AHC/WI: Turkish Raj (Ottoman India)

As the title says, what happens if the Ottoman Empire have somehow managed to conquer and rule the Indian subcontinent like the OTL British Raj?

How would this impact on the world as of result?
 
It's something I've fantasized about, but there would have to be a sixteenth-century POD at the latest. I've dreamed of a (somewhat implausible) TL that goes like this:
  • The Ottomans build the Suez Canal like Suleiman and the Venetians wanted to. They sweep into the Indian Ocean and kick out the Portuguese, inheriting their colonial possessions.
  • Later, the reign of an alt-Osman II results in the Ottoman Empire fissuring into a Constantinopolitan empire, dominated by the janissaries and the ulema, and a much more absolutist Cairene empire. (Iraq is taken over by the Safavids.) The Cairene empire strengthens its grip on the Indian Ocean to compensate for its loss of Europe and Anatolia, meaning the VOC and EIC never become more than trading companies. Egyptian merchants dominate the sea lanes, benefiting from the Suez Canal.
  • When the Mughals collapse for internal reasons as OTL, the Cairene empire gradually takes over South Asia as much as the EIC did IOTL.
I thought splitting the Ottomans necessary because a Constantinopolitan empire is unlikely to be too preoccupied with India.
 
My two cents: perhaps the Ottoman Raj starts as a way to outflank the Persians by co-opting local Muslim rulers and gaining influence by the back door, i.e. providing the military expertise for them to triumph over their neighbours?

In 1555 the Ottomans won a war against the Persians, providing them with the southern coast of the Persian Gulf, which would open up the area for development by the Ottomans. Perhaps, after Lepanto, a more chastened Ottomans might decide instead to focus on building up their Red Sea and Persian Gulf navies instead of challenging the Europeans on land. This trend might also be intensified as a result of further catastrophic collapse placing Istanbul on the front lines and necessitating a moving of the capital to Baghdad or some such.

The Ottomans, strengthened by their Indian acquisitions, might be able to secure a direct land route to India in later Persian wars, permanently changing the balance of power in the east, and continue their conquest of India. In this case we would have an empire centred on the Persian Gulf with a weird Egypt-shaped tumour to the west and a weird Anatolia-shaped tumour to the north. I dunno, it wouldn't really be the Ottomans if they didn't have Anatolia, would it?
 
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Being Muslim, it's going to be harder to divide and rule using the Hindus in any real way.
There were more than enough political divides to exploit without adding religion into the mix.
I think the real question is, how do the Mughals and the Persians deal with having the ottoman sultan, the only other worldly ruler they saw as equal maintaining a military presence just off their coasts without responding with their own naval development- after all the Europeans were easy to dismiss as irrelevant little Christians from small countries half the world away, while the ottomans are less so and especially considering Akbar’s suspicion and resentment of the ottomans, I can’t imagine there being no butterflies.

Possibly a different pod is the Ottomans providing support to the various petty pre Mughal sultanates, like Gujarat, Bengal, Golconda, Bijapur, against the spectre of Mughal power, and eventually drawing them in as vassals and subjugating the Mughals like that as well
 

Albert.Nik

Banned
It's not as easy as it sounds. India is a vast country and being able to control it all as Ottomons did elsewhere could be extremely difficult and even more as they are not even connected by land. So I don't think it's possible hence.
 
It seems outright impossible, outside of Anatolia and Greece, Ottoman control of the rest of the empire by Sulieman the Magnificent seemed to vary, but an Ottoman presence in India would be very autonomous, and hardly able to anything, the Ottomans as they were quite spread out. Unless you want something like Shahzade Bayezid instead of going to the Safavids, goes all the way to India and becomes a general (Take your pick of realm), but it's in an India where Babur gets killed by Adam Khan, and it throws the Mughals into chaos which allows Bayezid to carve out a realm.
 
This could maybe be possible in a no-Timurid TL: Ottomans never get weakened by Timur's invasion and the ensuing civil war, the Tughlaq dynasty is never unseated by the Timurids (but probably remains very unpopular, the Delhi Sultanate will probably change hands as some Afghan provincial governor or another decides he wants to wear the big hat), and the Mughals never arise as a looming background menace to the Sultanate. In other words, the Ottomans may be able to reach a point of conquering India (Sindh is as good a starting point as any) a lot sooner, and governments in both Iran (no Timurids may mean no Safavids) and India will likely be weak enough to present no major obstacle.
 
As the title says, what happens if the Ottoman Empire have somehow managed to conquer and rule the Indian subcontinent like the OTL British Raj?

How would this impact on the world as of result?

Without going into detail how it will happen...

If it is after 1700... Indian Rulers will largely sit on their thrones as vassals. Maybe, just maybe, some coastal cities are directly ruled.

The odds of this to succeed is that Indian Muslims were largely more supportive of the 'Caliph' than Arabs or even Turks. As long as the Ottomans would not fck up with racial division and/or religious discrimination and large interference it might work out... until Indian Rulers feel otherwise.
 
The odds of this to succeed is that Indian Muslims were largely more supportive of the 'Caliph' than Arabs or even Turks. As long as the Ottomans would not fck up with racial division and/or religious discrimination and large interference it might work out... until Indian Rulers feel otherwise.

As far as I know this is only really true post 1850 or so, with the widespread idea of Islam under attack culminating in the idea that the only major Islamic ruler in the world and thus the one they needed to rally around to protect Islam was the ottoman sultan- before that I can’t see how you’d reach that conclusion considering there were so many Shias in India and in the Mughal government specifically. And as for the caste system, avoiding the British disastrous handling of caste is always good and will i think result in maintaining the much more fluid nature of caste than happened otl.
 
Its important to realize the Right Honorable East India Company (Who did the real heavy lifting in terms of establishing European rule over the subcontinent) diden't "conquer" India in the conventional way. They established control by integrating themselves into the local government systems via commerce and treaties and working to increase their power by negotating and strong-arming for more privlages and authority in order to consume the old Muhgal tributary structure from the inside out. Thus, if the Ottomans want to establish a proper Raj, the "Vassal State" or "Allied" approach is probably the best way. For example, if they had a sturdy relationship with the Muhgals as their power started crumbling in the south, the Ottomans could be invited in to support local clients of the court in Dehli in retaining power and pushing back rebels... which of course would require allowing the Turks to establish local fortifications and being granted the right to collect levees on certain goods or from certain tax farms to keep her forces in supply. Having those garrison headquarters be in major ports of call, and that could be in the form of customs duties on the exports back West, and as local leadership become more and more intgrated with/dependent on the Ottomans and Dehli's power continues to wane, the Ottoman officals would be able to negotiate for more and more power and better and better terms until they've essntially BECOME the local Rajputs, perhaps officalizing the inheiritence via intermarriage.
 
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