Taxes in India were significantly increased by Britain during the war, almost tripling if memory serves. India was still quite impoverished at this time, so it's no exaggeration to say that this imposition represented a massive extraction of wealth from India.

[–] fckreddit@lemmy.ml 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Not to mention the Bengal famine of 1943, which is apparently due to Churchill diverting the food resources to the soldiers, starving the population: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943

[–] gmtom@lemmy.world 5 points 9 months ago

I did a deep dive on that a few years ago. The claim that food was diverted from india comes from a single book written by a guy whose entire career is based on that book. And there is no actual documentation to show that any food was actually diverted, the closest you can get is that food shipments from Australia heading towards the med went close to India.

[–] npdean@lemmy.today 11 points 10 months ago

Short answer - British

Long answer - Colonisation by the British

[–] arbitrary_sarcasm@lemmy.world 6 points 10 months ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7CW7S0zxv4

It's not too long (15 minutes), but it's a very good speech about the economic situation in India before and after British colonization.

[–] bluecat_OwO@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

as an Indian, I have heard people around me say, britishers looted all of our riches, the riches being gold from the western, central, southern kingdoms in both late 18th century and throughout 19th century; we had high taxes imposed and east india company had trade monopoly, then in 20th century the taxation was getting out of hand and a lot of indians were becoming slaves at indigo plantations, then slowly came the revolution and in mid 20th century wwII, some indians got control of our iron and coal mines, tata's and birla and I forgot, our mills and by now we had some educated-literate folks which led the revolution...

if you go on Instagram for a while and scroll, you'd eventually find some content with indians in the comment section blowing up about our past glory and ancient hinduism and what not. We lowkey still have tons of uneducated idiots