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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
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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

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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 consid-
ered a potent administrative tool by the British. The story of the
institutionalization of the archiving system in India has been nar-
rated 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 docu-
ments the process of the collection, documentation, and publication
of the records by the British officials and their utilization for docu-
menting 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 schol-
ars, researchers, and other users of archives but also by administra-
tors—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 ques-
tioning 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 nineteenth-
century 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 govern-
ment’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 well-
meaning 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 wel-

comed 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 offi-
cers. 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 non-
official 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 propo-
nents 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 govern-
ment 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 sec-
retaries 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 revela-
tion 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 his-
torical 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 histori-
cal 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 begin-

ning of the organized system to preserve documents in India after
1858. After the termination of the East India Company admin-
istration, 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, sol-
diers of British origin, were small in number compared to the numeri-
cal 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 inter-
est. 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 mil-
lion 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 govern-
ment’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 propri-
ety 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 consult-
ing 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 prun-

ing 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 valu-
able 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 personali-

ties 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 govern-
ment 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 his-
tory can identify several members with historical interest and attain-
ments 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 gov-
ernment 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 com-
mittee 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 serv-
ing 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 sec-
retaries of the Records Committee, the president was always a dis-
tinguished 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 inter-
ests 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 Cave-
Browne served on the Records Committee; he is the author of a his-
torical 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 histor-
ical 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 admin-
istrative 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 record-
keeping 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 com-
plete 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 use-
less papers for disposal or destruction, having the papers selected for
preservation, bound and catalogued, and placed in a separate record-
room 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, prohib-
ited 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 satisfac-
tory 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 attain-
ment of the desired end suggested6 the desirability of availing of Mr
Wheeler’s practical experience in the work of examining and classify-
ing 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 presi-
dent 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 impor-
tant 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 muni-
ment 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 coun-
try 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, part-
time, 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 recommenda-
tions 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 recom-
mended by the Commission and since laid before Government, I must
dissent. Its expense would be very great, and the advantages problemati-
cal 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 rec-

ommended 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 dif-
ference 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 propos-
als 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 com-
pleted 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 spon-
sored 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
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 opin-

ion 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 bureau-
cracy 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
he included British memoirs and travel accounts as well as govern-

ment 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 gen-
eral’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
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 consid-
erations. 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 satisfac-

tory 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 govern-
ment 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 histori-
cal 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
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 disad-
vantage 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 con-
struction 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 pre-
1857 East India Company and government records in the deposito-
ries 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
central archive in India began to be considered by the Government

of India. Robert Orme (1728–1801) was an eminent eighteenth-
century historian, Sir John Malcolm’s (1769–1833) career spanned
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while the historical writ-
ings 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
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 after-

wards 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 materi-
als, 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 col-
lection 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 contempo-
rary and famous as the author of The History of British India, pub-
lished 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
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, trans-
mitted 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 mili-
tary 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
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 com-
moner 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 hap-
pened 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 posses-

sion of a body of unpublished documents, which, having been pre-
sented 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
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 pub-
lication 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 regard-
less 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
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 ongo-
ing 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 annexa-
tion 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 denun-
ciation 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 civi-
lization. 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
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 estab-
lish 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 com-
pleted 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 impor-

tant of their state papers, and of their public and secret correspon-
dence, 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 gov-
ernment were under my own immediate charge, and many original
papers of historical importance, the existence of which was unknown
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 correspon-
dence, and for authenticating a variety of facts, originally obtained
from Mahratta authorities, but of which there is no trace in the sec-
retary’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 land-
mark one in the development of historical writing based upon the
archives of Indian princely states.
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, recount-
ing 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 under-
standable 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 sta-
tioned 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
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 com-
parable 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 cop-
ies 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 col-
lect information through conversation.
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 there-
fore 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 recog-
nition than he has obtained from Indian historians.
Lord Macaulay’s Legacy
Lord Macaulay figures prominently in Indian history as the pro-

ponent of the policy of Anglicization of education in British India.
However, it is not commonly recognized that he was equally
important as a trendsetter in history writing in British India. His

