a missionary who taught English literature for many years in a college in Bengal and became a good friend of Rabindranath Tagore; he translated some of Tagore’s works, and since he was an avid correspondent he left behind many letters to and from Tagore which his son, the famous British historian E.P. Thompson, has edited and published.123 His collaborator in writing a history of modern India, G.T. Garratt, was a civil servant in India for 11 years and thereafter a Labour Party politician and Member of Parliament in England. Given their background, Thompson and Garratt were disinclined to toe the line laid down by the civil servant historians of earlier days. Thompson and Garratt collaborated to produce a history

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of modern India, The Rise and Fulfillment of British Rule in India (1934), less than 15 years before India attained independence. What was there in Thompson and Garratt’s approach which was new, and how was it different from the general run of history written by contemporary British historians? The difference between them and him was often criticized by Thompson and Garratt in their work and that is where the differences show up. Thompson and Garratt were critical of British historians who, they felt, allowed themselves to be guided by the ‘official’ line on how history was to be written in a manner that aided the government’s efforts to keep Indian nationalists from influencing the public mind through criticism of the British record of ruling India. Thompson and Garratt wrote in their preface (1934) that it was necessary ‘to write objectively’ of that record but there was an ‘informal censorship’ in that the British readership was influenced by the spirit of partisanship: ‘He that is not for us is against us.’ All issues were ‘approached from the stand point of administration’ and this exercised ‘a constant silent censorship, which made British-Indian history the worst patch in current scholarship’.124 Such statements were not likely to make Thompson and Garratt’s work very popular among British scholars. Thompson and Garratt were viciously attacked. For instance, the review of their book in the bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, said: ‘It generally conveys the impression that the joint authors formed their opinions first and supported them by selective study afterwards. The book in fact is a bulky political pamphlet rather than a historical study.’125 In their appraisal of the older colonialist approach Thompson and Garratt pointed out that the British narratives seemed to be only about what the British soldiers and civil servants did in India. Thompson and Garratt wrote in 1934: ‘The writer of Indian history must recognise the narrow limits of the world which he has described. The little group of alien officials and leading Indians, who have moved across the stage, draw too much attention’ while the vast majority of Indians received no attention in the British Indian historians’ writings.126 One consequence of Thompson and Garratt’s awareness of this shortcoming of British writings on modern India was an effort to emphasize in their narrative social and cultural aspects of modern Indian history. This was also the characteristic, as we noted

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earlier, of the writings of C.F. Andrews or L.S.S. O’Malley. Charles Andrews wrote an entire monograph on the ‘renaissance’ in India; indeed he was the first among British historians to use that concept in the Indian context. This attention to socio-cultural history was a new trend that distinguished these authors from the old school of colonialist historians. The latter (with a few exceptions such as Alfred Lyall) usually gave all their attention to the political history of imperial conquests and the history of administration to maintain imperial rule; an extreme example of that was the Cambridge History of India edited by Dodwell—in its several hundred pages there is not a mention of Rammohun Roy and the reawakening of India in the nineteenth century; the occlusion of social and cultural history in their narrative was a limitation that warped their judgement of the origins and the growing strength of the nationalist movement. The perspective in the works of Charles Andrews, Percival Spear, or Edward Thompson was more accommodative to the political aspirations that found expression in the nationalist movement. The publication of those works was a landmark indicating the reorientation in thinking in British which eventually made the transfer of power in 1947 acceptable to the erstwhile imperial power. As we conclude, we may recall that in evaluating contemporary historiography apropos of our study of the archival policy, we have traversed the great distance historiography had travelled forward from James Mill to Thompson and Garratt. This period, spanning the beginning of the nineteenth century to the last years of British rule in India, saw the evolution from a Eurocentric and disparaging approach to India towards a more liberal and less ethnocentric approach. The two World Wars, the gradual decline of Britain from the position of being the premier great power, Britain’s experience of fighting a losing battle against the ascendancy of nationalist politics in African and Asian colonies, the beginnings of decolonization, the peer group pressure on archivists expressed in the opinion in favour of opening the archives in the IHRC meetings, public access to the records from 1939, increasing contestation of colonialist historiographic position on many issues—all these factors account for the transformation. There remained, of course, rearguard actions by defenders of the old empire as well as ‘revisionist’ attempts of subtler kinds, but the mainstream of British mind had by the last

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decades of the twentieth century moved far away from the old imperial theme which was at the core of historiography in the high noon of the empire. Notes 1. Indian Historical Records Commission Proceedings [hereafter IHRC Progs], 1948, Presidential speech by Maulana A.K. Azad, p. 10. 2. IHRC Progs, 1948, Prime minister’s inaugural address, p. 5. 3. C.R. Wilson, Officer in charge of records of Govt of India, to Secretary, Home Department, 20 May 1904, and Annual report on Imperial Record Dept, Home Department, Public Branch, September 1904, No. 98, pp. 12–15. 4. IHRC Progs, 1946, Resolution no. IX. 5. IHRC, Research and Publications Committee Progs (hereafter IHRC, RPC Progs), 1948, Resolution no. X. 6. IHRC, RPC Progs, 1948, Resolution no. VIII, February 1948, Imperial Record Department, In S.N. Sen, ed., Resolutions of the IHRC (New Delhi, 1949), p. 121. 7. IHRC, RPC Progs, 1948, Resolution no. IV, July 1948, Imperial Record Department, in Sen, Resolutions of the IHRC, p. 121. 8. IHRC, RPC Progs, 1947, Resolution no. IV, March 1947, Imperial Record Department, in Sen, Resolutions of the IHRC, pp. 98–101. 9. IHRC, RPC Progs, 1947, Resolution no. IV, March 1947, Imperial Record Department, in Sen, Resolutions of the IHRC, pp. 98–101. 10. IHRC Progs, 1922, Resolution no. VIII, Imperial Record Department, in Sen, Resolutions of the IHRC, p. 84. 11. IHRC Progs, 1946, Resolution no. IX. 12. IHRC Progs, 1937, Lahore, 13–15 December 1937, Resolution no. VIII. 13. IHRC Progs, 1942, Inaugural session addressed by chairman and secretary. 14. IHRC Progs, 1942, Resolution no. V. 15. A.C. Ewald, Public Records: A Brief Handbook to the National Archives (London, 1873), p. 117. 16. IHRC Progs, 1937, note by Surendra Nath Sen, ‘Observations on the Record Rooms of India’, session no. 14, 13–15 December. 17. IHRC Progs, 1937, note by S.N. Sen, ‘A Few Observations on the Record Rooms in India’. 18. IHRC Progs, 1937, Jadunath Sarkar’s reply to the inaugural address by H.E., the governor of Punjab, 13 December 1937.

