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Preview Catalogue of the European manuscripts in the Oriental and India Office Collections of The British Library

Catalogue of the EUROPEAN MANUSCRIPTS IN THE ORIENTAL AND INDIA OFFICE COLLECTIONS OF THE BRITISH LIBRARY by DAVID M BLAKE THE BRITISH LIBRARY 1998 O 1998 The British Library Board First published 1998 by The British Library 96 Euston Road St Pancras London NW1 2DB British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP record is available fromThe British Library ISBN 0 71 23 4575 2 Printed in England on long-life paper co by Redwood Books, Trowbridge FOREWORD It is a great pleasure to welcome into print the first ever complete summary of the European Manuscripts, or Private Papers, held in the lndia Office Collections of the British Library. The sequence of organisational changes which brought these manuscripts into the Library is admirably summarised in the author's introduction. They have always stood alongside and complemented the official archives of the East lndia Company and the lndia Office. However, I find it particularly exciting for future scholarship that in our new building at St Pancras they will also be alongside the British Library's Western Manuscripts, which include some notable Indian collections. This catalogue will serve both as an invaluable research tool for access and as a record of a remarkable collecting effort over the last forty years. Stanley Sutton, librarian of the lndia Office Library, with the unique advice and guidance of Sir Gilbert Laithwaite, began in the 1950s a systematic drive to gather in the papers of 'servants of the Raj' and their families. The European Manuscripts then comprised some 40-odd collections and 350 miscellaneous manuscripts. After the work of Sutton and successive departmental curators Molly Poulter, Stella Rimington, Richard Bingle and the present author David Blake, there are now more than 300 collections and 3000 smaller deposits. They range in quality and depth from a handful of letters written by a private soldier to the hundreds of volumes left behind by a Viceroy of India, but taken as a whole the European Manuscripts must also be seen as a tribute to the great generosity of donors, for gifts have always far exceeded purchases. Indeed, the process continues and the Library is always interested to hear from owners who may wish to find a permanent home for papers relating to the British experience in lndia and neighbouring countries. Finally, like all our published works, the appearance of this catalogue is a testimony to cooperation between staff in various parts of the Library, particularly David Way and colleagues in the Marketing and Publishing Office for seeing the work through the press. May it provide many new insights into the complex interactions between Britain and South Asia. John Ashworth Chairman The British Library March 1998 INTRODUCTION The European Manuscripts of the Oriental and lndia Office Collections of the British Library are probably the world's largest collection of private papers relating to lndia and South Asia. They comprise about three hundred collections of British statesmen, soldiers, administrators, scholars, missionaries, businessmen and others, and some three thousand smaller deposits containing documents of historical importance or curiosity. Though often including papers similar to or complementing the much more extensive lndia Office Records (containing the official archives of the East lndia Company, the Board of Control, the lndia and Burma Offices, and copies of the proceedings of the Government of India) the European Manuscripts are distinguished from the Records by their status as private papers. They trace their origin to the decision of the Directors of the East lndia Company in 1801 to establish a Library for the safe custody of books and manuscripts placed in their care by their servants in lndia and others, coupled with the bequest in the same year of the papers of Robert Orme, lately the Company's historiographer. The European Manuscripts Section therefore began as a place of deposit for private papers relating to lndia as distinct from the Company's official archives. In 1858 the Company was abolished and its Library and Records were taken over by the newly established lndia Office. In 1947, with the achievement of independence by lndia and Pakistan, it was the turn of the lndia Office to be abolished, and the Library and Records, now vastly increased by the addition of the lndia Office's own archives, were inherited by the Commonwealth Relations Office and then by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Finally, in 1982 the lndia Office Library and Records were transferred to the British Library and in 1991 merged with the latter's Oriental Collections Department to form the Oriental and lndia Office Collections of the British Library. Throughout these organisational changes the European Manuscripts Section has retained its responsibility for the receipt and preservation