Colonialism was fundamentally a project of economic exploitation. The project to extract and exploit productive labor however required that the colonial state form a knowledge base of their subjects. As the British merchants became rulers of India, they had to develop an understanding of Indian society. The anxiety that the colonizers felt in their inability to understand Indians, their customs, religions, state structures, and various other facets of life led them to produce and catalog a “knowledge” of Indian society. During the initial stages of colonialism, this project was driven by a general fascination with India’s ancient past—for it was their understanding that it was in the ancient past that an “unsullied” knowledge of India could be found. Beginning in the early nineteenth century however, the colonial state increasingly sought to explain the backwardness of India through racial differences—an understanding that dominated colonial state’s politics and policies until the twentieth century.