THREE

THIS PARCHED LAND

BETWEEN 1876 AND 1879 THE DECCAN PLATEAU IN THE SOUTH and parts of northwestern India suffered famine as intense as any ever recorded. Twenty years later, in 1896 and 1897, drought ravaged millions of lives again, this time across a large expanse of central India. Before they had recovered, another serious famine struck those same regions in 1899 and 1900. Crops withered. Cattle perished. Tanks ran dry. Employment vanished. Those with the least power in society—the landless, the aged and infirm, women and children—were the first to find that they could earn no money with which to purchase the food that made it to market, its price swollen by scarcity and rumor. People moved to the cities, where some of them survived on private charity; hundreds of thousands moved to British famine camps, where they received meager rations and a cash wage for strenuous labor building roads, digging ditches, breaking stones. Rarely in the voluminous reportage on the famines do we read the actual name of a person who died. They succumbed to starvation; weakened by hunger, they fell to cholera, to plague, to the catchall “fevers” that medical officers inscribed as their “cause of death.”

“The rains failed.” The phrase recurs in almost every account of these catastrophes, always intransitive. What this meant is that the rains failed to behave as they were expected to—they failed to fall when, as much, or where they usually did. The rains failed to obey the patterns upon which human societies had organized their material lives. The suffering of those years reached as far as China, Java, Egypt, and Brazil’s northeast. In China five northern provinces—Shandong, Zhili, Shanxi, Henan, and Shaanxi—bore the brunt of the suffering. Between 9.5 and 13 million people died in China, most of them from diseases that spread hand-in-glove with starvation. We know now that failures of rainfall in the late nineteenth century were caused by El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events of exceptional intensity. El Niño is a quasiperiodic rise in sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific, with effects on global atmospheric circulation. Local fishers off the coast of Peru had identified the phenomenon as early as the seventeenth century, and had called it El Niño (Christ child), since it tended to appear near Christmas time. Those who tried to make sense of it in the nineteenth century had only a growing sense that the droughts were global in reach—somehow connected.¹

More searching questions followed. The rains failed—did individuals, societies, and governments fail, too? In an era when technology promised to collapse both time and space—as so many enthusiastic observers of rail and steam foresaw—need drought always turn to starvation? In an era when the British Empire proclaimed its superiority and its benevolence, did the colonial authorities act with foresight and justice? Could the famines have been prevented? These questions animated supporters and critics of colonial policy, economists, and meteorologists; they haunted administrators who carried the guilt for starvation in their districts. Drought and famine sparked many discussions about the future of water, for it was water’s absence that had spelled disaster. Water unleashed new claims upon states by journalists and humanitarians and engineers; water unleashed new claims by states upon their subjects. Here, in the realm of ideas—in competing visions of the future, in the articulation of fears about nature and hopes of betterment—lay the lasting legacies of the nineteenth century’s nightmares. We live with them still.

I

The first portent of trouble in southwestern India came with the drought that set in over the princely state of Mysore in 1875. The following year, rainfall during the southwest monsoon was much lower than usual over the whole Deccan plateau. By October, as local supplies were exhausted, the first murmurings of famine began to be heard in districts across Madras and Bombay. In the western Indian countryside of Bombay Presidency, the alarm was raised early on by workers of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha. Founded in 1870, the association was, in the words of its constitution, a “mediating body” between the state and “the people.” The Sabha was a bold experiment in representative politics—each member had to produce a mukhtiarnama (a power of attorney) signed by at least fifty people, authorizing him to speak on their behalf. Dominated by the landed and the wealthy, exclusively male in membership, the Sabha flourished under the leadership of Mahadev Govind Ranade, a judge and social reformer who carried a reputation as an orator when he moved from Bombay to Poona in 1871. The Sabha pioneered a new tradition of social investigation in India. The British kept close watch, sensing that the Sabha, in the words of one official, “threatens to grow into an imperium in imperio,” noting that “popular representation is a sharp weapon, and a very perilous one to play with.”² The Sabha’s growth coincided with the worst famine to hit the region in living memory—from the start, the Sabha played an important role in drawing attention to the suffering.

