The Imperial Record Department

Abstract

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