The Politics of Development of an indigenous and active history, the west proceeded to perform its ordained historical task within it, ostensibly for its own good. Sub-continental destiny henceforth seemed located in enabling the civilizing and developmental destiny of the colonizing consensus. What we do, thankfully, understand today is that 'orientalism' as a super-structural imposition was propelled by an immediate instrumental need. For long years after the Company arrived in India it faced an infuriatingly stubborn resis-92 tance from knowledgeable local elites. Land-holding structures, rent-structures, the system of dues owing correspondingly to the state and to land-communities were all shrouded in mystery which Company officials Lacking in knowledge of Persian could simply not negotiate.5 Thus, the Company's needs dictated engaging with the colony's past history (all too real), much of which was located in Persian documents, chronicles, missives, administrative fatwas and so on. It was simultaneously, therefore, to the Company's hegemonic interests to cultivate and further a Persian-knowing civil society which, for a time, was to be the dominant Indian middle-class along with the brahminical. As we know, the new needs of a manufacturing and industrial England looking to turn India now into a market and a supplier of raw materials was, towards the 1830s, to cause a repudiation of orientalist education. The requirement, administrative and hegemonic, was for a reconstituted English-knowing middle-class. What does need to be recorded (at more mundane levels), however, is that while Hastings was patronizing Sanskrit and Persian learning as representative of the Indian non-materialistic weltanchauung, he was also plundering the conquered territories of their very considerable material wealth with a single-minded ruthless-ness. Especially after acquiring the rights to the civil administration (or Diwani) over Bengal, Bihar and Orissa in 1765, empowering the Company to collect land revenue, the accumulation of capital and its transfer to England was to attain mind-boggling proportions. Between 1765-66 and 1775-76 revenue collection was to increase from $ 1,470,000 to $ 2,818,000. In 1793 (at the time of the Permanent Settlement) Cornwallis was to fix it at $3,400,000. The famine of 1770 was to denude Pumeah district alone of a third of its population; overall, ten million lives were lost, and yet revenue collection only went further up. In Hastings' own forthright summation: Notwithstanding the loss of at least one-third of the inhabitants of the province, and the consequent decrease of the cultivation, the net collection of the year 1771 exceeded even those of 1778. ... It was naturally to be expected that the dimunition of the revenue should have kept on equal pace with the other consequences of so great a calamity. That it did not was owing to its being violently, kept up to its former standard' (emphasis added). William Fullerton, the British member of Parliament, was faithfully to record how 'within the short space of twenty years many parts of these countries have been reduced to the appearance of a desert. The fields are no longer cultivated, extensive tracts are already overgrown with thickets, the husbandman is plundered, the manufacturer oppressed, famine has been repeatedly endured, Journal of A} fs & Ideas