of private papers. Chronologically the main strength of the European Manuscripts lies in the period from about 1750 up to 1947, though there are some holdings for the earlier period including the earliest known summary of the East lndia Company's foundation charter of 1600, and one or two collections reflect continuing British contacts with lndia and Pakistan in the immediate post- colonial period. The geographical scope of the Manuscripts, though naturally concentrating on, is not limited to, the sub-continent of India, and reflects the East lndia Company's and the Government of India's contacts with many other countries ranging from Egypt to Japan and from Tibet to Sri Lanka. Documents of every type, private letters, diaries, memoirs, official correspondence and papers, drafts of scholarly or literary works, newspaper cuttings, scrapbooks, photographs and paintings, are to be found in the European Manuscripts. Most of them, as their name implies, are in a European language, normally English, but Oriental languages also occur, for example among the papers of a scholar such as Brian Houghton INTRODUCTION vii Hodgson (1800-94) whose collection includes material in a number of Indian languages as well as English. Nor are the collections confined to manuscripts in the strict sense of the term, since they also include many typescript papers, and printed documents both published and unpublished. Indeed the volumes of printed unpublished correspondence between Viceroys and Secretaries of State are probably the single most important class of documents held by the European Manuscripts Section. The Section also collects photocopies and microfilms of papers relevant to South Asian studies which are held in other Repositories or are still in private hands, and in recent years it has built up a collection of tape- recorded interviews with people who knew British lndia during the last decades of the Raj. All manner of people are represented in the European Manuscripts, and any attempt to classify them is bound to be arbitrary; but the following broad categories and particular examples may help to give a general picture of the Section's holdings. Sentants of the Raj 'Servant' may seem something of a misnomer for some of the commanding personalities who promoted British conquest and rule in India: men such as Clive, the Lawrence brothers, Curzon or Mountbatten. Yet servants of the East lndia Company or the Crown is what they were. Altogether, the European Manuscripts contain collections of fifteen Viceroys and twelve Secretaries of State, and it is possible to study British policy making at the highest level through the collections of either a Viceroy or a Secretary of State (and sometimes both) for an almost continuous period from the assumption of the Government of lndia by the Crown in 1858 to the achievement of independence by lndia and Pakistan in 1947. With the Mountbatten collection the study can be carried into the first months of the administration of independent India. The following table lists the collections which provide this unique overview: Viceroy Dates of Office Secretary of State 1859-66 Wood Elgin (8th Earl) 1862-63 Lawrence 1864-69 1866-67 Salisbury (microfilm) 1868-74 Argyll (microfilm) Northbrook 1872-76 1874-78 Salisbury (2nd time) (microfilm) Lytton Hartington Dufferin Cross Lansdowne Elgin (9th Earl) Hamilton Curzon Morley Chelmsford Montagu INTRODUCTION Reading 19 2 1-26 19 24-28 Birkenhead Irwin (Halifax) 1926-31 1931- 35 Hoare (Templewood) Willingdon (private 1931- 36 letters only) 1935-40 Zetland Linlithgow 1936-43 Wavell (photocopies) 1943-47 1947 Listowel Mountbatten 1947-48 (microfilm) Lower down the hierarchy, there are collections of some fifty Provincial Governors, and the papers, memoirs or diaries of a very large number of East lndia Company servants and members of the lndian Civil and Political Services, with the lndian Police and the specialist Ecclesiastical, Educational, Engineering, Forest and Medical Services also represented. On the military side there are collections of only six Commanders-in-Chief, but regimental officers of the lndian Army make a very strong showing, with British Army officers also present. The rank and file put pen to paper only rarely, but when they did the result could be graphic, for example the description by Private William Guess of the exhausting marches, battles, and summary executions of rebel sepoys, which he experienced during the lndian Mutiny. For most of the period of Company rule its servants went to lndia to seek their fortunes. Their services to the Company and the Raj, though sometimes very great, were almost incidental to their private ambition to make their fortune. Clive is the classic example of this type, and the European Manuscripts contain two collections relating to him (his own and Robert Orme's). Perhaps more typical were men whose careers were on a less heroic scale, for example the unlucky Harry Verelst, Clive's friend and successor as Governor of Bengal 1767-69, who retired