“A Foreign Office is essentially a custodian of precedents,”
K.P.S. Menon, independent India’s first Foreign
Secretary, in his autobiography, Many Worlds (1965).
K.P.S. Menon wrote from long experience: He had joined the Indian Civil Service in 1921, and in 1925 became one of the very few Indians selected for the Indian Political Service whose members served as residents in princely states or in the overseas territories administered by the government of British India. By the 30s, he had worked his way up to the government’s Foreign and Political Department—and from there, he would likely have had a clear view of how the British Foreign Office functioned, and the role played by its historical division in the execution of the British government’s foreign policy.
Yet, when he arrived at India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) in 1948, “we had no precedents to fall back upon because India had no foreign policy of her own till she became independent.”
His solution? To build its own repository of precedents there should be a section for historical research at the heart of India’s new foreign office.
