The Colonial Project That Reshaped South Asia | Hindustan to British India

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]When the British begin to [music] establish themselves as a political party under the East India Company, they begin a process in the 17th century of kind of dismantling [music] other forms of political imagination in order to set forth a very particular form of political imagination, which was the liberal [music] British idea that they were there to free the those who were captured by the by the they saw themselves as liberators. So, who are they liberating?

[00:00:31]They saw themselves liberating the majority, Hindu majority, from the Muslim minority rule. So, they saw the Mughals who the whom the British East India Company is engaged in a both direct warfare and negotiation with, they saw the Mughals as oriental [music] despots, as in unacknowledged rulers who do not care for the population. They are They are colonial, to use a anachronistic world. And they saw that these oriental despots, these Muslim polities, had governed the subcontinent [music] for a thousand years plus and that the British job was to not only civilize the landscape, but also free them. And so, in the 18th [music] century, there was a project to dismantle earlier political ideas and to [music] establish a new idea of British India. And the concept that the British state, the British soldiers, scribes, as I call them in my book, that they wanted to dismantle was this concept of Hindustan.