The British Raj and the Famines of India

Between 1770 and 1943 the Indian subcontinent experienced a series of famines of an intensity unmatched in the modern history of any continent. At least thirty million people, and probably considerably more, died in famines under British rule. The largest death tolls came in 1770, in 1876–1878, in 1896–1897, and in 1943 — four catastrophes separated by nearly two centuries but linked by a common set of conditions: a monsoon failure, an extractive revenue system, and a colonial state that was, at best, uncertain how to respond. The famines of British India were not acts of God alone. They were also the consequence of the political economy of British rule.

The 1770 Bengal Famine: The First Great Disaster

The 1770 Bengal Famine was the first great humanitarian catastrophe of British rule in India. The failure of the 1769 monsoon, followed by a drought in 1770, devastated the rice crop across the Gangetic plain. Contemporary observers described villages emptied of their inhabitants, fields lying untilled, and bands of starving peasants roaming the countryside in search of food. The East India Company’s revenue demand — fixed in advance regardless of the harvest — pushed the ryots to sell their remaining grain, their cattle, and even their seed corn to meet the demand. The result was a famine in which perhaps a third of the population of Bengal, then the wealthiest province of the Mughal successor states, perished.

The famine produced a major political response in Britain. The directors of the Company, alarmed by the collapse in revenue, appointed a series of investigating committees. The Company critics in London — including the Whig politician Edmund Burke — used the catastrophe to argue for fundamental reform of the Company’s governance. In his speech opening the impeachment of Warren Hastings in February 1788, Burke denounced “the desertion of the people of Bengal” by a company that had taxed them in their extremity and exported their grain. The first Regulation Act of 1773, which established the post of Governor-General of Bengal, was in part a response to the famine. The lesson drawn in Britain at the time, and reinforced by every subsequent famine, was that Company rule had failed in its basic responsibility to protect the population.

The Agra Famine of 1837–1838

The first major famine of the British Crown in India (following the takeover of 1858) was the Upper Doab famine of 1837–1838, which killed perhaps 800,000 people in the North-Western Provinces. The famine was caused by the failure of the summer monsoon of 1837 and the absence of any organised relief machinery. The Governor-General, Lord Auckland, refused to declare a famine or to authorise large-scale relief works, in keeping with the prevailing laissez-faire doctrine that government intervention in the grain market would only make things worse. The contemporary accounts describe a population driven to eating bark, grass, and the bodies of the dead, and a countryside emptied by death and migration. The Agra famine was the first to be subjected to systematic historical investigation, and it became a touchstone in the later debate over British famine policy.

The Agra famine was, in this respect, a turning point. The British administration of India had previously been dominated by Company officials who had personal experience of earlier famines. By the late 1830s a new generation of administrators, trained in the doctrines of the Scottish political economy — Malthus, Ricardo, the Mills — had taken over. Their principled objection to famine relief on the grounds that it would distort the grain market and produce dependency would dominate British policy in India for the next forty years.

The Great Famine of 1876–1878: The Worst of the Century

The Great Famine of 1876–1878, which affected the Madras Presidency, the Bombay Deccan, the Central Provinces, and parts of Mysore, was the worst famine of the nineteenth century in India. The famine was caused by a severe failure of the south-west monsoon in 1876, compounded by a strong El Niño weather pattern and a series of administrative decisions made worse by the policies of the viceroy, Lord Lytton. Modern scholarship puts the death toll between 5.5 and 12 million people, with the worst-affected regions being the Madras Presidency and the Bombay Deccan. The contemporary accounts of the famine describe mass migrations of starving peasants, the abandonment of villages, the sale of children by starving parents, and the deaths of millions in the relief camps and on the roads.

The famine was made significantly worse by the policy of the British authorities. The viceroy, Lord Lytton, refused to prohibit the export of grain from India even as the famine deepened, on the grounds that interference with the market would only make the situation worse. The British authorities also refused to undertake large-scale relief works, partly on fiscal grounds and partly on doctrinal ones. The political scandal in Britain was substantial: The Daily News and other Liberal newspapers attacked Lytton’s policies, and the opposition leader William Gladstone denounced the government’s response. Lytton was recalled in 1879 and replaced by Lord Ripon, who immediately appointed the Indian Famine Commission of 1880 to investigate the crisis and to propose a new famine policy.

