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Print Price: $52.95

Format:
Hardback
240 pp.
140 mm x 216 mm

ISBN-13:
9780199489923

Publication date:
December 2018

Imprint: OUP India

Archiving the British Raj

History of the Archival Policy of the Government of India, with Selected Documents, 1858-1947

Author Sabyasachi Bhattacharya

Generally the archives are sites where historians conduct research into our past. Seldom are the archives objects of research. Archiving the Raj traces the path that led to creation of a central archive in India. In examining the archival policy of the colonial government, it proceeds to explore the complex relationship between knowledge and power. While a section of British political authorities favoured accurate archiving of historical events and limited access to records for selected non-official researchers, the overwhelming opinion in official circles was against such access. In the last two decades of colonial rule in India there were anticipations of freedom in many areas of the public sphere, and, in many ways, these were felt in the domain of archiving, chiefly in the form of reversal of earlier policies. From this perspective, the author discusses how the World Wars, the decline of Britain, among other factors, effected a transition from a Euro-centric and disparaging approach to India towards a more liberal and less ethnocentric approach.

Readership : Institutional buyers, libraries, universities with courses on historiography, research methodology, modern history, Indian history, colonial history, archival policy. Scholars and researchers who work in the mentioned fields.

Foreword, Pritam Singh
Introduction
1. 1858 to 1871: Absence of a Definite Archives Policy
2. Developments Leading to the Creation of a Central Archive: 1872-1891
3. The Imperial Record Department: Objectives and Achievements, 1891-1926
4. Anticipations of Freedom: 1927-1947
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

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Sabyasachi Bhattacharya is Tagore National Fellow, Ministry of Culture with the Government of India. He was earlier Vice Chancellor of Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, and Professor at the Centre for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has published several volumes with OUP, India, including The Defining Moments in Bengal, 1920-1947 (2014) and Talking Back: The Idea of Civilization in the Indian Nationalist Discourse (2011). For the former, he was awarded the H.K. Barpujari award at Indian History Congress in December 2017.

Writing History - William Kelleher Storey and Towser Jones
The Defining Moments in Bengal - Sabyasachi Bhattacharya
Talking Back - Sabyasachi Bhattacharya

Special Features

This is the first work that reflects on the institutional history of the archival policy in India.
It sheds light on the fact that the relationship between the writing of independent minded history, the keeping of archives, and access to archives is not just a professional question but a political one.
Shows convincingly that almost all questions that confront the historian today about the decay of institutional recordkeeping, preservation, use of technology and access are the legacy of imperial archival policy.
The author offers perhaps the first and accessible overview of the deliberations of the Indian Historical Records Commission's key contribution to both archival policy and independent India's new history.