From the Mughals through the British Conquest
The delegates at Simla in 1945 inherited an India shaped by two empires. This reading covers the subcontinent's geography, the Mughal Empire and its breakup, the rise of the East India Company, and the structure of British rule. Watch for two patterns. First, formal authority and actual power on the ground rarely matched. Second, religion became tied to political control. Hindus and Muslims were not locked in permanent conflict; rather, successive rulers found it useful to govern through religious categories.
India is a subcontinent the size of Europe. Its people speak dozens of languages, practice several major religions, and live in landscapes that run from Himalayan peaks to tropical coastline. Where people live shapes what they grow, whom they trade with, and who rules them.
The Gangetic Plain stretches across northern India and is one of the most fertile regions on earth. Fed by the Ganges River as it descends from the Himalayas, it has supported dense populations and powerful empires for millennia, and it is one of the historic centers of Hindu civilization.
To the east lies Bengal, built around the Ganges delta and the port city of Calcutta. Its waterways connect it to Southeast Asia and the wider maritime world. Bengal's wealth made it the first target of European merchants and the first region of India to fall under British rule.
The Deccan Plateau covers the dry interior of the peninsula. Its mountains long kept northern conquerors from subduing the south.
In the northwest, the Punjab (Persian for "five waters") is watered by five rivers that flow from the Himalayas into the Indus. Its farmland makes it India's breadbasket, and its population of Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs will make it the most contested ground of partition. Beyond the Punjab lies the Khyber Pass, the mountain route to Afghanistan and Central Asia and the traditional road for invading armies.
India in 1605, at the death of Akbar the Great. The Mughal Empire controlled most of the north, but regional kingdoms persisted in the south and east. Source: Charles Joppen, 1907, Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
Before the British, India had never been a single state. In the 1500s and 1600s, the Mughal dynasty, Muslim rulers of Central Asian descent, governed much of the subcontinent and reached its peak under Akbar the Great (r. 1556–1605). The Mughals built one of the richest empires in the world; around 1700, the subcontinent produced roughly a quarter of the world's economic output. Even so, the emperor's reach was limited. Officials enforced decrees and collected taxes in the capital and the major cities. Across most of the empire, the emperor handed authority to relatives, chiefs, and local leaders.
One historian calls the Mughal state a "paper empire." It ran one of the most sophisticated agricultural tax systems in the world and produced hundreds of thousands of volumes of reports and assessments. But the system depended on cooperation from below. Day-to-day authority rested with local zamindars (landowners), who professed loyalty to the emperor and sent tribute now and then but otherwise ruled as they pleased. When crops failed or an emperor looked weak, ambitious zamindars kept the taxes.
Several Mughal habits outlasted the empire. Persian became the language of government and high culture across northern India, used by Hindu administrators as readily as by Muslim rulers. By 1700, Hindus held most of the middle and lower posts in the Mughal administration between the Punjab and Bengal, especially members of the Kayastha scribal caste, who learned Persian and built family traditions of literacy and government service. One eighteenth-century Muslim cleric complained: "All of India's accountants and clerks are Hindus. They control the country's wealth." The dynasty was Muslim, but the government was a partnership. Hindus and Muslims shared power, regional cultures, languages, and even some religious practices. Most Mughal emperors were devotees of Sufism, the mystical tradition within Islam, and Hindu clerks regularly visited Sufi shrines. The lines between religious communities were far more porous than twentieth-century politics would suggest.
Two features of the society the Mughals governed need explaining: the Hindu caste system and the place of Islam in India.
Hinduism is one of the world's oldest religious traditions. It has no single founder, holy book, or central authority. Many strands of Hindu practice recognize one ultimate divine reality expressed through many gods and goddesses. Three ideas help explain how Hinduism shapes social life. Dharma is duty: what a person is required to do given their birth, family, and station. Karma is cause and effect: every action has consequences, in this life or the next. Samsara is the cycle of death and rebirth, in which the soul passes through many lives, rising or falling according to its karma, until it achieves liberation.
These beliefs underpin the caste system, a social hierarchy rooted in Hindu scripture. The Sanskrit term varna divides society into four ranks: Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (warriors and rulers), Vaishyas (merchants and traders), and Shudras (servants and laborers). Below all four are the Untouchables (also called Dalits), considered ritually polluted and historically barred from temples, wells, and schools. Each varna contains thousands of jatis, subgroups defined by birth, occupation, and region; in daily life, jati is the identity people refer to most. Karma and dharma supply the logic for the hierarchy: do your duty faithfully and you may be reborn into a higher caste; fail, and you fall.
