Conclusion

There are many more nuances to this story, but, if we may overgeneralize a bit, this was essentially the state of affairs when some elements within the East India Company began in the 1750s to develop greater political and territorial ambitions in India, beyond their capacity as “mere” traders.

It is important to remember, of course, that prior to this—and even in the buildup to the famous Battle of Plassey (1757), which is usually seen as the inaugural moment of British colonial expansion in India—most of the Company's maneuvering had been fairly limited to the coasts, and focused on monopolizing the India trade for themselves vis-à-vis their European rivals (especially the French) rather than any clearly articulated desire to colonize India. Be that as it may, over the course of the eighteenth century the East India Company grew adept at exploiting some of the same structural factors discussed earlier to their advantage. The monetization of the military labor market, for instance, allowed them to hire Indian soldiers (known as “sepoys,” from the Persian sipahi) purely on salary, outside the old patterns of service and obligation such as naukari and namak-halali. The Company paid for at least some of this increased militarism, moreover, through arrangements with native Indian financiers such as Amir Chand and the Jagat Seths, in turn using these resources to exploit some of the very same inter-regional rivalries that had incentivized many eighteenth-century Indian rulers to maintain “the semblance of Mughal empire” (as noted previously) to the Company's, and ultimately Britain's, own advantage. Indeed, the degree to which the East India Company conquered India with Indian soldiers, with Indian capital, and with the collaboration (albeit sometimes reluctant) of Indian states that aligned themselves with the British in order to gain leverage over their local rivals, is too often underappreciated (and undertheorized) in a lot of modern South Asian historiography.

The rise of the British colonial state in India, however, is another long and complex story altogether. In closing this rather lengthy chapter, then, perhaps it is worth emphasizing once more that although Mughal military, political, and economic power had certainly waned by the mid-eighteenth century, the symbolic potency of the empire's governing idiom remained intact, at least as an ideal. This perhaps explains why so many “successor” states—including, at first, even the East India Company in Bengal—sought to emulate the erstwhile Mughal administrative and ideological idiom, rather than simply cast it aside. In this regard even the built environment could serve as a potent reminder not just of Mughal grandeur as such, but also of the empire's remarkable capacity, at least in its heyday, for assimilating so many disparate and often fractious elements of Indian culture and society into a single, coherent imperial vision. It was precisely this kind of cultural memory, it may be argued, that led the various groups of rebels of 1857 to converge on the Red Fort in Delhi in order to plead with the enfeebled, octogenarian, “last Mughal” emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar (r. 1837-1857), to unify their cause.^[1951] It was from the ramparts of that very same Red Fort that Jawaharlal Nehru would announce India's independence from British rule nearly a hundred years later, in his famous “Tryst with Destiny” speech at midnight on August 14, 1947—and from which the sitting prime minister addresses the nation during the annual Independence Day celebrations to this very day.

Conclusion

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