As the above quote suggests, British dominance of India depended on how well they could ‘delineate’, ‘penetrate’, ‘investigate’ and ‘know’ the sociopolitical contexts of ruling the country and the people. If topographical surveys and cartographic projects enabled the British to chart out the physical extent of their rule, the ‘advantages of information’ apropos the character, manners and religion of the inhabitants were considered equally important. British policies of governance, education and evangelization in India were greatly shaped by the opinion they had of those they ruled. At the heart of the contention was how the British conceived of the Indians. The complex quandary was whether to regard the Indians as facsimiles of their selves with the possibility of integration or to regard them as inherently different and therefore to reject them. It is worth exploring the almost obsessive persistence of conceptions regarding India in the writings of the British in India, as it signifies the trajectory of the development of ideas regarding the land and the people. The chapter, in light of Claudius Buchanan's prophetic claim in the above quote, also examines the involvement of the missionaries in perpetuating such conceptions.

India has always been central to Western imagining of the Other. A rich mosaic of images of India has slowly accumulated in the intellectual tradition of the West, overlapping and contradicting, constructing an extraordinary palimpsest of representations. The earliest surviving accounts of references on India in Western literature can be found in the History of Herodotus (480–425 BC).