[rayiner]

I don't think that is especially accurate. India has a lot of ethno-linguistic diversity, but has hundreds of years of centralized administrative rule even before the British: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mughal_Empire. That's longer than Germany or Italy have had centralized governance.

[Apocryphon]

Funnily enough, the Mughals were initially foreign conquerors, just like the British with their Raj. But then ancient Germania was also somewhat unified by the foreign Romans, so perhaps it's same as it ever was.

I always wonder why the Maurya Empire doesn't get brought up as a pan-Indian empire, it was local to the area and conquered almost the entirety of the subcontinent.

[xyzzyz]

Human history is a story of repeated conquest, population admixture and/or replacement. Almost all “indigenous people” in present or past are just descendants of the most recent conquerors. Hardly any peoples have legitimate claim to land on the virtue of being there first, it’s almost universally on the basis of conquest instead. It always has been thus.

[Apocryphon]

Yes, but it's interesting to note the difference between when a large region is united through conquest by locals, or an outside power further away. Italy, in comparison to the above two examples, was united by the local Romans. (Though of course, "local" is incredibly relative. The difference between northern and southern Italy has been vast even unto modernity, never mind during antiquity.)

Now, I'm not sure what the difference of living under Maurya vs. Mughal vs. British rule was for its inhabitants, these are widely different polities from completely different time periods, but it's still a distinction. Though I suppose more of a retroactive one imposed by our modern bias, when we can point at India, Italy, and Germany and say, "ah, that patch of land is naturally meant to be united by someone."

[rayiner]

But there is a difference between conquerors that intermarried (European colonists to Latin america) and ones that didn’t (Mughals and British). Modern Indians have very little Mughal ancestry.

[selimthegrim]

It’s the other way around - Mughals gained Indian ancestry. Canonical example is Babur to Akbar losing epicanthic folds. I guess “Ganga-jamni tahzeeb” and culture of Awadh don’t count here according to you.

- Signed, one of your mythical people with “very little Mughal ancestry” whose family founded Shahjahanpur.