How can we get an Indian Colonial Empire?

Given all that @FillyofDelphi pointed out here, it might be more likely to see colonies developed from individual, fragmented states within the Indian subcontinent as opposed to explicitly "Indian" colonies. And then, eventually, those fragmented states could be united under a single power which takes control of the colonies, and perhaps expands and/or adds to them. Still though, what motivates those states to colonize, I'm not totally certain.

Edit: Given an extremely cursory knowledge of Indian history, I'd say that the Vijayanagara Empire strikes me as your best bet. Apparently religiously tolerant, as well as having an economy that was seemingly very important for the times. According to Wikipedia, "Large vessels from China made frequent visits, some captained by the Chinese Admiral Zheng He, and brought Chinese products to the empire's 300 ports, large and small, on the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal."

If you can give the Vijayanagra an incentive to build a strong navy, I don't see why they wouldn't be interested in establishing some trade outposts for access to additional goods. Those outposts could then become colonies.
This was what i was meaning here, guess i had a bad choice of words.
 
Agreed, but it is still has more reasons to colonize than say China, which had all the goods it wanted.

How about a Vijanayagara ruler seeking to control trade in the Indian ocean? That could be a good start.

The thing is though... any strong Vijanayagara state would already have control of the trade by default due to its control of the southern portion of the penninsula. They don't have to do piddly squat in order to extract their share from the trade... so why go through the added expense for such a small marginal benefit? One of the reasons you could get so much effort towards colonial commerical ventures from Europeans was that the profit-margin of a successful run to the Spice Islands was absolutely mind-boggling due to the high price you could fetch in Europe: therefore, even small increases in reliability/volume on the whole (Granted, it was a high risk high reward system, but developments like ship insurance and the buying of shares (IE owning 1/10th of a fleet of 10 vessels rather than strictly just one of those vessels, thus mitigating the risk of any merchant getting permenantly ruined by "black swan" events and thus helping to maintain continuity of bussiness/contacts/experiance) among other things made it attractive relative to many of the other alternatives. In the Indian subcontinent there's just alot more profitable, comfortably secure bussinesses one can be in to make a fortune.
 
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