GENESIS AND EVOLUTION OF ARCHIVES

“South Asians have long grown accustomed to being represented by others: in the colonial
period by officials eager to dissect and define their societies for purely practical administrative
purposes, and in the postcolonial period by academics—historians, anthropologists, and
others—telling us what Indian society ‘really’ is.” 1

These remarks of Crispin Bates in his book ‘Beyond Representation: Colonial and
Postcolonial Constructions of Indian History’, awaken the squelched thoughts in the mind of the
readers about the history of ‘our people’ and culminate into questioning the convenient Western
notions of history writing that were colluded by the imperial powers. How the religious magnus
opera and proficient works of ancient Indian scholars, authors and historians were deemed
‘useless’2, and a storehouse of longueurs of administrative documents took their place in the
form of a ‘modern’ archival base. This babble may sound more reasonable as we delve into the
study of archives of India and the fecund records of history which have undergone degenerative
interpretation during a long period of colonial subjugation. Furthermore, our conceptualisation
of archives, their genesis and development, may become clear in the discourse that follows.

What are Archives?

In the course of daily life, individuals and organizations create and keep information
about their personal and business activities. Over time, these form a part of our memory, at least
partly, and the records of these memories—along with the places where they are kept—is what
the National Museum of American History defines as archives. Memory is the faculty by which
knowledge is retained or recalled; memory is a retention of knowledge within the grasp of the
mind, while remembrance is having what is known consciously before the mind. Either may be
voluntary or involuntary. Recollection involves volition, the mind making a distinct effort to
recall something or fixing the attention actively upon it when recalled. Reminiscence is a
half-dreamy memory of scenes or events long past; retrospection is a distinct turning of the mind
back upon the past, bringing long periods under survey. Now why go around these many
synonyms of a single word when one can suffice? The answer is simple- due to the multi-faceted
nature of archives. “Archives… represent a kind of living organism, growing, breathing,
suffering, enjoying; an organism with which one can communicate; an organism that can be
belittled, burned, falsified, nurtured, exploited, used, and abused. However, this organism is not
an organism in its own right; the organism reflects us-the archivist, the administrator, the records

1
Crispin Bates. 2006. Beyond Representation : Colonial and Postcolonial Constructions of Indian Identity. New
Delhi ; New York: Oxford University Press.
2
Sabyasachi Bhattacharya. 2019. Archiving the British Raj : History of the Archival Policy of the Government of
India, with Selected Documents, 1858-1947. New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press.

1
manager, the family, the politician, the owner, and the thief, the corrupted ones and those who
will be corrupted.”3

As discussed above, archives include all forms of memories and histories. In the process
of selection certain parts are chastised, or given away while others are documented and presented
to the public. This brings into limelight the role of an archivist, and the evergreen debate
encircling social and public archival memory. In leity language, an archivist is a person who is
entrusted with the responsibility of preserving the documents, inchoate manuscripts, records,
photographs, etcetera, which form an integral part of archives. However, a closer inspection on
the modus vivendi of an archivist reveals the more significant—and equally neglected—side of
the functioning. Archivists are primary agents in this process, of necessity making choices about
what is to be hauled to the landfill, what is to be preserved, and, perhaps as importantly, how it is
to be preserved. While historians are lost in the lucid delusion of writing history through their
plethora of research papers and books entailing lifelong works, the oblivious, and yet undeniable,
truth is that their writings are subjective manifestations of archives—something over which our
archivists exercise paramount authority. Thus, historians do their job of hiding the archival
materials, to which they have privileged access, in their writings and present the past to their
audience. However, as Patrick Geary points out “in reality, historians are more likely than not
providing their readers not with a tour of the past but with a tour of one or more archives, the
creative work of teams or generations of archivists. It is they, through their process of selection,
reorganization, and elimination, who largely determine what past can be accessed and, to a great
extent, what that past might be.”4 Archivists are thus, it can be argued, vis-á-vis the authors who
can be placed parallel to the original writers of archives, due to the crucial role they play in
selecting and deselecting records and histories.

