In the case of the Śrī Pārtasārati Svāmi Temple, the shift from a Hindu political context to a British mercantile environment was relatively swift and direct. The English merchants of the East India Company acquired trading rights and some land for their settlement on the Coromandel coast (in what is today Madras city) from a local Hindu ruler in 1639. By 1676 the village of Triplicane, including the Śrī Pārtasārati Svāmi Temple, was confirmed as British territory. The attitude of these English merchants toward this and other temples within their jurisdiction was pragmatic. Ad hoc decisions concerning temples (especially when they involved the economic advantage of the English or when public order was threatened) were made. But for the rest of the seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries a clear policy was never formulated.

In spite of certain similarities between the ad hoc and pragmatic approach of the East India Company toward temples and the preexisting Hindu model of king-temple relations, there were three basic contrasts. First, temples were, at no time, fundamental, in a normative sense, for the establishment or expansion of British authority in South India. Thus the exchange of honors between king and deity as a basis for political authority largely ceased to exist. Mutatis mutandis, the English merchant-rulers, did not transact in any systematic way with sectarian leaders or groups or with local organizations of any traditional sort.