In a series of letters to the government of Bombay, written in the last few months of 1876, the Sabha gave an account of the famine’s spread: one of the letters insisted that it contained “details accessible only to those who, like the agents and correspondents deputed by the Sabha, live among, and form part of, the people overtaken by this calamity.” The Sabha’s workers mirrored the “tours” undertaken by British officials through their districts, but they presented a view closer to the ground. The dispatches are brief; village by village, they chart a looming catastrophe. One of the entries reads:

Pangaum, Oct 11—No rain except the first showers.… Drinking water scarce, as in the hot season. The tank will last for 3 months. No new water in the wells.… Neighbouring villages in a worse condition. The only relief work is to be commenced at Mohol. Great distress is expected of the respectable and poor people. Grains should be imported and sold gratis.³

The northeast monsoon brought no respite that winter, extending the drought to southeastern India. One contemporary observer noted that prices “sprang at a bound” to levels previously unknown. In a brutal reversal of what had been thought would be the impact of the railways, newly laid rail lines raised prices as grain was “hurriedly withdrawn by rail and sea from the more remote districts,” channeled to urban markets where speculators fed on fears of shortages to reap higher prices. In the summer of 1877, the monsoon was slow to begin and then patchy, followed by a deluge late in the season which destroyed many of the limited crops that had managed to take root. Water’s absence, followed by a short burst of excess, brought cultivators to ruin across Madras Presidency, their reserves depleted by the previous year’s crop failures. That summer the drought spread north; central India and parts of the northwest saw their lowest rainfall ever on record. They had few reserves to fall back on because so much grain had been exported from India, drawn by high prices on the London market. What began as a localized drought in Mysore became a catastrophic famine. The winter rains of 1877 brought some relief, but only in the summer of 1878 did “normal” rainfall produce a good harvest. The drought coincided with the most severe El Niño event in 150 years; its effect was global.⁴

Everywhere drought sparked a rapid rise in food prices accompanied by an abrupt loss of agricultural employment. Landless laborers in the worst-affected districts were the first to feel the effects. What followed was a collapse in the livelihoods and incomes of the most vulnerable sections of the population. Many people undertook long journeys in search of relief. By the end of 1876, starvation began to kill those who were most vulnerable. Illness thrived where immunity had been weakened by widespread starvation. Cholera and dysentery accompanied the movement of people, and social disruption contributed to their spread. The return of the rains in 1877, and then more fully in 1878, saw another spike in death: most likely as a result of malaria, which thrived in the sudden change in the ecology of water after a long dry spell.⁵

IN THE MIDST OF INDIA’S DISASTER, IN MAY 1877, RICHARD STRACHEY presented a lecture in London on the “Physical Causes of Indian Famines.” Strachey was from an aristocratic family deeply connected with empire. From the 1840s, as a member of the Bengal Engineers, he took an interest in irrigation. Meteorology was among his most enduring interests, and from 1867 to 1871 he served as director-general of irrigation. He would go on to lead the government of India’s Famine Enquiry Commission of 1880. He began his lecture by depicting a constant struggle between the forces of life and death: “Among the most active of forces are the conditions of local climate, and notably those of atmospheric heat and moisture.” Many contemporary observers saw climate as an active force in the world. In its late-nineteenth-century English usage, “agency”—from the medieval Latin agentia—was used as often to refer to natural as to human actions. India was overcome by the “agency of drought,” preyed on by “agencies of destruction.” These “devastating forces of tempest, drought, flood and disease” rendered human life fragile in their wake.⁶

As the drought gripped the Deccan region, administrators and journalists and missionaries followed its path. Drought appears in their accounts as an unwelcome visitor, leaving telltale marks upon the land: “The whole country is bare and brown,” one letter described; “tanks, which at this season of the year ought to be wide sheets of water, are now nothing but vast expanses of dry mud.”⁷ Drought left its fingerprint on market prices. The most widely traveled famine observer was Sir Richard Temple, sent to tour the affected districts by the imperial government in Calcutta. He had one overriding goal—to spend as little money on famine relief as possible. Critics charged that he barely dismounted from his carriage: he swept through the land and saw only what confirmed his prejudices. But his own pen left us a vivid description of monsoon failure. Temple recounts the progress of drought as if it were on a journey. “On the right or southern bank of the Toongabhadra river,” he reported, “the drought developed all its most destructive agencies, and showed its greatest force all along the frontier.” Drought “visited” the city of Madras, and then “rested for some time on the districts of South Arcot, Tanjore, and Trichinopoly, and threatened them with evil.” It had the force of a marauding army as it “extended itself with havoc throughout the southern peninsula, laying waste the districts of Madura and Tinnevelly, right down to the sea-shore near Cape Comorin.” Worse was to come. By the middle of 1877, “all hope of the south-west monsoon was given up,” the Madras government wrote to the British Indian capital in Calcutta. The government of southern India pleaded for resources. Endowed with a cruel propensity to tease, the clouds tantalized only to disappoint: “Very heavy showers would fall with a dash from blackened skies over a small area, whilst all around the skies continued as iron.”⁸

