By London Bangla Radio Magazine.

What If Britain Had Never Colonised India?

The South Asia That Might Have Been

An alternate-history thought experiment asks how the political map of South Asia might have changed if British colonial rule had never taken hold.

Imagine opening a map of South Asia in 2026 and finding no country called India. In its place are several powerful neighbours: a Hindustan Confederation centred on Delhi; a Punjab Khalsa Raj with Lahore as its capital; a unified Bengal led from Dhaka; a Maratha Confederacy in the west; a modern Hyderabad in the Deccan; a Rajputana Union; and a Lanka Kingdom across the Palk Strait.

That is the world shown in the accompanying illustration. It is a striking image, but it should be read in the spirit in which it is offered: not as a prediction, and certainly not as a claim that history had one inevitable alternative route. It is an exercise in alternate history. It asks what might have happened if one of the most consequential forces in modern South Asian history, British colonial rule, had never shaped the political order of the subcontinent.

Editorial note: Counterfactual history can clarify that the present was not preordained. It cannot establish what would have happened. This article therefore presents one plausible imagined trajectory among many.

Before the thought experiment, one important caveat

It is easy to imagine an uncolonised subcontinent simply as today’s India without the British. That is probably the least convincing version of the scenario.

Modern India is a constitutional republic with a national political framework, but the subcontinent has also contained empires, kingdoms, confederacies, city-states and regional powers with distinct languages, commercial networks and political traditions. Regional identities were not frozen in time: they developed, changed and sometimes overlapped with wider imperial structures. The National Institute of Open Schooling notes that, as Mughal authority weakened in the eighteenth century, important regional states emerged or reasserted themselves, including Punjab, Bengal, Hyderabad, Mysore and Maratha polities.^[1]

That historical starting point does not tell us what would have followed. It does, however, make one thing clear: there is no compelling reason to assume that all these regions would eventually have merged into a single successor state with the borders of the present-day Republic of India.

A political landscape already in motion

The most useful way to approach this counterfactual is not to erase Britain from an otherwise unchanged story. It is to recognise that British expansion altered a political landscape that was already dynamic.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Mughal authority was under pressure and regional rulers, military elites, commercial centres and local dynasties were negotiating their own futures. The Marathas were a major force across western and central India. Hyderabad was a substantial Deccan state under the Nizam. Bengal had a long regional history and deep commercial connections. In the north-west, the Sikh Empire under Maharaja Ranjit Singh became a formidable power before the Anglo-Sikh wars brought it into conflict with British-Indian forces.^{[1] [2]}

Remove British conquest, alliances and paramountcy from that story and the possibilities multiply. Some states might have expanded. Others might have fragmented. Dynasties could have been overthrown, federations created or new nationalist movements formed around language, region, religion, trade and class. A united subcontinent would still have been possible, but it would have been only one possible outcome, not the default destination.

One imagined map, seven different political stories

The accompanying map chooses one particular route: a South Asia of several large states. Its borders are deliberately imaginative, but each state draws inspiration from a real political or regional tradition. The table below is a guide to the map, not a reconstruction of a lost historical reality.

Imagined state	Capital	Historical starting point
Hindustan Confederation	Delhi	A deliberately fictional northern federation, drawing on the Indo-Gangetic plain’s political and economic importance.
Punjab Khalsa Raj	Lahore	An imagined modern successor to the Sikh Empire and the wider, multi-faith history of Punjab.
Bengal Republic	Dhaka	A unified Bengali political space, shaped by regional identity, river networks and maritime commerce.
Maratha Confederacy	Pune	A federalised continuation of Maratha political power across western and central India.
Hyderabad State	Hyderabad	A constitutional and federalised evolution of the historic Nizam’s state.
Rajputana Union	Jaipur	A federation built from historic Rajput kingdoms rather than a single centralised monarchy.
Lanka Kingdom	Kandy	An imagined island polity included to make this a map of South Asia rather than only the former territories of British India.

Hindustan: a large state, but not ‘India by another name’

On this map, the Hindustan Confederation is the largest inland power. Delhi remains a political centre, but the country is imagined as a federation rather than a unitary empire. Its strength would lie in population, agriculture, internal markets and the symbolic authority of the Indo-Gangetic heartland.

Yet this fictional Hindustan does not absorb every neighbouring region. Punjab, Bengal, Hyderabad and Maratha territories remain outside its borders. That matters because it turns South Asian politics into a question of balance: the largest state would need alliances, trade and diplomacy rather than assuming that its scale alone settled every dispute.

