From the Mughals through the British Conquest
Before you can understand the 1945 debates at Simla, you need to understand the India those delegates inherited. This reading covers the subcontinent's geography, the Mughal Empire and its fragmentation, the rise of the East India Company, and the structure of British rule. Pay attention to two recurring patterns: the gap between formal authority and actual power on the ground, and the way religious identity became entangled with political control, not because Hindus and Muslims were always in conflict, but because successive rulers found it useful to govern through communal categories.
India is a subcontinent the size of Europe, home to hundreds of millions of people who speak dozens of languages, practice several major religions, and inhabit landscapes ranging 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, one of the most fertile regions on earth. Watered by the Ganges River descending from the Himalayas, it has sustained dense populations and powerful empires for millennia. This is one of the historic centers of Hindu civilization.
To the east lies Bengal, centered on the vast Ganges delta and the great port city of Calcutta. Bengal's waterways connect it to Southeast Asia and the wider maritime world. Its 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 peninsular interior, largely dry, with mountains that historically prevented northern conquerors from subduing the south.
In the northwest, the Punjab, whose name means "five waters" in Persian, is watered by five tributaries flowing from the Himalayas into the Indus River. Its rich farmland makes it India's breadbasket. It is home to large Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh populations, a mix that will become explosive. Beyond the Punjab lies the Khyber Pass, the narrow mountain route connecting India to Afghanistan and Central Asia, the traditional highway 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.
For centuries before the British arrived, India was not one country but many. During the 1500s and 1600s, the Mughal dynasty, Muslim rulers of Central Asian descent, governed much of the subcontinent, reaching a peak under Akbar the Great (1556--1605). The Mughals built one of the wealthiest empires in the world. By 1700, roughly a quarter of global commerce flowed through the Indian subcontinent. But even at its height, the emperor's authority was limited. In the capital and major cities, officials enforced decrees and collected taxes. In most of the empire, the emperor delegated authority to relatives, chiefs, and local leaders.
The Mughal state ran on what one historian calls a "paper empire." It maintained one of the most sophisticated agrarian taxation systems in the world, producing hundreds of thousands of volumes of reports and assessments. But administering that system required cooperation from below. Day-to-day authority rested with powerful local zamindars (landowners). They professed loyalty to the Mughal dynasty and periodically forwarded tribute, but otherwise ruled as they saw fit. When crops failed or emperors appeared weak, ambitious zamindars kept the taxes for themselves.
The Mughal period established patterns that would persist long after the empire itself collapsed. Persian became the language of government and high culture across northern India, used by Hindu administrators as readily as by Muslim rulers. By 1700, most of the middle and lower rungs of Mughal administration between Punjab and Bengal were held by Hindus---particularly the Kayastha scribal caste, who learned Persian and built traditions of literacy and bureaucratic service. One eighteenth-century Muslim cleric complained: "All of India's accountants and clerks are Hindus. They control the country's wealth." The Mughal Empire was a Muslim dynasty, but it was not a Muslim government in any simple sense. Hindus and Muslims shared power, regional cultures, languages, and even some spiritual practices. Most Mughal emperors were devotees of Sufism, the mystical tradition within Islam, and Hindu clerks regularly visited Sufi shrines. The boundaries between religious communities were more porous than later politics would suggest.
To understand the society the Mughals governed, two features require explanation: 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, no single holy book, and no central authority. Many strands of Hindu practice recognize one ultimate divine reality expressed through many gods and goddesses. Three concepts are essential for understanding how Hinduism shapes Indian social life. Dharma is one's duty: what one is required to do based on birth, family, and station in life. Karma is the law of cause and effect: every action has consequences, if not in this life, then in the next. Samsara is the cycle of death and rebirth: the soul passes through countless lives, ascending or descending based on karma, until it achieves liberation.
These beliefs underpin the caste system, a hierarchical social order 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, historically excluded from temples, wells, and schools. Within each varna are thousands of jatis, subdivisions based on birth, occupation, and region. Jati is the most commonly referenced marker of identity in daily Indian life. Karma and dharma provide the cosmological logic for this hierarchy: fulfill your dharma faithfully and you may be reborn into a higher caste; fail, and you descend.