Drought was an “agency” of famine; its prime characteristics were violence and caprice. In many eyes, a Christian God brought or withheld rain: “I now see but little chance” of rain, wrote Mr. Price, collector of Cuddapah district, “except by a special dispensation of Providence.”⁹ Some invoked Hindu cosmology: the rains rested in the power of “Indra and Vayu, the Watery Atmosphere and the Wind,” who were “still the prime dispensers of weal or woe to the Indian races.”¹⁰ Others turned to the language of science to describe the physical drivers of climate: “The true cause of all movements of the atmosphere which we describe as wind is wholly mechanical, being difference of pressure at neighboring places,” Strachey declared.¹¹ Mechanical or divine, to see climate as an active force was also to attribute a certain inevitability to drought. Famine appeared to be a natural characteristic of India, no less than its landscape. At best, governments and communities could adapt to the certainty of periodic monsoon failure. In the shadows of this resignation lay a British reluctance to acknowledge that now, to an extent unimaginable fifty years earlier, the means were at hand to mitigate the impact of famine quite drastically. That, after all, was the boosters’ claim for the railways. But faced with the scale of the crisis, faced with demands to spend more money, it was easier to insist that famine was, and ever would be, India’s climatic fate.

IF THE DROUGHT WAS A FORCE OF NATURE, IT ALSO PRESENTED AN all-too-human crisis. Prolonged and exceptional in its severity, it threw into sharp relief the fractures of society. It exposed the fragile infrastructures of economic life. It pressed upon the limitations of the physical infrastructure—the word only came into widespread use in English in the early twentieth century, from the French—that had impressed so many observers of India’s landscape. In the late nineteenth century, human dependence on water—rains and rivers, wells and streams—began to be posed as a moral and political challenge.

In India, as in many parts of the world, the weather reflected moral concerns. Throughout Christian Europe, extreme weather and geological events—floods, droughts, eruptions, earthquakes—were seen as manifestations of divine judgment. China had a deep tradition of “moral meteorology,” as historian Mark Elvin describes: “Rainfall and sunshine were thought to be seasonal or unseasonal, appropriate or excessive, according to whether human behavior was moral or immoral”; the conduct of the Emperor mattered most of all. “The people of the empire bring floods, droughts, and famines on themselves,” the Yongzheng emperor declared in a decree of 1731. Because extremes of climate were unevenly distributed, a moral geography of rain and drought could be discerned—areas that suffered most, on this view, were those where standards of public behavior or administration had slipped. North America, too, had its version of “moral meteorology.” In the 1870s and 1880s, ideas about rainfall and virtue underpinned conflicting views of how land should be allocated in the Great Plains of the United States. The idea arose that “rain follows the plow”: industrious white settlers would transform the land, and their labor would in turn bring rain. Settlers, historian Richard White writes, saw themselves as “the agents of climate change.” Aridity was a form of cultural or spiritual malaise.¹²

A form of “moral meteorology” pervaded the writings of missionaries in India who observed the great drought—but it acquired a radical edge, as they suggested it was a judgment not on the morality of Indian society but rather on that of the British government. Florence Nightingale wrote from India in 1878 that “the land of India is not especially subject to famine”; she insisted that “the cultivators of the soil are industrious; the native races compare favorably with other races in capacity to take care of themselves.” The true nature of the problem was simple: “We,” the British, “do not care for the people of India.”¹³ “Famine in India is no invincible foe,” another observer wrote—“in a climate whose great danger is drought, and where Nature therefore teaches the necessity of precaution, we reap only a legitimate punishment when we suffer the penalties of imprudent neglect.”¹⁴ Here was a reversal of the language of Malthus: the “precaution” was lacking, the “imprudence” manifest on the part of the British rulers of India and not its people. An American writer in the New York Times went so far as to describe a “state of society in India whose only parallel in recent times was to be found in American slavery.”¹⁵ In a bold Tamil work depicting the great famine in verse, Villiyappa Pillai, court poet of the small kingdom of Sivagangai, turned the conventional view on its head. His bitingly satirical poem, published at the end of the nineteenth century, depicts the lord Sundarweswara (Siva) confessing to the starving people of the area that he was helpless in the face of their suffering—he directs them instead just to write a letter to the local zamindar.¹⁶ The “agencies of destruction” were not climatic—they were human.

