This article considers the ways in which provincial elites in the Peruvian Andes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries addressed the task of dismantling colonial institutions and relations. It draws on material from a municipal archive to trace how the land-for-labour ‘pact of reciprocity’ linking the town of Tarma both to the central state and to the indigenous hinterland was re-worked and eventually brought to an end. The contexts in which a postcolonial discourse of the Indian emerged are explored, and are understood as linked to struggles between local government and central state over the deployment of indigenous labour.