Have Westerners/British A Majority in India

Some kind of war scenario that kills off most of the male population, leaving the women for the victorious Europeans who will then raise the children as Westerners?
 
Some kind of war scenario that kills off most of the male population, leaving the women for the victorious Europeans who will then raise the children as Westerners?

The problem with that is who on Earth would they be fighting who could kill that many? The entire rest of the world?
 
The problem with that is who on Earth would they be fighting who could kill that many? The entire rest of the world?
Civil war, some sort of massive Indian Thirty years war, or something like the South American War of the Triple Alliance
 
Some kind of war scenario that kills off most of the male population, leaving the women for the victorious Europeans who will then raise the children as Westerners?

Even if this wasn't ASB in and of itself, a mother will place some kind of cultural influence on their children, creating a hybrid Indian/Western culture rather than a Western culture.
 
Even if this wasn't ASB in and of itself, a mother will place some kind of cultural influence on their children, creating a hybrid Indian/Western culture rather than a Western culture.
So basically we'd have the new Indian culture comparable to Latin American culture?
Here's another thought. Maybe somehow we could severely stunt Indian technological growth to a point where the Europeans could roll in with the relative ease that they had with the Americas and Australia. (Note, I said relative ease.) However, there would be no way of stopping India's neighbors from doing the same. We could have some disease on the scale of the Black Death that only effects the male population, and the Europeans arrive after the whole thing runs its course, but not too long after, so the population doesn't rebound in time.
 
You could convert the entire subcontinent to Shakerism via a massive prostelization effort and wait 40 some odd years for the now celebate populace to die off. There. Problem solved humanely. Now you just need to find 100k or so militant Shaker fanatics willing to travel to exotic locales... ;)


it's either this, or convert the entire male population to Catholicism and convince them to be priests, or my 4.5 billion proposal.
 
So basically we'd have the new Indian culture comparable to Latin American culture?
Here's another thought. Maybe somehow we could severely stunt Indian technological growth to a point where the Europeans could roll in with the relative ease that they had with the Americas and Australia. (Note, I said relative ease.) However, there would be no way of stopping India's neighbors from doing the same.

The Americas and Australia weren't rolled over due to the technological difference, they were rolled over because there was no immunity to Eurasian plagues, which killed something on the order of 90% of the indigenous population in a century.

India was too closely attached to the rest of Eurasia to expect agriculture, animal husbandry, and thus plague immunity, to not become heavily established by the colonial era.

A plague which wipes out Indian males will, again due to the linkage between global populations, wipe out most men in Eurasia, and the world at large if the POD is far enough forward.
 
How about just limiting this India to some of the coastal posts? The OP never said all of India :D:p

This strikes me as more plausible - a white-majority city somewhere on the coast of India, perhaps including some hinterlands. It's still tricky to pull off, I think - even if you have the British (or whoeever) founding a city in some unsettled swamp to use as a trading base, they're still likely to import more laborers from the surrounding country than from the homelands.
 
Damn, some of you beat me to it. My idea upon reading this thread was:

Easy. A trading post along the Indus river grows into a major European exclave, which becomes known colloquially as "India." OTL India is referred to as "Hindustan," and is probably a collection of several states rather than one big one. The muslim area upriver is known as "Punjab," and racial mixing laws prevent them from coming into the territory proper; the justification for these laws is "to keep the peace," since many punjabis are rather upset at having their land taken from them.

Cut to modern day. Thanks to all the agricultural development in the area and food imports, 30-50 million people now live in *India, speaking whatever language the main colonizer spoke (Portuguese, maybe?). It may or may not be independent, but in any case it's incredibly wealthy, like some kind of unholy amalgamation of Singapore, South Africa, and Israel. At one point it controlled much of Punjab, but released them when occupation became too costly; Punjab now has a vastly larger population than *India.
 
Damn, some of you beat me to it. My idea upon reading this thread was:
That's exactly what I thought too, a country on the Indus River. Destroying India or keeping it from developing would cause major butterflies that mess up Europe as well, and East Asia would dominate India, if not the world.
 
Even if this wasn't ASB in and of itself, a mother will place some kind of cultural influence on their children, creating a hybrid Indian/Western culture rather than a Western culture.

