In 1799, Mahlaqa Bai “Chanda”, “The Moon”, presented a book of her songs to the Deputy British Resident of Hyderabad, John Malcolm, in the middle of a music and dance party. Renowned as the first Indian courtesan to write a collection of Urdu poetry, she was equally famous for her affairs with powerful men at the Nizam’s court. Obscured by Mahlaqa Bai’s luminescence today is the man behind the Moon, her ustād (master-teacher) Khushhal Khan “Anup”. A hereditary musician in exile from Mughal Delhi, Anup left behind an enormous corpus of songs, several music-technical treatises, and an illustrated rāgamālā. In this chapter I use the illustrated writings of this single hereditary musician to unravel the stories of musical life, and the lives of these two extraordinary figures and their patrons, in Nizami Hyderabad c.1780−1830.

Long before the East India Company’s founding, individual Europeans traveled to India as soldiers. Rulers recruited such men to gain access to new technical knowledge and to demonstrate their cosmopolitan reach. Company officials had long sought to make use of these adventurers as informal diplomatic agents, but had little success until the mid-eighteenth century, when the Company’s expanding political power made such connections valuable to European adventurers. As the balance of power between the Company and Indian states shifted, those adventurers demanded more formal positions within the Company, including as political residents through whom the Company asserted indirect influence over nominally independent states. Their success in implanting themselves as Company agents contrasts with the status of Indian officers and sepoys employed by the Company, who were also active in the fluid military labor markets of India. Rather than seeing such figures as potential representatives, Company officials used their growing corps of diplomat-adventurers to compel Indian states into new treaties criminalizing such movement and thus curtailing the fluidity of South India’s military economy.

In this chapter, I address the issue of selection bias more directly. First, I present a comparative case study using most-similar research design between the two similar princely states of Awadh and Hyderabad, which shows that historical contingency determined by external geo-political circumstances prevented British from being selective and led to direct rule in Awadh vs. indirect rule in Hyderabad. Second, I develop a new instrument for the British choice of indirect rule through princely states based on the exogenous effect of major European Great Power wars that decreased the ability of the British to fight wars of annexation to bring additional territory into direct rule and increased their tendency to sign treaties of indirect rule with Indian states on the frontiers of British direct rule. The instrumental variable (IV-2SLS) analysis is a major empirical contribution and allows an estimate of the causal effects of colonial indirect rule on Maoist insurgency. I also develop a fine-grained typology of different types of princely states and show that warrior states like Mysore had higher development, while successor states like Hyderabad and feudatory states like Bastar had more inequality and less development and thus Maoist insurgency.

Similar to the Chhattisgarh chapter, I use archival and interview data to do process tracing of the mechanisms for another crucial pathway case of Maoist insurgency in Andhra Pradesh. The Telangana districts of Andhra Pradesh that had Maoist insurgency were historically part of the princely state of Hyderabad where Nizam’s rule created lower levels of development and land inequality and despotic extraction, which then persisted into postcolonial times through path dependence. The Telangana peasant rebellion of 1946-49 provided rebel agency and organizational networks and was followed by the CPI-Marxist- Leninist movement in 1967-72, and culminated in the People’s War Group (PWG) Maoist insurgency in the 1980s. All these rebellions succeeded in the Telangana districts of the former princely state of Hyderabad, and not in the British direct ruled areas of Madras province that had higher levels of development and less land inequality. I also describe the history of evolution of the PWG Maoists in Telangana region of Andhra Pradesh and show how rebel agency exploited the structural conditions to create successful Maoist insurgency. Finally, I test the theory on an Assembly Constituency dataset to show that former princely state constituencies had positive correlation with Maoist control.

The final chapter returns to the Indian subcontinent to reveal the durability of the Company’s expansion within the carapace of Mughal sovereignty by the mid-eighteenth century. Although traditionally understood as a period of Mughal decline, largely facilitated by the ‘rise’ of the Company, this chapter argues that the two were not mutually exclusive, and in fact the continued expansion of the Company within a Mughal framework contributed to the empire’s continued authority on the Indian subcontinent, as the networks of Company servants helped bind the emperor in Delhi to the regional nawabs into the 1750s. For example, the imperial farman of 1716 provided the Company with its greatest set of rights yet, including customs-free trade and the territorial expansion of most of its main settlements, such as Calcutta and Madras. The Company’s negotiations to implement these rights with the empire’s various regional governments served to embed the Company even further into these regions, even as the nawabs assumed greater local powers themselves. Many of these negotiations continued to be shaped by the private transcultural networks between Company servants and Mughal elites, and despite the emergence of a powerful and more capable British nation-state in the early eighteenth century, one that made various claims on the Company in Asia, these intimate and cross-cultural ties proved remarkably resilient.