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19. Rev. Father H. Heras, ‘Facilities for the Study of Historical Records in India’, IHRC Progs, 1937. 20. IHRC Progs, 1937, Record of discussion on resolution no. VIII. 21. IHRC Progs, 1937, Nilkanta Sastri’s speech on item no. XI of Agenda of Business. 22. IHRC Progs, 1937, K.S. Aiyengar and R.K. Mookerji on item no. XI of Agenda of Business. 23. IHRC Progs, 1937, Jadunath Sarkar summing up discussion on agenda item no. XI. 24. IHRC Progs, 1937, Jadunath Sarkar on resolution no. VIII. 25. IHRC Progs, 1937, letters from R.C. Majumdar, O.P. Bhatnagar, D.N. Banerji, and Khwaja Abdul Hyere, ‘Consideration of Revised Rules Regulating the Access of the Public’. 26. IHRC Progs, 1937, Balkrishna’s speech as reported in discussions on Rule 8 of the IRD concerning payments. 27. IHRC Progs, 1937, Resolution no. VII. 28. IHRC Progs, 1937, S.N. Sen, ‘A Few Observations on Record Rooms in India’, . 29. IHRC Progs, 1937, H. Heras’s note, ‘Facilities for the Study of Historical Records in India’. 30. IHRC Progs, 1937, Sri Ram Sharma’s speech in minutes of discussion, ‘Revised Rules Regulating the Access of the Public’. 31. IHRC Progs, 1937, A.F.M. Abdul Ali on item no. XV, ‘Suggestions for Granting Greater Facilities to Bona Fide Students of History’. 32. IHRC Progs, 1937, ‘Secretary’s Note on the Paper by Rev. H. Heras’, by A.F.M. Abdul Ali (emphasis mine). 33. IHRC Progs, 1938, Resolution no. VI. 34. IHRC Progs, 1939, Sir Jadunath Sarkar’s address as president. The head of the IRD, Surendra Nath Sen, in his reply said that ‘existing rules are soon to be revised’ by the Government of India (emphasis mine). 35. Jayaprabha Ravindran, ‘Liberalization of Access Policy and Changing Trends of Research in the National Archives of India, 1947–2007’, Comma, no. 2 (2013), Liverpool University, available at http://dx.org. DOI.10.3828. I have drawn upon this article, the only recent and documented research article on the changes mentioned above. 36. S.N. Sen, ‘A Note on the Imperial Record Department’, The American Archivist, vol. VII, no. 3 (July 1944): 153–64 (emphasis mine). 37. NAI, Home Department, Public Branch, 1940, F. No. 261/40, the Imperial Record Department (Historical Research) Rules, 1940. 38. Ravindran, ‘Liberalization of Access Policy’, p. 108. The period from when the records would be open remained a little vague in India. And

204 Archiving the British Raj

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

it does vary from country to country till now. It is probable that the most liberal practice prevails in the USA. According to a report of the Department of States of the United States on the public availability of diplomatic archives, in the USA there is no legislative requirement for the declassification of Department of States records after a fixed period of time; however, papers are opened and transferred to the National Archives of USA approximately 28 to 32 years after origination in State Department (US Dept of States, Office of Historians Bureau, Public availability of Diplomatic Archives [Washington, DC, 1985]). IHRC Progs, 1938, Welcome address by Sir Girja Sankar Bajpai, Secretary, Dept of Education, Govt of India, p. 7. Sen, ‘A Note on the Imperial Record Department’, pp. 153–64. IHRC Progs, 1927, Resolution no. X. IHRC Progs, 1928, Resolution of the Commission, 5 December 1928. IHRC Progs, 1937, Chairman Jadunath Sarkar’s address. IHRC Progs, 1923, Governor of Bengal, Lord Lytton’s address to the IHRC. Sen, ‘A Note on the Imperial Record Department’, p. 160. IHRC Progs, 1930, Item no. VI of Agenda. IHRC Progs, 1930, Note by secretary, IHRC, on Memorandum from H.L.O. Garrett. I recall that I happened to be a member of the IHRC when some of these laws were passed and I played a part in drafting the law prohibiting export of records of historical interest. Resolution 1 of the fifth meeting of the IHRC and the resolution by the Department of Education, Health and Lands, No. 639-General, dated 17 June 1923. IHRC Progs, 1926, Lucknow session. IHRC Progs, 1937, Note by S.N. Sen. IHRC Progs, 1938, p. 194. IHRC Progs, 1938, Pune session. IHRC, RPC Progs, 1946, Resolution no. IV. IHRC, RPC Progs, 1941, Resolution no. V; a consolidated list of RPC resolutions is available as an addendum in the following: Imperial Record Department, in Sen, Resolutions of the IHRC. IHRC Progs, 1923, Lord Lytton’s welcome address at the Calcutta session. IHRC Progs, 1945, Resolution no. I. IHRC Progs, 1922, Resolution no. IX. IHRC Progs, 1938, p. 193. IHRC Progs, of 1922, 1923, 1924, 1928, 1938, 1942, 1946.