strength lay in writing historical essays in an argumentative, corus-
cating style and a lucid manner, which enthralled the readers who
wanted readable history. His weakness was a frequent failure to sup-
ply 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’ writ-
ing, 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 com-
mand over form and content.
In fact, Macaulay’s influence impeded progress towards sound archive-
based 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 pri-
vate papers of contemporary persons. As a scholar, he was definitely
aware of the sources and occasionally quoted some quotable por-
tions. 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 read-
ers, not only insipid, but positively distasteful. Perhaps the fault lies
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 tedious-
ness. 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 pri-
vate 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
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 prin-
cipal 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 histori-
ans 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 friend-
ship, are intended for defence or attack, and yet are withal exceed-
ingly 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 gov-
ernment 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
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 com-
pensated 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.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Lepère. L’Eglise de Jouy le Moutier
Size of the original etching, 6⅜ × 6⅜ inches
Lepère. L’Enfant Prodigue
Size of the original etching, 9½ × 12⅝ inches
Classic Lepère can be, however, with a curiously vital appreciation of
what the living classic must have been. He has an etching of a
swineherd entering the yard in which the beasts are penned. They
move, grunting, toward him. Outside is a cluster of great trees with
bushy foliage. The light is clear and warm. The folds of the
swineherd’s mantle and his gesture are Greek. His figure might have
passed across the Athenian stage, one fancies, at the time of
Sophoclean drama. And the landscape has the deep repose
immortalized in classic verse—such songs as in his extreme old age
Sophocles made to do honor to his native village:
Our home, Colonus, gleaming fair and white:

