¹ ‘Village Schools and Peasant Proprietors’, in The Calcutta Review, vol. XIV (Calcutta: Sanders, Cones and Co., 1850), 208. Emphasis and italics in the quotations in this article, unless otherwise noted, are all original.

² Ahuja, Ravi., Pathways of Empire: Circulation, ‘Public Works’, and Social Space in Colonial Orissa (c.1780–1914) (Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2009)Google Scholar; Kumar, Deepak, Damodaran, Vinita, and D'Souza, Rohan, eds., The British Empire and the Natural World: Environmental Encounters in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

³ The literature on this topic is vast. For a few classical as well as more recent examples, see Prakash, Gyan, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Arnold, David, Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Seth, Sanjay, Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Tschurenev, Jana, Empire, Civil Society, and the Beginnings of Colonial Education in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ For a few examples, see ‘The Settlement of the N. W. Provinces’, in The Calcutta Review, vol. XII (Calcutta: Sanders, Cones and Co., 1849), 413–67; ‘Native Education in the North-West Provinces’, in Benares Magazine, vol. VIII, part I (Calcutta: Bishop's College Press, 1852), 158–74; ‘The Settlement in the North-West Provinces’, The Friend of India, 10 January 1850; ‘The Revenue Settlements in the North West Provinces’, The Friend of India, 11 December 1851.

⁵ Bayly, Christopher Alan, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 365Google Scholar. For more recent works that study colonial knowledge-making beyond high intellectual history, see, for example, Viswanath, Rupa, The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Mitra, Durba, Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020)Google Scholar.

⁶ Cf. Alam, Muzaffar and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, ‘The Making of a Munshi’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24, no. 2 (2004): 61–72; 393–423CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Raman, Bhavani, Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 102CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Bellenoit, Hayden J., The Formation of the Colonial State in India: Scribes, Paper and Taxes, 1760–1860 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. O'Hanlon, Rosalind, ‘The Social Worth of Scribes: Brahmins, Kāyasthas and the Social Order in Early Modern India’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review 47, no. 4 (2010): 563–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kinra, Rajeev, Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the Indo-Persian State Secretary (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Most recently, Nandini Chatterjee shows that Persianate forms of law penetrated deep into Mughal Indian society through the adoption of the languages and formats of legal documentation. This article can be read as an effort to bring Chatterjee's narrative further into the colonial period by examining how the EIC not only appropriated precolonial forms of revenue documentation in India, but also transformed it into an arena of legal discourse. Chatterjee, Nandini, Negotiating Mughal Law: A Family of Landlords Across Three Indian Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ Bhattacharya, Neeladri, The Great Agrarian Conquest: The Colonial Reshaping of a Rural World (Ranikhet: The Orient BlackSwan, 2018)Google Scholar; Wilson, Jon E., The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780–1835 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ Bhattacharya, The Great Agrarian Conquest, 56.

⁹ Ibid., 63.

¹⁰ Wilson, The Domination of Strangers, 105.

¹¹ Ibid., 3.

¹² My usage of the term ‘official’ needs some explanation. Many of the local administrative personnel whom I will refer to in this article did not regularly receive salary from the government but were nevertheless closely tied to the state's administrative establishment. Under British rule, they remained primarily servants of the villages while also subject to ever closer state supervision. For linguistic convenience, I will still call these people ‘officials’, bearing in mind that these local ‘officials’ occupied an ambiguous position between the state and village societies.

¹³ For two classical accounts of the genesis of British colonial revenue policies in North India, see Gupta, Sulekh Chandra, Agrarian Relations and Early British Rule in India: A Case Study of Ceded and Conquered Provinces (Uttar Pradesh) (1801–1833) (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1963)Google Scholar; Siddiqi, Asiya, Agrarian Change in a Northern Indian State: Uttar Pradesh, 1819–1833 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973)Google Scholar; for an account that connects the fiscal consequence of British revenue policies to the 1857 Rebellion, see Bhadra, Gautam, ‘Four Rebels of 1857’, in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Guha, Ranajit, Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, and Said, Edward W. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 129–75Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Travers, Robert, ‘The Real Value of the Lands: The Nawabs, the British and the Land Tax in Eighteenth-Century Bengal’, Modern Asian Studies 38, no. 3 (2004): 517–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; cf. Bellenoit, The Formation of the Colonial State in India, 75–6.