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61. IHRC Progs, 1930, 1942, 1946. 62. IHRC Progs, 1924, Resolution no. IX; IHRC Progs, 1927, Resolution no. XVII; IHRC Progs, 1930, Resolution no. VI. 63. IHRC Progs, 1923, Resolution no. III. 64. IHRC Progs, 1928, Resolution no. XV, p. 199. 65. IHRC Progs, 1930, Chairman’s address. 66. IHRC Progs, 1937, ‘Facilities for the Study of Historical Research in India’, paper by Father H. Heras. 67. IHRC Progs, 1937, ‘Facilities for the Study of Historical Research in India’, paper by Father H. Heras 68. IRD departmental note on IHRC Progs, 1946, Resolution no. X, Imperial Record Department, Resolutions of the Indian Historical Records Commission, 1919–1948. 69. IHRC Progs, 1940, Resolution no. IV. 70. IHRC Progs, 1942, Resolution no. V. 71. W. Foster, English Factories in India, 1630–33 (Oxford, 1910), vol. I, followed by a series thereafter. 72. IHRC Progs, 1920, Resolution no. II. 73. IHRC Progs, 1922, Resolution no. II. 74. IHRC Progs, 1926, Resolution no. II. 75. IHRC Progs, 1938, Resolution no. III. 76. IHRC Progs, 1937, Resolution no. III. 77. IHRC Progs, 1942, Resolution no. II. 78. IHRC Progs, 1942, Resolution no. IV. 79. IHRC Progs, 1943, Resolution no. X. 80. IHRC Progs, 1930, Resolution no. V. 81. IHRC Progs, 1942, Resolution no. V. 82. Sen, Resolutions of the IHRC. 83. IHRC Progs, 1942, Resolution no. XI. 84. Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Aitihasik Chitra’ (Images from History), first published in 1899, reprinted in Tagore, Itihas (Calcutta, 1953), my translation from Bangla. 85. Documents which were authenticated through government order, explanatory documents submitted, entitlement papers, and papers in the office of the peshwa. 86. M.G. Ranade, Rise of the Maratha Power (Bombay University, 1959 [1900]), p. 10. 87. Ranade, edition of 1959, p. 4. 88. Akshay Kumar Maitreya, Sirajuddaullah (Calcutta, 1897); Akshay Kumar Maitreya, ‘The Black Hole Story’, Journal of the Calcutta Historical Society, vol. XII (part I, no. 23): 156–71.

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89. Translation by Sisir Kumar Das, History of Indian Literature: 1800– 1910 Western Impact, Indian Response (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademy, 1991), p. 266. 90. Sisir Kumar Das, History of Indian Literature, and Appendix ‘A Chronology of Literary Events 1800–1910’, compiled by a team of scholars covering 22 Indian languages, pp. 409–772. 91. Das, History of Indian Literature, p. 263. 92. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, ‘Introduction: New Approaches to Indian Thought in Relation to the Social Sciences in Modern India’, in Development of Modern Indian Thought and the Social Sciences, ed. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, vol. 10, part 5 of D.P. Chattopadhyay (gen. ed.), History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization (Delhi, 2007), pp. xxvii–xxviii. 93. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Birth of Academic Historical Writing in India’, in The Oxford History of Historical Writings, ed. Stuart Macintyre et al. (Oxford, 2011), vol. IV, chapter 25, p. 523. 94. Peter Burke, ‘Lay History: Official and Unofficial Representations, 1800–1914’, in The Oxford History of Historical Writings, Chapter 6. 95. Burke, ‘Lay History’, p. 523. 96. Gabriele Lingelbach, ‘The Institutionalization and Professionalization of History in Europe and the United States’, in The Oxford History of Historical Writing, Chapter 4. 97. R.C. Majumdar, ‘Nationalist Historians’, in Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon, ed. C.H. Philips (London, 1961), p. 417. 98. Prachi Deshpande, Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700–1960 (Delhi, 2007). 99. Ranade, Rise of Maratha Power, p. 92. 100. Translation by Deshpande, Creative Pasts, p. 132; since Rajwade’s works cited by Deshpande are in Marathi, I have depended on her translation of passages cited. 101. Rajwade quoted by Deshpande, Creative Pasts, p. 132. 102. B.V. Bhat, Maharashtra Dharma (Dhule, 1925), quoted and translated by Deshpande, Creative Pasts, pp. 136–7. 103. Jadunath Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times (Calcutta, 1969 [1919]), p. 389. 104. Stefan Berger, ‘The Invention of European National Traditions in European Romanticism’, in The Oxford History of Historical Writing, chapter 1. 105. Berger, ‘The Invention of European National Traditions in European Romanticism’. 106. Berger, ‘The Invention of European National Traditions in European Romanticism’.