The nightingale still haunteth all our woods,
Green with the flush of spring;
And sweet, melodious floods
Of softest song through grove and thicket ring.
Lepère is not often found in this mood, however, and the swineherd
plate cannot be considered wholly characteristic of his temper of
mind. It seems to have been one of those rare happenings when the
mind is lifted above its habitual plane, occasion serves, and the
trained hand obediently records a moment of peculiar exaltation. He
is perhaps most of all his daily self in the little plate called Le Moulin
des Chapelles. Here he shows us the machinery of the mill and the
round white column of the structure as others have done, but he also
shows us what others seldom do—the use of the mill. A patient
horse is standing near, a man is shifting the bags of flour to his back.
It is not a mere accident of landscape; it has a social and utilitarian
function; it is connected with human life.
This is the most characteristic attitude of mind for an artist so alert to
the significance of visible things; and it is immensely to his credit as
an artist that he almost never permits this keen and throbbing
interest in the world about him to trespass upon his logical use of his
great instrument.
If organization of line and space, ability to establish in each of his
compositions a decorative scheme adequate to support easily all the
delightful episodes and figures which he chooses to introduce, is the
most important element in Lepère’s artistic equipment, the next in
significance is the clarity and precision of his utterance. There is no
vapor in his imagination; he is a poet as well as an artist, with a
poet’s sensitiveness to definition of form. All that he lacks is the
intensity of emotion that sweeps away interest in everything but the
personal feeling. We suspect that the world for him will always be
“full of a number of things,” and that he will not be able to forget any
of them in the exaltation of profound self-absorption. But he has a
genius for infusing a rich suggestiveness into all that he observes,
and for giving his narrative an epic character.
HERMAN A. WEBSTER
By MARTIN HARDIE
“D
ID you ever see a barber sharpen his razor? That’s what it
wants—the decision and the smacks.” That is one of the many
quaint remarks that old John Varley used to hurl at the pupils
who came to him for lessons in the complete art of painting in water-
color. It is a remark very appropriate to the vast quantity of etchings,
mechanically correct, but unimpassioned and uninteresting, which
are produced to-day. There are wonderfully few etchers whose work
strikes a note of imagination and individuality, and appeals by its
force and directness, its decisions and its smacks. One of that small
company is Mr. Herman A. Webster.
An artist’s life is written in his work, and the cold facts of his
biography are of little real importance. To some extent, however, they
act as a commentary upon his productions, and at the worst they
serve to satisfy the not unpardonable curiosity which impels all of us
to inquire into the age and life-history of any man whose pictures or
prints awaken our instant sympathy. So I put here a few outlines of
Mr. Webster’s career, merely the mile-stones that mark the route
along which he has proceeded. It has been a career of strenuous
activity, for the artist who now prints his finely-wrought plates in his
studio in the Rue de Furstenberg at Paris (the street of which
Whistler made a lithograph in 1894) has graduated at a famous
university, traveled round the world, spent two years in commercial
life, toiled as general reporter to a big daily paper, worked in a coal-
mine, and acted as assistant cashier in a bank. And the tale of his
years is only just over thirty, for he was born in 1878. Need I add—
for an English reader it would be quite superfluous—that Mr.
Webster is an American, with New York as his native city?
Mr. Webster came into the world with an innate love of art. In his
school-days, before he had received any instruction in drawing, he
made posters, that were perhaps crude but not ineffective, for the
school games; and at Yale he was one of the editors and a valued
illustrator of the Yale Record. This love of art was fostered by a visit
to the 1900 Exposition at Paris, where the genius loci has a stronger
spell for the young artist than anywhere else upon earth. Studios and
restaurants of the Quartier Latin are fragrant with great memories,
still haunted by the mighty spirits of the past: Louvre and
Luxembourg are filled with the living realities that abide. Amid the
enchantment of this artistic atmosphere, with all its traditions and
associations, Mr. Webster lingered for some months, and then set
out on a trans-Siberian tour to the Orient, staying long enough in
Japan and China for his natural instinct to be quickened by the
marvelous art which has exerted so strong an influence on the
Western world. On returning home his desire to adopt art as his life-
calling was checked by family opposition. Here in England—for I
write as one of Mr. Webster’s English admirers—many a boy artist
has been thwarted by a foolish antipathy in the home circle to art in
the abstract, but for a parent in the New World the conviction must
be even more sincere that business is the only lucrative profession,
while art is at least something precarious, if not a downward road to
poverty and starvation. And so, at his father’s wish, Mr. Webster, in
the office of the Chicago Record-Herald and elsewhere, served two
years of bondage to commerce. Determination, however, won its
way at last, and in February, 1904, he set out to Paris with the family
consent to “try it for a year.” That year is still continuing.
Webster. St. Ouen, Rouen
“His chief delight is in the nooks and corners of old-world
thoroughfares and culs-de-sac, where deep shadows lurk in
the angles of time-worn buildings, and sunlight ripples over
crumbling walls, seamy gables, and irregular tiled roofs.”
Martin Hardie.
Size of the original etching, 5½ × 3⅞ inches
Webster. La Rue Grenier sur l’Eau, Paris
“A fourth plate, perhaps even finer than any of these in its
force, directness, and concentrated simplicity, is the Rue
Grenier sur l’Eau. There is much of Meryon in its clear, crisp
line-work.” Martin Hardie.
Size of the original etching, 8¾ × 4⅞ inches
Seven months during 1904 were spent at the Académie Julien under
Jean Paul Laurens, in study from the nude; and that is the only
academic instruction which Mr. Webster has received. A few months
after his arrival in Paris, chance led him to the Bibliothèque
Nationale, where he saw some of Meryon’s etchings, and fell
instantly under the spell of the great artist whose sinister needle first
revealed the mysterious and somber poetry of Paris and the Seine.
From Meryon and from books he forthwith taught himself to etch,
receiving no outside instruction, but evolving his own methods till he
attained mastery of the “teasing, temper-trying, yet fascinating art”—
a mastery the more valuable and complete in that it was based on
his own experience. A first attempt was made from his studio window
in the Rue de Furstenberg, and some copperplates went with him on
his autumn holiday at Grez, that “pretty and very melancholy village”
in the Forest of Fontainebleau, where Robert Louis Stevenson met
the romance of his life. As the first-fruits of this holiday three little
etchings won their way into the next summer’s Salon—the Rue de
l’Abbaye, The Loing at Grez, and The Court, Bourron, the last being
the forerunner of several subjects of similar type. At the Salon also
was hung a large oil-painting of still life, a study of fabrics and
porcelain; but though color will no doubt claim allegiance again, Mr.
Webster has been too closely held in thrall by etching to essay
further experiments in the painter’s craft.
A pilgrimage to Spain in the spring of 1905 was the source of several
spontaneous and effective plates, among them St. Martin’s Bridge,
Toledo, and Mirada de las Reinas, Alhambra. Up to this point Mr.
Webster’s work may be considered, in a large measure, tentative
and experimental, but from 1906 onward he has found in Normandy
—at Pont de l’Arche and Rouen—at Bruges, and above all in Paris,
the inspiration for a series of plates noteworthy for their fine
craftsmanship and their expression of individuality. They have won
him the recognition of connoisseurs and public without his passing
through any period of undeserved obscurity. At the Paris Salon, at
the Royal Academy, and in his native land, his etchings have
constantly been exhibited and admired. Nor must I forget to add that
in 1908 he was elected an Associate of the Royal Society of Painter-
Etchers, which, under the presidency of its veteran founder, Sir
Francis Seymour Haden, has done so much to foster the revived art
of etching.
Webster. Quai Montebello
“Few etchers have ever preached the gospel of light with
more truth and earnestness than Webster himself in the Quai
Montebello and many other plates.” Martin Hardie.
Size of the original etching, 7⅞ × 5⅛ inches
Webster. Le Pont Neuf, Paris