¹⁵ Edward Baber's letter, dated 13 December 1772, quoted in J. D. Patterson's report on qanungo, dated 23 April 1781, reproduced in Ramsbotham, R. B., Studies in the Land Revenue History of Bengal: 1769–1787 (London, et al.: Oxford University Press, 1926), 173Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Selections from Revenue Records, North-West Provinces (Allahabad: Printed at the North-Western Provinces’ Government Press, 1873), 319–20. See also the Board of Commissioners’ remark in Selections from the Revenue Records of the North-West Provinces, 1818–1820, Preceding the Enactment of Regulation VII 1822 (Calcutta: Military Orphan Press, 1866), 33. The Court of Directors and Lord Hastings also held this opinion. See letter from G. A. Robinson and Thomas Reid to the Governor General in Council, dated 12 July 1820, in Selection of Papers from the Records at the East India House, Relating to the Revenue, Police, and Civil and Criminal Justice, under the Company's Governments in India, vol. 3 (London, 1826), 21; see also Lord Hastings's minute dated 21 September 1815, cited in Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company; and Also an Appendix and Index, vol. III, part II, 1832, 304.

¹⁷ Selection of Papers from the Records at the East India House, 3:40–1.

¹⁸ Kolff, Dirk H. A., Grass in Their Mouths: The Upper Doab of India under the Company's Magna Charta, 1793–1830 (Leiden: Brill, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁹ It should be noted that, while the colonial government decided to fully bureaucratize the qanungo, it left the patwari in a more ambiguous position in which they would receive salaries from their original patrons while simultaneously being subject to the supervision of the British Collectors. This decision was made largely because of the practical difficulty in making one Collector responsible for selecting and sending salaries to the hundreds of patwari scattered in the villages, as compared with the employment of a few town-based qanungo. See Selection of Papers from the Records at the East India House, 3:8–10.

²⁰ See Regulation IV of 1808 and Regulation XII of 1817 in The Regulations of the Bengal Code, in Force in September 1862, with a List of Titles and Index (Calcutta: Bengal Printing Company Limited, 1862).

²¹ Rose, H., Report on the Settlement of the District of Cawnpore (Agra: Printed at the Agra Orphan Press, 1842), 36Google Scholar.

²² Matthew Edney's monumental work does not say very much about the revenue survey. As we shall see later, his omission may be at least partly the result of the ambiguous relationship between the revenue survey and the other cartographical projects of the colonial government. Edney, Matthew H., Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²³ Directions for Revenue Officers in the North-Western Provinces of the Bengal Presidency, Regarding the Settlement and Collection of the Land Revenue, and the Other Duties Connected Therewith. Promulgated under the Authority of the Honorable the Lieutenant-Governor (Calcutta: Baptist mission press, 1850), 33.

²⁴ Smyth, Ralph and Thuillier, Henry Edward Landor, A Manual of Surveying for India, Detailing the Mode of Operations on the Revenue Surveys in Bengal and the North-Western Provinces (Calcutta: W. Thacker, 1851), 574Google Scholar.

²⁵ This word originally refers to the register of land occupation. The British used it to indicate the survey methods used for preparing such a register.

²⁶ For a detailed description of the mode of the khasra survey, see Smyth and Thuillier, A Manual of Surveying for India, 582–96.

²⁷ Ibid., 597.

²⁸ Ibid., 587. For further details on the complicated relationship between these different survey activities, see footnote 31 below.

²⁹ Bhattacharya, The Great Agrarian Conquest, 77.

³⁰ For one thing, the very pursuit for accurate measurement during the cadastral survey of the 1860s and 1870s was a direct legacy of the NWP settlement. At the same time, the documents produced by the cadastral survey were no less confusing than those of the NWP survey. Until the early twentieth century, the revenue survey of the countryside was still so daunting a task that some British officials recommended making do with deficient revenue maps. See, for example, W. E. Partridge's comment on the cadastral survey in Crawford, C. E., Final Report on the Seventh Settlement of the Azamgarh District of the United Provinces (Allahabad: Pioneer Press, 1908), 8–9Google Scholar.

