ABSTRACT
In a technical sense the partition of India in 1947 made the bank's title an anachronism. Whereas in 1893 'India' was the name for an empire, after 1947 it described only one of the independent states which emerged from the Indian Empire. Clearly the bank could not confine its business to modern India and abandon its long-standing interests in the new states of Pakistan, Ceylon and Burma. In a business context the alignment with the sub-continent was also shifting. Early in the century, after the acquisition of the Bank of Calcutta in 1906, the bank's Indian branches held 81 per cent of overseas (that is, non-London) assets in 1910. The equivalent shares in 1935 and 1947 were 66 per cent and 68 per cent respectively-a surprisingly low figure in the latter case in view of the 'wipe-out' of the bank's Far East business and the relatively strong economic position of India in the immediate post-war years. The earnings of the branches were even less dependent on the sub-continent. In 1947, for example, only 42 per cent of the total net profits of overseas branches came from India, Pakistan, Ceylon and Burma. This pattern of earnings raised the searching question of whether the bank, in the post-independence world, would either return to its specialization in Indian business or accelerate the diversification of its overseas markets.