But caste in practice was more fluid than caste in theory. Brahmins were not always priests; many held zamindaris or worked in government administration. Shudras who acquired wealth could seek higher ritual and social ranking. The Holkar family, for instance, rose from humble origins to rule the kingdom of Indore in the eighteenth century. Caste also varied enormously by region: in Bengal, Brahmins were often large landholders who ate fish despite vegetarian prescriptions; in the Punjab, caste was defined more by occupation than by ritual status; in the south, Brahmins were fewer in number but held disproportionate influence. There was no single "caste system" but rather thousands of local arrangements, enforced by village councils and subject to constant renegotiation. This fluidity would matter enormously when the British later tried to freeze caste into fixed legal categories.
Islam arrived in India through Arab traders as early as the 7th century and through military conquest beginning in the 11th century. Many of India's Muslims are descendants of converts over the centuries, some drawn by Islam's egalitarian teachings, others incorporated through Sufi networks, elite patronage, or regional political change. Perhaps 70 to 80 percent of South Asian Muslims can trace their ancestry to Hindu converts, many from Untouchable and lower-caste communities for whom Islam offered escape from the rigidities of the varna system. Islam's rejection of caste hierarchy offered a powerful alternative, though Indian Muslims developed their own informal hierarchy based on claimed descent from the Prophet (Syeds), from Arab and Persian conquerors (Shaykhs), or from more recent Indian converts. The more foreign lineage one could claim, the higher one's social standing. Social equality was a religious ideal; social hierarchy was the lived reality.
Under Mughal rule, Hindu and Muslim elites shared power. Historians have demonstrated that there was surprisingly little explicit Hindu-Muslim religious rivalry in eighteenth-century India. Hindu merchants bankrolled Muslim kingdoms; Muslims served in Sikh armies; Hindu writers composed in Persian while Muslim poets wrote in Hindi and Bengali. When religious violence did occur, it was usually shaped by economic, military, and political motives rather than purely theological ones. But this coexistence rested on political arrangements, not on resolved theological differences. When those political arrangements collapsed, religious identity would become the fault line of Indian politics.
By the late 1600s and early 1700s, the Mughal Empire was breaking apart. The emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1658--1707) spent his final twenty-five years in a draining military campaign to conquer the Deccan, exhausting the treasury. When he died, his three sons fought among themselves for the throne, setting a pattern of succession crises that would recur for decades. Ambitious nobles became direct contenders for power, using princes as pawns. After 1724, the Mughal governor of the Deccan effectively declared independence and founded the kingdom of Hyderabad. The physical breakup of the empire had begun.
Afghan and Persian kings exploited the weakness. In 1739, the Persian conqueror Nadir Shah invaded, crushed the Mughal army at Karnal, and sacked Delhi. Up to 20,000 residents were killed. Nadir Shah looted an estimated 70 crore rupees, worth hundreds of millions in today's currency, enough to exempt his own kingdom from taxation for three years. He carried away the legendary Koh-i-nur diamond and the jewel-studded Peacock Throne of Shah Jahan. The Mughal emperor was forced to beg on his knees for mercy.
Within India, ambitious zamindars and regional leaders founded their own kingdoms. Large clans and religious communities took control of vast regions: the Sikhs in the Punjab, the Rajputs in Rajasthan, the Marathas in the Deccan. This was not simply the "decline" of the Mughal Empire but its regionalization: provinces like Bengal, Hyderabad, and the Punjab became effectively independent kingdoms, each with its own administration, army, and tax system. Some of these successor states were well-governed---when the British conquered the Kingdom of Mysore in 1799, they were surprised to find that Mysore's peasants were more prosperous than those in British-controlled Madras.
This was also a period of intense military mobilization. Around two percent of India's entire population served in full-time uniform in the 1700s; including part-time fighters, perhaps five percent were engaged in warfare in any given year. India on the eve of British conquest was not a passive or pacifistic society. It was a landscape of competing, well-armed states---and the fragmentation of central authority created the conditions for British takeover.