“A fitting companion to this vision of Notre Dame is Le Pont
Neuf, another of the etcher’s largest and most distinguished
plates. The stern solidity of the bridge, with its massive
masonry, its corbeled turrets, and its deeply shadowed arches,
makes pleasing contrast with the irregular sky-line of the sunlit
houses that rise beyond.” Martin Hardie.
Size of the original etching, 8⅛ × 11¾ inches
It is of some of the chief works produced and exhibited during the
last three years that I have now to speak, and in doing so may
perhaps indicate a few leading characteristics of the etcher’s work.
His chief delight is in the nooks and corners of old-world
thoroughfares and culs-de-sac, where deep shadows lurk in the
angles of time-worn buildings, and sunlight ripples over crumbling
walls, seamy gables, and irregular tiled roofs. Of such is a series of
subjects found in old Rouen—the St. Ouen; the Rue du Hallage,
where the cathedral spire towers high above old timbered houses;
and that charming plate with the title Old Houses, Rouen, a quaint
corner of tenements whose high-pitched roofs stand propped against
one another for all the world like a castle of cards. The etcher of this
and of the St. Ouen was welcomed with warm sympathy by the
Gazette des Beaux-Arts, which said that “never before has there
been so fervent and skilled an interpreter of the bowed timber and
crumbling plaster of the old houses of Rouen, which line the street
ending in the cathedral with its pointed spire against the open sky.”
And so we pass to two courtyard scenes—belonging, like the Rouen
subjects, to the year 1906—the Cour, Normandie, and Les
Blanchisseuses. In both we find the artist becoming more adept in
using broad and balanced disposition of light and shade to give not
merely chiaroscuro but the suggestion of actual color, and more
skilled in adding exquisiteness of detail to refined truth of visual
impression. Les Blanchisseuses, in particular, with its rich mystery of
shadow, with its sunshine falling on white walls and lighting the
seamed interstices of plaster and timber, has an indefinable charm
that, for myself at any rate, makes it a high-water mark in Mr.
Webster’s art. Of similar type is the Old Butter Market, Bruges,
where a cobbled street curves beneath a shadowed archway; and
then for variety you step from Bruges la Morte, from the silent
cobbles that centuries ago were a busy thoroughfare for ringing feet,
to the Bruges of to-day. It is Bruges in a very different aspect, this
free and spirited study made on July 27, 1907, on the day of the Fête
de l’Arbre d’Or, giving a quick impression of gay holiday crowds, of
banners fluttering against the open sky, and of the “belfry old and
brown” whose carillon inspired America’s poet, as its tall form and
fretted outline have inspired the American etcher of whom I write.
This Bruges en Fête, and Paysanne, a clever and direct figure-study
of an old peasant at Marlotte, come as an episode of pleasing variety
in Mr. Webster’s work, and tend to show that, though he has his
preferences, he is not really fettered by any limitation of subject or
treatment.
Webster. La Rue Cardinale
“La Rue Cardinale has affinity of general treatment with Rue
de la Parcheminerie, and is not the less interesting for an
amazing tour de force in the rendering of color and texture in
the striped blind over a shop-front.” Martin Hardie.
Size of the original etching, 10⅞ × 7⅝ inches
Webster. La Rue de la Parcheminerie, Paris
“Closely akin to Rue Brise Miche in restful balance of
composition and in fine shadow effect is the Rue de la
Parcheminerie—of special value now, for the old street has
disappeared largely since the making of the plate.” Martin
Hardie.
Size of the original etching, 11⅛ × 7 inches
It is but natural that an artist of Mr. Webster’s temperament, a

