Uncovering Indian voices in the records of the East India Company
With over three million images of content from the India Office Records now available and searchable, East India Company aids in the recovery of the marginalised voices of colonial India.
As befits an organisation that was once the most powerful in the world, the records of the East India Company are incredibly vast, spanning 400 years and literal miles of shelving at the British Library. The fifth module to be added to the East India Company resource 'Correspondence: Domestic Life, Trade and Governance' introduces almost 1,000 new volumes of correspondence sent and received by the Company’s administration between 1699 and 1859.
These books contain detailed records of almost every major decision that governed the lives of hundreds of millions of people across the Indian subcontinent and South-East Asia living under Company rule during this period. Yet despite the volume of material, the perspective from which these documents were recorded is – inevitably – overwhelmingly that of the coloniser. As David Veevers explains in his essay for module V, one of the most crucial challenges that twenty-first-century researchers of this institution face is reckoning with this paradox: uncovering the hidden voices of the colonised amidst this ‘embarrassment of archival riches’.
Letter to the Company’s Court of Directors on 14 July 1847, IOR/E/4/1084, copyright of The British Library
When they do appear, glimpses of colonial experiences in these records can be both rewarding and revealing. Amongst the correspondence preserved in IOR/E/4/1084 – a collection of original draft despatches to Bombay [Mumbai] in 1847 – is a letter to the Company’s Court of Directors on 14 July. This letter relates to the establishment of a Parsee [sic] Benevolent Institution, a charitable foundation to support the Parsi community in the city by providing education and financial aid to its members.
The Institution was the brainchild of Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy (1783-1859), a Parsi businessman and philanthropist who made his name as a merchant in the Company’s service, eventually creating his own firm and amassing considerable wealth. Having risen from humble beginnings, Jejeebhoy devoted his later life – and much of his fortune – to addressing the widespread poverty amongst his countrymen through charitable works, and in 1842 became the first Indian to receive a knighthood from the British Empire.
Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy (1783-1859), copyright of The British Library
By July 1847, a Deed of Trust was in place for the Institution’s establishment; however, as the letter reveals, there were complications. We read that the Advocate General had expressed concerns around the religious nature of the schools, as well as Jejeebhoy’s wish that the Institution would also fund funeral and wedding expenses for poor Parsis. Nevertheless, the letter confirms that ‘there shall be founded at Bombay two schools (one for boys, and the other for girls), and an almshouse; with corresponding Establishments at four other places, and that the management shall be vested in a Punchayat composed of Parsees’, and that the proposed contributions towards marriages and funerals would be permissible ‘in the light of charity’. It also specifies that any religious or charitable work must not be of a religious character, so as to remain consistent with the Company’s principle of ‘refraining from all interference with the religious institutions…of the natives of India’.
Eventually founded in 1849, the Parsee Benevolent Institution thus became the first educational institution of its kind in Western India, with further foundations later appearing in Valsad, Navsari and Surat – all of which are still operational today, long after the end of colonial rule, and retain the name of their founder, who is not mentioned in the letter.
About the author
Jade Bailey is an Assistant Editor at AM.
About the collection
East India Company 'India Office Records, E: Correspondence: Domestic Life, Governance and Territorial Expansion' is out now.
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