Developments Leading to the Creation of a Central Archive

This chapter explores the fundamental issues encountered by the Government of India in archiving records. The colonial state was evolving a policy of record keeping that oscillated between certain polar opposites. First, there were two opposite models in the 1860s—that of archival organization in a decentralized departmental basis, as opposed to the concept of a centralized record office. Second, there were different ideas about how to go about the business of documenting British rule in India. There was another issue: a choice between a policy of limiting access to documents to those authorized by virtue of bureaucratic privilege as opposed to allowing access to the interested public. The fourth area of conflicting policy perceptions was at the epistemological level: is the object of archiving acquisition, preservation, and dissemination of historical knowledge, or it something more limited, namely documentation as an instrument of governance?