And of course, similarly, declinism is a crucial ingredient in Turkish republican/nationalist history-writing about the Ottoman past as well.

Incidentally, the standard nationalistic narrative of british takeover emphasized the importance of trade, and that the loss of Indian freedom was a consequence of loss of control over sea lanes of communication (due to neglect of naval security and regional political and military instability), and hence trade from India. At least this was the narrative when I studied NCERT books as a school student (80’s and early 90’s). The books were otherwise pretty communist :), and I must say that there is much more merit to this than the standard tropes that you refer to. This is of course also partly Braudel’s thesis of colonization.

I also really felt sorry for Dara Shikoh and was pretty distressed by his fate when I heard the story in my childhood. :)

And, to Qalandar, I often imagine an alternate universe with the 2 vols. of The Rothschilds and none of Ferguson’s later books. I feel better about liking them, that way.

Dara: Random Aside: his “Mingling of the Two Oceans” is available in English too…

They junk the kings and dynasties method, focus on things like traveller’s accounts, social formations, poetry and culture and leave Kings and Courtly culture for the last chapter.

*[I'm myself very unsympathetic to Aurangzeb's ideology, and have had distress ever since childhood that Dara Shikoh didn't win :-)].

The Spanish or Ottoman empires provide better comparisons, imho.

http://qalandari.blogspot.com/2007/03/book-review-felt-community-2002_25.html

Jonathan: to this day, standard histories treat the 18th century as some kind of doom and gloom period for India, and I am glad to see openness to countervailing notions. The century probably wasn’t all that bad from the perspective of the Maratthas, the Jats, etc. etc. (more broadly this would get into the debate over, not only whether de-centralization was “good”, but over how centralized the imperial polities were in the first place). [The "empire-centrism" re-asserts itself here too, as this or that polity is anointed as imperial successor; typically the Maratthas, doing some violence to the way that polity was structured.]

I must confess to great impatience with Ferguson, who often does read like an apologist for empire, especially in his post-9/11 writings. And, playing devil’s advocate for a second, Sen’s view is standard nationalist, but he might feel the need to re-invigorate the paradigm given the triple threat it faces from the likes of Ferguson; the Hindu nationalist accounts which basically see an unending night from Mahmud of Ghazni all the way down to Jawaharlal Nehru (suitable glimmers for Shivaji, Maharana Pratap, and Vijaynagar); and a certain “post-modern” tendency to resist the simplistic accounts of imperialism by focusing so much on the cross-cultural exchange aspect of it that the empire begins to seem like one big pluralistic party.