This brings us to the next question of whether there exists a bias archiving, and the larger
humdrum of social and public history. The answer to which is yet again simple- definitely. We
can proceed the argument by highlighting the works of the famous German philosopher and
scholar Friedrich Nietzsche. In his 1874 essay, ‘On the Use and Abuse of History for Life’,
Nietzsche considers a state of mind in which ‘likes and dislikes are closely tied to the peg of the
moment’, as is the case most clearly with animals. He argues that this principle applies at both a
personal and societal level, and that the skill required of a person in order to live a happier life is
one of knowing the ‘line which divides the observable brightness from the unilluminated
darkness’—essentially, knowing when to remember and when to forget. Being first in addressing
the importance of forgetting, Nietzsche speaks of “that malleable power of a person, a people, a

3
Albada, Joan v. 2006. “Archives: Particles of Memory or More?” In Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of
Social Memory_ Essays from the Sawyer Seminar, 215-18. First ed. Michigan, United States of America: University
of Michigan Press.
4
Geary, Patrick. 2006. “Medieval Archivists as Authors: Social Memory and Archival Memory.” In Archives,
Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory_ Essays from the Sawyer Seminar, 116-113. First ed. Michigan,
United States of America: University of Michigan Press.

2
culture, . . . to grow in new directions, to restructure and reconstitute what is past and foreign, to
heal wounds, to replace what has been lost, and to recast those molds which have been broken.”5
These statements of the philosophical luminary stand contested. Inarguably, a great deal of
information is produced in the form of records and literature concerning individuals. But when
public political and administrative legislations, for instance, are evaluated, the focus is often on
records containing information about political decision making and the political and
administrative deliberations behind new legislative initiatives. However, the vast numbers of
personal case files contain—among other things—information about how public laws and
regulations and public institutions affect individual citizens in various aspects of their lives. A lot
of the data contained in such files are of a trivial, repetitive, and routine character. What is
noticeable here is that it is these ‘trivial’ archives that contain etched onto them the information
regarding the interaction of public administration and the individual, which is invaluable. Now
the intentional or unintentional bias is exercised by the archivists from the past and the
contemporary era in preserving selected records which serve the taste and function of the higher
authority. Hence, if we give some heed to Nietzsche’s words on the need to forget history, we can
politely term these blunders as ‘official biases’. This is how a whole section of social memory is
lost in the trials and tribulations accompanying a process directed towards presenting a vignette,
rather narrowed, memory to the public gaze.

Empowered by the works of Jacques Derrida, Ann Laura Stoler thus writes:
“In cultural theory, ‘the archive’ has a capital ‘A,’ is figurative, and leads
elsewhere. It may represent neither material site nor a set of documents. Rather, it may
serve as a strong metaphor for any corpus of selective forgettings and collections.”

In response to this proposition, scholars are also trying to dig a way of overcoming the
inevitability of official biases. It gives way to a different challenge: to identify the conditions of
possibility that shaped what could be written, what warranted repetition, what competencies were
rewarded in archival writing, what stories could not be told, and what could not be said. Whether
documents are trustworthy, authentic, and reliable remain pressing questions, but a turn to the
social and political conditions that produced those documents has altered the sense of what trust
and reliability might signal and politically entail.6 These ‘evidentiary paradigms’, as Carlo
Ginzburg calls them, will play a significant role in our understanding of colonial dissecting
(which was referred to in the introductory section of the paper) of Indian history in the later
subsections.

5
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. 2019. The Use and Abuse of History. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications.
6
Stoler, Ann Laura. 2002. “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance.” Archival Science 2 (1-2): 87–109.
https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02435632.

3
The Colonial Archives of India
The archive was the supreme technology of the late nineteenth-century imperial state, a
repository of codified beliefs that clustered (and bore witness to) connections between secrecy,
the law, and power.7 Therefore, what constitutes the archive, what form it takes, and what
systems of classification and epistemology signal at specific times reflect critical features of
colonial politics and state power, something which Sabyasachi Bhattacharya constantly refers to
in his work titled ‘Archiving the British Raj’.

