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A tribute (it’s different enough that I can’t quite call it a cover) to giddyautomaton’s Indian World ( www.deviantart.com/giddyautoma… ), in which Timur has more competent descendants, the Mughals are butterflied away, and the South Indian Hindu Empire of Vijayanagara manages to fighting the Decanni Muslims to a standstill, leading to an India of competing multiple powers rather than one hegemonic land power, and a more effective response to European pressures than OTL. Some of this writeup is cribbed from his work, but I have rewritten parts and added some bits and pieces.

A bigass Sunni Muslim central Asia and Iran becomes the norm for this world (occasionally making excursions into China, the Indian subcontinent, and up until the 1700s, Russia), while the Indian powers begin to look overseas and from the late 1500s compete increasingly with Europeans in the lands around the Indian Ocean. The Portuguese are driven from the spice islands by the Dutch, who in turn clash with Vijayanagara and Bengal in Java and points westward.

Come the year 1960s, the Indian Big Three powers of Bengal, the Bahmani Sultanate, and Vijayanagar have managed to largely push Europeans out of the Indian Ocean region and established colonial empires of their own. Vijayanagara and the Bahmani are generally fairly loosey-goosey and federal in their organization, Vijayanagara’s empire arising initially from trade networks and alliances as convenient, if increasingly standardized in the modern era, while Bengal has a more centralized empire of conquest and vassalization, and while Vijayanagara is very religiously tolerant and the Bahmani Sultanate at least sets it’s glass ceiling for non-Muslims quite high, Bengal discriminates openly against non-Muslims, only tempered by the sheer number of Hindus within its territories and the risk of revolt.

Vijayanagara is the richest and most influential of the Indian powers, with a standard of living comparable to the most developed European powers and a sizable population (India will soon fall behind our timeline’s India in terms of population: it grew faster in the 19th and early 20th century, but growth has contracted sharply with a modern demographic transition.) It also leads an alliance of Hindu states and has ambitions to create some sort of Pan-Indian (less Bengal) economic union. The Bahmani Sultanate took the place of Oman OTL in taking over the Swahili coast of Africa, but with far greater manpower pushed much further inland. It is less developed than Vijayanagara, but still a modern state and proportionally more densely populated than that area of India OTL. Bengal, product of the last expansionist era of the Delhi Sultanate and Muslim colonization of the eastern Ganges delta, is the poorest of the three, pestered by Hindu and peasant (of both major faiths) unrest and really somewhat overextended in SE Asia.

The world’s greatest power is still the British Empire, which with India increasingly inaccessible to Europeans unwilling to bend the knee to local rulers had concentrated more on North America, succeeding in creating a loose imperial federation which persists to this day. If not quite as populous as in our timeline, the North American tail increasingly wags the British dog, something which hasn’t quite sunk in yet due to the mutual squabbles of the various American dominions: but if the ambitions of the various “American Federalists” succeed, the British Isles and South Africa will be essentially reduced to appendages of North America.

Russia on the other hand is even more populous than in our timeline at this point, having avoided the horrors of our WWII and Stalinism, but is economically backwards: it had a revolution in which the White-equivalents won, but if somewhat democratic it still has a Czar, censorship, secret police, a franchise severely restricted by wealth, severe corruption, and a left-wing Christian revolutionary movement. Poland and most of the Ukraine took advantage of the revolution to break away, and are under German protection.

France had as OTL a revolution against the less than stellar Bourbons, and a Napoleon equivalent with a better idea of his limits managed to consolidate French domination of western Europe, although this has eroded in the last seventy years: the last of the Emperors was sent packing into exile, a new republic established, and most of France’s Italian holdings were lost to rebellion. France and Russia don’t like each other very much, but they’re pragmatically allied vs. Germany and Britain.

Germany united under the ruling house of Hesse-Brandenburg, although with less Blood and Iron and more pragmatic negotiation than in our world (no glorious crushing victories over France here). Relations with the triple monarchy of Austria-Bohemia-Hungary are iffy, due to their fairly open desire to break up the triple monarchy and absorb the first two parts, and their failure to help our when ABH suffered losses at the hands of a Romania backed by Russia (the Romanians still claim all the western territories of OTL Romania). After all, given Germany’s historically friendly relationship with Britain, who needs them?

Lefty and antiracist, the United States of Mesico broke away from Spain a good deal earlier than in our world, in 1799, giving it time to get its crap together before English-speaking expansionists showed up banging on the doors. It’s democracy is imperfect (a touch Catholic-theocratic, and it had its own limitations on the franchise until quite recently), but it is seen as a leader of an international democratic and anti-colonialist movement, the Alliance of Free States, which nowadays incorporates all of Spanish-speaking America and areas in Asia and even Africa. It opposes European and Bahmani colonization in Africa, Bengal in SE Asia, and the Dutch wherever. There’s a bit of a Cold War, but it’s less intense than OTLs.

