In this essay, I will discuss a conflation of knowledge and demands
for political reform in mid-nineteenth-century India.1 At the centre
of my discussion is an objection to the often-reiterated argument
that emphasizes how colonial forms of knowledge underpinned the
British regime in its bid to control and subjugate Indians. Rather, I
would suggest that Indians appropriated and put to work data and
institutional forms for making and communicating knowledge that
the British initially had monopolized, in political activities challenging
the British administration.