Aware of the ‘limited gaze’ and institutional dependence on existing pre-colonial structures, the English East India Company-state's bureaucracy was clear right from the beginning about attaining maximum self-reliance in its administrative functioning. One way of trying to achieve this was to promote administrative mobility, which was based on the idea of seeing things in person. Among the variety of tours, some of which we have discussed in the previous chapter and some we will see in the next, were official tours, which are the main focus of this chapter. They were performed at different bureaucratic levels according to the cultural-bureaucratic functions of the Raj. They had graded meanings; the ones undertaken by higher officials, for instance, were more like public displays, to both constitute and represent authority. They also aimed at ‘inspecting’ things. In contrast, the local-level tours of district collectors on horses, elephants apart from representing authority, were of the nature of ground exercises in maintaining ‘law and order’, reviewing the work of the judiciary and police thannahs (police outposts), holding on-the-spot courts to settle judicial and revenue cases, collecting information about local trade networks, weather, communication and so on. They were acts of ‘knowing the countryside’ by ‘going into the interiors’.

The purposes of such tours were utilitarian (to generate knowledge) and also, complementarily, to strike a personal chord with the ‘natives’. One strand in the argument about the power of local-level officials is that ‘the British district officer was a prisoner if not a puppet of the local social forces’.