Archiving the British Raj: History of the Archival Policy of the Government of India, with Selected Documents, 1858-1947

摘要

Can history be written 'without prejudice or passion'? The history in question was that of the conquest of undivided India by the East India Company and its subsequent integration into the British Empire in 1858. Yet Abul Kalam Azad, the first education minister of independent India, exhorted the Indian Historical Records Commission (IHRC) to aspire to such intellectual emancipation. Members of the IHRC had gathered in New Delhi in 1948, its first meeting in free India. Azad himself was an activist-historian. His stress on shedding 'prejudice' is aimed not only at those who resented British narratives, but also at Hindu and Muslim scholars suspicious of rival 'histories' that had shaped ideas of the 'nation' and sectarian identities. The wounds of the Partition, its mass migrations and brutal carnage, were still raw. Azad's was an argument on behalf of 'reason' that contemporary India seems to be losing.