As rival warlords were carving up the Mughal empire, a potent new force appeared at Indian ports. During the late 1600s, European merchants arrived to trade silver and copper for Asian spices, silks, tea, and saltpeter. The profits were enormous. The foremost enterprise was the British East India Company, chartered by the crown in 1600---one of the world's first publicly traded joint stock companies, granted a monopoly on trade between India and England.
The East India Company was not a government; it was a private, profit-driven corporation with its own army. This marriage of private enterprise and state power was a distinguishing feature of British imperialism. The transformation from trading company to territorial ruler was neither inevitable nor sudden. Initially, the Company wanted to avoid political entanglements that might eat into profits. Indian rulers did not fear the Europeans; many saw them as crude, violent barbarians who drank too much. In 1689, the Mughal emperor humiliated the Company militarily, driving its traders from Bengal and forcing them to seek refuge on a fever-stricken island. Company officials became, in their own words, "humble petitioners" begging that "the ill crimes they have done may be pardoned."
What changed the balance was not British superiority but Indian collaboration. Wealthy Hindu and Jain merchant-banking families bankrolled regional kingdoms and, when those kingdoms proved unstable, shifted their support to the more reliable British. The Jagat Seth banking family of Bengal held larger assets than the entire Bank of England by 1750. When Bengal's ruler alienated these financiers, they secretly conspired with Company agent Robert Clive to overthrow him. At the Battle of Plassey (1757), a key Bengali general had been bribed to withdraw his forces; the Company won a lopsided victory that was more a financial transaction than a military conquest. The withdrawal of Indian financiers from regional courts created what one historian calls a "recipe for colonialism." India was not simply conquered; Indian elites helped make the conquest possible.
The real turning point came in 1765, when the weakened Mughal emperor was pressured into granting the Company the diwani---the right to collect revenue 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 importing silver to pay for Indian goods, the Company could now use Indian tax revenue to buy Indian products. Revenue from Bengal alone was worth nearly eight million pounds sterling---the modern equivalent of billions of dollars.
By 1800, much of southern India had fallen. The Company imposed "subsidiary alliances" on Indian rulers, forcing them to station and pay for British troops, creating a perpetual debt cycle that ended in annexation. In the 1840s the British defeated the Sikhs and acquired the Punjab, completing Company domination of the subcontinent. Crucially, the Company concealed its ambitions throughout. It never adopted the symbols of Mughal sovereignty. Indian rulers did not believe the Company had political designs; they thought it was merely offering military services for hire. By the time they understood otherwise, it was too late.
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 East India Company employed Englishmen as officers but found it cheaper to hire and train Indian soldiers ("sepoys"). By the 1850s, a long accumulation of grievances had built to a breaking point. The Company had annexed kingdom after kingdom using the "Doctrine of Lapse," seizing any state whose ruler could not produce a biological male heir, a rule that violated the longstanding Hindu tradition of adoption. Christian missionaries preached openly in military barracks. Sepoys saw their bonuses cut. An English observer noted 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 spark came in 1857, when officers introduced the new Enfield rifle. Indian soldiers learned that the gun cartridges, which had to be bitten open, had been greased with animal fat. This outraged Hindus, who regard beef as sacred, and Muslims, who consider pork unclean. On May 9, eighty-five soldiers of the 3rd Native Cavalry who refused the cartridges were dismissed, sentenced to ten years' imprisonment, and put into fetters. 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. With that act, a military mutiny became something larger.
The rebellion was far more than a soldiers' revolt. In Awadh (Oudh), which the British had annexed just the year before, the civilian population rose en masse. Of the roughly 150,000 people who died fighting the British in Awadh, over 100,000 were civilians. Hindu and Muslim rebels cooperated: wherever the rebellion succeeded, orders were immediately issued banning cow slaughter out of respect for Hindu sentiments. A senior British official bitterly complained that "in this instance we could not play off the Mohammedans against the Hindus." Among the rebellion's most celebrated leaders was the Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi, whose kingdom the British had seized under the Doctrine of Lapse. She died fighting on horseback on June 17, 1858; beside her fell her lifelong companion, a Muslim woman.