In practice, caste was looser than the theory. Brahmins were not always priests; many held land or worked in government. Shudras who got rich could press for higher ritual and social rank. The Holkar family, for instance, rose from humble origins to rule the kingdom of Indore in the eighteenth century. Caste also varied by region. In Bengal, Brahmins were often large landholders who ate fish despite vegetarian rules. In the Punjab, caste was defined more by occupation than by ritual status. In the south, Brahmins were few but held outsized influence. Caste worked through thousands of local arrangements, enforced by village councils and constantly renegotiated. That flexibility is what the British later tried to freeze into fixed legal categories.
Islam reached India through Arab traders as early as the seventh century and through military conquest beginning in the eleventh. Most of India's Muslims descend from converts. Some were drawn by Islam's teaching of equality before God; others came in through Sufi networks, elite patronage, or regional political change. Perhaps 70 to 80 percent of South Asian Muslims have Hindu ancestors, many from Untouchable and lower-caste communities for whom Islam offered a way out of the varna system. Indian Muslims nonetheless built their own informal ranking, based on claimed descent from the Prophet (Syeds), from Arab and Persian conquerors (Shaykhs), or from more recent Indian converts. The more foreign your lineage, the higher your standing. Equality was the religious ideal; hierarchy was how people actually lived.
Under the Mughals, Hindu and Muslim elites shared power. Historians have found surprisingly little open Hindu-Muslim religious rivalry in eighteenth-century India. Hindu merchants bankrolled Muslim kingdoms, Muslims served in Sikh armies, Hindu writers composed in Persian, and Muslim poets wrote in Hindi and Bengali. When religious violence broke out, economic, military, and political motives usually drove it more than theology did. This coexistence depended on political arrangements, though, and the theological differences remained. Once those arrangements collapsed, religion could become the dividing line of Indian politics.
By the early 1700s, the Mughal Empire was coming apart. The emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707) spent his last twenty-five years on costly campaigns to conquer the Deccan, draining the treasury. When he died, his sons fought over the throne, and succession wars became routine for decades. Powerful nobles began competing for power in their own right, using princes as pawns. After 1724, the Mughal governor of the Deccan effectively declared independence and founded the kingdom of Hyderabad.
Afghan and Persian kings took advantage. In 1739, the Persian conqueror Nadir Shah invaded, crushed the Mughal army at Karnal, and sacked Delhi, killing some 20,000 residents or more. He carried off an estimated 70 crore rupees, enough to let him suspend taxes in his own kingdom for three years, along with the Koh-i-nur diamond and Shah Jahan's jewel-studded Peacock Throne.
Inside India, zamindars and regional leaders founded kingdoms of their own. Clans and religious communities took over large regions: the Sikhs in the Punjab, the Rajputs in Rajasthan, the Marathas in the Deccan. Historians describe this less as the empire's "decline" than as its regionalization. Provinces such as Bengal, Hyderabad, and the Punjab became independent kingdoms in all but name, each with its own administration, army, and taxes. Some were well run. When the British conquered the Kingdom of Mysore in 1799, they were surprised to find its peasants better off than those in British-controlled Madras.
These kingdoms were heavily armed. In the 1700s, around two percent of India's population served full-time in uniform, and counting part-time fighters, perhaps five percent took part in warfare in a given year. On the eve of British conquest, India was a landscape of competing, well-armed states, and the absence of a strong central authority gave the British their opening.
While regional rulers carved up the Mughal Empire, European merchants were building up their presence at Indian ports. Over the 1600s they came to trade silver and copper for spices, silks, tea, and saltpeter, and made large profits. The leading enterprise was the British East India Company, chartered by the Crown in 1600. It was one of the world's first joint-stock companies and held a monopoly on English trade with Asia.
The Company was a private, profit-seeking corporation with its own army, and that mix of commerce and military force set British imperialism in India apart. It did not become a territorial ruler overnight, and it did not set out to. At first it avoided political entanglements that might eat into profits. Indian rulers did not fear the Europeans; many saw them as crude, violent men who drank too much. In 1689, a Mughal army defeated the Company and drove its traders out of Bengal. Company officials described themselves as "humble petitioners" begging that "the ill crimes they have done may be pardoned."
The balance shifted because Indian elites chose to back the British. Wealthy Hindu and Jain banking families financed regional kingdoms and, when those kingdoms proved unstable, moved their money to the more dependable Company. By 1750, the Jagat Seth banking family of Bengal held more assets than the Bank of England. When Bengal's ruler alienated these bankers, they plotted with Company agent Robert Clive to overthrow him. At the Battle of Plassey (1757), a key Bengali general, bribed in advance, held his troops back, and the Company won an easy victory that owed more to money than to fighting. One historian calls the bankers' defection a "recipe for colonialism." Indian elites helped make the conquest possible.
