This chapter probes the relative absence in late nineteenth to early twentieth-century India of the style of essay that predominated in Britain and the United States from the seventeenth century. Rather than the heterogeneous, speculative, provisional, unmethodical, Montaignian essay, the essay that appeared in India at this time was more structured, more critical, and leaned more heavily into history. This chapter argues that the shape the essay took in India was the outcome of three factors: the condescension of colonial thinkers such as James Mill, who dismissed Indians as outside reason; the Victorian form of the essay that was transplanted to the subcontinent; and an indigenised version that transformed the essay into a vehicle for the writing of histories that was sweeping the subcontinent and was a cornerstone of the nationalist, anti-colonial struggle.