to England with a modest fortune only to lose it and die in exile in France where he had fled to escape his creditors. In the nineteenth century, ethical standards began to improve, and crude fortune hunting was replaced by the steady pursuit of a well paid career, while some men even began to feel a sense of service to lndia and the lndian people as well as to the British Raj. Mountstuart Elphinstone (East lndia Company servant 1795-18 27 and Governor of Bombay 1819 -27), Sir Thomas Munro (Madras Army 1780-1827 and Governor of Madras 1820- 27), Sir Henry Lawrence (Bengal Artillery 1823-57 and President of the Punjab Board of Administration 1849-53), F L Brayne (Indian Civil Servant 1905-41 and advocate of 'village uplift') and Penderel Moon (Indian Civil Servant 1929-43 and servant of the independent Government of lndia 1948-61) may be cited as examples of this trend. Indeed, by the twentieth century the idea that the British were in lndia to help Indians was almost universal among members of the services. Critics of imperialism and 'orientalism' have since attacked this claim as at best patronising, at worst hypocritical. There is perhaps no better way of testing it than by the study of the private papers deposited in the European Manuscripts. INTRODUCTION ix Missionaries For missionaries, of course, the idea of service was uppermost from the first. In their own eyes they were in lndia to serve the cause of Christianity, the lndian people, and only last and least the Raj, though many doubtless believed that Christianity and the Raj were mutually supporting. Their sense of mission could be expressed in various ways. Some missionaries pursued the straightforward aim of converting lndians to Christianity, for example William Carey (17 61- 18 34) and John Marshman (17 94-18 77) at the outset of the movement to evangelize India, or later the Lakher Pioneer Mission which was active among the Lakher or Mara people in the Lushai Hills of Assam from 1907 to 1975. Others, perceiving that acttve proselytization might all too easily offend Hindu and Muslim sensitivities, preferred to bear witness to their Christianity by offering lndians the advantages of western medicine (for example the Vellore Christian Medical College and Hospital founded in 1902 by Dr Ida Scudder the daughter of an American missionary family), or education (the Women's Christian College, Madras, opened in 1915 by a consortium of British and American missionary societies). Others went to lndia as missionaries but were themselves converted by Gandhi to serve different causes: the pursuit of lndian political aspirations in the case of C F Andrews, or the welfare and scholarly study of primitive tribes in the case of Verrier Elwin. Entrepreneurs The East lndia Company was of course itself a commercial body, and as already mentioned its servants were no mean entrepreneurs on their own account. However, the Company's statutory monopoly of the lndian trade was contested by occasional interlopers and free merchants. One example in the European Manuscripts is Joseph Fowke who passed in and out of the Company's service, but who from 1771 to 1781 was a free-lance trader in diamonds. There were also the firms of managing agents, indispensable to all in providing banking and other commercial services. But it is really only with the termination of the Company's trading monopoly in lndia in 1813, and the restriction of its servants' activities to administration, that a separate business class began to emerge, a process which was further accelerated by the termination in 1833 of the Company's right to regulate European immigration into India. A notable record of the life of a nineteenth century businessman was left by William Prinsep in a very full memoir written about 1870. He recounts his early days with the well known firm of Palmer (L Co, the trauma of its collapse which triggered the great Calcutta banking crash of 1830, and his own rescue by the prominent lndian businessman Dwarkanath Tagore whose firm he joined and who emerges from Prinsep's pages as a most attractive personality. The mid-century saw the arrival of railways in India, and the early beginnings of the Great lndian Peninsular Railway can be traced in the papers, dated 1844-51, of its projector John Chapman. In the present century, the running of the Nizam's State Railway in Hyderabad can be studied in the papers of its General Manager Cyril Lloyd Jones. The life style of twentieth century European businessmen in lndia can be illustrated from the diaries and scrapbooks of Wilfrid Russell of the Bombay firm of Killick, Nixon & Co, the letters of Albrecht von Leyden, manager of Agfa Ltd in India, or from a number of tape-recorded interviews in the Oral x INTRODUCTION Archives Collection; while an overview of European commercial activities, aspirations and anxieties throughout South Asia can be derived from the papers of two trade associations: the India, Pakistan and Burma Association (papers dated 1941-70) and the British Association of Malaysia