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107. Here I draw upon an earlier publication of mine: Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Talking Back: The Idea of Civilization in the Indian Nationalist Discourse (New Delhi, 2011). 108. T.G.P. Spear, ‘British Historical Writings in the Era of the Nationalist Movement’, in Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon, chapter 29. 109. Spear, ‘British Historical Writings in the Era of the Nationalist Movement’, pp. 410–11. 110. Spear, ‘British Historical Writings in the Era of the Nationalist Movement’, p. 411. 111. Harold Temperley, Research and Modern History, inaugural lecture as professor of modern history (London, Cambridge University, 1930). 112. Temperley, Research and Modern History. 113. E.T. Stokes, ‘The Administrator and Historical Writing in India’, in Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon. 114. C.E. Luard, ‘The Indian States, 1818–57’, in The Cambridge History of India, ed. H.H. Dodwell (Cambridge, 1929), vol. V, p. 588; emphasis added in the quotation. 115. P.E. Roberts, ‘Warren Hastings and His Colleagues’, in The Cambridge History of India, vol. V, pp. 239–42. 116. Fitzjames Stephen, The Story of Nuncomar (London, 1885); Henry Bevridge, ICS, Nanda Kumar: A Narrative of a Judicial Murder (Calcutta, 1886). 117. H.H. Dodwell, ‘The Development of Sovereignty in British India’, in The Cambridge History of India, vol. V, p. 588. 118. P.E. Roberts, India under Wellesley, 1929, pp. 135–6. 119. Edward Thompson and G.T. Garratt, Rise and Fulfillment of British Rule in India (London, 1934), p. 234. 120. P.E. Roberts, The Administration of Warren Hastings, 1772–1785 (London, 1892), p. 123. 121. C.F. Andrews, The Renaissance in India (Edinburgh, 1912). 122. L.S.S. O’Malley, ed., Modern India and the West: A Study of Interactions between Their Civilizations (London, 1941), ‘Preface’ by O’Malley. 123. E.P. Thompson, ed., Alien Homage: Edward Thompson and Rabindranath Tagore (New Delhi, 1993); Kishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, eds, Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore (Cambridge, 1997), and Uma Dasgupta, ed., A Difficult Friendship: Letters of Edward Thompson and Rabindranath Tagore, 1913–1940 (New Delhi, 1993). 124. E.P. Thompson in Tagore, Nationalism (Delhi, 1992), p. 665. 125. Review of E.J. Thompson and G.T. Garratt, ‘The Rise and Fulfillment of British Rule in India, 1934’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, vol. 8, no. 1 (February 1935): 264–5. 126. Thompson and Garratt, 1934, p. 645.

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NAI, Government of India. Home Department, Public, Nos 24–42, March 1891, p. 98. . Home, Public, Nos 227–8, October 1899. . Finance and Commercial Department. Salaries, Establishments, etc., Dispatch No. 313 of 1904. . Note by C.R. Wilson, 21 May 1904, Home Department, Public, September 1904. . Note by H.H. Risley, 23 June 1904, Home, Public, no. 98, September 1904. . Note by R. Nathan, Deputy. Secretary, Home Department, 25 May 1904, Home, Public, No. 98, September 1904. . Note by C.R. Wilson, 27 April 1904, Home Department, Public, No. 98, September 1908. . Note by H. Claughton, 22 February 1910, arising out of note by R. Ritchie of 17 November 1909, Home Department, Public, No. 131, March 1910. . Department of Education, General, Nos 1–17, April 1918. . Department of Education, Resolution no. 77, 21 March 1919. . Department of Education, General, Nos 1–21, August 1919. . Home Department, Public, F. No. 261/40, the Imperial Record Department (Historical Research) Rules, 1940. O’Malley, L.S.S., ed. Modern India and the West: A Study of Interactions between Their Civilizations. London, 1941. Ranade, M.G. Introduction to the Peshwa Diaries: A Paper Read before the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. Poona, 1900. . Rise of Maratha Power, 1957 [1900]. von Ranke, Leopold. Frederick I and Maximilian II of Austria: An Essay on the Political and Religious State of Germany Immediately after the Reformation, English Translation. London, 1853. . History of England, Principally in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. Oxford, 1875. . The History of the Popes. Translated by E. Foster. London, 1889. Ravindran, Jayaprabha. ‘Liberalization of Access Policy and Changing Trends of Research in the National Archives of India, 1947–2007’. Comma, no. 2 (2013) Liverpool University, available at http://dx.org. DOI.10.3828. Record Commission. Papers Relative to the Project of Building a General Record Office. London, 1835. Redington, Joseph. Calendar of Treasury Papers. London: HMSO, 1868. Report to the Royal Commission on Public Records, vol. II, part I. London: HMSO, 1914, second reprint.

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Thompson, E.J. and Garratt, G.T. ‘The Rise and Fulfillment of British Rule in India, 1934’. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, vol. 8, no. 1 (February 1935): 264–5. Ridley, Jane. Edwin Lutyens. London, 2003. Roberts, P.E. India under Wellesley. London, 1929. . ‘Warren Hastings and His Colleagues’. In Cambridge History of India, edited by H.H. Dodwell, vol. V. Cambridge, 1929. Sainsbury, Ethel Bruce, ed. A Calendar of the Court Minutes of the East India Company, 1640–43. Oxford, 1909. Sainsbury, W. Noel, ed. of the Public Record Office, Calendar of State Papers, Original Series, East Indies, China and Japan, 1617–21, Preserved in Public Record Office. London, 1870. Sardesai, Govind Sakharam (Series Editor). Selections from Peshwa’s Daftar. Bombay: Government Central Press, 1930–3. Sarkar, Jadu Nath. Shivaji and His Times. Calcutta, 1969 [1919]. . Adhunik Bharate Itihaser Vikash (The Development of Historical Writing in Modern India), 1935. Reprinted in Nikhiles Guha, ed. Jadunath Sarkar Rachana Sambhar (Collected Works of Jadunath Sarkar). Calcutta, 2011. Scargill-Bird, S.R. A Guide to the Principal Classes of Documents Preserved in the Public Record Office. London, 1896. . Guide to the Public Record Office. London: HMSO, 1896. Second Report of Royal Commission of Public Records of England Wales, vol. II, Part I. London: HMSO, 1914, p. 86. Sen, Surendra Nath. ‘A Note on the Imperial Record Department’. The American Archivist, vol. 7, no. 3 (July 1944): 153–64. , ed. Resolutions of the Indian Historical Records Commission, 1919– 1948. New Delhi, 1949. . ‘Observations on the Record Rooms of India’. IHRC Proceedings, 1937, session no. 14, 13–15 December, 1937. Seton, Sir Malcolm. The India Office. London, 1925. Sharma, R.S., ed. Indian Society: Historical Probings. Delhi, 1974. Smith, Scott, ed. Calendar of Indian State Papers, Secret Series, 1774–75. Calcutta, 1864. Smith, Vincent. The Oxford History of India. Oxford, 1911. Spear, T.G.P. ‘British Historical Writings in the Era of the Nationalist Movement’. In Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon, edited by C.H. Philips. London, 1961. Srinivasachari, C.S., ed. Selections from Orme Manuscripts. Annamalai, 1952. Stephen, Sir James Fitzjames. The Story of Nuncomar and the Impeachment of Sir Elijah Impey, 2 vols. London, 1885.

