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Pardon me, but I don't think we do know that. I would be surprised if we have such complete and accurate data about famine in pre-British India that we can confidently state that they didn't have famines that were as bad as the ones they had under British rule. Furthermore, do we all know that these famines were preventable? I don't.
Finally, did British rule actually cause India's economic growth to slow down? Because if so I was also not aware of that.
Naively, I would assume that being ruled by one of the earliest countries to industrialize (Britain) would mean that India had better access to the technologies of the Industrial Revolution than a country outside the British sphere. Since industrialization turns every other variable into a rounding error, I would expect early access to British technology to similarly drown out any damage the East India Company or the Raj were capable of doing. Bear in mind that the number of British people on Indian soil was always tiny, and for the most part the British were just occupying the top rung of a pre-existing power structure that was, and remained, populated almost entirely by Indian people who were carrying on day-to-day business as they always had. I would be surprised if such a small number of people could have a significant impact on India's economic growth.
Population growth was faster under the Raj than under the Mughals (and faster under the Mughals than any other pre-Raj government). Given that mass living standards in India remain at bare subsistence (with negligible growth in GDP per capita) until India escapes the Malthusian trap in the 1990's, we can reasonably assume that most of GDP goes to keeping peasants alive, and that the faster population growth under the Raj corresponds to faster GDP growth.
The claim that India was a rich nation turned destitute by colonialism (Mughal + British or just British according to factional ID) is the Big Lie of Indian nationalism. India was dirt poor when the British arrived, and slightly less dirt poor when we left. Its just that if you go far back enough everyone was dirt poor, so the working definition of "rich country" was "dirt poor country where the elites can afford blinged-out throne rooms with big shiny diamonds". By that definition, Mughal India was the richest country in the world. And it is indeed the case that the biggest, shiniest diamond was no longer in India at independence.
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I mean ironically the post of colonial overlord had historically bounced between a bunch of non-Indian invaders prior to the British. Mughals et al. It's not like Britain came in and were the only ones to ever subjugate the Indian people.
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