and Singapore (papers dated 1920-74). Nor should we forget that alongside big businessmen in lndia there was an extensive class of Europeans engaged in retail trades, for instance Frederick Emery a jeweller working for Orr & Sons, Madras in the 1870s, or W D Holmes and his son R B Holmes who followed eachother as professional photographers in the North-West Frontier Province from the late nineteenth century until the coming of independence. A rather different group of European entrepreneurs were the planters. The earliest collection in this category reminds us that the British were not the only European settlers in India, for in the papers (dated 1735-1840) of the Verlee family and their associates we see something of the lives of a group of French indigo planters at Chandernagore. Thomas Machell first showed his entrepreneurial spirit as a boy by running away to sea, but later turned to indigo planting in Bengal and finally coffee planting at Wynaad in Madras. His diaries provide a sometimes poignant record of his experiences between 1840 and 1856, including service in the First China War. The papers of the Indian Tea Association (comprising over 2300 files and volumes) offer a vast quantity of information for research into the tea planting industry between 1879 and 1982, while a more intimate view of the tea planter's life is given by tape recordings with Walter Mackay, a plantation manager with James Finlay & Co in the High Range of Travancore, or with Father Webb, SJ, who was born and grew up in the 1920s and 30s on tea plantations managed by his father in the Duars region of Bengal. Discoverers of lndia For many of the British in lndia the country came as a revelation, a strange and fascinating world which cast its spell over them and drew them on to explore it and unlock its secrets, to learn its languages, to understand the manners and customs of its many different peoples, to appreciate its history, culture, art and antiquities. These discoverers of lndia came from all classes and occupations. Two early examples were sea captains: Thomas Bowrey (papers dated c1680-1709) who corresponded with the Oxford academic Thomas Hyde about several eastern languages, and Isaac Pyke who described the cave temples of Elephanta in a journal, dated 1712-13, illustrated with lively, if naive, pen and ink drawings. For the most famous discoverer of all, Sir William Jones, his appointment in 1783 as a Judge of the Supreme Court at Calcutta simply provided the means of pursuing on the spot the oriental studies for which he had already acquired a considerable reputation. The European Manuscripts have only a few items of Jonesiana, but these include a rare copy of an early work, his translation from the Arabic of a treatise on the Muslim law of inheritance. This copy belonged to Lt-Gen Thomas Maniott of the Madras Army, who has bound up with it his own manuscript translation made about I801 of another Arabic legal text. Marriott's work remains unpublished to this day and he is unknown as an orientalist. But he is typical of all those British men and women who took a quiet and often unnoticed interest in the land in which their lot had been cast. For others, as for Sir William INTRODUCTION Jones, oriental studies became the passion of their life, easily overshadowing their official duties. Thus Colonel Colin Mackenzie employed almost forty years in lndia (1783-1821) to amass several large collections of oriental manuscripts in about fourteen different languages, together with translations thereof, copies of rock inscriptions, coins and sculptures. James Prinsep, an official of the Calcutta mint, sacrificed his sanity to deciphering ancient rock and coin inscriptions; while another employee of the mint, Horace Hayman Wilson, achieved fame as an oriental scholar, and went on to become the East lndia Company's Librarian in 1836. While some discovered India's history, others explored her geography, and the European Manuscripts contain the journals and papers of many travellers within and beyond her borders, among them George Bogle one of the first Europeans to visit Tibet (1774-75), Francis Buchanan-Hamilton who between 1807 and 1814 compiled a detailed survey of Bengal, William Moorcroft (papers dated 1812-25) who journeyed as far as Bukhara, and Charles Masson (papers dated ~1828-53)w ho explored Punjab, Sind, Baluchistan, Afghanistan and Iran. The papers (dated 1820- 58) of Brian Houghton Hodgson, testify to a lifetime's study of Nepal. In the twentieth century, Sir Charles Bell, whose official duties took him to Tibet, became a personal friend of the Dalai Lama and a profound scholar of that country. The tradition of the scholarly official was maintained right up to independence, as witnessed by the joint collection of W G Archer, lndian Civil Service, Bihar 1931-47, and his wife Mildred who between them became international authorities on lndian poetry, lndian painting (especially popular painting), and western painters in India. Women From Margaret Clive to Lady