How much did the colonial state ‘truly’ know about India? This question underpinned Sir William Wilson Hunter’s early foundational work, The Annals of Rural Bengal, which marked his entry into colonial knowledge production. In this text, Hunter offered a searing critique of the Company’s ‘unreliable’ and ‘incomplete’ knowledge. This article argues that such anxieties about ignorance, sharpened in the post-1857 imperial order, enabled the colonial state’s investment in local knowledge, culminating in the Gazetteer project. Hunter’s reconstruction of the Santal rebellion of 1855 articulated a sense of anxiety, reframing colonial ignorance as a political problem of governance and diagnosing it as the product of an inadequate colonial knowledge framework revealed in moments of rebellion and administrative delay. In casting ignorance as a political risk, he recast violence as evidence of administrative misrecognition, thereby justifying the need for systematic forms of knowledge production such as the Gazetteer. The article shows how epistemic anxiety was translated into bureaucratic forms of knowledge production, with the Gazetteer institutionalising uncertainty rather than resolving it.