What a sad day! Prof Amiya Kumar Bagchi is no more. I learnt so much about researching and writing on banking history from him and Dr Thingalaya (who passed away in 2019).
Prof Bagchi’s work on SBI’s history is one of its kind: detailed and thorough. He explained the pains he had to undertake to do build history of SBI in this annual lecture at Godrej Archives.
We aren’t really good at preserving history:
Let me first begin by expressing my heartfelt thanks to the Godrej Archives and their moving spirits Mrs. Pheroza Godrej and Mr. Jamshyd Godrej. While I cannot claim the credit for creating the archives of the State Bank of India, I had a lot to do with the attempt to preserve the documents and to rescue them from destruction. I feel very strongly about the importance of archives as I feel archives will outlast us all, and succeeding generations will use them and know the real history of India. I am therefore very pleased that I have been invited by a serious institution that has set up a properly maintained archives.
Unlike the Chinese – inheritors of another old civilization – Indians have been extremely remiss in not preserving their history. In recent times (for the last 200-300 years) business history has been extremely important for understanding the conditions of living in every country. A large part of modern India’s history is connected with the development of business communities and business houses, but very few business houses have attempted to set up their archives. That is yet another reason why this initiative of the house of Godrej gladdens my heart.
SBI’s history:
My association with the State Bank’s records started when I was asked by Mr. R.K. Talwar, the then Chairman of the State Bank of India, to write the history of the bank. As soon as I agreed to do this, I realised that it was a tremendous job, because the State Bank f India (SBI) is an integration of several of its colonial and native banks.
…..
By 1984, I had finished writing the first volume of the history, which came altogether to nearly 1,200 printed pages. It took about eight
years to put that first volume together. In fact, one of the complaints very often voiced by some of the senior management of the SBI
was that I was taking too long a time to write the history of the State Bank. But the point was that during those years I began collecting
SBI documents from all over India, and many of them were needed to write the first volume. Under the directorship of Mr. Talwar and his successor, Mr. P.C.B. Nambiar; the State Bank of India had put at my disposal their officers for research assistance.
Four History Cells of the SBI were set up, in Bombay, Calcutta, Madras and Delhi – The Imperial Bank’s original headquarters had been in Calcutta. It was shifted to Bombay when the bank was nationalised. Madras had been the headquarters of the Bank of Madras.
One cell in Delhi was needed because the National Archives was located there. And they put very good officers at my disposal. One of them, Shri Abhik Ray, has continued from almost the very beginning of the work, and is now looking after both the State Bank of India Archives and the writing of the later volumes of the history of the State Bank of India. Without the cooperation of these very dedicated officers, I could not have done anything.
There were earlier attempts to do SBI history and release it on 1976 to mark centenary of 1876 Act. However, it could not be done. So Prof Bagchi was asked to do it:
I realised that even to come up to 1876 of the bank’s history within a year was impossible. There were three separate banks whose proceedings I had to consult. The Bank of Bengal had not only directors’ proceedings but also daily proceedings, which had to be analysed to find out how the directors and the managers took the decisions. These should be really good material for further study for all future historians of Indian banking and finance. The proceedings of the Bank of Madras also had survived. In the case of Bank of Bombay we were up against a problem because the proceedings of the old Bank of Bombay, which collapsed in 1867, were lost. So we had to rebuild the whole history through the work in the Maharashtra State Archives and National Archives. We also had assistants in London doing some of that work.
So in the first phase there were in fact five sets of proceedings – three sets of the three banks which survived, one set which had vanished which had to be re-constructed from the archival materials and the fifth was the daily committee proceedings of the Bank of Bengal. Then there were the branch records, because from 1861 the three banks began opening branches. We managed to collect valuable materials from other branches with great effort, as the documents had not been preserved.
Lots of records were destroyed earlier and later as well. Read the whole lecture for his trials to save records!
Finally, he had to struggle to set up SBI archives:
My work ended in 1997 with the history of the founding of the Imperial Bank. …. I started to persuade the Bank management to formally set up archives. Mr. D.N. Ghosh, who was the SBI Chairman at the time the The Presidency Bank and the Indian Economy 1876-1914 (1989) was published, wrote in his Forward that SBI Archives should be set up. However, after his departure, for several years this proposal hung fire. And in fact there was an attempt to move some of therecords to Hyderabad, where the State Bank had a bankers’ training college for its officers. But the trouble was that there was nobody in Hyderabad to look after these records. Nobody wanted to look after them. Again we had a lot of trouble getting them back to Calcutta. Formally the foundation stone of the archives was laid in 1997 by Mr. P.G. Kakodkar, the then Chairman of the SBI and the Finance Minister of the Government of West Bengal Mr. Asim Dasgupta, an ex-student of mine.
Tragedy of being an economic/bank/business historian.
Travel Well Sir!
Mostly Economics 
