The untold story of the India Office Library and Records, 1946-1982
This thesis examines the long-running contestations that surrounded the India Office collection in the decades after the partition of India: who did it belong to, whose history did it contain, and who needed easy and ensured access to it? It analyses the ways in which the British Government responded to the formal claims for ownership from India, Pakistan, and Burma, and the changes they effected to the collection in the three decades after 1947. It places emphasis on the secrecy that surrounded these negotiations, which would lead to this dispute becoming a forgotten matter. Second, it shows the implications of this dispute on the evolution of partition historiography. It retrieves proposals of unwritten histories of partition from the 1950s and 1960s to challenge the wisdom that traces the origins of the field of history writing and partition studies to the release of documents in the Transfer of Power series. While the narrative is driven primarily by recently declassified official correspondence held at the National Archives at Kew, the thesis pays attention too, to the numerous written records, secondary works and histories of partition, recollections by individuals, and tributes to certain figures, which were produced in this period and are available in the public domain. Through this use, it disentangles some of the threads that make up the history-writing and memorialisation of partition in (mainly) Britain, but also in India and Pakistan.
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations