Beginning with the transition from Mughal and Ottoman rule, this chapter focuses on the forms and schedules of the census as a site of negotiation and as a battleground infused by the axis of suspicion between administrators and communal leaderships, comparing bureaucratic negotiations and processes of separation in each of the colonies. It compares how hybrid bureaucracy deployed the census as a toolkit of government, in which categories of religion, language, and region gradually solidified into ethnonational identities. Through attempts to standardize, homogenize, and separate, communities were constituted as essentially different to justify the selective pairing of administrative practice to population. Division into majorities and minorities turned the census forms into a site for negotiation between subjects and officials, as well as an arena for rivalry between communities. Suspicion or embrace of enumeration techniques depended on one’s proximity to the negotiation over resources, amidst fears of control.