Also hostile to Colonial Powers are the*Marxist regimes of Italy and Spain, which form a mini-block of their own (although there are some hard left states in the Alliance of Free States, neither of them want to belong to a club led by Mesico). Spain is something of a larger 1990s Cuba nowadays: Italy is more democratic and prosperous, but the economy has been stuck in “crawl” mode for a decade, and both are hampered by difficulties in integrating their Muslim African regions (Spain in particular is having a hard time with the Berbers).

The Empire of China is relatively backwards, its development hampered by a continued paranoia towards the merchant classes, and government meddling in most aspects of the economy. It gets along better with Japan, with which it has clashed less than in our history, and with which it shares a mutual sense of being slighted by European and Indian powers. A long military confrontation with the Manchus made China better prepared for military confrontations in the 19th century, but slow economic progress in the 20th century and its authoritarian nature leads most people to write it off as an “oriental despotism”: too big to conquer, too conservative to ever really change the world.

The autocratic Timurid Empire of Mongolistan is truly something of a Sick Man, and has survived mostly due to sheer bulk: it regained some territory lost to Russia during the Revolution and civil war, but since it has progressed only slowly, and while modern political realities make an outright attack in peacetime on the part of other powers unlikely, if (as many predict) the Empire is torn apart by rebellion Russia, Turkey and even China are likely to make land grabs in the name of “restoring order.” Due to the Empire’s increasingly important oil exports, the British Empire and the Indian powers are likely to get involved in the Persian Gulf area. A major war breaking out is not unconceivable, and with no less than ten and possibly eleven nuclear powers, the possibilities are truly alarming.

(Nuclear weapons were invented earlier than OTL, but there hasn’t been a wild atomic arms race as OTL, so arsenals remain (so far) fairly small. However, since missile technology is also more advanced, any nuclear exchange promises to be horrifically destructive none the less. )

The earlier development of rocket science (in which India played a role) means there are more nations involved in space exploration than in our world at this time, but the space program has taken a somewhat different route, with more concentration on automated probes and near-earth stuff (nobody has actually landed on the Moon yet, although Vijayanagara has some robot crawlers on the surface. Indeed, there is some debate in Vijayanagara as to whether people _should_ walk on the Moon: the sacred nature of the Moon makes the notion of people walking, and possibly pooping, while on the Moon deeply disturbing to many Hindus).

Description

A tribute (it’s different enough that I can’t quite call it a cover) to giddyautomaton’s Indian World ( www.deviantart.com/giddyautoma… ), in which Timur has more competent descendants, the Mughals are butterflied away, and the South Indian Hindu Empire of Vijayanagara manages to fighting the Decanni Muslims to a standstill, leading to an India of competing multiple powers rather than one hegemonic land power, and a more effective response to European pressures than OTL. Some of this writeup is cribbed from his work, but I have rewritten parts and added some bits and pieces.

A bigass Sunni Muslim central Asia and Iran becomes the norm for this world (occasionally making excursions into China, the Indian subcontinent, and up until the 1700s, Russia), while the Indian powers begin to look overseas and from the late 1500s compete increasingly with Europeans in the lands around the Indian Ocean. The Portuguese are driven from the spice islands by the Dutch, who in turn clash with Vijayanagara and Bengal in Java and points westward.

Come the year 1960s, the Indian Big Three powers of Bengal, the Bahmani Sultanate, and Vijayanagar have managed to largely push Europeans out of the Indian Ocean region and established colonial empires of their own. Vijayanagara and the Bahmani are generally fairly loosey-goosey and federal in their organization, Vijayanagara’s empire arising initially from trade networks and alliances as convenient, if increasingly standardized in the modern era, while Bengal has a more centralized empire of conquest and vassalization, and while Vijayanagara is very religiously tolerant and the Bahmani Sultanate at least sets it’s glass ceiling for non-Muslims quite high, Bengal discriminates openly against non-Muslims, only tempered by the sheer number of Hindus within its territories and the risk of revolt.

Vijayanagara is the richest and most influential of the Indian powers, with a standard of living comparable to the most developed European powers and a sizable population (India will soon fall behind our timeline’s India in terms of population: it grew faster in the 19th and early 20th century, but growth has contracted sharply with a modern demographic transition.) It also leads an alliance of Hindu states and has ambitions to create some sort of Pan-Indian (less Bengal) economic union. The Bahmani Sultanate took the place of Oman OTL in taking over the Swahili coast of Africa, but with far greater manpower pushed much further inland. It is less developed than Vijayanagara, but still a modern state and proportionally more densely populated than that area of India OTL. Bengal, product of the last expansionist era of the Delhi Sultanate and Muslim colonization of the eastern Ganges delta, is the poorest of the three, pestered by Hindu and peasant (of both major faiths) unrest and really somewhat overextended in SE Asia.