Look at what happened to Asia Minor. The Turks moved in, expelling some and intermarrying with others and raising the children Muslim. Recent genetic studies have shown the Turkish part of the region's genome actually isn't that large, so they assimilated more than they drove out.

Abdul said 10-15% of the Turks converted to Christianity, but the fact that Anatolia ultimately became Muslim shows that this strategy can be fairly effective regardless of what Mommy wants.
 
Last edited:
Of course, who would be doing this?

For some reason, I'm thinking of a Europe united by revolutionary France trying to extend a "civilizing mission" into India. The French had colonies in India that were wiped out by the British in OTL, so they'd need to do better there first.

Massive Indian versions of the Vendee leading to the obliteration of the ruling cultural elite and the deaths of much of the male population?

(I'm thinking Napier's policy toward suttee on a colossal scale with a much more organized Indian resistance--that gets crushed.)

And given how the French Revolution went into some very dark places in the name of "Reason," allowing polygamy by the European ruling class could be judged a reasonable means of assimilating India...
 
Of course, who would be doing this?

For some reason, I'm thinking of a Europe united by revolutionary France trying to extend a "civilizing mission" into India. The French had colonies in India that were wiped out by the British in OTL, so they'd need to do better there first.

Massive Indian versions of the Vendee leading to the obliteration of the ruling cultural elite and the deaths of much of the male population?

(I'm thinking Napier's policy toward suttee on a colossal scale with a much more organized Indian resistance--that gets crushed.)

And given how the French Revolution went into some very dark places in the name of "Reason," allowing polygamy by the European ruling class could be judged a reasonable means of assimilating India...

Why would it get crushed? You couldn't have mass European armies in India because huge numbers would die from the climate (remember the British armies in India were always majority Indian). The European revolutionaries would have to raise their own Indian Revolutionary Corps or something of the sort and if they're doing that it's going to be hard to exterminate the Indians on their side because you now have armed, disciplined Indians, trained to European standards fighting on their home ground.
 
Why would it get crushed? You couldn't have mass European armies in India because huge numbers would die from the climate (remember the British armies in India were always majority Indian). The European revolutionaries would have to raise their own Indian Revolutionary Corps or something of the sort and if they're doing that it's going to be hard to exterminate the Indians on their side because you now have armed, disciplined Indians, trained to European standards fighting on their home ground.

Good point. Tropical countries = die white man, for a long time.

The Indian Revolutionary Corps could be culturally Westernized, with sessions on the Rights of Man in between lessons on advancing under fire.

Or, if straight introduction of Western liberal ideas, how about the use of Sikhism as an Indian version of the Cult of Reason? Sikihism is anti-caste, frex.
 
Also, how are you going to get this army to India in the first place? They'd need shitloads of ships not only to transport the masses of soldiers but also to carry supplies back and forth around Africa unless you plan on pulling an Alexander and marching non-stop throughout the entire Middle-East (nevermind the fact that Alexander could not even really get into India) and once they're there, Europe would be severely depopulated in manpower, Russians could just walk there and put the flag on anything they wanted. And the troops in India, even if their home is not taken, are still gonna be relying on the most unrealistically long supply line in history.
 
The most you can hope for is a city-state like Singapore that happens to have the majority of its population white European and that's really pushing it. It's likelier you would find culturally "westernized" Indians making up the majority of this "white" Indian enclave. And you're not going to have large armies of Europeans fighting in Europe, there's the matter of tropical diseases and the sheer cost of such an expedition. You would be laughed straight out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andaman_and_Nicobar_Islands#Indian_Control

I think there were plans for the Anglo Indian community to be given these islands to settle in as a colony by the British. The local inhabitants were few in number and most of the peoples had gone extinct within just a few decades due to the slavery and oppression, etc. It would fulfill the challenge to a (very tiny) degree.
 
Good point. Tropical countries = die white man, for a long time.

The Indian Revolutionary Corps could be culturally Westernized, with sessions on the Rights of Man in between lessons on advancing under fire.

Or, if straight introduction of Western liberal ideas, how about the use of Sikhism as an Indian version of the Cult of Reason? Sikihism is anti-caste, frex.

It's not like people are just going to up and convert. Also the Sikhs might not be too happy about this- after it got firmly entrenched in the Punjb they weren't particularly enthusiastic about converting. Sikhism is technically anti-caste but like all other religions in India it ended up slotting into the wider caste system.
 
Top