In 1765, the weakened Mughal emperor granted the Company the diwani, the right to collect taxes across Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. As one historian put it: "The merchant had become the sovereign. It would be like Microsoft taking over the state powers of California." Instead of shipping silver to India to pay for Indian goods, the Company could now buy those goods with Indian tax revenue.
By 1800, much of southern India had fallen. The Company forced Indian rulers into "subsidiary alliances" that required them to host and pay for British troops, which trapped them in debt that often ended in annexation. In the 1840s the British defeated the Sikhs and took the Punjab, leaving the Company dominant across the subcontinent. The Company hid its ambitions throughout. It never claimed the symbols of Mughal sovereignty, and many Indian rulers believed it was simply selling military services. They found out otherwise only after it had taken their territory.
The Indian Rebellion of 1857, as depicted in the Illustrated London News. The rebels seized Delhi, Lucknow, and other cities before being crushed. Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
The Company used Englishmen as officers but found it cheaper to recruit and train Indian soldiers, called "sepoys." By the 1850s, grievances had piled up. Under the "Doctrine of Lapse," the Company annexed any state whose ruler died without a biological son, overriding the long Hindu tradition of adoption. Christian missionaries preached in the barracks. Sepoys saw their bonuses cut. One English observer wrote that the Indian soldier "is esteemed an inferior creature. He is sworn at. He is treated roughly. He is spoken of as a 'nigger'."
The trigger was the new Enfield rifle. Its cartridges had to be bitten open, and sepoys heard that they were greased with cow and pig fat. That offended Hindus, for whom the cow is sacred, and Muslims, who consider pork unclean. On May 9, 1857, at Meerut, eighty-five cavalrymen who refused the cartridges were sentenced to ten years in prison and put in chains in front of their regiment. The next day their comrades freed them, killed their officers, and marched to Delhi, where they proclaimed the aged Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar ruler of India.
Civilians joined in. In Awadh (Oudh), which the British had annexed the year before, the population rose en masse; of the roughly 150,000 people who died fighting the British there, more than 100,000 were civilians. Hindu and Muslim rebels cooperated. Wherever the rebellion took hold, rebel leaders banned cow slaughter out of respect for Hindu feeling. A senior British official complained that "in this instance we could not play off the Mohammedans against the Hindus." One of the most celebrated rebel leaders was the Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi, whose kingdom the British had seized under the Doctrine of Lapse. She died fighting on horseback in June 1858.
The rebels, however, could not agree on what they were fighting for. Were they restoring the Mughal Empire, defending Hindu kingdoms, or just driving out the foreigners? That lack of a shared goal is a problem Indian politics would face again. The rebellion was also geographically limited. Bengal, Bombay, Madras, and the Punjab stayed largely quiet, and Sikh soldiers from the Punjab helped the British crush the same sepoys who had earlier helped the British conquer the Punjab.
British reprisals were savage. Muslim rebels were sewn into pigskins before being hanged. Prisoners were tied to the mouths of cannons and blown apart. Delhi's old Muslim quarter was demolished. In Lucknow, Indians were pushed to the outskirts and the inner city was reserved for Europeans. The British also disarmed the civilian population.
In 1858 Parliament dissolved the East India Company and placed India under direct rule by the Crown. Real authority lay with the governor-general (also called the viceroy), whose powers were nearly absolute; Queen Victoria added the title Empress of India in 1876. Bahadur Shah, the last Mughal emperor, then in his eighties, was exiled to Rangoon.
The governor-general ruled about two-thirds of India directly. By the early twentieth century, this "British India" was divided into provinces including the United Provinces, Bihar, Bengal, Madras, the Punjab, the Central Provinces, and Bombay. Each province was split into districts, roughly one per million inhabitants, each run by a British administrator.
The day-to-day work fell to the Indian Civil Service (ICS), which in 1880 had about 1,000 senior members, nearly all British. Queen Victoria's 1858 proclamation had promised that subjects "of whatever race or creed" would be "freely and impartially admitted to office." In practice the ICS kept Indians out: its entrance examinations were held only in London, in English, and tested European classical learning. The service was also too thin to reach most Indians. Many villagers never saw a British official. For them, authority meant the local zamindar and the Brahmin priest.
The British Indian Empire, 1909. Provinces under direct British rule appear in pink; princely states in yellow. Source: Imperial Gazetteer of India, Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
The governor-general's main job was to keep the colony profitable. Roughly a third of the colonial budget went to the army, a quarter to administrative salaries, and 15 percent to debt payments. Irrigation and public works never got more than three or four percent, and education and public health never reached three percent. One administrator asked: "What hope is there of educating a man on three rupees a year?"
