The birth of the nation in South Asia is inextricably linked to the sundering of our past and our communities along religious lines, a fracturing rehearsed endlessly in the bloodbaths of repeated partitions, riots, and pogroms, in the banality of daily lynchings. For South Asians today, “India” before the Raj is indeed a foreign country. Let me recount a tale from this faraway land, which cannot be located on modern maps, to show how wondrously strange it is.

On 1 April 1597, Gonçalo Toscano was arrested in Portuguese India.1 The Inquisition classified Toscano by “caste” as being “Muslim [mouro], originating from Balaghat [a range of foothills in present-day Maharashtra], freedman [forro], single,” and about twenty-three years of age. Some nine years before, after being baptized and owing to disagreements he had with “his friend,” a certain Matheus Carvalho, he had left the city of Bassein (Baçaim) to return to his hometown of Kalyan (Galiana, near Thane).

This chapter examines the emergence of modern Sikh nationalism against the background of colonial modernisation of the Punjab’s economy from the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It reviews the competitive social mobilisation that led to religious reform movements among Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. It examines the role of the Singh Sabhas in the late nineteenth century that were at the forefront of the religious renaissance among the Sikhs, shaping a distinct non-Hindu identity which culminated with the Akali movement in the early 1920s and the Sikh Gurdwaras Act (1925). It then reviews the cultural expressions of this new consciousness in the growth of the Punjabi press, Punjabi language, literature and material culture. This is followed by an outline of the dominant narratives of Sikh politics during colonial democratisation that ended with the Government of India Act (1935) and its immediate aftermath before the outbreak of the Second World War. The conclusion summarises the internal cleavages within Sikh society dating from this period that underlay the overarching sense of Sikh identity and continue to provide competing conceptions of Sikh identity and the nationalist ideal.

This chapter examines the English East India Company’s (EIC’s) rise to dominance in South Asia from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. The EIC followed Asian precedents by forging its empire through reliance on strategies of define and conquer and define and rule. Company officials first curated indigenous identities to mobilize a uniquely competitive multicultural conquest coalition. They then stabilized their rule through a diversity regime of ecumenical incorporation, which reified religious difference as the primary cleavage on which colonial divide and rule logics would rest. The chapter proceeds in six sections. The first charts the onset of competitive state-building in South Asia following the Mughal Empire’s decline. The second section recounts the EIC’s expansion, before critiquing existing explanations for this. The third to fifth sections advance my substantive explanation for the rise of the ‘Company Raj’. The discussion conforms to the template of emergence, institutionalization, legitimization and consolidation established earlier to explain the rise of the Mughals and the Manchus. The sixth section sums up the chapter’s findings and teases out its broader implications.