If you don't count the people doing the work, it indeed looks like you don't need as many people to do the work.
In your scenario order and rent extraction is not being maintained by an absentee landlord at all then.
Are they not also Victorian Elites, or did they lose that status by not being in Britain?
As an essential part of the colony, you can't really count them out. That's similar to how in feudal structures, and military regimes, I'd count the military and civil service as one entity.
I am in the process of reading the volume on India for the Oxford History of the British Empire.
In early modern academia, "Historia" was defined as opposed to "Philosophia" as being the study of the particular versus that of generalizations.
One thing that my experience in studying history at a major European university showed me is that almost any generalization one makes about any period in history can be disproved. There is a lot of complexity in the development of path dependent evolution and irreversible processes that simply cannot be compressed and modeled.