³¹ Directions for Revenue Officers in the North-Western Provinces of the Bengal Presidency, 33. The administrative rather than geographical/topographical/cartographical nature of the revenue survey of the NWP becomes most apparent when we compare it with the contemporary Irish Ordnance Survey. In the Ordnance Survey, large-scale (six inches to one mile) field maps were designed to add up to a general map of Ireland. But in the revenue survey of the NWP, village revenue maps were at best loosely connected to the other cartographic enterprises of the EIC. In Figure 1, the outer boundary of the village was produced by the Professional Surveyor while the internal lines of field division were filled in by the khasra survey. It should be noted that these lines of field division were not drawn on the basis of the khasra measurement of the fields (these data of measurement simply went into a register) but were rather made from a mere eye-sketch. Such lines were not intended to ‘accurately’ reproduce any physical reality, as a topographical map was, but were meant to give a rough idea of where the field occupied by a certain villager lay so that revenue officials could use them as a visual guide to their settlement works. The products of the Professional Survey, namely the drawing of the village boundaries, though conforming to European cartographic standards (that is, based on measurement, using scale, and so on), also did not consistently contribute to the making of smaller-scale topographical maps of India, as shown in Figure 2. See Smyth and Thuillier, A Manual of Surveying for India, 582–96. Many surviving village boundary maps were bounded in Regional Archives Allahabad (RAA), Mirzapur Collectorate Records, vol. 304. For the Irish Ordnance Survey, see Andrews, J. H., A Paper Landscape: The Ordnance Survey in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, 2nd ed. (Dublin: Four Courts, 2002)Google Scholar.

³² A similar problem of commanding hierarchy emerged in the survey of the Madras presidency in the early 1800s. See Edney, Mapping an Empire, 173–4.

³³ Smyth and Thuillier, A Manual of Surveying for India, 576.

³⁴ Letter from the Board of Revenue to A. Ross, dated 12 July 1803, RAA list no. 14, vol. 2, 17.

³⁵ The word amin (originally means agent) acquired the meaning of ‘surveyor’ in colonial English sources because many of the people who were usually called upon to survey the fields were the agents (amin) of the ‘amil (Collectors). This usage of the word amin is related but still different from the Mughal official title of amin as found in imperial compendiums such as the ‘Ain-i Akbari. Letter from A. Ross to Secretary to the Board of Revenue, dated 18 September 1803, RAA list no. 14, vol. 113, 323.

³⁶ Selections from Revenue Records, North-West Provinces: A.D. 1822–1833 (Allahabad: Printed at the North-Western Provinces Government Press, 1872), 480.

³⁷ The Regulations of the Bengal Code, 1013–4; cf. Selections from Revenue Records, North-West Provinces: A.D. 1822–1833, 74–5.

³⁸ Selections from Revenue Records, North-West Provinces: A.D. 1822–1833, 480.

³⁹ Smyth and Thuillier, A Manual of Surveying for India, 598.

⁴⁰ The ideal procedure could be summarized as follows: when the survey of a village commenced, the British revenue officials would first urge the patwari to set up marks on the boundaries of their own villages based on their intimate knowledge of the localities. The professional surveyors would then measure these boundaries using triangulation. The result of triangulation would then be used to check the khasra survey of the fields lying inside the village. The British revenue officials would then set out to assess and settle the village with the help of the registers and maps produced by the surveys. Finally, they would file the result of the survey and the settlement in the record rooms of both the local Indian officials and the Collectors. For a detailed description of the procedure, see Directions for Revenue Officers in the North-Western Provinces of the Bengal Presidency.

⁴¹ Selections from Revenue Records, North-West Provinces: A.D. 1822–1833, 480.

⁴² Scott, James, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

⁴³ Rao, Parimala V., ‘Compulsory Education and the Political Leadership in Colonial India, 1840–1947’, in New Perspectives in the History of Indian Education, ed. Rao, Parimala V. (New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2014), 151–75Google Scholar; Tschurenev, Empire, Civil Society, and the Beginnings of Colonial Education in India.

⁴⁴ As noted before, Bhavani Raman is among the scholars who draw this connection. Her focus, nevertheless, falls more on the philological training of the officials rather than on the education of the ordinary people outside the bureaucracy. Rao touched on this point and connected it to the debates about the use of educating poor labourers since the late nineteenth century. She, however, did not go further to explore how this fiscal–educational–legal complex came into being in the first place. Rao, ‘Compulsory Education and the Political Leadership in Colonial India, 1840–1947’, especially pp. 152 and 155–7.

⁴⁵ Note by Holt Mackenzie, dated 17 July 1823, in H. Sharp, ed., Selections from Educational Records, Part I, 1781–1839 (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1919), 58–9.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 24–5.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 59, 154.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 152–3.

⁴⁹ General Report on Public Instruction in the North Western Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for 1843–44 (Agra: Agra Ukhbar Press, n.d.), xix–xx.

⁵⁰ Ibid., xx.

⁵¹ John Thomason, Report of the Collector of Azimgurh on the Settlement of the Ceded Portion of the District Commonly Called Chuklah Azimgurh (Agra, 1837), 7.

