Colonialism, Institutions, and Ethnic Violence in India

Aspects of the British-princely distinction persisted in the political behavior of a generation of postindependence Indian politicians and their constituents. In certain contemporary Indian states, however, the significance of the British/princely distinction has been even greater: historical-political heterogeneity — briefly, the fact and the consequences of British versus princely rule in historically separate territorial units — has fundamentally influenced the formation of the contemporary state and its evolution as a political community. — John Wood

Contemporary patterns of ethnic conflict in India were constructed during the period of British colonialism on the subcontinent. In the mid-nineteenth century, a massive rebellion against the British East India Company ended imperial expansion and fixed the boundaries between British and princely India. Princely rulers were not simply controlled by the British; rather, they were largely autonomous within their kingdoms, especially during the run-up to independence. Colonial officials and the princes had strikingly different conceptions about ethnicity and how to organize and stratify ethnic groups, and their disparate policies created different fault lines of conflict. After independence in 1947, the institutions of the provinces and princely states transmitted the legacies of the past into modern Indian politics.

A Glimpse of Medieval India

Prior to the establishment of British rule, the most important political events on the subcontinent were a series of invasions by Islamic warlords from Central Asia. The earliest of these invasions reached the borders of modern India by the eleventh century, and the last, the Mughal conquest, began in the sixteenth century. The Mughals hailed from modern Uzbekistan, and the founding of their empire is dated to the victory of Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur (who reigned from 1526 to 1530), the first Mughal emperor, over the Afghan Lodi dynasty in the Battle of Panipat in 1526. Over the next two centuries, the Mughals consolidated their rule over most of India with the exclusion of its southern tip. Because this book's central focus is on the influence of the British period on contemporary patterns of ethnic violence in India, it is important to consider what is known about ethnic politics and conflict prior to the onset of colonialism, primarily during the period of Mughal rule.

The literature on religion during the precolonial period is fraught with disagreement and controversy. One school of scholars tends to high