The world’s greatest power is still the British Empire, which with India increasingly inaccessible to Europeans unwilling to bend the knee to local rulers had concentrated more on North America, succeeding in creating a loose imperial federation which persists to this day. If not quite as populous as in our timeline, the North American tail increasingly wags the British dog, something which hasn’t quite sunk in yet due to the mutual squabbles of the various American dominions: but if the ambitions of the various “American Federalists” succeed, the British Isles and South Africa will be essentially reduced to appendages of North America.

Russia on the other hand is even more populous than in our timeline at this point, having avoided the horrors of our WWII and Stalinism, but is economically backwards: it had a revolution in which the White-equivalents won, but if somewhat democratic it still has a Czar, censorship, secret police, a franchise severely restricted by wealth, severe corruption, and a left-wing Christian revolutionary movement. Poland and most of the Ukraine took advantage of the revolution to break away, and are under German protection.

France had as OTL a revolution against the less than stellar Bourbons, and a Napoleon equivalent with a better idea of his limits managed to consolidate French domination of western Europe, although this has eroded in the last seventy years: the last of the Emperors was sent packing into exile, a new republic established, and most of France’s Italian holdings were lost to rebellion. France and Russia don’t like each other very much, but they’re pragmatically allied vs. Germany and Britain.

Germany united under the ruling house of Hesse-Brandenburg, although with less Blood and Iron and more pragmatic negotiation than in our world (no glorious crushing victories over France here). Relations with the triple monarchy of Austria-Bohemia-Hungary are iffy, due to their fairly open desire to break up the triple monarchy and absorb the first two parts, and their failure to help our when ABH suffered losses at the hands of a Romania backed by Russia (the Romanians still claim all the western territories of OTL Romania). After all, given Germany’s historically friendly relationship with Britain, who needs them?

Lefty and antiracist, the United States of Mesico broke away from Spain a good deal earlier than in our world, in 1799, giving it time to get its crap together before English-speaking expansionists showed up banging on the doors. It’s democracy is imperfect (a touch Catholic-theocratic, and it had its own limitations on the franchise until quite recently), but it is seen as a leader of an international democratic and anti-colonialist movement, the Alliance of Free States, which nowadays incorporates all of Spanish-speaking America and areas in Asia and even Africa. It opposes European and Bahmani colonization in Africa, Bengal in SE Asia, and the Dutch wherever. There’s a bit of a Cold War, but it’s less intense than OTLs.

Also hostile to Colonial Powers are the*Marxist regimes of Italy and Spain, which form a mini-block of their own (although there are some hard left states in the Alliance of Free States, neither of them want to belong to a club led by Mesico). Spain is something of a larger 1990s Cuba nowadays: Italy is more democratic and prosperous, but the economy has been stuck in “crawl” mode for a decade, and both are hampered by difficulties in integrating their Muslim African regions (Spain in particular is having a hard time with the Berbers).

The Empire of China is relatively backwards, its development hampered by a continued paranoia towards the merchant classes, and government meddling in most aspects of the economy. It gets along better with Japan, with which it has clashed less than in our history, and with which it shares a mutual sense of being slighted by European and Indian powers. A long military confrontation with the Manchus made China better prepared for military confrontations in the 19th century, but slow economic progress in the 20th century and its authoritarian nature leads most people to write it off as an “oriental despotism”: too big to conquer, too conservative to ever really change the world.

The autocratic Timurid Empire of Mongolistan is truly something of a Sick Man, and has survived mostly due to sheer bulk: it regained some territory lost to Russia during the Revolution and civil war, but since it has progressed only slowly, and while modern political realities make an outright attack in peacetime on the part of other powers unlikely, if (as many predict) the Empire is torn apart by rebellion Russia, Turkey and even China are likely to make land grabs in the name of “restoring order.” Due to the Empire’s increasingly important oil exports, the British Empire and the Indian powers are likely to get involved in the Persian Gulf area. A major war breaking out is not unconceivable, and with no less than ten and possibly eleven nuclear powers, the possibilities are truly alarming.

(Nuclear weapons were invented earlier than OTL, but there hasn’t been a wild atomic arms race as OTL, so arsenals remain (so far) fairly small. However, since missile technology is also more advanced, any nuclear exchange promises to be horrifically destructive none the less. )

The earlier development of rocket science (in which India played a role) means there are more nations involved in space exploration than in our world at this time, but the space program has taken a somewhat different route, with more concentration on automated probes and near-earth stuff (nobody has actually landed on the Moon yet, although Vijayanagara has some robot crawlers on the surface. Indeed, there is some debate in Vijayanagara as to whether people _should_ walk on the Moon: the sacred nature of the Moon makes the notion of people walking, and possibly pooping, while on the Moon deeply disturbing to many Hindus).