understandable.

I do not feel that connected to any empire, but if you talk in today terms, what is india, was not really a 1 big soverign entity. It was much like todays europe - tonnes of states. One could argue mughals were the most recent empire under which a very large part of current India was under (almost entirety of north and west and central). they had a larger cultural impact. Our current most spoken language (hindi) did not exist, lets just say, 200 years ago. there were tonnes of derivaties from older sanskrit and dravidian roots (european equivalent would be romanic and germanic roots). what mughals brought (not them, it existed before as brought by trade and previous empire (tipu sultante, which is very small, but still some what important)) were the languages usually used in islamic world - arabic and persian (farsi as we call it). from these older languages and their amalgamations we got "hindustani" . Consider it parent of hindi and urdu (most spoken languages in northern india, and pakistan). these 2 languages are in some sense same - 2 speakers can communicate orally, but not in writing, because urdu reatined the arabic script, and hindi retained the devanagri script (sanskrit). Mughals had a large enough impact on india, something our current administration really tries to downplay, and paint in very bad light. Yes, they were not the ideal, utopic, do-no-evil kingdom. But no empire has been that, ever. they were very comparable in terms of other empires in terms of social standards.