The idea of what is currently known as the National Archives of India (NAI) was
conceived back in the mid-eighteenth century. In his report of 1860, Sandeman, a civil auditor,
envisaged the creation of a ‘Grand Central Archives’, three decades prior to the birth of the
Imperial Record Department (IRD), the precursor of the NAI. Documents and records
concerning the operations of the British East India Company in India had existed for a long time
under various departments of revenue, and other state departments, apart from various other
non-official sources. What Sandeman proposed in his report was to create a central repository to
relieve the offices of congestion by destruction of papers of routine nature and minor interests.
Accordingly, a Record Committee was set up in 1861 to study the implementation of the report.
However, the recommendations on the report were inchoately implemented as the Committee
overlooked the supervision, winnowing and organisation of the records, apart from lollygagging
in a records publication programme rather than maintaining a central storehouse of archives.

A regnant historian who came into the fore during this time was George William Forrest,
who was appointed to the Bombay Educational Department, late in 1872, then as a Census
Commissioner at Bombay (1882) and the Professor of English History, Elphinstone College, in
1887. Besides, he had earned the stature of a respectful archivist, as a consequence of which
Forrest was invited for special duty to examine the records of the Foreign Department of
Government of India. In his report of 17, August 1889, he was aghast to notice the deplorable
condition in which the records were stored in muniment rooms. Forrest remarked that a large
number of documents were already reduced to irrecoverable mounds of junk due to the “ignorant
and indifferent custodians, damp and white ants” 8, and recommended the transfer of all records
of the East India Company to a central repository.

Therefore, on 11 February 1891, in order to amend the floundering committed in the past,
the Secretary of State, at the behest of the Government of India, appointed Forrest as Officer-in-
Charge of the records of the Government of India. Consequently, the Imperial Record
Department was set up on 11 March. The first formal date in the history of the department is
May, 1891, when—empowered by the support of the Home Government (ie. Britain)—definitive
7
Crispin Bates. 2006. Beyond Representation : Colonial and Postcolonial Constructions of Indian Identity. New
Delhi ; New York: Oxford University Press.
8
National Archives of India, New Delhi. 1979. Archives in India, International Archives Week 23-29 October. New
Delhi, India: National Archives of India.

4
steps were taken by the Government of India for creating a common storage for all the
documents which had till then been lying scattered in the various secretariat offices at Calcutta.
The scope of the new office at the start was limited to cataloguing, classification, and
arrangement of records. Besides, the government made it quite clear that they had no intention of
sanctioning the construction of establishments like the Public Record Office of England that
required huge investments. Therefore, the IRD operationalised with humble beginnings.9
According to data, Forrest started with a modest staff of an assistant, 8 clerks, 18 draftees and
coolies for carrying the archives; he got a temporary staff by 1899. The Imperial Records
Department was allotted about half a dozen rooms in the ground floor of the Imperial Secretariat
Building at Calcutta. Care and attention was primarily directed to reducing the vast accumulation
of past muniments into consultable order and repairing the mischief caused by former neglect. S.
N. Sen commemorates Forrest’s contribution in finding the “… time to launch the gigantic
scheme of press-listing all records of the East India Company down to 1800, to compile and print
three large volumes of state papers dealing with Lord Clive and the early days of the company,
and to collect a mass of materials on the Sepoy Mutiny from the Military Department records
which were later published in four volumes.” Prior to this, he had published three magnificent
volumes of state papers on Warren Hastings’ administration. It is also to Forrest's initiative that
we owe the preservation of the unique collection of correspondence in Oriental languages which
now forms one of the proudest possessions of the department.10 Hence, Forrest is generally
regarded as the founder of the official archival organisation in British India.

'The Bengal Secretariat, Calcutta', India, early 20th century.

