The year 1911 saw the publication of the first volume of the Calendar of Persian Correspondence, arguably the most significant publication of the period of the Imperial Record Department that had been founded in 1891, under G.W. Forrest. These records were a part of the very large corpus of ‘ancient papers’ of the East India Company that had long been held in ‘various secretariat offices at Calcutta’. They included some 26,000 bound volumes, as well as 1.5 million unbound documents. The Calendar was to present to the public a summary version of merely a part of these, namely the Persian-language ‘letters which passed between some of the [East India] Company’s Servants and Indian Rulers and Notables’, commencing in 1759. Though initially concerned mainly with the ‘Affairs in Bengal’, the series—of which the first five volumes, covering the years 1759 to 1780, had appeared by 1930—eventually came to take into account other parts of India as well.

 

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