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FAMINES during British Rule
Author: Dr. Jayakumar Srinivasan
Press Release: https://www.esamskriti.com/e/History/Indian-History/Famines-During-British-Rule-1.aspx
More than 50 million died in famines during British rule, yet many school text books do not mention about them, or say thousands died. Read all about the famines.
To read the same article in Tamil please click on PDF.
Our team was asked by a State Government SCERT Textbook Board to review 6 to 8 standard Social Sciences textbook. We made many recommendations for change of content. The State adopted about half of those suggestions. Let us look at one example.
In the context of the Zamindari system, take a look at the following extract from the 8th standard textbook 1
It is true that the British policies ruined our agricultural system. But let us draw our attention to the sentence “There were great famines which killed thousands of people”.
A famine is a situation where there is an extreme scarcity of food, especially grains. Many of us many not have had a first hand-experience of a famine because the last famine was in 1943. However, much research has been done on the study of famines in India, especially during the colonial period.
In an important book Late Victorian Holocausts 2, summarized by Fred Magdoff 3, Mike Davis mentions that there were 17 famines in the 2,000 years before British rule. In comparison, in the 120 years of British rule, there were 31 serious famines. Davis argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World were sown in this era of High Imperialism, as the price for capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants’ lives. This fact should impel us to understand the British role in creating intense famines in India.
Here is a list of some major famines during British rule in India. 4
| Year | Name | Region | Deaths | Comment |
| 1769–70 | Great Bengal Famine | Bihar, Northern and Central Bengal | 10 Million | About one third of the then population of Bengal |
| 1783–84 | Chalisa famine | Delhi,UP, Punjab,Rajasthan, Kashmir | 11 Million | Severe famine. Large areas were depopulated. |
| 1791–92 | Doji bara famineorSkull famine | Hyderabad,Central India,Deccan,Gujarat, Southern Rajasthan | 11 Million | One of the most severe famines known. People died in such numbers that they could not be cremated or buried. |
| 1860–61 | Upper Doab | Rajasthan | 2 Million | |
| 1865-67 | Orissa famine | Bihar, Orissa, Parts of Southern India | 1 Million | The British Secretary of State for India, Lord Salisbury, did nothing for two months, by which time a million people had died |
| 1868–70 | Rajputana famine | Rajasthan | 1.5 Million | |
| 1876–78 | Great Madras Famine | Mysore and Hyderabad States (Madras Presidency) | 6-10 Mil | |
| 1896–97 | Indian famine | Rajasthan, parts of Central India and Hyderabad | 5 Million | |
| 1943–44 | Bengal famine | Bengal | 3.6 Million | 1.5 from starvation; 2.1 from epidemics. |
In an 1883 Volume on Rural Bengal 5, W. Hunter gives a vivid and disturbing picture of the 1770 Bengal Famine, “All through the stifling summer of 1770 the people went on dying. The husbandmen sold their cattle; they sold their implements of agriculture; they devoured their seed-grain; they sold their sons and daughters, till … no buyer of children could be found; they ate the leaves of trees and the grass of the field; and in June, 1770, the Resident at the Durbar affirmed that the living were feeding on the dead.
Day and night a torrent of famished and disease-stricken wretches poured into the great cities. …pestilence had broken out. … we find small-pox at Moorshedabad, … The streets were blocked up with … heaps of the dying and dead. … even the dogs and jackals, the public scavengers of the East, became unable to accomplish their revolting work, and the multitude of mangled and festering corpses at length threatened the existence of the citizens.
Starving and shelter less crowds crawled despairingly from one deserted village to another in a vain search for food, or a resting-place in which to hide themselves from the rain. The epidemics incident to the season were thus spread over the whole country; … Millions of famished wretches died in the struggle to live … their last gaze being probably fixed on the densely-covered fields that would ripen only a little too late for them…”
About a quarter to a third of the population of Bengal starved to death in about a ten-month period. In 1865–66, severe drought struck Odisha and was met by British official inaction.
Victims pictured in 1877 Reference 4.
Relief Distribution in Bellary Reference 4. Great Famine 1876 to 78.
An important work to understand the role of British during the period 1939-45 (World War II), is Madhusree Mukerjee’s book “Churchill’s Secret War” 6 where she shows that the 20th Century’s greatest hero is also its greatest villain.
