In premodern times Islamic institutions (Sufi shrines, hospices, and mosques), were often responsible for the provision of social services: healthcare and food for the indigent and the infirm, schooling, and so on. During times of crises – famine, epidemic, and war – Sufis (especially) served the people. The Persianate social obligation to “feed the people” (takafful-i umur), still valid in Iran, Afghanistan, and South Asia (but known by sundry terms – if at all), was an imperative for the shrine’s leadership in the past, and to an extent today, namely, access to the shrine’s library, the construction of a new public library, and financial aid for students enrolled at the shrine’s seminaries. The provision of services to the public will have intensified symbiotic bonds between shrine and community.

The Anglo-Mughal War of 1686–1690 is the focus of Chapter 5, which seeks to challenge traditional understandings of the war as the result of a more capable and belligerent Company seeking to impose its will on the Mughal empire and expand its territory and rights by force, culminating in the acquisition of Calcutta. Instead, this chapter places the war within the context of the personal tensions and conflicts produced by the transcultural ties which bound Company servants and Mughal elites together. Some servants sought to renegotiate these increasingly one-sided relationships with a limited show of force, for which they were immediately expelled from Bengal by the Mughal government. Only after ten years of complex negotiations, in which new transcultural relationships were established with an entirely new Mughal regime, could the Company return and develop Calcutta as a settlement. Even then, its expansion relied on the Company’s utility to the new Mughal regime, to which they contributed men and money to uphold the nawab’s authority against several large-scale rebellions. By the turn of the eighteenth century, the Company transformed itself into a key client of the Mughal government which could be mobilised to consolidate the empire’s control of Bengal in exchange for greater rights and privileges.