The man about history

Professor Mushirul Hasan appears not to be in a hurry. Sitting inside his large office chamber, with beautiful colonial-era furniture, Prof. Hasan, the new director general of the National Archives of India (NAI), looks as carefree as a retired man.

The 61-year-old academic, author of several books on Indian history, talks in a singsong voice; he laughs easily and peppers his conversation with amusing Urdu couplets. Soon, however, he comes to the point. “I want the Archives to be like London’s British Library, which is wonderful in terms of collection, conservation, preservation and, most importantly, accessibility.”

As the storehouse of the non-current records of the Indian government, the NAI, situated on Janpath close to India Gate, has thousands of rare old books, documents and lithographs piled up on various floors. While researching here for his book The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty (Delhi 1857), author William Dalrymple discovered previously unexamined manuscripts that present the Indian perspective on the 1857 mutiny. “All the Urdu research for the book was done there,” says Dalrymple. “The archive contains the biggest and fullest colonial archive in India.”

Full report here Mint