When asked to release more grain to India, Churchill said “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.” When the Delhi Government sent a telegram to him painting a picture of the horrible devastation and the number of people who had died, his only response was, “Then why hasn’t (Mahatma) Gandhi died yet?”
How to imagine the scale of loss?
The Gaja cyclone of Tamil Nadu in November 2018, which devastated the livelihoods of 500,000 families by leveling coconut, cashew and mango farms killed about 40 people. The 2004 Tsunami killed 230,000 across 14 countries.
The number of Indians who died in famines in Colonial India is 50 million. The scale of loss is incomparable.
What can India do now?
Indian school textbooks should bring out British brutality unambiguously, as these were facts of our history. In the absence of critique of the colonial period, students can come away with the false notion that colonization was the best thing that happened to India.
After our team sent this critique to the State, the Editorial Board replaced one word “thousands” by the word ‘millions” 1. While this is welcome, the text makes it appear that the British rule was benevolent to India. That view needs to be refuted and completely restated that the British were disinterested in the welfare of India!
We can also learn from the West. For example, to memorialize the Jewish Holocaust (where close to 6 Million Jews were deliberately killed in Europe during 1941-45), the US has a museum – called the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In addition, almost every child going to school in this world likely learns about the Holocaust.
The infamous Gas Chambers of the Nazi Holocaust Ref 8n Holocaust Museum USA Ref 9.
India should establish monuments in West Bengal and other places to memorialize this genocide that killed as many people as the World War I (40 Million), and World War II (60 Million).
What were factors contributing to an increased incidence and severity of famines during the British rule of India? We will review this in a future article.
References
1. Social Studies, Class VIII, Hyderabad: SCERT, Telangana, 2018.
2. M. Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World, Verso Books, 2017.
3. F. Magdoff, “Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. By Mike Davis 2001. Verso, London and New York,” Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, vol. 20, pp. 190-192, 2007.
4. “Timelines of Major Famines in India during British Rule.” (Online).
5. W. W. Hunter, “Annals Of Rural Bengal,” vol. 1, 1883.
6. M. Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II, India Penguin, 2018.
7.”Bengal famine of 1943″. To read Bengal famine and Responsibility for Holocaust
8. G. Will, “A showcase of the vilest and noblest manifestations of humanity,” 26 April 2018.
Author: Dr. Jayakumar Srinivasan
Press Release: https://www.esamskriti.com/e/History/Indian-History/Was-India-Always-A-Poor-Country-1.aspx
To read article in Tamil in PDF.
Today, many people consider India to be a developing country, or a polite way of saying that Indians are “poor”. There is truth in this observation. Despite the dazzle and comforts of city life, air travel, multi-storied malls and Smart Phones, the majority of Indians lead a rough life. People attribute India’s continued poverty to many causes such as government corruption and ineptitude, poor infrastructure, social inequality, communal conflicts, and lack of innovative spirit.
In the same breath, we also say that India is one of the oldest civilizations, i.e. that it has one of the longest histories of any country, or rather people lived here for many thousands of years continuously. On top of that, we are told that the British made Indians civilized and prosperous.
In this article, the question we are asking is “Was the geography that we now call India alwayseconomically backward?” Specifically, we are focusing on the economy aspect of overall prosperity.
How does one measure economic prosperity? For example, today, we say that the USA is a very prosperous country. What does this mean?
We use a number called GDP (“Gross Domestic Product”) that is calculated for every country. Higher the GDP number, more prosperous a country is. GDP is supposed to measure economic activity of a country. GDP is defined as the value of all goods and services produced by a country in one year. The more a country produces, which then gets consumed locally or exported globally, the higher the GDP. For example, today, the world buys expensive items like Hewlett Packard laptops, Apple iPhones, and Boeing aircraft from the USA. People in the USA also consume large quantities of goods and services, much more than anywhere else in the world. Hence, it is no surprise that the GDP of USA is the highest in the world today.
To illustrate how we are going to use GDP, I performed a simple analysis of GDP data for the year 2017 published by the International Monetary Fund (1):
| 2017 GDP comparison in Trillion US Dollars | |
| GDP of USA | $19.4 |
| GDP of Entire World | $ 80 |
| America’s Share of World Economy | 19.4/80 = ~25% |
| GDP of India | $ 2.6 |
| India’s Share of World Economy | 2.6/80 = 3.2% |
This means that when the world citizen spends Rs. 100, Rs. 25 of that revenue goes to the USA. Now you can imagine why USA is economically prosperous, even without visiting it!
