Wow! This movie seems like a ton of fun. To get a better idea about what film you're referencing I watched this compilation.

I will speak to a trend that was contiguous with British rule of India in both company and home rule and that would be food insecurity. The Anarchy by historian William Dalrymple accounts the British conquest of South Asia in the mid to late 18th century. The East India Company was a corporation that sought to develop profitable ventures in South Asia, initially through cooperation with indigenous states like the Mughals, but from the get go also interested in economic expansion through military conquest. This led to the EIC being seen as the "government" of certain regions such as Bengal. Dalrymple argues that as a corporation, the EIC was most accountable to turning a profit to distribute to shareholders and felt less obligated to govern the people who lived in these conquered areas. It is important that even before the EIC attempted to alter established economic systems to maximize profit, loot (which is a borrow word from a South Asian language) was a key source of revenue for the EIC. When conquering states and cities, they would loot them and sell their gains for personal and company gain. The amount of theft we are talking about is tremendous. Objects of cultural value in South Asia would be sold or shipped to the metropole and some of those objects still inhabit museums in the United Kingdom today. We can never quantify the value of the loot taken out of South Asia but Dalrymple claims that after the Battle of Plassey that secured EIC presence in Bengal and finally supplanted Mughal leadership on the subcontient, the EIC earned 2.5 million pounds, equivalent to 250 million English pounds today.

But "looting" India is rather intangible and restricted more towards the British taking from the people who had something to take. Britain's impact on South Asian agriculture had a far broader impact on South Asians and could be characterized as brutal and savage. The Anarchy discusses a few famines that occurred during Company Rule. The Bengal Famine of 1769 was caused by a failure of the monsoons to generate adequate rainfall and EIC fail to provide any form of meaningful relief. In many places across South Asia, taxation systems stayed continuous from the EIC came to power, but the EIC did raise taxes. During the famine, they did not lower taxes. Since most taxation was in kind, Farmers were paid their taxes with what they grew. That food was sold by the EIC or distributed where they believed it to be valuable, which was not to the farmers of Bengal. Since the EIC hadn't done any census work at the time, claims regarding the human cost of the 1769 famine vary. Warren Hastings claims 1/3 of Bengal died or fled the region during the famine. The article that discusses that in the worst hit regions as many as 1/2 of the people in an areas affected by the famine fled their homes or died.

So this 18th century famine, and we haven't gotten to RRR yet. So the final famine event I will talk about are the El Nino famines of the late 19th century in India. These occur during Home Rule so famine was not unique to the laissez-faire profiteering that guided EIC decision making. Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis discusses a series of famines caused by variations in weather patterns caused by the El Nino Southern Oscillation and its impact on the food production of India. Now its important to note that droughts happen and food production ebs and flows continuously. Davis argues that the Raj's political institutions were unable to provide anything close to adequate relief for the people of the Raj experiencing the famine. According to Davis, as many 30 million people died from food-related issues (either starvation or pandemics caused by food insecurity) during the period of 1876 to 1900 (and keep in mind not every year was a famine year). Mark Brown summarizes the literature on LVH by highlighting scholarship that indicates that the British unwillingness to invest agricultural development, such as irrigation canals can clearly be linked to areas most impacted by famine. The British were extracting a great deal of wealth from India's agricultural production and it wasn't being invested in developing India's economy beyond how India's development could benefit the metropole. This famine would be in the living memory of many people living in India during the setting of RRR in the 1920s. Events like the Bengal famine of 1943 have to happened yet, but also are further examples of a type of "dispassionate" rule by the British.