There is a delicious anecdote that Harvey Mansfield, the legendary Harvard professor, loved to share when he lectured on Thomas Hobbes. In his masterpiece LeviathanHobbes famously posits that life without government would be “nasty, brutish, and short”. Unfortunately, having neither read nor listened with due care, one hapless undergraduate, Mansfield would recount, went on to write his term paper on how life without government would be “nasty, British, and short”.
This anecdote came to mind on the second anniversary of one of the worst cyberattacks in Britain. Back in October 2023, the computers of the British Library (BL) were taken over by hackers. When the BL rightly refused to pay the ransom they demanded, the hackers retaliated by destroying the management systems vital to marshalling the 170 million records under its care. To its credit, the BL immediately set about restoring services and subsequently published a frank report detailing how inadequate investments in technology had allowed this “cyber incident” to occur. In the meantime, its outstanding staff stepped up to help patrons trace items manually, serving as what one report described as “human computers”.
The real horror is that two years hence, the BL is yet to fully recover. Several catalogues, the very essence of a library, remain offline. A new library management system, which was due to be released this week, has been postponed because staff have gone on strike over inadequate pay. Meanwhile, the £6-7 million spent on necessary technological upgrades was reported to have depleted the BL’s reserves by 40%. Overall, the glaring vulnerabilities that allowed the hackers in and the limping recovery since then are symptoms of Britain’s buckling public finances.
What makes this imbroglio a cause of particular concern for India is that the BL is the principal repository of the records and holdings of the India Office. The contents — ranging from surveys, maps, and artworks to memoranda, official files, and private papers — are, without doubt, the single-most important resource in the world to understand what transpire in India between 1757 and 1947, spanning as they do rule by the East India Company and the Crown. So extensive is this collection that it occupies some 14 km of shelving.
This concentration of resources in a small patch of London has two implications. First, it means that scholars must make pilgrimages to one of the most expensive cities in the world. This requirement disadvantages scholars from the developing world, who felt their geographical disadvantage all the more when the pandemic limited international travel. Second, it means that our ability to study the emergence of modern India is worryingly dependent on the upkeep of one institution. The hacking incident made it difficult to locate records, but it did not destroy them. It is possible, however, to envision worse happening, with studies warning that the climate crisis is increasing the risk of flash flooding in London.
The obvious remedy to these concerns about equity and preservation is to digitize the India Office Records and make them freely available to the wider world. Several important repositories such as the Wellcome Collection and the Getty Collection have already made their holdings open access. But given its strained finances, and the size of its holdings, the BL is unlikely to follow suit. There is an alternative, however. Over the past decade, the Qatar Foundation has funded the BL to create the Qatar Digital Library, a completely free online resource that beautifully digitises and presents colonial records relating to the Gulf. Might the government of India learn from this example and create a non-profit foundation to fund the digitization of irreplaceable Indian records held in Britain?
No such thing will ever happen. This much is clear from the government’s lackluster performance on this front in India. Every few months, there is a grandiose press release promising the imminent digitization of millions of valuable holdings in some library or archive in the country. But hardly any of these ventures have borne fruit. Try visiting the National Digital Library of India (NDLI), whose prehistoric website would actually be improved by being hacked. Or try using the typo-ridden digital catalogs of the National Archives of India (NAI). There is a reason why its portal, bravely described as Abhilekh Patalis better known to researchers as Abhilekh Pataal,
The fundamental issue is that, unlike in Britain, the bureaucracy in India has no genuine desire or incentive to support historical research. The instinct is to control and prohibit. There are plenty of promises to satisfy political masters, but on the ground, nothing ever changes. Little wonder, then, that the most interesting efforts to preserve and widen access have come from private initiatives such as Srujanika, a collective whose digitization of rare Odia texts has been documented in The Volunteer Archivists, a moving film by Subhashish Panigrahi. Ironically, the BL, whose mandate is to serve the British public, has probably done more than the Ministry of Culture to bring unique Indian archives online. Its noble Endangered Archives Program (EAP) has made available materials from private archives and libraries in India that successive governments have not cared to help.
What all this means is that, incredibly, nearly eight decades after Independence, Indians must hope that Britain keeps calm and carries on, because their best chance of studying their own history depends upon it. In India, history is meant to be fought over, not to be preserved or to be seen. If you want to actually inspect a document or view an artefact, your luck depends on whether the British carried it away (and that Russian hackers have not carried it away from them in turn). Perhaps there is something admirable about this arrangement — the expatriation of our history. Like a coursing river, contemporary India cares solely about moving forward. Only those civilizations that believe their greatest days are behind them need to worry about crumbling pagodas and decaying archives. We will create new monuments and new memories. And for those who wish to think of what was and could have been, for them there is London, hackers and pandemics permitting.
Rahul Sagar is Global Network associate professor at NYU Abu Dhabi. His recent books include The Progressive Maharaja and To Raise A Fallen People. The views expressed are personal