In the 1700s, India was one of the world's great manufacturing economies, with about a quarter of global trade in textiles. Indian cloth was prized across Europe, Asia, and Africa, and in parts of Southeast Asia it served as currency. Within two generations of British rule, that trade had collapsed. Britain used tariffs, trade restrictions, and industrial regulations to replace Indian finished goods with British manufactures. By 1830, Britain was shipping 60 million yards of cotton cloth to India a year; by 1870, more than a billion yards, over three yards for every person in India. A famous line, often attributed to the governor-general Lord William Bentinck, held that "the bones of the cotton weavers were bleaching the plains of India." Dhaka, whose muslins had been sought worldwide, shrank from several hundred thousand people in 1760 to about fifty thousand by the 1820s.
Weavers and artisans who lost their trades went back to the land, and under British rule more Indians became peasants than ever before. Famines, made worse by the commercialization of agriculture and British refusal to intervene in markets, killed an estimated 15 to 20 million people in the late nineteenth century. Grain merchants sold to the highest bidder and often exported food while Indians starved. Earlier Indian rulers, Hindu and Muslim, had usually cut taxes during famines. The British, committed to laissez-faire economics, refused. This history of deindustrialization and famine is one reason that every faction at Simla, whatever else divided them, wanted the British gone.
British rule also changed caste. To govern efficiently, the British asked Brahmin scholars to define Hindu law. No ruler of India had seriously tried to reduce the many strands of Hindu legal tradition to a single code before. The Brahmin "native informants" produced a version more scriptural, more hierarchical, and more centered on Brahmins than what most Indians actually practiced. The effects were concrete. Hindu women who could inherit property under local custom lost that right under the new code, because British judges trusted Brahmin treatises over actual practice.
The British then locked this version in place. Before codification, Hindu legal scholars could reinterpret the law case by case. British judges wanted certainty, finality, and precedent. The census, begun in 1871, required every Hindu to state a caste, and the answer became a permanent government record that later generations would cite. The government also grouped lower castes under official labels such as the "Depressed Classes," hardening social distinctions that had been more fluid. (From 1935, the government's list, or "schedule," of these groups gave rise to the term Scheduled Castes.) Colonial scholars also treated caste as race, arguing that varna (which can mean "color") reflected an ancient split between lighter-skinned Aryan invaders and darker-skinned native peoples. The theory had little basis, but it shaped how Indians came to think about themselves.
The result was a caste system more rigid and more central to politics than before. As one historian put it: "Colonial conquest was about the production of an archive of and for rule." The British did not invent caste, but they turned a flexible, regionally varied practice into a fixed system recorded by the state and enforced in court. At Simla, the political claims of the Untouchables will be among the most divisive questions on the table.
British rule also set Indians arguing about their own traditions. Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833), a Bengali Brahmin and one of the first major Indian intellectuals to take up Western ideas, argued that child marriage and sati, the burning of widows on their husbands' funeral pyres, were corruptions of Hinduism rather than part of it. He drew on both Hindu scripture and Enlightenment philosophy to argue for reform from within. The British banned sati in 1829, partly at Roy's urging. The larger question he raised, whether India should recover its own traditions or adopt Western ones, remained open in 1945.
The remaining third of India consisted of some 600 princely states ruled by hereditary monarchs, mostly Hindu maharajas and Muslim nawabs. Some were huge. Hyderabad, roughly the size of Great Britain, had about 15 million people, and Kashmir was about the size of Idaho. Others covered less than a square kilometer.
After 1857, British policy toward the princes reversed. Before the rebellion, the Company had used the Doctrine of Lapse and subsidiary alliances to swallow princely territory. Afterward, the British recognized more princes and hereditary titles than ever, treating traditional rulers as "breakwaters to the storm" of popular unrest. If maharajas, nawabs, and the Nizam, rulers ordinary Indians understood, could keep order, the British could rule cheaply without risking another uprising.
None of the princes were truly independent. Each had a British official, the "Resident," assigned to his court. Princes could not conduct diplomacy with one another or with foreign governments. A prince who failed to keep order or offended the British could be undermined or removed. An elaborate system of honors, including ranked gun salutes, knighthoods, and titles like "The Most Exalted Order of the Star of India," kept the princes competing for British favor instead of uniting against British rule.
Two princely states will figure heavily in the debates over India's future. In Hyderabad, a Muslim ruler governs a mostly Hindu population. In Kashmir, a Hindu ruler governs a mostly Muslim population. Both rulers claim their treaties with Britain guarantee their independence regardless of what happens to the rest of India. In both, as across the subcontinent, religious identity and political power do not line up.
Next reading: The Birth of Indian Nationalism (1885–1919)