9
Sen, S. 1944. “A NOTE on the IMPERIAL RECORD DEPARTMENT.” The American Archivist 7 (3): 153–64.
https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.7.3.t75563mk87877455.
10
Ibid

5
 Samuel Charles Hill succeeded Forrest and ,undoubtedly, as many historians
acknowledge, continued his rich legacy as the Officer-in-Charge of the IRD. Apart from
enriching the institution with phenomenal works like the complete set of the Calcutta Gazette
(1786), a number of old maps of Calcutta (1723-1842) and volumes of work on Bengal of
1756-57—a selection of public and private papers dealing with the affairs of the British in
Bengal during the reign of Siraj-ud daula— Hill introduced revolutionary reforms including the
program of flattening the entire series of folded records that housed the department building,
repairing them and placing them between docket covers. Other publications included The life of
Claud Martin, major-general in the army of the honourable East India Company, Calcutta
(1901); Three Frenchmen in Bengal: or, The Commercial Ruin of the French Settlements in 1757;
Episodes of piracy in the eastern seas, 1519 to 1851, Bombay 1920 (first appeared in IA
1919-20) and Notes on piracy in eastern waters, Bombay 1928 (first appeared in IA 1923-28). 11

Dr. Charles Robert Wilson succeeded Hills at the time when the IRD had made
substantial progress both in rehabilitation of disintegrating documents and preparation of
reference media. He introduced another set of sweeping reforms in the department like the
systematic cataloguing of records and the brilliant initiative of printing full length documents.
However, ill health cut his career short and he left for England on 24 May, 1904—leaving behind
him, at times undulating, an idea awaiting execution and his posthumous Volumes on Old Fort
William in Bengal, at a liminal stage of completion. But his scheme of calendaring the entire
series of Persian records was taken up by his successor, Mr. (later Sir) E. Denison Ross, who
himself was a distinguished scholar of Persian as well as a linguist. Ross formulated a detailed
plan for the work and published the two volumes of the Calendar of Persian Correspondence
under his personal supervision.12 Ross was also responsible for compiling a press list of the
Select Committee's records, publishing lists of Foreign, Military, Finance, Home, Public Works
Department of the 18th and 19th centuries, and three volumes listing original treaties and
engagements. Mr. A. F. Scholfield, who succeeded him in 1915, was more of an archivist than a
scholar. To him belongs the credit of compiling a number of press lists of the Foreign
Department's records and preparing an excellent consolidated index to the public series of press
lists. The salutary changes he introduced in the method of archives-keeping and treatment of old
records is something which makes his name worth mentioning among the leading archivists.
Under him was also carried out the replacement of the old method of mending documents with
tracing paper by that of repair with chiffon.

Professor Sabyasachi Bhattacharya lays emphasis on twofold objectives of the British

Government in establishing a central archival department.

11
“HILL, Samuel Charles – Persons of Indian Studies by Prof. Dr. Klaus Karttunen.” 2017.
Whowaswho-Indology.info. February 14, 2017. https://whowaswho-indology.info/2986/hill-samuel-charles/.
12
National Archives of India, New Delhi. 1979. Archives in India, International Archives Week 23-29 October. New
Delhi, India: National Archives of India.

6
 “First, the stronger voice from within the bureaucracy spoke of the archive as an
instrument of governance. Second… approach—often voiced by the ‘Home authorities’,
politically conscious people… as well as academic persons or journalists outside the
bureaucratic circle in India- emphasis was on ideological issues, Britain’s imperial
image, and the interpretation of the past of the Indian Empire.”13

