Publications proscribed by the Government of India: a catalogue of the collections in the India Office Library and Records and the Department of Oriental Manuscripts and Printed Books, British Library Reference Division

Abstract

• The books, pamphlets, periodicals, newspapers, handbills and posters proscribed by the British government in India are an invaluable printed archive for the study of the Indian freedom struggle during its last four crucial decades from the 1910s to the 1940s. As such they also constitute perhaps one of the largest accumulations of primary literature and ephemera relating to any twentieth-century independence movement. Four large collections of Indian proscribed publi­cations have been preserved. Two are in London, at the India Office Library and Records and in the Department of Oriental Manuscripts and Printed Books, British Library Reference Division, and two are in New Delhi, in the Library of the National Archives of India and in the files of its Home (Political) Proceedings. Smaller collections are to be found in at least some of the Indian state archive offices, such as that of West Bengal in Calcutta, and the Center for Research Libraries, Chicago, holds a complete microfilm copy of the personal collection of Professor N.G. Barrier (about a quarter the size of any of the major collections) made by the South Asia Micro­form Project (SAMP).