From what I understand the British created an ingenious system by which the majority of the the population fight each other for favor of their colonial masters at the top of the trash heap. However even at the top of the caste system the Indians weren't really on top because that privilege belonged to the British. So am I correct in assuming that since the British lived outside the laws they made if a soldier raped an Indian woman, even if she came forward, he wouldn't be punished?
During the British Raj, the Offenses Against the Person Act dictated that "every Person convicted of the Crime of Rape shall suffer Death as a Felon." Death as a Felon being different from Death as a traitor, since felons were hanged and traitors were quartered. The death sentence in the UK underwent reform in the years to follow allowing penal servitude in exchange for the convict's life. Despite harsh punishments, rapists were hardly ever convicted in the metropole until well into the 20th century with the Sexual Misconduct acts, let alone in the colonies.
If a soldier were to rape a woman, not only was it very likely her accusation would be ignored by the colonial administration, it would also be covered up by her family as something shameful to be hidden, not something to seek recompense for. Rape ruined a woman's chance of finding a "suitable" husband, thus decreasing the family unit's social standing in the community. We don't find many records of rape occurring in British colonial documentation, however this is more of an indication of the fact that claims were being suppressed rather than an indication that rapes did not occur. Rape and gendered violence are a very common theme in all colonial regimes, there is an excellent book on India in particular by Nancy Paxton called "Writing under the Raj: Gender, Race, and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830-1947". If you are interested in the topic of colonial power dynamics, race and sexuality, I would recommend "Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers" by Joane Nagel.
**Sorry for the formatting, I'm on mobile. Also I apologize if any of this is incorrect since my focus of study is actually on sexual politics in the Caribbean, not India! I hope this helps though :)
There's a very good article on this very subject if you have access to history journals, Household Crimes and Domestic Order: Keeping the Peace in Colonial Calcutta, c. 1770-c. 1840 by Durba Ghosh. It seems that there was actually a significant amount of cases where sexually abused Indian women took the European perpetrators to court, and "[...]perpetrators were occasionally convicted, but very rarely."(pp 620).
So why did these women still endure the public humiliation of these trials, and why did the courts allow them to come forward? Ghosh argues that one of the reasons was that they were there to legitimise Company rule, by at least giving an image of rule of law, and at the same time being able to control the local power structure between europeans and indians, and in some rare instances actually discipline their european subjects to keep the peace.
In enabling a string of acquittals for European men accused of intimate violence, early colonial courts were able to create an image of fairness while maintaining hierarchies of gender and race within the domestic order of colonial households. (pp. 623).
I hope in sort of answer your question!