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By Root 982 0

saw the power vacuum opened up by the Mughal collapse— and they filled it. In essence, the company recapitulated the strategy of the Persian and Tang emperors. They identified the warrior classes among their subject populace—such as the Rajputs from the north, who had long-standing military traditions—and aggressively recruited them, using them to conquer and rule a territory and population far vaster than the British could otherwise have controlled. At its peak, the company's army numbered roughly 320,000 soldiers, of whom only 40,000 were European. By the mid-nineteenth century, the East India Company was the greatest power on the subcontinent, presiding over the largest civil service, wielding the largest army, and governing a population of approximately two hundred million. As the historian T. A. Heath-cote put it, “The East India Company succeeded the Mughals as the next Indian empire.”26

Unlike the ultraorthodox Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, the Company ruled with a tolerant hand—not out of idealism but expedience—following Wellington's principle that interfering with India's “ancient laws, customs and religion” was politically dangerous. Britain's Indian army included Muslims, Hindus, Christians, and Sikhs, as well as a number of Africans and Arabs. All were permitted to worship as they chose. British officers, acting under Company orders, joined in native religious ceremonies. Troops and cannons were made available for local festivals. Indeed, as successors to the kings and princes whom they had replaced, the Company's directors maintained Hindu temples and collected taxes for the benefit of religious pilgrims.27

The same precepts of calculated tolerance underlay the Company's commercial and governmental dealings in India. From the beginning, the Company profited enormously from alliances with indigenous entrepreneurial minorities, most of whom had previously worked in the service of the Mughal emperors. It was only through partnerships with these native capitalists—Jain moneylenders, Gujarati banking families, Hindu and Parsi merchants, dubashes in Madras, banians in Bengal—that the Company could penetrate India's interior. The Company's British merchants allowed their Indian counterparts to make great fortunes, in the process turning them into “uneasy collaborators in the creation of colonial India.” At the same time, the Company employed more and more Indians as petty bureaucrats to administer its expanding territories. Here the strategy was a modern variation on Genghis Khan's. The Company coopted and trained a pro-English cadre of Indian functionaries and elites who handled day-to-day administration under British supervision.28

Interestingly, the Company's men showed a similar openness to native “abilities” when it came to their sexual lives. During the period of Company governance in India (roughly between 1757 and 1858), marriage between British men and Indian women was common. And there was considerably more miscegenation than there was intermarriage. “I now commenced a regular course of f—ing with native women,” wrote one Englishman, recalling his early days in India as a sixteen-year-old Company cadet. Another Company employee waxed more philosophical: “[T]hose who have lived with a native woman for any length of time never marry a European … so amusingly playful, so anxious to oblige and please [are they], that a person after being accustomed to their society shrinks from the idea of encountering the whims or yielding to the fancies of an Englishwoman.”

The Company's promiscuity, both sexual and religious, outraged English evangelicals back in London. The evangelicals did not mince words about Christianity's superiority over the “abominable and degrading superstitions” prevailing in India. “Our religion is sublime, pure and beneficent,” declared William Wilber-force to the House of Commons in 1813. “Theirs is mean, licentious and cruel.” Wilberforce demanded that Parliament undo the barriers erected by the Company against Christian proselytizing in India. As time went on, the evangelical movement gained