IOR/R/1/6

When orders were given in May 1947 for the review of Political Department records in Simla and Delhi and for the transfer of selected records to the United Kingdom High Commission in New Delhi, Nawabzada Saeed Alam Khan and Major W. P. Cranston of the Indian Political Service were appointed as Officers on Special Duty for Records Disposal. They took Dixon's report [R/1/6/2-3] as the basis for their work, and in June reviewed records in Simla [R/1/6/27-43] and sent selected records to the United Kingdom High Commission [R/1/6/4-6]. Cranston reviewed records in the Political Department in Delhi in July [R/1/6/23-26], and in August transferred to the staff of the United Kingdom High Commission.

In the High Commission, Cranston dealt both with Political Department records and with Residency records received there [R/1/6/7-9], locating specific files in answer to requests from the Government of India and from the Commonwealth Relations Office in London [R/1/6/10-12] and beginning to sort and list the Political Department files [R/1/6/13-22 and R/1/6/44]. When, late in the year, he fell ill and returned to England, the records were crated in their half-listed state and shipped to London in December [R/1/6/45-46].

Returning to work at the Commonwealth Relations Office when the shipment of records arrived in London in March 1948, Cranston at first continued to sort files on the same lines as before [R/1/6/47-52]. By introducing more economical methods of listing, he produced draft lists of both Political Department files and Residency records by the summer [R/1/6/55-103], and submitted them typed with a memorandum explaining his arrangement in August 1948 [R/1/6/108-149]. Large sections of the Residency records, especially Bombay Political Department records transmitted to Presidencies in the 1930s, came with their own 'index registers' [R/1/6/151-178], which Cranston incorporated into his own system of finding aids.

Cranston had to deal with office requests for specific files [R/1/6/104-107], with the late receipt of Baluchistan files from Karachi [R/1/6/179], with the re-transmission of selected files to the Government of India [R/1/6/182], with the question of the disposal of pre-1880 Residency records [R/1/6/53], and with missing files [R/1/6/54 and R/1/6/183]. He concluded his work by providing a rough list of his working papers [R1/6/1].

The selected Kashmir Residency records, missing in 1947, were discovered in India in 1949 and sent to London to join the main bulk of the records [R/1/6/150 and R/1/6/180], and a small group of files found in the High Commission was added in 1960 [R/1/6/181].

An attempt was made in 1967 and 1968 to re-arrange the Political Department files in their original record room order, although without understanding the sequence of selection and arrangement of 1947-48. This arrangement, in 36 sections in the India Office Records R/1 series [R/1/6/184-187], persisted until the 1980s despite its imperfections, while investigations continued, through the medium of the documentation of the 1947 review, into the organisation of Political Department record rooms and registry systems. The present list is the product of these investigations [R/1/6/188-205].