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Stokes, E.T. ‘The Administrator and Historical Writing in India’. In Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon, edited by C.H. Philips. London, 1961. Stokes, Eric. The English Utilitarians and India. Oxford, 1959. Tagore, Rabindranath. ‘Aitihasik Chitra’ (Images from History). Bharati (1305 Bengali Era). Reprinted in his Itihas. Calcutta, 1953. Temperley, Harold. Research and Modern History. London, 1930. The Dawn, vol. 16, January–November 1913. Thompson, E.P., ed. Alien Homage: Edward Thompson and Rabindranath Tagore. New Delhi, 1993. Voigt, Johannes H. ‘The British Policy towards Indian Historical Research and Writing, 1870–1930’. Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 3 (1966): 137–49. Wheeler, J.T. Early Travels in India. London, 1864. . Memorandum on Records of Govt of India, 26 December 1862, Home Department, Public, No. 19, 12 October 1865. . Early Records of the British in India. London, 1878. . India under British Rule. London, 1886. Wilson, C.R., ed. Old Fort William in Bengal: A Selection of Official Documents Dealing with Its History. London, 1906.

Index

Afghanistan 31, 33, 92 Afghan War, First (1838–42) 31–2 Aiyangar, Diwan Bahadur S. Krishnaswamy 148, 155, 159, 178–9 Ali, A. F. M. Abdul 154, 158, 163, 169, 180 The American Archivist 165 Andrews, Charles Freer 195, 198–9, 201 Anglo-Maratha war (1805) 26 The Annals of Rural Bengal 12, 57, 75–6 Archaeological Survey of India 109 archival movement, in Bombay Presidency 124 archival research facility, in Indian records 4 Archival Science, journal 2 archives/archiving contemporary 74–8 definition of 1 freedom of access to 151–63

knowledge of past as cultural human right 5 nationwide regime, centralization of records in New Delhi 167–8 practice to open records in European countries 5–6 in India 6 in USA 5 study in relation to statebuilding and imperialism 2 Archives Ultramarine, Lisbon 156 archiving policy, of East India company 22–33 Asiatic Society, Bombay 125 Asiatic Society of Calcutta 183 Asiatic Studies (Alfred Lyall) 128, 131 Azad, Abul Kalam 98, 146 Bajpai, Girjasankar 167 Balkrishna 153, 160–1 Banerjee, Kaliprasanna 115 Banerji, Anil Chandra 155

Index

Banerji, D. N. 160 Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, Calcutta 155 Bayley, Edward Clive 21 Bengal Historical Records Room 172 Bengal in 1756–57 95, 102, 136 The Bengal Manuscript Records 75 Bengal Presidency 12, 95 Bentham, Jeremy 25, 191, 194 Berger, Stefan 189–90 Beveridge, Henry 80–2, 196 Bhagvat, Rajaramshastri 188 Bhakti movement 189 Bhandarkar, R. G. 27 Bharatiya Itihas Samsodhak Mandal (BISM), Poona 124, 126, 155, 181 Bharatiya Swarajya (Narayan Pavagi) 185 Bhatnagar, O. P. 155, 160 Birdwood, George 68, 70, 114 Black Hole tragedy 42, 184 Blaker, R. H. 96–7 Board of Revenue, Calcutta 76 Bombay Educational Service 73 Bombay Record Office 178 A Brief History of the Indian Peoples 77 British Indian Army 9, 92 British Public Records Commission of 1914 122 British Treasury Office, London 171 Brodrick, John 112 Buckland, C. E. 95 Burke, Edmund 196

217

Burke, Peter 186 Burnes, Alexander 31–2 Calcutta Gazette 18, 60 Calcutta in Olden Times 11 Calcutta Record Commission 38–9, 48 Calendar of Despatches, 1744–1765 107 A Calendar of the Madras Records, 1740–1744 107 Calendar of Treasury Papers 71 Calendars of State Papers, East Indies (W.N. Sainsbury) 69 Camanistan-e-Kashmir (Moulavi Muhammed Zakaullah) 185 Cambridge History of India (H. H. Dodwell) 195–7, 201 Campbell, George 75 Catalogue of the Khalsa Durbar Records (Sita Ram Kohli) 184 Cave-Browne, James 12 central muniment room 14–19, 21–2, 52–4, 56–7, 60, 91, 151 central provinces 55, 95 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 113–14, 186–7 Chandrasekharan, C. V. 155 Chand, Tara 155 Chatterjee, Nandalal 154 Christian Missionary Society 14 Civil Finance Commission 10 Civil Service of India (CSI) 53 Claughton, H. 113 Clive, Robert 23, 34–5, 102 Colebrook, E. 27, 29 Colvin, Auckland 12