Now we should be able to understand statements such as this in the news “PM Narendra Modi today called for targeting double-digit GDP growth … and said India’s share in world trade has to more than double to 3.4 per cent.” (2)
Now, how are we to understand the economy of countries in the past? Indians must thank an economist Angus Maddison (3). He was a Professor of Economics in The Netherlands. He extensively research to compare the economies of many countries and how they evolved over time. He went backward in time – not a year, not a decade, not a century, but two thousand years!
Prof. Maddison collected a lot of data over many years. The best way to understand what he found is by looking at the chart below (4).
Looking at this chart, we can make the following observations:
1. India was the most prosperous country for the first 1,500 years of the Current Era
2. India’s share of the global GDP started plummeting from a high of 25% since late 1700 all the way to under 5% at Independence.
3. After the British entered India and established their regime, the economy of Western Europe increases dramatically from around 1800.
4. After Europeans establish settlements in America and began slavery, a non-existent American economy skyrockets starting in 1800s.
5. The trend for India has been reversing since the 1970’s.
So, if I were to ask the question “How economically prosperous was India 300 years ago”, we should be able to see that “India was as relatively prosperous then as USA is today!”
S. Gurumurthy’s talk at IIT Bombay in 2010 (5) provides a very good introduction to this topic.
Pay closer attention to the economic trends of India and Western Europe. Less than a century after the British entered India and establish themselves firmly, European economy begins skyrocketing for almost 150 years. Raj Vedam (6) says that this is not a coincidence. He attributes this to transference of wealth from India.
Let us see what the plundering British themselves had to say. Robert Clive (1725-74) was the Commander-in-Chief of British India. He created ownership of the lands of what is today India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and established a process of funneling wealth out of India to Britain. He said that India was “a country of inexhaustible riches and one which cannot fail to make its masters the richest corporation in the world” (7). At that time, the state of “Bengal” alone, which was the richest “state” in India, was richer than the entire Britain!
When an American philosopher Will Durant visited India in 1930, 175 years after Robert Clive’s planned campaign to destroy India began, Durant was so horrified at the destruction wrought by the British (8) that, instead of pursuing his goal of writing his book “The Story of Civilization”, he took up writing to inspire Indians to fight for Independence. In what he terms as “The Rape of a Continent”, he says “But I saw such things in India as made me feel that study and writing were frivolous things in the presence of a people-one-fifth of the human race – suffering poverty and oppression bitterer than any to be found elsewhere on the earth…” Raj Vedam highlights actions by the British that choked India (6).
●The cost of British conquests (including first and second world wars), developments in Britain, and administration of India, were all charged to Indians.
●Indians were forced to sell cheap and buy exorbitantly.
●Indians were taxed twice as high as in England and thrice as in Scotland.
●Millions of dollars’ worth of bribes from rulers who were dependent on favours and guns.
Hence, it is accurate to say that the British rule decimated Indian economy and ruined India. Yet, today, our children are taught that it is “the caste oppression” that made India poor!
In conclusion, India was one of the most economically prosperous countries in the world for a good bit of the known past. The British rule is probably the most significant factor that contributed to India’s poverty.
Let us remind ourselves that “Colonization” is never beneficial for the colonized people. If we study history properly, we will likely find that every colonized country was culturally and economically prosperous, and each such country is in various states of struggle or ruin today.
References
1. “World Economic Outlook Database“, International Monetary Fund, 17 April 2018.
2. “PM Narendra Modi seeks double-digit GDP growth, raising India’s share in world trade”, The Economic Times, June 22, 2018.
3. Maddison A, “Contours of the World Economy 1-2030 AD”, Oxford University Press, 2007.
4. Hunter, Tracy M., Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,
5. S. Gurumurthy, speech at IIT Bombay Hindustan Times Avenue 2010 (Full),
6. Raj Vedam, “Indian civilization: The Untold Story”, Talk at Srijan Foundation, New Delhi, February 2018.
7. J. Albert Rorabacher, “Property, Land, Revenue, and Policy: The East India Company, C.1757–1825”, Routledge, 2017.
8. Will Durant, “The Case for India”, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1930.Also read
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