The Missionary Sisters of the Office

While I was writing out my thoughts on Andalusada's differences from IRL two nights ago, I came up with the Heretical Hero as an archetype. And then, between that, Taiping China, and my drabblings of writing about the Maroons (out when they're done), I came up with another tropey character, the Maud Missionary.

I really should have written up her first, because while I know that the Maud Missionary is the perfect and rightful heir of St. Matilda, I don't know anything about the movement she's a part of. So little, in fact, that I've been hammering myself for hours about what they're named.

To that end, a conversation with Ebola gave me the working name, and the one I'll be using for the URL: "the Missionaries of Hegemony."

New Ireland

As a general rule, you can get away with a lot in alternate history by mentioning any given place once. Most places are still there, and it isn't foreordained that the same stuff should happen at the same places; that's what gave rise to the Skete of Orsa, for example - the random derpy idea that there may be a Battle of Taizé, and there is a Battle of Stockholm, and where in Sweden could I plausibly put a Taizé-like community? That minimal amount of work saves you a lot of the shame of Hollywood geography by making a lot of ill-documented places important.

Then there are the hard ones: the places (usually countries) that have long, well-documented histories, which potentially are going to be significantly altered by the changes you make. Places that give rise to lots of people who understandably have the right to wonder what the hell happens there.

Places like Ireland, for instance.

International perceptions of India

IRL, our perception of "India" is actually of north India. India is Aryan; "Indian" restaurants (at least in America; not sure how it works in the UK) are much closer to Punjabi than, say, Gujarati cuisine. This isn't "natural"; it evolved this way for historical reasons.

After a thousand years of divergence, Andalusada's Indian subcontinent has diverged in two ways, hinted at before but spelled out explicitly here:

• The colonial hegemon is French. England, Scotland, Portugal and a few other players all have their own presence on the subcontinent, but most of that looks disproportionately large on maps because otherwise it wouldn't be visible at all.
• Colonialism has been much less successful. Because of various trends that are still too far in the future for me to explain yet, the French Empire has not been able to build a united French Raj. While Paris controls much more of India than you might expect (especially given that unlike the United Kingdom IRL they have not had a solid century of domestic tranquility), Gujarat and points north have repeatedly fought the Firangis to a standstill, and Bengal has successfully played its French and Scottish (later Anglo-Scottish) neighbors off each other so long and so well that it's become an established buffer state.

So what are the consequences of this?