⁵² Selections from the Records of the Government, North West Provinces: Mr. Thomason's Despatches, vol. I (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1856), 333–4.

⁵³ Grierson, George Abraham, A Handbook to the Kayathi Character (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, and Company, 1881), 1Google Scholar; Hutchinson, J. R., Allygurh Statistics: Being a Report on the General Administration of That District, from A. D. 1803 to the Present Time (Roorkee: Thomason College Press, 1856), 46Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ Memoir on the Statistics of Indigenous Education Within the North Western Provinces of the Bengal Presidency (Printed at Baptist Mission Press, 1850), 8.

⁵⁵ Selections from the Records of the Government, I:335.

⁵⁶ Memoir on the Statistics of Indigenous Education Within the North Western Provinces of the Bengal Presidency, 8.

⁵⁷ ‘Village Schools and Peasant Proprietors’, 167; Reid, Henry Stewart, Report on Indigenous Education and Vernacular Schools in Agra, Aligarh, Bareli, Etawah, Farrukhabad, Mainpuri, Mathura, Shahjahanpur, for 1850–51 (Agra: Secundra Orphan Press, 1852), 138–9Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ Selections from the Records of the Government, I:335. The four manuals were: Das, Ram Sharan, Acchar abhyas (Agra: Secundra Orphan Press, 1849)Google Scholar; Das, Ram Sharan, Phailavat (Agra: Secundra Orphan Press, 1845)Google Scholar; Das, Ram Sharan, Map-tol (Agra: Secundra Orphan Press, 1848)Google Scholar; Das, Ram Sharan, Patwari ki kitab (Agra: Secundra Orphan Press, 1845)Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ Ram Sharan Das's position was mentioned in Directions for Revenue Officers in the North-Western Provinces of the Bengal Presidency, 35.

⁶⁰ Selections from the Records of the Government, I:336.

⁶¹ Memoir on the Statistics of Indigenous Education Within the North Western Provinces of the Bengal Presidency, 9.

⁶² Hanaway, William L. and Spooner, Brian, Reading Nasta'liq: Persian and Urdu Hands from 1500 to the Present (Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 1995), 3–4Google Scholar; King, Christopher Rolland, One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1994), 128–33Google Scholar.

⁶³ Ram Sharan Das, Acchar abhyas, 1.

⁶⁴ Ram Sharan Das, Map-tol, 3–4.

⁶⁵ Ram Sharan Das, Patwari ki kitab, 4.

⁶⁶ Udaicand, ‘Dastur al-ʿamal’ (1788), foll. 1b–2a, British Library, IO Islamic 1855. The translation is mine.

⁶⁷ Ibid., fol. 1b.

⁶⁸ Ibid., fol. 2a.

⁶⁹ The issue of over-assessment has been discussed by the classical literature on economic history cited earlier. More recent literature focuses on the imposition of alien categories. See, for example, Smith, Richard Saumarez, Rule by Records: Land Registration and Village Custom in Early British Panjab (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Chaudhry, Faisal, ‘Property and Its Rule (in Late Indo-Islamicate and Early Colonial) South Asia: What's in a Name?’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 61, no. 5–6 (2018): 920–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁰ Reports on the Revenue Settlement of the North Western Provinces of the Bengal Presidency Under Regulation IX, 1833, vol. I (Benares: Medical Hall Press, 1862), 485.

⁷¹ Thornton, Edward, Report on the Settlement of the District of Moozuffurnuggur (Agra: Printed at the Agra Orphan Press, 1842), 4Google Scholar.

⁷² Selections from Revenue Records, North-West Provinces: A.D. 1822–1833, 413.

⁷³ Ibid., 487.

⁷⁴ See for example the case of Azamgarh. Thomason, Report of the Collector of Azimgurh on the Settlement of the Ceded Portion of the District Commonly Called Chuklah Azimgurh, 29.

⁷⁵ Reports on this issue are numerous. See, for example, ibid., 28; Reports on the Revenue Settlement of the North Western Provinces of the Bengal Presidency Under Regulation IX, 1833, 1862, I:62–3, 243, 446; Reports on the Revenue Settlement of the North Western Provinces of the Bengal Presidency Under Regulation IX, 1833, vol. II, part I (Benares: Medical Hall Press, 1863), 93.

⁷⁶ Hutchinson, Allygurh Statistics, 299.

⁷⁷ Ibid., 46. Similar observation was also made at a later date in Mainpuri. Report on the Settlement of the Mainpuri District, North-Western Provinces (Allahabad: North-Western Provinces Government Press, 1875), 7.