The Commission’s report, published in 1880, was a landmark in the development of Indian famine policy. It laid the foundations of the Indian Famine Code of 1883, which established a permanent famine administration, a system of relief works, and a graded scale of relief according to need. The Code was not implemented without difficulty — the 1896–1897 famine would test it severely — but it was the first systematic attempt to provide for famine relief on a continental scale.

The Indian Famine of 1896–1897

The Indian famine of 1896–1897 affected much of central and northern India, from the Central Provinces through the Bombay Deccan to the United Provinces, and killed perhaps five million people. The famine was caused by the failure of the south-west monsoon in 1896 and by a more general climatic disruption associated with a strong El Niño event. The response of the British authorities was markedly better than in 1876–1878: the relief works established under the Famine Code of 1883 were extended on a substantial scale, the Indian railways allowed the rapid movement of grain from one region to another, and the death toll, while still catastrophic, was substantially lower than in the earlier famine. The viceroy, Lord Curzon, appointed the Famine Commission of 1898 to review the operation of the Famine Code, and the Commission’s recommendations were embodied in the revised Famine Code of 1897, which governed British policy for the rest of the colonial period.

The 1896–1897 famine was followed by a further severe famine in 1899–1900, which affected western and northern India and killed perhaps a million people. The 1899–1900 famine was particularly severe in Gujarat, the Central Provinces, and parts of the Punjab, and it was the first major test of the revised Famine Code. The response of the authorities was more systematic than in 1896–1897, and the death toll, while still substantial, was lower in proportion to the affected population.

The 1943 Bengal Famine: The Last Great Crisis

The 1943 Bengal Famine was the last major famine of British India, and it killed perhaps three million people in the province of Bengal. The famine was caused by a complex combination of factors: the Japanese occupation of Burma, which had been a major source of Burmese rice imports to India; the loss of rice imports from South-East Asia; the wartime disruption of the Indian economy and of the coastal shipping that normally moved rice from Burma to Bengal; the policy of the British authorities in Bengal, who requisitioned boats and food stocks for the war effort; the decision of the British Indian government to continue the export of rice from Bengal even as the famine was developing; and a series of natural disasters, including a cyclone that hit the Bengal coast in October 1942 and a smallpox epidemic that ravaged the population in the months that followed.

The contemporary accounts of the famine describe scenes of mass starvation, the abandonment of the rural population to the cities of Calcutta and Howrah, the collapse of the rural economy, and the deaths of millions in the streets of Calcutta. The British response, and in particular the role of Winston Churchill, who was said to have blamed the Indians for the famine, has been the subject of intense historical controversy. The Famine Inquiry Commission of 1944–1945, which was established by the British Indian government, was a major investigation, and its report attributed the famine primarily to administrative failure. The 1943 Bengal Famine acquired a particular symbolic importance in the historiography of British India, and it continues to be a focus of historical and political debate.

The Regional Geography of Famine

The famines of British India were not evenly distributed across the subcontinent. The regions most affected were the dry and semi-arid zones of western and central India, the Gangetic plain, and the south-eastern districts of Bengal. The great famines of 1770, 1876–1878, 1896–1897, and 1943 each had distinct regional patterns: 1770 and 1943 affected Bengal particularly badly, 1876–1878 was concentrated in the Madras Presidency and the Bombay Deccan, 1896–1897 affected central and northern India. The regional patterns reflected the underlying climatic geography of the subcontinent — the failure of the south-west monsoon, the strength of the El Niño phenomenon, the patterns of drought and flood — but they were also shaped by the regional differences in the British administrative system, the local agrarian structure, and the local relief arrangements.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the Indian famines has been transformed, since the 1980s, by the integration of climate science and by the work of the Indian economic historians. The older tradition, going back to the work of Romesh Chunder Dutt in the Economic History of India (1906) and carried forward by the nationalist historians, treated the famines as a direct consequence of British colonial exploitation — of the revenue demand, of the destruction of Indian textile industries, of the export of grain to Britain. The more recent work, of which David Arnold’s The New Cambridge History of India: The Science of Empire (1992), the work of the climate historian Vinita Damodaran, and the contributions to Agriculture, Food Production and Food Policy (in the Cambridge Economic History of India) are representative, has been more cautious. The famines were, on this more recent view, the consequence of a complex interaction between climatic events and political-economic structures. The British revenue demand, the export of grain, the inadequate relief arrangements, and the underlying vulnerability of the rural population all played a role. The death tolls, which range from a minimum of perhaps 20 million to a maximum of perhaps 50 million across the colonial period, are not contested. The interpretation of them is.

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