218 Index

Companion of Indian Empire (CIE) 53 comptroller and auditor general (CAG) 8 Comte, Auguste 78 Congreve, Richard 80 Cotton, H. E. A. 97 Council of Europe 5 Cranbrook, Earl Gathorne 62 Cunningham, J. D. 2–3 Daftar-i-Diwani, Hyderabad 174 Danvers, Fredrick C. 68–70, 114, 118, 120 Das, Sisir Kumar 185 Datta, K. K. 153, 155 Deccan Vernacular Translation Society 124–5 Deshpande, Prachi 189 Deshpande, Y. K. 155 Dictionary of National Biography (British) 95 Dirks, Nicholas 2 Discovery of India (Jawaharlal Nehru) 187 District Gazetteers 74 Dodwell, H. H. 136, 180–1, 195–6, 199 Duff, James Grant 2–4, 24, 29–30 Durand, Henry Mortimer 130 Dutt, Michael Madhusudan 14 The Earl of Mayo 13, 78 The Early Annals of the English in Bengal 96, 103

Early Records of the British in India (James Talboys Wheeler) 11, 19, 61, 81–2, 101 Early Travellers in India (James Talboys Wheeler) 11 Economic History of India (Romesh Chandra Dutt) 184 The Economist 9–10 The Edinburgh Review 25, 27, 34 Edwardes, S. M. 196 Elphinstone, Mountstuart 27–30, 93, 101 English Factories in India (William Foster) 178, 180 English Historical Review 137 Erskine, James C. 11 Erskine, William 11 European historiography 137, 189 Europe in the Nineteenth Century (Harold Temperley and A.J. Grant) 194 Finance Commission 8, 10 Firminger, W. K. 115 Forrest, George W. 5, 67, 70, 80–1, 94–5, 98–101, 104, 106, 127, 132, 181, 198 Foster, William 67–70, 114, 119, 179, 195 Frederick I and Maximilian II of Austria 138 French Revolution 5, 20, 152, 156 Garratt, G. T. 3, 191, 195, 198, 200 Garrett, H. L. O. 169

Index

Ginzberg, Carlo 1 Gleig, G. R. 24, 35, 79 Goff, Jacques Le 1 Government of India Act of 1935 148, 154 Grant, A. J. 194 Great Depression of 1929 166 Grey, William 75 Guide to the Records in the National Archives 103 Guizot, Froncois Pierre 186 Gupta, Hari Ram 155 Gupta, Pratul Chandra 155 Gwynn, J. T. 196 Habib, Mohammad 155 Hallward, N. L. 96 Hamilton, George 105 Handbook of Records of the Government of India, 1748–1859 180 Harvey, G. E. 196 Hastings, Warren 8, 24, 34–5, 78, 80, 94, 102, 107, 181, 194, 196–8 Havell, E. B. 117 Heras, H. 153, 155, 157–8, 162–4, 175 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 190 Hill, Samuel Charles 70, 95, 100, 102–3, 114, 136, 183 Hinduism 135, 189, 192 Historical Fragments of the Moghal Empire, of the Morattoes, and of the English Concerns in Indostan (Robert Orme) 24

219

The Historical Geography of the British India: History to the End of the East India Company (P. E. Roberts) 197 historical knowledge historians using British Indian records 2 involvement of power in creation of 1 Historical Records Room 168 historical writings 2, 23, 29–31, 34, 78, 127–8, 137, 146, 182, 184–9, 191–2, 194 of British Indian 22–33 colonialist, transition in 191–202 contemporary 74–8 transition in 181–91 The History, Antiquities, etc., of Eastern India, compiled from the Buchanan MSS., in the East India House (R. Montgomery Martin) 86 History of British India (P. E. Roberts) 197 The History of British India (James Mill) 24, 93 History of India (Mountstuart Elphinstone) 28 History of India under Babur and Humayun (William Erskine) 11 History of the Indian Mutiny (George Forrest) 132 History of the Mahrattas (James Grant Duff) 29, 183 History of the Military Transactions of the British

220 Index

Nation in Indostan (Robert Orme) 24 History of the Popes (Leopold von Ranke) 138 Hume, A. O. 12, 20, 58 Hunter, William Wilson 12, 20–2, 53–9, 74, 76, 82, 93, 191, 198 Ibbbetson, Denzil 111 Iggers, Georg G. 137 Imperial Gazetteer 12, 74 Imperial Gazetteer of India 74 Imperial Record Department (IRD) 147, 151–3, 157–8, 165, 184 (see also Records Comittee) agenda of 99–100 archival policy for pre-British Indian papers 124–7 calendars and press lists of records 103–7 crucial question of access to government records 108–15 formation of 91 heads of 94–9 historiographic trends 127–40 methods adopt latest technology 170–2 objectives of 91–2 record-keeping in England as a model 118–20 records centralization 167–8 as instruments of governance 92

records commission, developments leading to 121–4 relocation to New Delhi 115–18 renaming as NAI after Independence 148 research advancement through publications abandoning of calendaring of records 177–9 calendaring records, alternatives to 179–81 selection from records 101–3 services to Government departments 169–70 Imperial Record Office, Calcutta 94, 99, 167 Imperial Record Room 3–4 Impey, Elijah 79–80 India in 1880 (Richard Temple) 11 Indian Civil Service (ICS) 4–5, 11, 21, 53, 62, 76 Indian Education Commission (1882–3) report 13, 77 Indian Historical Congress Proceedings of 1937 180 Indian Historical Records Commission (IHRC) 97, 119, 121–3, 126–7, 146–8, 201 access to historical state papers, issues in debates 156–63 archiving native or princely states 173–7 composition and status, changing of 153–6

Index

extension of archiving regime to provinces 172–3 historians recommendations acted upon by Indian government 149 Historical Association, idea to create 150–1 official opinion on issues raised in 163–6 policy interventions of 151 recommendation to renamed IRD as NAI 149 Research and Publications Committee recommendations for historical records 149–50, 171–2 Indian History Congress (1935) 151, 162 Indian Infanticide, Its Origins, Progress and Suppression 12 The Indian Muslims 13, 78 Indian National Congress 12, 20–1, 148 Indian National Museum 117 Indian Social Heritage (H. H. Dodwell) 199 Indian War of Independence (V. D. Savarkar) 184 The India Office 114 India Office Records 35, 57, 61, 64, 67–70, 178 India under British Rule (James Talboys Wheeler) 11 India under Wellesley 197 Indigo Rebellion 21 Intellectual Council of Archives 5