⁷⁸ Chatterjee, Negotiating Mughal Law; O'Hanlon, Rosalind, ‘In the Presence of Witnesses: Petitioning and Judicial ‘Publics’ in Western India, circa 1600–1820’, Modern Asian Studies 53, no. 1 (2019): 52–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Travers, Robert, ‘Indian Petitioning and Colonial State-Formation in Eighteenth-Century Bengal’, Modern Asian Studies 53, no. 1 (2019): 89–122CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kaicker, Abhishek, ‘Petitions and Local Politics in the Late Mughal Empire: The View from Kol, 1741’, Modern Asian Studies 53, no. 1 (2019): 21–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sahai, Nandita Prasad, Politics of Patronage and Protest: The State, Society, and Artisans in Early Modern Rajasthan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hasan, Farhat, State and Locality in Mughal India: Power Relations in Western India, c.1572–1730 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

⁷⁹ It should be noted that there were way more cases involving the patwari in these legal records than those involving the amin and the qanungo. This partly reflects the nature of revenue documentation at the field level, which primarily concerned the village patwari rather than the subdistrict or district qanungo. It may also result from the fact that these legal disputes took place after the survey was concluded, rendering the British unwilling or unable to trace back to the work of the amin who conducted the measurement on-site. The patwari, who were the long-term custodians of the village revenue records and living closest to the villagers, thus became the focal point of disputes.

⁸⁰ North-Western Provinces Zillah Courts Decisions: October 1854, n.d., Zillah Allahabad, Case No. 116, 253 (the pagination in these volumes of zillah court decisions is confusing, so I am including the districts and the case numbers alongwith the page numbers in my references).

⁸¹ North-Western Provinces Zillah Courts Decisions: July-September 1854, n.d., Zillah Mainpuri, Case No. 144, 139.

⁸² North-Western Provinces Zillah Courts Decisions: December 1854, n.d., Zillah Gorakhpur, Case No. 602, 200.

⁸³ For a few more examples, see North-Western Provinces Zillah Courts Decisions: July-September 1854, Zillah Ghazipur, Case No. 47, 178; North-Western Provinces Zillah Courts Decisions: October 1854, Zillah Fatehpur, Case No. 67, 275.

⁸⁴ See, for example, North-Western Provinces Zillah Courts Decisions: January-April, 1850, n.d., Zillah Moradabad, Case No. 12, 46; North-Western Provinces Zillah Courts Decisions: July-September 1854, Zillah Fatehpur, Case No. 39, 205; Zillah Moradabad, Case No. 124, 210.

⁸⁵ The Commissioner frequently refuted the Collector's decision to punish the patwari. See the three letters from the Commissioner to the Collector, respectively dated 14 September 1848 (RAA list no. 13, vol. 43, 38), 8 December 1848 (RAA list no. 13, vol. 43, 127–28), and 31 March 1849 (RAA list no. 13, vol. 44, 92).

⁸⁶ See, for example, the reports furnished by the Settlement Officers of Mathura, Kanpur, Aligarh, and Moradabad. Reports on the Revenue Settlement of the North Western Provinces of the Bengal Presidency Under Regulation IX, 1833, 1862, I:270, 361, 446; Reports on the Revenue Settlement of the North Western Provinces of the Bengal Presidency Under Regulation IX, 1833, 1863, II, part I:53.

⁸⁷ Mansel, C. G., Report on the Settlement of the District of Agra (Agra: Printed at the Agra Orphan Press, 1842), 17Google Scholar.

⁸⁸ Edmonstone, G. F., Report on the Settlement of the District of Mynpooree (Agra: Printed at the Agra Orphan Press, 1842), 18Google Scholar.

⁸⁹ Reid, Report on Indigenous Education and Vernacular Schools, 88.

⁹⁰ Ibid., 88.

⁹¹ General Report on Public Instruction in the North Western Provinces of the Bengal Presidency, for 1844–45 (Agra: Secundra Orphan Press, 1846), lii.

⁹² Reid, Report on Indigenous Education and Vernacular Schools, 5.

⁹³ Markham, Clements R., A Memoir on the Indian Surveys, 1875–1890, 2nd ed. (London: E. A. Arnold and Co. etc., 1891), 181Google Scholar; for a discussion on local resistance to revenue documentation, see, for example, Guha, Ranajit, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 51–2Google Scholar; Bayly also argues that these records were targeted during the Rebellion because they were seen as tools of British exaction. See Bayly, Empire and Information, 325.