The India Office, unlike the empire it governed, was an instant institution, riddled with paradox. It was born out of the Matiny in 1858 while the embers of the revolt were still being extinguished. Yet its arrival in the family of governmental offices excited little comment, for it had been many years in gestation and bore a remarkable resemblance to the Home Government of the East India Company which had fathered it. Its dissolution on 15 August 1947 was as undramatic, Tributes appeared in the press. Perhaps the most poignant came from a sensitive pen in the Glasgow Herald:
There will be no valedictory ceremony, nothing at all to mark the occasion except the visit of a Ministry of Works employee to take off the old brass plate.......
Those dim and venerable corridors, hung with pictures of Elder Statesmen, those shadowy, high-ceilinged offices, are just as they were; nobody has moved the furniture in the reception rooms, or interfered with that odd arrangement of pictures in one of them which placed a portrait of Bonapart opposite the fine, bushy-bearded countenance of a Persian plenipotentiary. These things are all undisturbed; a housewifely person might even remark that the dust upon them has suffered no undue shaking up for many years. However, outside the walls of the office there is evidence that some people are aware of coming change. A chalked-up legend reads: "Carmen! Don't shoot no more coke here"-a sign, perhaps, that the Ministry of Fuel have crossed one Departmental customer off the list,
Despite its unobtrusive advent and departure, for eighty-nine years the India Office was the Home Government of Britain's most prized, and, perhaps, most challenging overseas possession. It is one of the anomalies of the historiography of the British Empire and Commonwealth that whereas the Colonial Office has been subjected to intensive scrutiny, the India Office has been neglected. There is no systematic, comprehensive account of its origins, structure, function and the formation of policy. Only a handful of books and theses relate directly or indirectly to the subject: none of them spread their nets widely enough for a good catch. Indian history remains top-heavy with overwritten Secretaries of State to the whole or partial exclusion of the Indian Office itself. It is the story of the governor without the engine. One book, by Sir Malcolm Seton, bears the title The India Office (London, 1926). Informative as it is, it contains virtually nothing about the formation of policy. S. N. Singh has attempted a study of The Secretary of State for India and his Council 1858-1919 (Delhi, 1962). This is an unsatisfactory book. Anything beyond the Secretary of State and the Council of India does not seem to exist. There is no critical assessment of the formation of policy. For the sixties, better writing is to be found in R. J. Moore's Sir Charles Wood's Indian Policy 1853-66 (Manchester, 1966) and Thomas R. Metcalf's The Aftermath of Revolt: India 1858-1870 (Princeton, 1965). But neither give the formation of policy in the India Office the prominence it deserves. The only other detailed work is Prashanto K. Chatterji's The Making of Indian Policy 1853-65 (Calcutta, 1975). Like others, it neglects the role of personality, experience, procedures, the Council of India, departments and departmental committees. However, for the later 19th and early 20th centuries the work of Dr. Arnold Kaminsky, based on his unpublished Ph.D. thesis, "Policy and Paperwork: The Formation of Policy and the India Office, 1883-1909, with special reference to the Permanent Under-Secretaryship of Sir Arthur Godley" (University of California, Los Angeles, 1975), is now opening up new and necessary dimensions.
The traditional indifference to the detail of the India Office, especially for the sixties, has resulted in a historiography without balance, an unsatisfactory state of affairs which is all the more frustrating because the historians know that the Secretary of State for India was the Secretary of State for India in Council and housed in the India Office. That he was not continually creative in the formation of policy is also common knowledge. True enough, the dictates of time and space impose restraints upon the historian of British India to the neglect of the Home Government. It is not always expedient to delve into the depths of the India Office and assess the importance of the many elements which went into the making of the despatches to India. There is a natural dichotomy in all history of empire, between the Home Government and the colony itself. It is often a false dichotomy, yet necessity and convention sometimes force the historian to choose on which side of the dividing line he can best operate. The result is usually a lack of perspective. In the case of India the flesh and gristle of the India Office is lacking. The Old Indians who are appointed to the Council of India seem to become less substantial. Personalities fade into the shadows and processes never emerge from the uniform pale grey which shrouds anonymity. While the heart of the "colonial" empire beats healthily and regularly, that of the Indian Empire generates concern for some historians.
An important reason for this state of affairs is the fascination of historians with the image of the East India Company. They have been unwittingly captives of the great days when Malcolm, Munro, Metcalfe and Elphinstone stalked like giants across the subcontinent, inflating the image of the Company and becoming legendary even in their own time. Because of this, historians have found it difficult to adapt to a new image of a less romantic, and certainly less exciting institution such as the India Office which was not involved in conquest and thus did not contribute to the glorious past, The giants have their equivalent later in such people as Gandhi, Jinnah and Nehru-but these latter-day heroes were Indians, not Europeans. Thus, increasingly after 1858 the attention of historians was riveted on India rather than London, on the charkha rather than the Council of India.
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