So wrote Ghulam Husain Salim Zaidpuri in the mid-1780s as he documented the history of Bengal. Charting the course of Islamic rule from its foundation in the thirteenth century to his own lifetime, Zaidpuri provided insights into the region's past and present as a tale of political transformations. The author was in fact a witness to the changing trajectories of Indian politics under British rule. What Aurangzeb had referred to as ‘Subah Jannat-e-Bilad-Bangla’ (Paradise on Earth, the Land of Bengal) in the latter half of the seventeenth century had eventually turned into the ‘British Bridgehead’. Bengal provided Britons with a foundation to develop their political influence over the rest of India. While direct British political intervention into Indian kingdoms had already begun in the Carnatic in the 1740s, Bengal became their training ground for experiments regarding civil and military administration at the cost of local rulers. By the early nineteenth century, we find the majority of Indian royalty coming under British control. It was not long after Napoleon Bonaparte's downfall in 1815 that the British defeated the Marathas and achieved, according to nationalist Indian historiography, the paramountcy in India.3 At the core of such developments was the reshaping of the concept of political authority, as the British increasingly superseded Indian rulers who remained heads of their kingdoms only in name.