The British did not create the entanglement in India of state power and commerce. It had already existed in politically decadent but hugely prosperous Bengal...
India needed less inwardness and more global interaction than it had in the eighteenth century, and these the British did provide...
As it happens, in the early period of British dominance in the eighteenth century, the extent of racial prejudice, when present, was relatively low, despite the ongoing economic plunder of India. At the cultural level, there was considerable British interest in India's ancient civilization. William Jones, an East India Company officer, was a great pioneer of studies of India's past, including its ancient history, and Warren Hastings, so reviled by Burke, was a patron of Indian scholarship (he tried to acquaint himself with local culture, learned some Bengali, Urdu, and Persian, and encouraged Sanskrit studies)...
In assessing Britain's relation with India in this year of anniversaries, we must make a clear distinction between the positive contributions of the British in bringing India more closely into the global world (including many domestic institutional changes) and the plentiful presence of inequity and negligence in British imperial rule.