Spectrum: A brief history of Modern India

This happened as the work of the East India

Company was distributed among various branches—public or general, revenue, political, military, secret, commercial, judicial, education, etc.

James Rennell as the first Surveyor General of Bengal in 1767

The records of the Reforms Office are very useful for an analytical study of the constitutional developments from 1920 to 1937.

the archives of the Kingdom of Lahore (popularly known as Khalsa Darbar records from 1800 to 1849), are important source material. 

the pre-British public archives in India is the Peshwa Daftar housed in the Alienation Office, Pune.

the princely states of Rajasthan, viz., Jaipur, Bikaner, Jodhpur, Udaipur, etc., the archives of these states, now housed in the Rajasthan State Archives at Bikaner

the history of Dogra rule from 1846 in Jammu and Kashmir can be studied in the valuable collection of state papers housed at Jammu.

The other significant archives of the princely states are those of Gwalior, Indore, Bhopal and Rewa, all in Madhya Pradesh, Travancore and Cochin in Kerala, Mysore in Karnataka and Kolhapur in Maharashtra.

The early records of Fort Williams (Bengal Presidency) were lost during the sack of Calcutta in 1756, but the archives of the Bengal presidency after the British victory at Plassey have survived more or less in a complete series, which are partly available in the National Archives of India and partly in the State Archives of West Bengal.

The records of the Madras Presidency begin from AD 1670 and include records of the Governor and Council of Fort St. George.

In these records there is plenty of information bearing on the rise of the English East India Company as a political power in the south and in the Deccan, including the Anglo-French struggle and the English conflicts with other Indian powers.

The archives of Bombay Presidency, housed in the Maharashtra Secretariat Record Office, Mumbai, are extremely useful in studying the history of Western India—Maharashtra, Gujarat, Sindh and the Kannada-speaking districts of the erstwhile Bombay Presidency which were incorporated in Mysore in 1956.

The archives related to the Portuguese preserved in Goa, mainly belonging to the period from 1700 to 1900,

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