The officials placed at a higher position and entrusted with the responsibilities of
policy-making were keen to get hold of the records. ‘Archiving the British Raj’ highlights one
such incident when a policymaker wrote to the secretary of state in 1889 focussing on the need to
preserve archives so that ‘a condition in which they can resist the ravages of time, and to make
their contents available for reference in the discussion of current affairs’.14 India comprised
hundreds of princely states and chieftains, and various treaties and documents recorded the
protocols that were initiated during the agency of the English East India Company (dating from
the eighteenth century). This includes the ancient papers of the East India Company consisting of
about 26,000 bound volumes and 1,505,000 unbound documents, the whole covering as many as
17,902,000 folios. It was, therefore, amenable for the new government to house these crucial
documents for administrative and bureaucratic purposes. Furthermore, they were also
implemented in the determination of the boundaries of India. Next, the records helped in
identification of tribal groups and their areas across the subcontinent, as well as the ideal sepoys
for the army; contained detailed information on the land settlement systems that could in turn
help in the assessment of revenue. Although the main archival series in the department begin
only from 1748, copies of a large number of interesting collections relating to the earlier years
have been found from the India Office. Among these are acquisitions containing columns of
abstracts on correspondence between the East India Company and their slaves in India from 1707
to 1748. Another very important source, what are called the ‘Original Consultations’, contain
minutes, memoranda, and proposals drawn up by East India agents. These throw light not only
on the working of administrative machinery, but also the social, political and economic
conditions that prevailed during that time. Papers on anthropology and geography by travellers
and explorers like Csoma de Koros (Hungarian traveller 1831-1832), the famous Schlagentweit
brothers (1861), the excellent work of Major Leech on the Hindi dialect of Bundelkhand (1844),
Captain Mackenzie’s accounts of the Gond, Kurku and Nihal dialects (1873), and Captain Lane’s
report on Manbhow sect (1874), are especially regarded as precious archives preserving the rich
cultural legacy of India. The most worthy possession is, however, the Mysore Survey by
Mackenzie which began soon after the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War which resulted in the defeat of
Tipu Sultan, and the consequent annexation of Mysore (which included parts of the modern
states of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu) by the English East India Company in
1799. On the one hand there was the official topographical survey leading to the compilation of
detailed maps of the areas covered, for which Mackenzie had an official staff of Assistants and
13
Sabyasachi Bhattacharya. 2019. Archiving the British Raj : History of the Archival Policy of the Government of
India, with Selected Documents, 1858-1947. New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press.
14
Home Department, Public Branch, Nos 24–42, March 1891, p. 98

7
Sub-Assistants; on the other, there was the collection of historical, literary and cultural materials
of all kinds, for which Mackenzie had built up his own personal staff, headed by Boria and later
C. Venkata Lechmiah, who communicated with the indigenous people and clarified the motive of
arrival of their British master.
“By February 1808, Mackenzie had ready a ‘General Map of the Rajah of
Mysore’s Territories’, and he also despatched a specimen volume containing some of the
results of his historical researches, namely a ‘Register, Specimens, and Translations of
Inscriptions, Grants, and ancient monuments, collected in the Ballaghat’. Then in
October 1808 he submitted six ‘charts’, or detailed maps on the scale of 2 miles to the
inch, with two more to follow, and six volumes of Memoirs [i.e. memoranda] on the
District of Mysore plus a seventh containing ‘ papers explanatory of the progress of the
Survey from its Institution’, and finally he reported that he had despatched a Jain statue
to the India Museum.”15

Captain Colin Mackenzie Map of the Lands of Tippo Saheb immediately following the 4th Anglo
Mysore War (1799).

15
Mackenzie to Buchan, r8 and 24 Oct. 1808, BC, F/4/280, Coll. 6426, ff. 197-208.

8
 It is often logically argued that the British created a central repository in order to preserve
the accounts of its ‘glorious rule’ over India and, more importantly, to hide the unscrupulous and
brutal policies that governed the Indian subjects from the radical judgement of the posterity. For
the same reason, scholars and students were denied access to these archives. Bhattacharya
remarks “For instance, in the memoranda and noting on the files by Sir Herbert Risley, the
secretary of the Home Department, we see apprehensions about the danger of opening access to
records to nationalist critics of British rule; Risley, therefore, desired rules in the archives that
would prevent unscrupulous students from selecting and publishing those portions of records
which tell in favour of their point of view”. The protracted process of making colonial archives
tended to colonize not only the writing of history but also the minds of the colonized population.
This process of manipulation by colonial forces of a particular sense of history denied the
Indians to use the indigenous sources and , ultimately, they were deprived of their history in the
process. Many scholars argue that apart from the vested political and administrative interests, the
English were not swayed by any compelling motive to work in the interests of the tribal people,
deprived groups, desolate Indian masses, women, and children. There also appear sequential
gaps in between the linkages of colonial archives, therefore, signifying the extent to which
indigenous histories were bent and ‘morphed’. Any record or document that posed a challenge to
the identity of the colonial power and their morphed knowledge system was either destroyed or
swept under the carpet.16 Civil servants were trained in West oriented institutions so that they
could imitate the orders of their masters like puppets; and the identities of the derided local
people, their language, were gormandized as a means to demolish culturally vibrant histories.
Konkani—the language of present day Goa—for instance, was destroyed almost completely.
During the colonial rule all educated people were expected to speak in Portuguese only and
Konkani was called the ‘Lingua dos criados’, the language of the illiterates.17 Also, after
Mackenzie’s death in 1921, his catalogues and archives on the rich heritage of South India were
passed on to H. H. Wilson and William Taylor, who did not have knowledge on history and
archiving. The latter claimed that Indians lacked historical knowledge as was evident from the
Surveys by Captain Colin Mackenzie. Added to this, Indian manuscripts, artefacts and sculptures
were shipped to London and embellished in grand glass cabinets at the dwellings of the nobility
and the royalty as well as displayed with majuscule letters at the Crystal Palace Exhibition,
1851. They were used as epithets of colonial power that subjugated vast continents where it was
carrying out the spread of industrialisation and the holy Christian faith among impoverished
masses. This was the diabolical hypocrisy of the British.

