Calendar of Persian Correspondence with and Introduction by Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Volume V: 1776-1780 (National Archives of India: Archives in India Historical Reprints) - Hardcover

Alam, Professor Department Of South Asian Languages And Civilization Muzaffar

9789380607689: Calendar of Persian Correspondence with and Introduction by Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Volume V: 1776-1780 (National Archives of India: Archives in India Historical Reprints)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 9380607687 ISBN 13: 9789380607689

Publisher: Primus Books, 2013

The year 1911 saw the publication of the first volume of the Calendar of Persian Correspondence, arguably the most significant publication of the period of the Imperial Record Department that had been founded in 1891, under G.W. Forrest. One of Forrest's eventual successors was C.R. Wilson, who conceived a 'brilliant scheme, that of calendaring the entire series of Persian records . . . '. These records were a part of the very large corpus of 'ancient papers' of the East India Company that had long been held in 'various secretariat offices at Calcutta'. They included some 26,000 bound volumes, as well as 1.5 million unbound documents, making up a total of roughly 18 million folios of Company-related papers in various languages. The Calendar was to present to the public a summary version of merely a part of these, namely the Persian-language 'letters which passed between some of the [East India] Company's Servants and Indian Rulers and Notables', commencing in 1759. Though initially concerned mainly with the 'Affairs in Bengal', the series-of which the first five volumes, covering the years to 1780, had appeared by 1930- eventually came to take into account other parts of India as well. The series was concerned therefore with the first phase of indirect rule by the British in India, that mediated by the East India Company. It was a phase for which a vast quantity of English-language records obviously existed as well, and these records had been extensively used by historians of the Company from the 1760s onwards. Since the Company's history from that time had been plagued not only by bitter factional infighting amongst its servants, but by quarrels with Parliament, even such records did not speak in unison. The early scandals surrounding Robert Clive, Henry Vansittart, It may also be noted that a particular difficulty: as pointed out by E. Denison Ross in his preface, the early part of the Calendar 'is based entirely on documents written in the English language', whos

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About the Author:

Muzaffar Alam is George V. Bobrinskoy Professor in South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.

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