We asserted that West crushed and humiliated the Mughals. 0M-3 answered that the humiliation was an inside job: it was the Marathas who broke Mughal power, and when Delhi passed to the Company in 1803 the treaty was signed with the Marathas, the emperor not even a party to it.

Did the British take India from the Muslims or from the Hindus? The empire the British inherited had already fallen apart, and it had fallen apart along lines that almost had nothing to do with faith.

The British conquered successor states, not an empire.

Aurangzeb died in 1707, and within a generation the Mughal map was a fiction. Hyderabad went its own way under the Nizam by the 1720s, Bengal and Awadh became nawabis in all but name, and the Marathas took the centre. The spectacular blows did not come from London. Nadir Shah of Persia sacked Delhi in 1739, carried off the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor, and left tens of thousands dead in the streets in a single day. The Afghan Ahmad Shah Durrani came back to plunder again and again after him. By 1788 the emperor Shah Alam had been blinded by an Afghan adventurer and was living as a pensioner of his Maratha keepers. When General Lake walked into Delhi in 1803 he collected a prisoner the Marathas had been holding, not a throne. The British did not topple the Mughals. They arrived to read the will.

The frontiers were not religious frontiers.

Press the communal map onto the eighteenth century and it tears at once. Tipu Sultan, the Muslim tiger of Mysore, ruled a country that was mostly Hindu and ran his revenue through a Brahmin, Purnaiah. Ranjit Singh, the Sikh lion of Lahore, ruled a Punjab that was mostly Muslim. The Maratha and Nawabi states alike were administered by Hindu clerks and financed by Hindu bankers. There was no Muslim India and no Hindu India waiting to be defeated. There were states, and the faith of the man at the top told you very little about the people beneath him, still less about the men who ran his treasury.

The conquest was paid for and fought by Indians.

Plassey in 1757 is remembered as a battle. It was closer to a purchase. Siraj-ud-Daula lost because his own commander, Mir Jafar, stood aside, and Mir Jafar stood aside because the Jagat Seths, the richest Hindu banking house in Bengal, had decided their Nawab was bad for business and bought his army out from under him. Seven years later at Buxar the Company beat the Nawab of Awadh, the deposed Nawab of Bengal, and the Mughal emperor himself, all three together, and then took the right to tax Bengal to pay for the next war. The armies that did this work were Indian, sepoy and Hindu and Muslim in the great majority, marching on credit raised against Indian land. The Company was paramount because Indians found it paid to make it so.

The disunity is the story.

The faith of each beaten ruler is almost beside the point. The British did not conquer a religion. They completed a hostile takeover of a bankrupt estate, with Indian money, Indian troops, and a long row of victories over rulers who were Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh by turns and who would never combine.