16
Lecture by Ms. Ritika Joshi, ‘Colonial Fragmentation and Destruction of Indigenous Histories, and
Eurocentrism’, 13 September, 2021, recorded by Vibhuti Pathak; in SEC Archives and Museums.
17
“Post-Colonialism and Cultural Identity.” n.d. OHeraldo. Accessed September 26, 2021.
https://www.heraldgoa.in/Edit/Postcolonialism-and-cultural-identity/161926.

9
 Image1- The Crystal Palace, London which hosted the exhibition in 1851.
Image 2- The industrial advances and machinery developed during the Industrial Revolution in
Britain was also displayed to the audience.
Image 3- Indian section of the exhibition showing stills of a royal procession as well as artefacts
placed in glass cabinets to the right.

10
 Later and Post-Colonial Developments: The National Archives of India
Towards the end of Scholfield’s tenure, the Government of India appointed the Indian
Historical Records Commission (IHRD) in 1919 to advise on the treatment of archives for
historical study, the compilation of reference media, public access to archives and training of
Indian students in historical research. The Keeper of Records (later Director of Archives) was to
act as Secretary to the Commission. Due to the supreme urgency of adopting the department an
even more comprehensive and better planned program the foundation of IHRD was laid.
Convinced, however, that success in such ambitious projects can be ensured only by enlisting the
active collaboration of provincial governments, universities, Indian states, and learned societies
in the work, the government as a preliminary step thoroughly reorganized the Indian Historical
Records Commission. Under the new constitution the provincial and state governments, the
universities, and other learned bodies became entitled to nominate their representatives in the
commission as well as its newly created adjunct, the Research and Publication Committee, upon
which devolved the task of organizing the academic activities of the commission. One result of
this democratization of the commission had been that the provinces and the states as well as the
universities and the learned institutions were now taking a keen interest in its activities.18 Under
the long tenure of Abdul Ali (1922-38), the Department was shifted to Delhi. The capital itself
had already been transferred from Calcutta to the new metropolis in 1911 and it was inevitable
that the official records would go with it. The current building was opened on 1 November 1926
and the transfer of records was completed only by March 1937. Thereon, the department quietly
settled down to its scheduled work. By the 1940s, under Dr. S. N. Sen, the portals of the archives
were thrown open to all genuine seekers of knowledge. The rules governing access to public
records were further liberalised in 1947 and all pre-1902 official records became available for
research.19 However, it is difficult to estimate the large number of records revealing the atrocities
of the previous government that must have undergone incineration and, thus, were hidden from
the public eye, forever. During 1946-47 a decision was taken by the British Government to weed
out all records of the former Political Department, barring only those needed for future political
transactions. The latter were to be handed over to the Government of UK immediately on the
transfer of power.

Independence ushered in a new era for the Central records repository immediately
reflected in the christening of the Imperial Record Department as National Archives of India on
30 August, 1947. This emphasised that the department was no longer a part of colonial
administration but the proud custodian of a nation’s heritage in documentary form containing the
essence of Indo-British experience for over two centuries. It also signified that the Department
was to play a more dynamic and creative role in the archival field of the whole country.