Punjab: beyond a simple religious label

An independent Punjab is one of the most compelling elements of the scenario. Ranjit Singh’s Sikh Empire showed that a powerful state could emerge in the north-west before British annexation. The historical Sikh Empire was not a simple template for a twenty-first-century nation-state, and this article does not treat it as one. Still, it provides a useful starting point for imagining a multilingual, multi-faith Punjab centred on Lahore.^[2]

In this imagined future, Punjab’s strategic position between the Indo-Gangetic plain, Afghanistan and Central Asia would make it a major diplomatic and commercial crossroads. Its national identity might be shaped by Punjabi language and regional history as much as by any one religious tradition.

Bengal: a political future organised around language and water

A unified Bengal is equally plausible as a thought experiment. In actual history, Bengal was not merely a province on the edge of someone else’s empire; it had its own regional past, cultural life and commercial importance. The National Institute of Open Schooling notes both Bengal’s long history as a regional kingdom and the importance of its trading links.^[1]

In an alternate timeline, Bengali language, riverine geography and access to the Bay of Bengal might have fostered a state whose centre of gravity lay in Dhaka, Calcutta or a purpose-built federal capital. The map chooses Dhaka. That choice is speculative, but it helps us see how different the political geography of the eastern subcontinent might have been if Bengal had not been divided by the later constitutional arrangements of British India.

Maratha, Hyderabad and Rajputana: several routes to modernity

The western and Deccan portions of the map reject the idea that political modernity requires a single capital or a single national story. The Maratha Confederacy imagines a loose federal state with Pune as its political centre and the Arabian Sea as an economic gateway. Hyderabad imagines that the Nizam’s state survives only by changing: from a monarchy into a constitutional, diverse and modern federation. Rajputana imagines a union of historic kingdoms that co-operate for trade, defence and influence.

None of these outcomes should be mistaken for a forecast. They are narrative devices designed to make a broader point: regional powers might have responded to industrialisation, mass politics and global trade in many different ways. They could have centralised, federated, democratised, fragmented or been conquered by one another.

Would Pakistan and Bangladesh still exist?

This is where the thought experiment becomes most sensitive and most revealing. Pakistan was created in 1947 out of the Partition of British India, while Bangladesh emerged from the political break between East and West Pakistan in 1971. The National Archives’ material on Partition shows how closely the later boundaries of Punjab and Bengal were tied to the end of British rule, negotiations among political leaders and decisions taken in the final period of the Raj.^[3]

Without British rule, the political institutions and constitutional crises that led to Partition would not have developed in precisely the same form. There would have been no British Indian elections in the same form, no identical Congress or Muslim League, and no Radcliffe Line drawn at the point of imperial withdrawal. That does not mean religious difference would have disappeared, nor does it mean that Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and others would inevitably have shared one country peacefully.

Instead, political identities might have formed around different combinations of region, language, faith, dynasty, class and trade. A Punjab state could have evolved in the north-west. Sindh might have taken a separate route. Bengal might have remained united or divided along entirely different lines. In other words, the absence of British rule does not simply remove India-Pakistan Partition from the map. It changes the political structures from which the familiar map emerged.

Would there have been less conflict?

No honest alternate history can promise that. Colonial rule and Partition caused profound trauma, violence and displacement, but removing colonial rule does not remove rivalry, ambition or geopolitics. The subcontinent had wars and power struggles before British dominance, and an uncolonised South Asia could still have seen border disputes, military competition and contested successions.

At the same time, a region of several states need not be dismissed as inevitable disorder. The National Institute of Open Schooling cautions against equating regional political plurality with chaos: regional states could be stable in their own areas while also competing, trading and influencing one another.^[1] That offers a better comparison than a simple choice between unity and fragmentation.

Perhaps South Asia might have resembled parts of Europe: a connected region whose states share food, faiths, languages, artistic traditions and long memories, while still maintaining distinct passports, parliaments, alliances and rivalries. Or perhaps one power would eventually have reunited much of the subcontinent. Both futures are imaginable.

The real lesson of the map

The purpose of this map is not to replace one national story with another. It is to remind us that political borders are made through human decisions, institutions, conflicts and compromises. They are not simply revealed by geography.

India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are real countries with real histories, cultures and peoples. Their existence should not be treated as an error in a historical puzzle. But neither should their borders be treated as the only imaginable ending to the subcontinent’s past.

That is the value of the question, ‘What if Britain had never colonised India?’ It does not give us a single answer. It asks us to see the present with greater humility. In an alternative 2026, Delhi, Lahore, Dhaka, Pune, Hyderabad, Jaipur and Kandy might have been capitals of different states, each with its own story of survival, power and belonging.

Or the map might have looked nothing like this one. That uncertainty is not a weakness of the exercise. It is the point.

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References

1. National Institute of Open Schooling, Emergence of Regional States in India: Twelfth to Eighteenth Century.
2. National Army Museum, First Sikh War.
3. The National Archives, Partition of British India.