But the rebellion exposed the same problem that would haunt Indian politics for the next century: the rebels could not agree on what they were fighting for. Were they restoring the Mughal empire? Defending Hindu kingdoms? Simply expelling the foreigners? The rebellion failed partly because its participants had no shared vision of the future. It was also geographically limited: Bengal, Bombay, Madras, and the Punjab remained largely quiet. Punjabi Sikh soldiers helped the British crush the very sepoys who had earlier helped conquer the Punjab.
The British responded with severe reprisals. Muslim rebels were wrapped in pigskin before hanging. Prisoners were tied to cannons and blown apart. Delhi's old Muslim quarter was demolished. In Lucknow, Indians were forced to live in the outskirts, with the inner city reserved for Europeans. The British then disarmed the civilian population, confiscating some three and a half million guns by 1858.
In the rebellion's wake, the British government dissolved the East India Company and decided to rule India directly as a colony of the crown. Queen Victoria became Empress of India, but the governor general (viceroy) wielded real authority, and his powers were nearly absolute. The aged Bahadur Shah, nearly eighty years old and the last Mughal emperor, was exiled to Rangoon. The last symbol of an older era was gone.
The governor general directly ruled two-thirds of India, divided into provinces: the United Provinces, Bihar, Bengal, Madras, Punjab, the Central Provinces, and Bombay. Each province was further subdivided into districts, roughly one for every million inhabitants, each governed by a British administrator.
The actual work of running the colony fell to the Indian Civil Service, which in 1880 consisted of 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 was designed to exclude Indians: the ICS held examinations only in London, in English, testing European classical knowledge. But this structure was also too thin to touch most Indians' lives. Many villagers had never seen a British official. For them, authority rested with local zamindars and Brahmin religious leaders.
The British Indian Empire, 1909. Provinces under direct British rule appear in pink; princely states in yellow. The patchwork illustrates why India was not one country but many. Source: Imperial Gazetteer of India, Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
The governor general's main task was to ensure the colony's profitability. Roughly one-third of the colonial budget went to the army, one-quarter to administrative salaries, and 15 percent to debt payments---leaving almost nothing for education, public health, or development. Spending on irrigation and public works never exceeded three to four percent of the budget; spending on education and public health never reached three percent. One administrator lamented: "What hope is there of educating a man on three rupees a year?"
The economic transformation under British rule was devastating. India in the 1700s was one of the world's great manufacturing economies, commanding a 25 percent share of global trade in textiles. Indian cloth was coveted across Europe, Asia, and Africa; in parts of Southeast Asia, Indian textiles served as a form of currency. Within two generations of British rule, this was systematically reversed. Britain imposed tariffs, trade restrictions, and industrial regulations designed to replace Indian finished goods with British manufactures. By 1830, Britain was exporting 60 million yards of cotton cloth to India per year. By 1870, it crossed one billion yards---more than three yards for every Indian man, woman, and child. Lord William Bentinck, the Company's own governor general, wrote that "the bones of the cotton weavers were bleaching the plains of India." The great textile center of Dhaka, whose muslins had been prized across the world, saw its population collapse from several hundred thousand in 1760 to roughly fifty thousand by the 1820s.
This was not simply the working of market forces. Former weavers and artisans, stripped of their livelihoods, were pushed into the countryside. Under British rule, more Indians became peasants than ever before. Famines, worsened by the commercialization of agriculture and the British refusal to intervene in markets, killed an estimated 15 to 20 million people by 1900. Grain merchants sold to whichever market offered the highest price, often exporting food while Indians starved. Unlike previous Indian rulers, both Hindu and Muslim, who had traditionally adjusted taxes during famine, the British adhered to principles of laissez-faire economics and refused to act. This economic destruction, the deliberate deindustrialization of a once-wealthy society, is essential context for understanding why every faction at the 1945 Simla conference, whatever else they disagreed on, wanted the British out.
