The East India Company conquest of Bengal opened a field of intellectual contestation centered on questions of rights. At issue were competing conceptions of the place of rights in the history of India. Rights as such could be regarded as having held little significance in light of an underlying history of despotism. On the other hand, the claims of subjects on donative largesse, state patronage, or public infrastructure could be understood as the exercise of a kind of right. Cutting across these positions and their variations was an engagement with the administrative idiom and historical example of the Mughal empire (ca. 1526–1857). Indeed, this rights discourse included contributions from figures who posed themselves as direct interlocutors as much with the Mughal old regime as with the evolving order of the Company. In their works, critiques of the Company could be made by recasting the old regime in new molds to challenge the practice and conceptual underpinnings of Company rule. In order to situate this field of contestation in the intellectual history of rights, this chapter analyzes the views of some singular figures of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.