Mountbatten, women have left their mark on the Raj, but inevitably in an age that had not yet seen the rise of feminism, they did so chiefly as the partners of their menfolk. A very great number of the collections in the European Manuscripts include letters from the wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters of servants and soldiers of the Raj; and it was often women who were the recipients of those letters to their distant homes which tell us so much of the thoughts of the sometimes lonely young men who found themselves administering an area the size of an English county or campaigning on some inhospitable frontier. Women are especially well represented among the Raj's diarists, and the well known journals of Honoria Lawrence, Lady Sale, and Fanny Eden are merely the best known examples of a large and informative class of material. Women, no less than men, have left memoirs of their life in India, and contributed to the Oral Archives Collection. A number of European women sought to improve the lot of their lndian sisters, and there are several collections which testify to their concern. For example, two University teachers, Louise Ouwerkerk (papers dated 1929-83) and Margaret Hunt (papers dated 1932-43) have left very full accounts of their careen in Travancore and Madras; the Eileen Palmer Collection records the repeated tours which she and her friend Edith How-Martyn made in the 1930s to India, Burma and Malaysia to explain to women the techniques and benefits of birth control; and finally three very large collections relating to the Christian Medical College and Hospital, Vellore, the Missionary Settlement for University Women, Bombay, and the Women's Christian xii INTRODUCTION College, Madras, reflect the considerable efforts devoted by women in Britain and America from the 1890s onwards to give Indian women the same access as men to educational opportunities. Areas outside lndia Though the main strength of the European Manuscripts Collection is undoubtedly its documentation of British India, material will also be found on virtually all countries with which the East lndia Company or the Government of lndia had contacts. Burma, governed as a Province of British lndia until 1937, is particularly well represented, and the holdings contain collections of five Governors including the two last, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith and Sir Hubert Rance, as well as the letters, diaries and memoirs of numerous members of the civil service in Burma or their wives. But besides Burma, the European Manuscripts contain material relating to Egypt, Ethiopa, the Middle East, Central Asia, Afghanistan, Tibet, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia, China and Japan. What, in the end, can we learn from all these papers ? It is, in fact, almost impossible to give a brief answer to this question, so diverse are the contents and so wide is the range of the European Manuscripts, but perhaps three major themes can be distinguished. Firstly, the servants and soldiers of the Raj easily outnumber all the other categories put together, and the dominant theme of their papers is the political, administrative and military history of British lndia and Burma. A second theme, as one might expect in a collection of private papers, is the private lives of the British, their hopes and fears, their social and sporting relaxations, their family concerns, their careers, ambitions and disappointments. And it is a theme illustrated from many different angles by papers from all the various categories listed above. Thirdly, there is the interface between the Orient and the Occident. On the one hand we see British admiration for the ancient civilization which they discovered in India, on the other their effort to convert that civilization to western ways or even, as some would argue,' imprison it within western thought-patterns through the varied activities of administrators, entrepreneurs, missionaries, and orientalists; and we see the Indians themselves, as viewed through the writings of the European strangers in their midst. Those writings display many different attitudes: there is both arrogance and respect between the races, both conflict and co-operation between the rulers and the ruled, both hostility and affection between masters and servants and officers and men. In sum, the European Manuscripts offer no simple picture of the relationship between Europeans and Indians, but a rich source for the study of that theme. The Catalogue Catalogues of some individual collections in the European Manuscripts have been published, and a catalogue of all the manuscripts, formerly on cards now on computer, has been available in the Reading Room. But the present work is the first catalogue of the European Manuscripts in their entirety to be produced in print. It covers deposits of European 1 Most notably Edward Said, Orientalism (reprint London 1995).

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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.