India Office - Description and Functions

Description and Functions

The Secretary of State for India was assisted by a statutory body of advisers, the Council of India, and headed a staff of civil servants organised into a system of departments largely taken over from the East India Company and Board of Control establishments, and housed in a new India Office building in Whitehall. The Secretary of State for India inherited all the executive functions previously carried out by the Company, and all the powers of 'superintendence, direction and control' over the British provincial administrations in South Asia previously exercised by the Board of Control. Improved communications with South Asia – the overland and submarine telegraph cables (1868–70), and the opening of the Suez Canal (1869) – rendered this control, exercised through the Viceroy and provincial Governors covering large areas in the regions of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, more effective in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It was only with the constitutional reforms initiated during the First World War, and carried forward by the India Acts of 1919 and 1935, that there came about a significant relaxation of India Office supervision over the Government of British India, and with it, in South Asia, a gradual devolution of authority to legislative bodies and local governments. The same administrative reforms also led in 1937 to the separation of Burma from rest of South Asia and the creation in London of the Burma Office, separate from the India Office though sharing the same Secretary of State and located in the same building. With the gradual events and establishments of sovereign independent nations and the final grant of independence to India (Bharat Ganarajya) and Pakistan in 1947, and to Burma (Myanmar) in 1948, both the India Office and the Burma Office were officially dissolved.

As a result of the widespread involvement in the external relations and defence policy of pre-1947 African, Asian and Middle Eastern countries, the India Office was also responsible for particular neighbouring or connected areas at different times. Among the most significant of these are:

Bengal (1616-1857);

Sri Lanka (c. 1750–1802);

St Helena (to 1834);

Cape of Good Hope (to 1836);

Zanzibar, Somalia and Ethiopia (mainly nineteenth century);

Red Sea, Arabian Peninsula, Gulf States, Iraq and Iran (c1600-1947);

Afghanistan, Russian and Chinese Central Asia, Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim (late eighteenth century to 1947);

Malaya and South-East Asia (to c. 1867);

Indonesia (to c. 1825);

China (early seventeenth century to 1947); and

Japan (seventeenth century).

Other groups of involvement have also resulted from India Office interest in the status of Indian emigrants to the West Indies, south and east Africa, and Fiji.