221

International Council on Archives (ICA), Paris 166 James Thomason (Richard Temple) 11 Kabul 32–3 Kant, Immanuel 190 Kaye, John 120 Kaye, William 132 Khan, Mohammed Akbar 33 Khan, Shafaat Ahmad 139, 148, 150–1, 153 Khare, G. H. 155 Khilafat Movement 135 Kim (Rudyard Kipling) 31 Kipling, Rudyard 93 Kohli, Sita Ram 153, 184 Kulkarni, A. R. 124 Kumar, Nanda 78 Labour Party 199 Lahore College 3 Lal, Munshi Mohan 31–3 Lawrence, John 18–19 The Life of Amir Dost Mohammed (Munshi Mohan Lal) 31 The Life of Claude Martin, Major-General in the Army of the Honourable East India Company 136 The Life of the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava (Alfred Lyall) 128 London Missionary Society 95 Long, James 11, 14, 16, 18, 21, 60, 103

222 Index

Lord Auckland 31–2 Lord Cornwallis 25, 94, 102, 181 Lord Crewe 113 Lord Cross 93 Lord Curzon 4, 94, 102, 105, 109, 112, 115 Lord Ellenborough 32 Lord Lake 26 Lord Lytton 168, 172 Lord Macaulay 23, 25, 79, 81, 130, 186, 194 historical writings on British Indian statesmen 34 policy of Anglicization of education in British India 33 Ranke’s view on 36 weakness of 34 Lord Powis 132 Lord Romilly 66 Lord Wellesley 25 Luard, C. E. 196 Lyall, Alfred 36–7, 93, 127–30, 136, 181, 201 Macaulay, T. B. 196 Macnaghten, William H. 31–2 Madinar Gourab (Mir Musarraf Husain) 185 Madras Council 23 Madras Educational Department 13 Madras in Olden Times (James Talboys Wheeler) 11 Madras Record Office 159, 181, 195

Madras Spectator (James Talboys Wheeler) 11 Mahakma Khas 175 Maharashtra Dharma 189 Mahatma Gandhi 198 Maitreya, Akshay Kumar 182–4 Majumdar, R. C. 155, 160, 187–8 The Making of British India 1757-1858 136 Malcolm, John 24–7, 34–5, 132 Maratha War (1803) 26 Marques of Dalhousie 13, 78 Marquess of Cornwallis 11 Memorandum on the Records of Foreign Department 19 Mill, James 24–5, 27–8, 78–81, 131, 140, 181, 191, 194, 201 Mitra, Dinabandhu 14 Mitra, Jamini Mohan 96–7 Modern India and the West: A Study of Interactions between their Civilizations (H. H. Dodwell) 199 Mohammad, Dost 31–3 Montagu–Chelmsford constitutional reforms of 1919 121 Mookerjee, Asutosh 98 Mookherji, Radha Kumud 153, 155 Moraes, George 155 Mouat, Francis J. 12 Muhammad, Zail 107 Muir, Ramsay 136 Munro, Thomas 192 Naoroji, Dadabhai 184 Nathan, R. 106, 110–11

Index

National Archives of India (NAI) 6, 11–12, 74, 98–9, 115–17, 148–9, 151–2, 157, 166 nationalist historians 189 agenda of early 182–91 nationalist history 187–8, 191 Nehru, Jawaharlal 117, 135 speech at IHRC met (1948) 146–7 Niebuhr, Berthold 138 Non-Cooperation Movement 135, 152 North-Western Frontier Province 12, 55, 92, 173 Numani, Shibli 185 Nuncomar or Nandakumar case 78–80, 196 Old Fort William in Bengal 96 old or past records 8, 10–11, 17, 55–6 Governmen of India official view on 67 importance 92 O’Malley, L. S. S. 191, 195, 198–9, 201 Orme, Robert 23–5, 35 Oudh 12, 55, 180, 197 The Oxford History of Historical Writing (Gabriele Lingelbach) 137, 187 Oxford History of India (Vincent Smith) 134–5 Panikkar, Sardar K. M. 155 Permanent Settlement 93 Persia 25, 31

223

Peshwa Daftar records 124–6, 182–3 Philips, C. H. 187 Pillai, Ranga 133 Pindari–Maratha War of 1817–18 26 Poona Residency Records 180 Potdar, D. V. 126, 154–5, 171 Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (Dadabhai Naoroji) 184 Prasad, Bisheshwar 155, 173 Prasad, Kunwar Durga 185 Public Record Office (PRO), England 100, 114, 118, 178 Public Records Act of 1837 65–6 Public Records Act of 1844 5 Punjab 31, 55 Qanungo, K. R. 153 Queen Victoria 33 Qureshi, I. H. 155 Raj Daftardar 175 Rajwade, V. K. 124, 182, 189 Ramsbotham, R. B. 168 Ranade, Mahadev Govind 124–5, 182–3 Rankean enterprise 137 Ranke, Leopold von 36–7, 137–40, 190–1, 193–4, 196–7 Rao, Peshwa Baji 26 Rao, Yagati Chinna 6 reading documents against the grain practice 2 record-keeping, British model of

