White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India

But in the months to come, the sheer quantity of intelligence that the British received from the city, and the lack of it in the rebels’ camp, did as much as anything to determine the outcome of the struggle for Delhi.

What had seemed an elegant solution to two problems—relieving population pressure in India and providing cheap labor to the farthest reaches of the growing empire—was now a headache in itself. For the Indians were part of a larger British strategy and could not be as easily maltreated as, say, Aboriginals or native Africans. The Indians had certain

The passage highlights something that is often forgotten in accounts of life on the Ridge: the fact that just over half the soldiers, and almost all the vast support staff, were not British, but Indian. It was, all in all, a very odd sort of religious war, where a Muslim Emperor was pushed into rebellion against his Christian oppressors by a mutino

More specifically, as far as Delhi was concerned, by extinguishing even the faintest hope of any of the princes of the royal house ever succeeding Zafar, the British created a situation where no one in the imperial family had anything to lose, and all were sufficiently disaffected to risk anything to try to save their position. It was a fatal error

The profound contempt that the British so openly expressed for Indian Muslim and Mughal culture proved contagious, particularly to the ascendant Hindus, who quickly hardened their attitudes to all things Islamic, but also to many young Muslims, who now believed that their own ancient and much-cherished civilisation had been irretrievably discredite

According to the Mughal historian Khair ud-Din Illahabadi, ‘The Emperor spent years – and fortunes – attempting to destroy the foundations of Maratha power, but this accursed tree could not be pulled up by the roots.’ From Babur to Aurangzeb, the Mughal monarchy of Hindustan had grown ever more powerful, but now there was war among his descendants