Correspondence with India

Letters received by the Court of Directors are arranged in four great series:. Letters from Bengal 1709-1834; Letters from India and Bengal 1834-1858; Letters from Madras 1709-1858; Letters from Bombay 1709-1858; There are also four series of Despatches sent by the Court to the same governments 1753-1858. There are also shorter sets of abstracts of letters and despatches. Correspondence addressed to, or issued by, the Company's Secret Committee is usually, but not invariably, omitted from the various IOR/E/4 series after about 1787, but letters and despatches from all the other correspondence departments and branches established in the Company's London administration or in India are regularly included, eg: Commercial, Ecclesiastical, Educational, Financial, Foreign, Judicial, Law, Legislative, Marine, Military, Political, Post Office, Public, Public Works, Railway, Revenue, Separate Revenue, Telegraph.

Unrestricted

For correspondence addressed to, or issued by, the Company's Secret Committee, see IOR/L/PS/5. In general, enclosures are not bound up in the IOR/E/4 series of letters received. For the location of these documents see the series IOR/F/4, IOR/L/F/3, IOR/L/MIL/3, IOR/L/PWD/3 or IOR/P, depending on the government and department concerned. Elsewhere among the surviving archives of the Company and the Board of Control there are a number of other series made up of copies of the Company's correspondence with the Indian administrations, usually arranged by department. The principal series are included in IOR/F/3, IOR/L/E/3, IOR/L/F/3, IOR/L/MIL/3, IOR/L/PWD/3, IOR/L/PJ/3 and IOR/L/PS/4-6. For indexes to the Court's Despatches included in IOR/E/4, see IOR/Z/E/4; for registers of Draft Despatches see IOR/Z/F/3.

The Fort William - India House Correspondence, edited by K K Datta et al (Delhi: Indian Records Series, 1949-) prints the full text of mush of the correspondence between the Bengal Government and the Court of Directors, from the copies in the National Archives of India.