224 Index

British Royal Commission on Public Records of 1914 70 control of access to records 65 elevation of office of the master of the rolls 66 public record system history, relevance for Indian archives study 63–4 Record Commission, appointment and abolition of 64–5 Record Report of 1800 64 Records Committee 91 activities of 10–22 appointment by Government of India in 1861 10 central record office, recommendation for 56 publication of records 60–3 Sir William Hunter recommendations for evaluation of work 54–8 records/record-keeping of Indian archives colonial state policy 52–3 destruction of old records after East India Company 8 England state secretaries awareness about historical value 4 feasibility of British model of archiving 71–4 inclination of hard-boiled imperialists 53 J. T. Wheeler’s Report in 1862 classification of 38–9

departmental classification of 47–8 historical classification of 41–7 specific classification of 39–41 Record Commission task to destroy old records 67–8 Records Committee (see Record Committee) utilization for writing history 78–82 Renaissance in India 198 Report of the Impeachment Committee in British Museum 80 Report on Moral and Material Progress 93 Reports of Parliamentary Committees 1772–86 80 Richards, Thomas 2 Rise and Expansion of the British Dominion in India (Alfred Lyall) 128 The Rise of British Power in the East (Sir Edward Colebrooke) 28–9 The Rise of the Maratha Power (Mahadev Govind Ranade) 182, 188 Risley, Herbert H. 106, 110–11, 113 Robertson, Henry Dundas 29 Roberts, P. E. 136, 195–8 Ross, Edward Denison 72, 96, 104, 106, 195 Royal Asiatic Society of London 102

Index

Royal Commission on Public Records of England and Wales (1914) 118–19, 148 Rulers of India 77–8 Sahitya Akademi 185 Sainsbury, W. Noel 72, 114, 178 Salaotore, B. A. 155 Sambhajiee Charitra (Raja Ram and Ramkrishna Bhagabat) 185 Sandeman, H. D. 10 Santiniketan 198 Sardesai, Govind Sakharam 126–7, 180 Sargent, John 154–5 Sarkar, Jadunath 23, 97, 122–3, 126–7, 137, 140, 148, 154–5, 157–9, 164, 168, 174–5, 180, 193 Scargill-Bird, S. R. 120 Scholfield, A. F. 96–7, 113–14, 121 School of Oriental and African Studies, London 107, 197, 200 Seeley, John 186 Selections from Calcutta Gazettee 11 Selections from State Papers of the Governor-General of India 101–2, 132 Sen, Surendra Nath 98–9, 155–7, 169, 171, 176, 181 Sepoy Recuitment in the Old Madras Army (H. H. Dodwell) 180 Seton-Karr, Walter Scott 11, 16–18, 54, 56, 60, 72

225

Seton, Malcolm 69 Sharma, Sri Ram 153, 162 Shastri, K. A. Nilkanta 97, 148, 153–4, 159 Shivaji (Jadunath Sarkar) 189 Siba Chatrapatice Charitra (Raja Ram and Ramkrishna Bhagabat) 185 Singh, Chait 197 Singh, Pandit Budh 31 Singh, Raghubir 155, 174 Sipai Juddher Itihas (Rajani Kanta Gupta) 184 Sirajuddaulla 183 Sirajuddaulla (the nawab of Bengal) 183–4 Sketch of the History of India from 1858 to 1918 197 Smith, Scott 18 Smith, Vincent 133–6, 181 Social Darwinism 191 Spear, T. G. P. 155, 191–3, 197–8 Spencer, Herbert 191–2, 194 Srinivasachari, C. S. 155 Srivastava, A. L. 155 State People’s Movement 176 Statistical Account of Bengal 12 Stephen, James Fitzjames 78–82, 131, 196 Stokes, Eric 196 Stoler 2 Studies in Literature and History (Alfred Lyall) 128 Tagore, Rabindranath 182, 198–9 Taher, Mohammad 32

226 Index

Tarikh-e-Ajodhya (Kunwar Durga) 185 Tarikh-e-Hindustan (Moulavi Muhammed Zakaullah) 185 Temperley, Harold 194 Temple, Richard 11–12 Thompson, Edward J. 191, 198, 200 Thompson, E. P. 199 Three Frenchmen in Bengal; Or, The Commercial Ruin of the French Settlements in 1757 136 The Times 117 transmission of knowledge process 108 Trevelyan, Charles 12, 192 The Trial of Diwan Mulraj (Sita Ram Kohli) 184 The Trial of Maharaja Nanda Kumar: A Narrative of a Judicial Murder 80 Tucker, Richard P. 124 uprising of 1857, challenges faced by British 19, 92 home charges, rise in 9 proportion of British Indian Army to Indian sepoys 9 rising of public debt due to 9 utilitarianism 25 Varendra Research Society, Bengal 183

Viceroy Lord Mayo 59 Viceroy Lord Northbrook 20, 53, 57, 59–60, 71, 73, 112 Vidya Purca Itihas (Lokahitavadi) 185 Voigt, Johannes H. 113–14 Warren Hastings (Alfred Lyall) 128 Wellesley, Arthur 26, 28, 197 West Bengal State Archives (WBSA) 117–18, 168, 172 Westland, J. 116 Wheeler, James Talboys 11, 13–14, 16–17, 19, 82, 177, 179 Report on Indian in 1862 38–48, 60 Williams, Rushbrook 97, 183 Wilson, Charles Robert 4, 95–6, 99–100, 103, 106, 108–13, 121 Wilson, H. H. 25 Wilson, James 9–10 Wollaston, Arthur 69 Wood, Charles 19, 62, 67, 93 World War First 96, 166, 187, 192–4 Second 167 Writers'. Building, Calcutta 67, 116, 167 Yule, Henry 68

About the Author

Sabyasachi Bhattacharya is former Tagore National Fellow, Ministry of Culture, Government of India. He was earlier vice chancellor of Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, India, and professor at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He is the author of The Defining Moments in Bengal: 1920–1947 (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Talking Back: The Idea of Civilization in the Indian Nationalist Discourse (Oxford University Press, 2011). For the former, he was awarded the H.K. Barpujari Award at Indian History Congress in December 2017.