History of the Archival Policy of the Government of India, with Selected Documents, 1858–1947
Sabyasachi Bhattacharya
1
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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
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 Indian Civil Service
IHRC Indian Historical Records Commission
IRD Imperial Record Department
NAI National Archives of India, New Delhi
PRO Public Record Office, London
Progs Proceedings
RPC Research and Publications Committee
WBSA 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
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
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.
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
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,
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.
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
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
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.
ActivitiesoftheRecordsCommittee
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
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,
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,
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
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
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.
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
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
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