18
Sen, S. 1944. “A NOTE on the IMPERIAL RECORD DEPARTMENT.” The American Archivist 7 (3): 153–64.
https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.7.3.t75563mk87877455.
19
National Archives of India, New Delhi. 1979. Archives in India, International Archives Week 23-29 October. New
Delhi, India: National Archives of India.

11
 According to the Government of India website “National Archives of India is the
custodian of the records of enduring value of the Government of India. Established on 11 March,
1891 at Calcutta (Kolkata) as the Imperial Record Department, it is the biggest archival
repository in South Asia. It has a vast corpus of records viz., public records, private papers,
oriental records, cartographic records and microfilms, which constitute an invaluable source of
information for scholars-administrators and users of archives.”20 The public records in the
custody of the NAI occupy today a shelf-space of 25 Kilometres. Among the acquisitions in
recent years particular mention may be made of the 20th century records of the late Foreign and
Political Department and those of its numerous agencies scattered all over India; the papers of
the Constituent Assembly and the Reforms Office embodying a detailed history of the
constitutional development of the country, etc. It has in its custody the records of the Survey of
India (1777-1902) and a rich collection of more than 15,000 printed and manuscript maps. Since
Independence there has been a growing awareness that private papers constitute an important
source material for the study of history though they often do not receive the care and attention
necessary for their preservation. The Department, therefore, embarked on a programme of
acquiring mainly through donations, the private papers of eminent Indians—these include
collections of eminent leaders such as Dadabhai Naoroji, Badruddin Tyabji, Pherozeshah Mehta,
Gopal Krishna Gokhale, G.S. Khaparde, V.S. Srinivasa Sastri, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Dr.
Rajendra Prasad, M.R. Jayakar, to name only a few. Papers of the eminent scientist S.S.
Bhatnagar and the brilliant mathematician Ramanujam are also available in the National
Archives. In 1948 the National Archives initiated a project for obtaining microfilm copies of
documents of Indian interest from various repositories in the world. This rich collection now
exceeds 2500 rolls of microfilms. The Department has also a rich Library of rare publications
and printed documents which date back to the 18th century. These include the Calcutta Gazettes,
Parliamentary papers from 1807. The library also has a collection of interesting publications in
various languages prescribed by the British Government, Reports on Native Newspapers.

Recently, the NAI also ventured into making its resources available through online
media. Consequently, the Abhilek Patal was set up. “Abhilekh Patal is a full-featured online
search portal to access the reference media and digitized collection of National Archives of
India.”21. The portal was inaugurated on the occasion of 125th foundation day of National
Archive of India by Dr. Mahesh Sharma, Hon’ble Minister of State for Culture and Tourism (I/c)
and Civil Aviation, Government of India on 11th March 2015. This portal contains more than 2.7
million reference media of National Archives of India and approximately 72 thousand digitized
archive documents of Government of India to make them accessible to the scholar to facilitate
research in the critical history of India. The subject of the documents varies from public records
to political records which has generated criticism in the history of India. The portal also contains

20
“National Archives of India | National Archives of India | Govt. Of India.” n.d. Nationalarchives.nic.in. Accessed
September 27, 2021. http://nationalarchives.nic.in/content/national-archives-india.
21
“Abhilekh Patal.” n.d. Www.abhilekh-Patal.in. Accessed September 27, 2021.
https://www.abhilekh-patal.in/jspui/.

12
manuscripts of historical importance. However, some of the documents are not available freely in
a full-text format which may be accessed using the Digital-on-Demand service of NAI by paying
a specified fee for the same. The digitalisation mission has also created a national electronic
database of manuscripts named Kriti Sampada. The database provides information on various
kinds of manuscripts, their conservation status and much more. It provides search by title, author,
script, language, subject or material. To create the database, the Mission receives data on
manuscripts from three different sources- National Survey followed by Post Survey, Manuscript
Resource Centres, Manuscript Partner Centres or Private Collections. The Mission endeavours
to provide comprehensive and authentic information about each manuscript