British rule also transformed the caste system. Before the British arrived, caste varied enormously by region and was more fluid than later codifications suggest. The British, seeking to govern efficiently, asked Brahmin scholars to define Hindu law. It was the first time any ruler in India had really attempted to systematize the diverse body of Hindu legal tradition into a single code. The Brahmin scholars who served as "native informants" produced a version that was more scriptural, more hierarchical, and more Brahmin-centered than what most Indians actually practiced. The consequences were concrete: Hindu women who had been able to inherit property under local custom found themselves legally unable to do so under the new codified law, because British jurists trusted Brahmin treatises over actual practice.
The British then locked this version into place. Before codification, Hindu legal scholars could interpret the law anew in every case; afterward, British jurists insisted on certainty, finality, and precedent. The 1871 census compounded the problem by requiring every Hindu to declare a fixed caste identity. If you were Hindu, the census asked: what is your caste? The answer became a permanent bureaucratic record, referred to by subsequent generations. Lower castes were officially classified with terms like "other backward castes" and "depraved castes," government-sanctioned designations that hardened what had been more fluid social distinctions. Colonial scholars also racialized caste, arguing that varna (which can translate as "color") reflected ancient racial divisions between lighter-skinned Aryan invaders and darker-skinned indigenous peoples, a theory that bore little relationship to reality but powerfully shaped how Indians came to think about themselves.
The cumulative effect was to make caste more rigid and more central to Indian political life than it had ever been. One historian summarized it bluntly: "Colonial conquest was about the production of an archive of and for rule." The British did not invent caste, but they transformed it from a flexible, regionally varied social practice into a fixed, legally enforced, bureaucratically recorded system. This transformation is essential background for the debates at Simla, where caste identity, especially the political claims of the Untouchables, will be one of the most divisive questions on the table.
British rule provoked debate among Indians themselves about their own traditions. Ram Mohan Roy (1772--1833), a Bengali Brahmin and one of the first major Indian intellectuals to engage with Western ideas, argued that practices such as child marriage and sati, the burning of widows on their husbands' funeral pyres, were not essential to Hinduism but superstitious corruptions of its original purity. Roy drew on both Hindu scriptures and Enlightenment philosophy to argue for reform from within. The British banned sati in 1829, partly at Roy's urging, but the broader question he raised---whether India's path forward lay in recovering its own traditions or adopting Western ones---would never be settled.
The remaining third of India consisted of some 600 princely states whose rulers were hereditary monarchs, mostly Hindu maharajas or Muslim nizams. Some were enormous: Hyderabad, roughly the size of France, had about 15 million people; Kashmir was nearly the size of Montana. Others were less than a square kilometer.
The British relationship with the princes shifted dramatically after 1857. Before the rebellion, the Company had been aggressive, using the Doctrine of Lapse and subsidiary alliances to annex princely territory. After 1857, the British reversed course. They recognized more princes and hereditary titles than ever before, seeing traditional rulers as "breakwaters to the storm" of popular unrest. The logic was pragmatic: if Indian maharajas, nawabs, and nizams---figures ordinary Indians understood---could maintain order, the British could rule on the cheap without provoking another mass uprising.
None of the princes were truly independent. Nearly all governed in "association" with the British. A British official, the "Resident," was assigned to each prince. The princes were forbidden from maintaining diplomatic relations with one another or with foreign governments. If the prince failed to keep order or offended British sensibilities, the Resident could invoke legal powers to undermine or remove him. An elaborate system of honors, including gun-salute hierarchies, knighthoods, and ornamental titles like "The Most Exalted Order of the Star of India," kept the princes competing with one another for British approval rather than uniting against British rule.
Two princely states will matter enormously in the debates over India's future: Hyderabad, where a Muslim ruler governs a predominantly Hindu population, and Kashmir, where a Hindu ruler governs a predominantly Muslim population. Both claim their British treaties guarantee their independence regardless of what happens in the rest of India. Together, they illustrate the problem that makes India's future so difficult: religious identity and political power do not align neatly anywhere on the subcontinent.
Next reading: The Birth of Indian Nationalism (1885--1919)
