To what extent would a British defeat at Plassey delay/prevent their conquest of India

Scenario: Nawab Siraj ud-Daulah doesn't fail to bring a tarpaulin sheet, and so the Bengalese gunpowder is not ruined by rainfall. Or, alternatively, the British are less effective at stirring up treason within his ranks and so lose the war .

The BEIC therefore fail to conquer Bengal, and lacking revenue and manpower from said territory are less effective at projecting power throughout the rest of India. The French are correspondingly strengthened, and more able to thwart British expansion in the South.

As per the title, is this more likely to prevent the conquest of India by Europeans outright, or merely delay it? It seems to me that ideal is for the French to be well-positioned enough to hamper British efforts, but not so strong that they can sideline the British completely and so take their place.

Or perhaps, for the French to be in a similar position to the British in the 1780s/90s, ie poised to sweep through India, only to be disrupted by a revolution comparable to OTLs?
 
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My initial assumption is that independent Indian states, or at least some of them, would be close to parity with Europe in economic and technical terms. After all they didn't cut themselves off from the outside world unlike China and Japan, and the latter was still able to close the gap relatively quickly.

On further thought, my initial assumption was clearly simplistic. Thailand did not, to my knowledge, cut itself off and yet nevertheless failed to approach parity.

I've no idea how to approach that- ie, whether the development of any givent Indian state is more likely to resemble the developmental trajectory of Thailand or that of Japan... although Japan did have both a high literacy rate and respectable proto-industrial advancement before it's opening. I'm not sure how Thailand compared in those respects.
 
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Thailand had a higher literacy rate than Japan.

Back to OP's topic, of course British defeat would mean they would almost certainly never conquer all of India. Mysore was, after all, producing better firearms than the British by the early 1790s and had an administration that was just as centralized, bureaucratized, and fiscalized as the typical 18th-century European state! The sheer British luck in conquering Bengal, the richest and most powerful area of the subcontinent, before India rapidly caught up was a key factor--arguably the most important factor--in the British conquest.
 
It's possible that the French just end up conquering the subcontinent instead, but IMO that's a much less interesting scenario than it remaining uncolonized.
 
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