devoted admirer of Meryon, should become absorbed in Paris
herself and endeavor to put upon copperplate the “poésie profonde
et compliqué d’une vaste capitale.” The Bruges and Rouen plates
showed Mr. Webster to be keenly susceptible to the magnetism and
charm of medieval tradition, but Paris, steeped in sentiment even
more than Rouen or Bruges, was to rouse a still greater warmth and
feeling. He began by searching out those picturesque streets in the
old quarters that have survived the wholesale demolishment of
Baron Haussmann, a name hated by artists as that of Granger by
lovers of books. The Rue Brise Miche found its way to the Royal
Academy, and was also honored by publication in the Gazette des
Beaux-Arts (July, 1907). Closely akin to it in restful balance of
composition and in fine shadow effect is the Rue de la
Parcheminerie—of special value now, for the old street has
disappeared largely since the making of the plate. La Rue Cardinale
has affinity of general treatment, and is not the less interesting for an
amazing tour de force in the rendering of color and texture in the
striped blind over a shop-front. A fourth plate, perhaps even finer
than any of these in its force, directness, and concentrated simplicity,
is the Rue Grenier sur l’Eau. There is much of Meryon in its clear,
crisp line-work. Some day perhaps these loving studies of the old
Paris of Balzac may be gathered in a series illustrating the “Quartier
Marais,” and published in an édition de luxe with descriptive text by
the etcher. Let us hope that this may come to pass, for the buildings
that Mr. Webster depicts are far more than a prosaic record of
architectural features. There is a spiritual and human suggestiveness
behind the mortar and bricks of his pictures: as a poet of his own
nation has it, they are “latent with unseen existences.” He has
appreciated the fact that etching—an art hedged in by limitations and
depending upon power of suggestion—is the one art that can give at
once those delicate lines, those broad shadows, those crumbling bits
of texture. The lover of etching can regard his subject with
indifference, and take full joy in the soft play of sunlight, the fine
choice of line, the effective massing of light and shade.
Another plate of this “Quartier Marais” series is a noble
representation of Notre Dame seen from an unusual aspect. It is a
drawing from near the Hôtel de Ville and shows the splendid mass of
the cathedral rising above the irregular houses that face the Quartier
Marais and the Quai aux Fleurs. There is freedom and charm in the
treatment of the foreground, where a little tug puffs along the river
and the big barges move cumbrously under the lee of the near bank,
and in the middle distance where the light plays pleasantly over the
old houses; but the roof of the cathedral itself, put in with unpleasing
rigidity of line, comes like cold fact in the middle of romance. It is as
though Meryon here had imposed his weakness as well as his
strength upon Mr. Webster, for in the Morgue, for instance, the one
small blemish is the ruled precision of the lines upon a roof. A fitting
companion to this vision of Notre Dame is Le Pont Neuf, another of
the etcher’s largest and most distinguished plates. The stern solidity
of the bridge, with its massive masonry, its corbeled turrets, and its
deeply shadowed arches, makes pleasing contrast with the irregular
sky-line of the sunlit houses that rise beyond.
It may be said of all Mr. Webster’s etchings—and perhaps there
could be no higher praise—that each possesses the faculty of
provoking fresh interest. That is certainly the case with four of his
most recent plates. One is an interior of St. Saturnin, Toulouse,
majestic and stately, full of suggestive mystery in the religious light
that falls with soft touch upon the pillars, throws into relief the dark
masses of the choir-stalls, and strives to penetrate the dim recesses
of the vaulted roof. St. Saturnin will be among the rariora of the
collector, for the plate unfortunately broke when twelve proofs only
had been printed.
The artist’s subtle perception of light and his refined
draughtsmanship have been used to singular advantage in the
Ancienne Faculté de Médecine, 1608. One is grateful to him for his
fine record of this domed building that was a little gem of
Renaissance art, though there is a note of sadness in the
substructure of balks and struts set at its base by the ruthless hand
of the destroyer.
Webster. “St. Saturnin, Toulouse”

