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....

Anticipations of Freedom

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 chiefly felt in the form of reversal of earlier policies. The biggest change was that the habit of looking at the records as resources exclusively to be used by the civil servants for purposes of governance was abandoned. The resistance of the bureaucracy from the 1860s to opening the records to the Indian public was overcome. And, above all, the locus of policymaking shifted in the 1920s to the Indian Historical Records Commission, consisting of leading Indian historians who outnumbered the ‘official’ members who represented the government record offices. The 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 Imperial Record Department

The Imperial Record Department was formed in March 1891. This chapter looks at the objectives and issues before the new Record Department in the first 25 years of its life. While the stronger voice from within the bureaucracy spoke of the archive as an instrument of governance, there was another approach that laid emphasis on ideological issues, Britain’s imperial image, and the interpretation of the past of the Indian Empire. The chapter also explores the routine functions that the Imperial Record Department was expected to perform. It also traces the events that serve to illustrate, first, the stout resistance of the bureaucracy to opening the records not only of the British Indian government, but also records of pre-British regimes in their possession, and second, the equally staunch struggle of the Indian intelligentsia to recover their own historical records.

Absence of a Definite Archives Policy

After the termination of East India Company administration, there was an attempt to put in order the records of the Government of India. Since the issue of expenditure and financial stringency comes up repeatedly in the discussions on this matter, this chapter dwells on the nature and extent of financial stringency which formed the background to the first steps taken by the Government of India with regard to records after the termination of the East India Company’s rule. The chapter also explores some other key questions: Who were the people interested in and responsible for the organization and preservation of records after the takeover of the Indian government by the Crown? Were persons who had historical interest appointed to serve as members of the Records Committee, 1861–72? How did colonial historians address the issue of documenting their narratives before an archive came into existence? The chapter also looks at the legacy of Lord Macaulay.

Developments Leading to the Creation of a Central Archive

This chapter explores the fundamental issues encountered by the Government of India in archiving records. The colonial state was evolving a policy of record keeping that oscillated between certain polar opposites. First, there were two opposite models in the 1860s—that of archival organization in a decentralized departmental basis, as opposed to the concept of a centralized record office. Second, there were different ideas about how to go about the business of documenting British rule in India. There was another issue: a choice between a policy of limiting access to documents to those authorized by virtue of bureaucratic privilege as opposed to allowing access to the interested public. The fourth area of conflicting policy perceptions was at the epistemological level: is the object of archiving acquisition, preservation, and dissemination of historical knowledge, or it something more limited, namely documentation as an instrument of governance?