We are pleased to announce that Cambridge University users now have access to the Indian Political Intelligence Files, 1912-1950 which provides access to primary source material including unique newspapers and includes access to most of the newspapers in the British Newspaper Archive.
Access is available on and off campus to member of the University of Cambridge and on campus to researchers at the University Library via the links in iDiscover and the Databases A-Z.
Contents
The files of IPI contain a mass of previously unavailable material on the monitoring of organizations and individuals considered a threat to British India. They include surveillance reports and intercepts from MI.5, MI.6 and Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, and a large number of intelligence summaries and position papers. Although the main thrust is anti-communist, exponents of the various nationalist movements were also monitored.
IPI kept files on most of the period’s best known activists and political figures – including Gandhi, as well as Subhas Chandra Bose, Jawaharlal Nehru and V.J. Patel. Their movements were recorded, their correspondence read and their publications combed through for allegedly subversive statements. In addition, there are more than eighty separate files on Indian censorship.
Characteristics
The IPI files serve as essential source material for the study of revolutionary movements in pre-independence India – and the support such movements received from Britain, Europe, the USSR and North America. They also shed new light on the way in which these movements were perceived and evaluated in London.
This archive contains previously classified data on political activists and various “subversive” movements.
The files expose in great detail the operations of a secret intelligence service, documenting the main concerns of the British in the last half century of the Raj.
Provenance
After the abolition of the India Office, the files were transferred to secure custody at the India Office Records which post-1947 was successively under the British Government’s Commonwealth Relations Office, Commonwealth Office, and Foreign and Commonwealth Office. In 1982, when the India Office Records were administratively transferred to the British Library, the files were recalled by the FCO. They were released into the public domain, after vetting by the FCO’s Sensitivity Review Unit, and returned to the British Library’s Oriental and India Office Collections in 1998.
Language
Texts are primarily in English, but some items are in Urdu or Hindi.
Content provided by: THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Photo by Abhinav Tripathi: https://www.pexels.com/photo/columns-in-traditional-building-in-delhi-15774367/
ejournals & databases services 