Size of the original etching, 10⅛ × 4¾ inches
Webster. Ancienne Faculté de Médecine, Paris
“The artist’s subtle perception of light and his refined
draftsmanship have been used to singular advantage in the
Ancienne Faculté de Médecine, 1608. One is grateful to him
for his fine record of this domed building that was a little gem
of Renaissance art, though there is a note of sadness in the
substructure of balks and struts set at its base by the ruthless
hand of the destroyer.” Martin Hardie.
Size of the original etching, 11⅞ × 7⅞ inches
Gothic canopies and tracery are drawn with loving care in the Porte
des Marmousets, St. Ouen, Rouen, but here again it is the mystery
of shadow in the deep porch that supplies the true theme. A church
porch has also supplied the subject of one of Mr. Webster’s latest
works, Notre Dame des Andelys. The ordinary observer will delight
in the print for its beautiful rendering of a noble fragment of
architecture. Those who have real knowledge of etching will
appreciate it still more for its clever biting and for its subtle delicacy
of line so cunningly used for the indication of stone, glass, and
woodwork with their different surfaces and textures.
That plate of Notre Dame des Andelys, though not the most instantly
engaging, is perhaps the most accomplished which the artist has
produced. It is in this accomplishment that from the coldly critical
point of view I see an indication—a hint only—of possible danger.
Here, and to some extent in the Pont Neuf and the Rue Grenier, the
careful, tense, concentrated work shows almost too disciplined a
self-control. Close study of these prints gives just a touch of the
irritation that comes from watching the monotonous perfection of a
first-class game-shot or golfer, bringing a malicious desire for some
mistake or piece of recklessness. The true etching always appeals in
some degree by its spice of adventure, by some happiness of
accident, and so while the Pont Neuf and the Notre Dame des
Andelys rouse full admiration and respect for their splendid artistry,
the more haphazard methods of the Rue Brise Miche and Les
Blanchisseuses touch a far deeper note of sympathy. They have in
them the breezy, natural oratory that is often so much more stirring
than the fluent, polished periods of the accomplished speaker. But
even where Mr. Webster is most precise in his articulation, most
resolute in his adherence to familiar truths, he always combines with
this a personal aspect and a power of selection that, disregarding the
commonplace and petty, lends poetry to the interpretation. His
“careful” work is very far removed from the cold and careful work of
the ordinary uninspired craftsman.

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Archiving the British Raj: History of the

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Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India: Histories of

The Tale of the Horse: A History of India on Horseback

The State of Texas: Government, Politics, and Policy,

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A greeting of the spirit : selected poetry of John

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The process for establishing archives in India started during the

Archives of India (NAI)—the Indian Historical Records Commission

ICS Indian Civil Service

towards the Sikhs. He wrote in his ‘Preface’ to the second edition

He saw no reason for continually recurring to the duty or destiny of

The independence of mind shown in these remarks was not wel-

school or public school, while the secretaries of state were products

made publicly available, after an interval of 30 to 40 years. In India

Absence of a Deﬁnite Archives Policy

It is a paradox that an endeavour to demolish records was the begin-

brought to India and two finance commissions were appointed to

Initially, the Finance Commission was assigned the task of prun-

Activities of the Records Committee

It will be useful to introduce to the reader some important personali-

who had historical interest appointed to serve as members of the

his academic acceptance and reputation was undeniable on account

As the volume of business increased, the unpaid secretary was replaced

the question of Mr Wheeler’s appointment was first raised by the

James Talboys Wheeler was originally employed in the Madras

English indigo planters upon the Bengal peasantry; he was convicted

In dealing with this vast mass of records, the primary considerations

For the implementation of this proposal, the committee made several

In order to effect these objects, the commission propose—(I) That a

The amount of records awaiting archiving as estimated by the

The only position sanctioned by the government was, as we have

Looking to the comparatively limited practical effect of the labours

alterations in our plans, provided such can be justified, or seem

Instead of a central record office, or muniment room, Seton-Karr rec-

the propriety of selecting a certain number of Head Offices, such as the

Incidentally, it is interesting to observe that later when the viceroy

bureaucratic inertia and the apprehension of increase in expenditure

In this instance, Sir Charles Wood represented the enlightened opin-

he included British memoirs and travel accounts as well as govern-

I doubt if they [Long’s selected documents] would be equally satisfac-

It was politically the safest course of action to publish the General

There is no class of men of letters and leisure to use such a Central

That was one part of Hunter’s argument against opening a central

Historiography and Archiving

Finally, we must turn to the task of considering the state of British

central archive in India began to be considered by the Government