The Burdwan raj and other expanded local kingdoms of eighteenth-century Bengal were products of nawabi patronage rather than military adventurism. Whether the productive partnership between the Punjabi ancestors of the Burdwan raj family and the Mughals began outside of Bengal or within is not known. The collaboration was established by 1657 when the Mughal government appointed Abu Rai to the office of kotwal (police officer) in Burdwan town. By 1680, the Burdwan family had obtained a small zamindari and had entered the Mughal revenue-collecting hierarchy. In subsequent decades, the Burdwan zamindari expanded over hundreds of villages and gained broad autonomy over its internal affairs. By the mid-eighteenth century it covered some 5,000 square miles and was a virtual Hindu kingdom within the weakening provincial Mughal hegemony.

The Burdwan raj family was geographically positioned to benefit from Mughal favor by virtue of its domicile, first near and then in Burdwan town. From the outset of Mughal rule in Bengal, Burdwan was a vital imperial outpost from which Mughal armies had marched to fight the Afghans who had previously ruled Bengal and to bring the largely independent chiefs to the south and west of Burdwan under Mughal administration. The town of Burdwan lies on the northern bank of the Damodar river, some 75 miles by the Grand Trunk Road northwest of Calcutta. The Damodar was more a hindrance to than a facilatator of Mughal Bengal's integration. The river's broad, sandy bed was fordable in the dry season but the river was unbridged and the river was navigable by small boats in its central and upper reaches only for a brief spell each year.