I mean... can you believe this is an Indian city??

https://www.reddit.com/r/kolkata/comments/1im3haq/colonial_calcutta_collected_pictures/

WOW!!! This is such a courageous thing to say!!! Just remember!! Treat the downvotes as upvotes!!! We got such a fucking chip on our shoulders about the British (saying it as someone who lives in Britain and who is from West Bengal + hates both Mamata Bannerjee/TMC and BJP) that it is a joy to see someone, at last, thinking rationally and not just engaging in utterly random condemnation. Mods, do your worst - mark as trollish, unpublish... I don't care - it will just prove my point!!!

this is what happens when we forget our history, please read up on the Bengal famine of 1943

or have a listen to this BBC podcast https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/m001wr57

Very disappointing response. We all know that all those things happened. We may even disagree with the OP's thesis because of those things. But treating it as some sort of unforgivable faux pas because of that is not good. Also, being eternally resentful about the past is not good either. It's bad for the national psyche, it's bad for peoples' personal mental situations.

This is what's known as toxic positivity. Understanding history is not resentment, it is perspective. It IS unforgivable like the holocaust but if you don't value brown lives then it's easy to say 'move on' (when what you really mean is it didn't matter because these people didn't matter).
The national psyche is better for seeing ourselves as survivors and humans worthy of respect. Not bending over for another kick with a grovelling smile.

Oh it's not just us that are guilty of this, even them! In their efforts to twist themselves into unrecognisable shapes to suit fads in their own country, you will hear a (thankfully small) minority of British white folk who will bend over backward to loudly proclaim the ills of colonialism. And yet at the same time, you'll also see empire apologists who will not acknowledge the actual bad stuff about colonialism, so you definitely can't complain about lack of viewpoint diversity! The trouble is, their schools don't teach them in the history classes about colonialism, so people form what fragmented views they do form from their own research (whose quality can vary greatly!).

Nothing is black or white, everything comes in shades of grey. While incidents like the Bagh Massacre were definitely inexcusable, there's also plenty of positives of colonialism- most importantly, building institutions in the country.

What happened has happened. Either Indians can still bitch and moan about colonialism, or we can take a leaf from Japan, a country that was literally nuked by the United States, but still stuck to the path of nation building rather than blaming all of their problems on historical incidents.

https://www.gettyimages.in/photos/bengal-famine

please see this also whenever u are willing to see the world for what it really is, and not just aEsThEtic

Concerning but not surprising. Colonial India was a land of native collaborators, from civil service to army to police to schools and universities. The children of these native collaborators obviously escaped the man-made famines and the arbitrary mass murders that were a routine part of the colonial life. Please understand that an overwhelming majority of colonial natives were collaborators (passive and/or active) in one way or the other and this pattern was naturally reflected in their political organisations, from the political left to the centre to the right. This collaboration was across class, caste, and gender. And to rub salt to the wound, the actual freedom fighters, who really tested the nerve of colonial regime were brutally murdered while the collaborators and their children (and their children today) happily “negotiated” for their freedom with their imperial overlords in a dialogue of mutual sympathy and necessity. So, of course, it should not shock anyone to witness the apologists of the colonial regime coming out proudly in forums like these today for they still constitute a majority in the country. The apologists do not indentify with the poor and the dead. And even without being lords, they would still very much like you to refer to them by “Your Lordship”.

These are not pics of "calcutta", but an enclave carved out of calcutta where the British officers used to reside, and "natives" were not allowed. The real colonial calcutta looked nothing like this, there are plenty of photographs available of areas where Indians used to live, a simple Google search would suffice. The military cant area or Meerut is not Meerut.