Recently, in the news have been debated the growing apprehensions about the Central
Vista Project that proposes to build a new Parliament building and new residences for the prime
minister and the vice-president. What has been opposed is the resultant impacts on the Annexe
building of the National Archives of India along with the National Museum and the Indira
Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, which are ready to be demolished. The demolition of the
NAI Annexe building entails a serious risk involving the transfer of historical records from old
repositories to new, temporary storehouses. It has invoked resentment among various sections of
society—in India and abroad—as archives are not only central to the scholarly enterprise but also
markers of active civic endeavour in a democratic society. Meanwhile, the Union minister of
culture, Prahlad Singh Patel, has assured that the main Lutyens’-style building of the NAI that
houses the ‘majority’ of the repositories will not be affected by the Central Vista project and,
hence, resistance against the demolition is unnecessary.22 It must be noted that some important
series of documents that were recently acquired and kept in the Accession section in the
basement of the Annexe building are still awaiting cataloguing. Some of them—six lakh
documents pertaining to the pensions of freedom fighters, ten lakh claim files of post-Partition
immigrants from Pakistan, a huge bulk of military records and those of the Archaeological
Survey of India—need to be catalogued to augment further research in these fields. Additionally,
newspapers like the Jam-i-Jahan Numa, the first printed Urdu newspaper in India that is
preserved in the NAI, are yet to be catalogued. The dearth of regular staff and the vastly
diminishing capacity of archivists to read the languages and scripts in which the materials are
preserved are two most visible reasons for such a lapse. The demolition of this building,
therefore, would put innumerable such documents at the risk of getting lost or damaged on
account of being mishandled by inexperienced hands. The documents also face a larger menace:
of being damaged by environmental threats or falling prey to microorganisms, termites and white
ants if physical conditions like temperature, humidity and access to light are not maintained at
standard levels in the new storing places. Any arbitrary or hasty transfer can lead to loss and
mismanagement of records. They would then be unavailable for scholars who are already
inconvenienced because of limited access to records due to the pandemic. Therefore, proper

22
“Demolition Squad.” n.d. Www.telegraphindia.com. Accessed September 27, 2021.
https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/indias-archives-and-the-central-vista-project/cid/1817138.

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consultation with and participation from archivists, historians, and librarians should be sought
before muddling with the existing order of the historical records.

Conclusion
Throughout the course of our discussion, we have enumerated the vital role that archives
and archivists play in the creation and destruction of a sense of history as well as public identity.
The metamorphosis that the archival policy and the access to archives underwent from British
Raj to neo-independent India to the current state is also evident from the discussion. This
necessitates the need to study archives as an institution rather than things of the past, because
throughout their journey they have been blessed, for some, and doomed, for others, with inherent
biases and ‘systematic’ as well as ‘planned’ erasure of memories which have been considered
trivial or deteriorative. It is also obvious that disparate attitudes towards admitting selected
entities, characters and themes in archives, and consciously removing or remaining silent about
others, are attempts to construct a unilinear archival narrative. Besides users of archives
(historians and others) and shapers of archives (records creators, records managers, and
archivists) add layers of meaning, layers which become naturalized, internalized, and
unquestioned.23 As a result, the importance of debating the archives as premiere and final sources
of information has also been highlighted.

In the contemporary world, the need for archives has arisen more as we are moving
towards a common modern way of life, and gradually passing the traditional village life and its
histories into oblivion. To ensure a widespread knowledge of this past should be the primary
objective of the neo-archival policies. Digital Libraries (DLs) are becoming a new way of
providing information resources and services to users. Sometimes they are remote and
unknown, and therefore it often becomes difficult to design and maintain a DL which can meet
users' needs if we don’t actively entangle the user in the design and development process. Thus, a
user-oriented system is the requirement in the development of Abhilekh Patal and Kriti Sampada.

I would like to end the discussion in the words of Thomas Jefferson, the American
statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, musician, philosopher, and Founding Father who served
as the third president of the United States:

“Let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the
public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of
copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.”

23
Schwartz, Joan M., and Terry Cook. 2002. “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory.”
Archival Science 2 (1-2): 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02435628.

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 By- VIBHUTI PATHAK
Roll No.- 18
B.A. Hons. HISTORY
Submitted To- MS. RITIKA JOSHI

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