How has colonial rule transformed Indian society? If it (Indian society) had not undergone colonial rule, then what type of Indian society would have been there? Elaborate. (Answer in 350 words)

- How has colonial rule transformed Indian society? If it (Indian society) had not undergone colonial rule, then what type of Indian society would have been there? Elaborate. (Answer in 350 words)
Introduction
Colonial rule changed the foundations of Indian society, which is exactly what makes the question of its absence unanswerable.
Body
1. What colonial rule transformed: Property first: the Permanent Settlement of 1793, and the ryotwari and mahalwari systems after it, made land private and saleable, created zamindars, tenants and a landless class, and demanded revenue in cash, which forced commercialisation. Handicrafts collapsed against machine imports while surplus went abroad, so the economy was commercialised without being industrialised. Knowledge was reorganised: the decennial census from 1871 enumerated caste and, as Bernard Cohn argued, turned graded local jatis into countable, competing all-India blocs. Law was codified, and personal law codified by religion, which hardened the boundary between communities; separate electorates then made that boundary political. English education after Macaulay's minute produced a new intelligentsia, and with it the reform movements and the nationalist leadership. Railways, the post and a single administration created a national space. Forest law dispossessed Adivasis and the Criminal Tribes Act criminalised whole communities. Desai's new classes and Srinivas's Westernization both describe this transformation.
2. Which of those changes were already under way regardless: Not all of it was colonial in origin. Bayly's work on the eighteenth-century bazaar shows a commercial society with banking, credit and long-distance trade already in place, and the successor states of the Mughal decline were centralising revenue on their own account. Challenges to caste from within — the Lingayats, the Sikh Gurus, the bhakti traditions — long predate the British. Printing and literacy were arriving anyway.
3. The society that might have been without it: Reasoning from those two, an indigenous capitalism growing out of the merchant and banking communities is plausible, without the drain and the destruction of handicrafts, though slower and more uneven. The subcontinent would more likely have held several states than one, so 'India' as a single political society might not have existed to be transformed. Caste reform would have come from religious dissent rather than from constitutional law, so an Ambedkar would have had no instrument like Article 17. There would have been no census-hardened caste blocs and no communal electorates, which is not to say there would have been no religious conflict.
4. How far such a claim can be supported at all: Only weakly. Counter-factuals cannot be tested, and the comparisons usually offered — Meiji Japan, Thailand, China — differ on too many variables to isolate colonialism as the cause.
Conclusion
The transformation is documented and the alternative is conjecture, which is why the honest answer names the mechanisms and refuses the ending.