Who personified, or what embodied, the transformation sweeping India and leaving millions vulnerable to a failure of the rains? A clear culprit emerged from critical accounts of the famines of the 1870s: “the new class of capitalists.” They were described by W. G. Pedder, an official who had worked in Gujarat and Bombay, as “men possessed by no ennobling ideas of public duty, cowards by caste and confession, citizens in no sense beyond that of benefiting society by selfish accumulation.” Pedder insisted: “The dearth was one of money and labour rather than of food; the cultivators were without the resources their own fields should have furnished, the labourers could not obtain work and wages.” The core of Indian cultivators’ vulnerability, he observed, was their “constant relations with a mercantile class” who combined “the functions of general shopkeepers, dealers in agricultural produce, bankers, and money-lenders,” known as banias, or saukars. Already indebted to the local moneylender, cultivators found themselves trapped without reserves if the harvest should fail. Pedder juxtaposed the wily “unscrupulousness” of the lenders with the “ignorance and timidity of the peasants.”¹⁷

A lack of capital was the root cause of cultivators’ vulnerability. The railway commissioner Lushington had seen this as early as the 1850s, when he cautioned against undue optimism about the railways. Andrew Wedderburn, the collector of Coimbatore district in Madras—a humane and direct voice railing against official inaction during the famine—saw that “some villages have sold their brass vessels, their ornaments (even including their wives’ ‘talis’), their field implements, the thatch of the roofs, the frames of their doors and windows.” In Bombay, G. L. Hynes, the master of the mint, saw something similar: “Silver ornaments and melted country silver discs are pouring in,” he wrote, to the tune of 9 lakhs (900,000) of rupees each month.¹⁸

The leaders of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha also had the malign influence of the moneylender firmly in their sights. In the first issue of their journal, in 1878, they published their analysis of the famine. They argued that India’s cultivators “are found to be too poor, too hopeless of retaining their independence, too inextricably involved in debt to be able to undertake agricultural improvements.” The famine had served to “throw the Ryots [cultivators] more and more into the hands of the Sowcars [moneylenders], and leave them little ground to hope a change for the better.”¹⁹ Families fortunate enough to have sufficient resources to survive three seasons of drought now found “the savings of years utterly exhausted.” They, too, had no choice but to turn to the moneylenders—and, at once, “from free men they have been degraded into slaves.”²⁰

WHILE HUMANITARIANS, SOCIAL REFORMERS, AND EVEN SOME COLONIAL officials attributed India’s vulnerability to famine to the grip of social and economic inequality, other observers drew a direct connection between nature’s “agencies of destruction” and human actions. In the eighteenth century, a group of European naturalists known as “desiccationists,” many of whom had traveled and worked in tropical lands, argued that cutting down trees caused drought. Deserts, on their view, were but ruined forests.²¹ This view gained prominence through the work of Alexander von Humboldt, who wrote in 1819 that “by the felling of trees that cover the tops and the sides of mountains, men in every climate prepare at once two calamities for future generations; the want of fuel and a scarcity of water.”²² Desiccationist views were common in British India by the middle of the nineteenth century; very often they were used to condemn local pastoralism and to restrict the use of forests by India’s tribal peoples, known today as adivasis. Justified by arguments for conservation, the colonial state encroached upon India’s forests, claiming more and more forest land, as well as uncultivated “wastelands” for itself; this limited the use rights of local people in a punitive way.

The strongest iteration of the desiccationist view was penned by an anonymous correspondent to Macmillan’s Magazine in 1877. He called himself “Philindus”—an echo, probably deliberate, of the liberal publication Friend of India. His dispatch reached a wide audience, discussed not only in England but as far away as Japan.²³ Philindus begins his piece by recalling an episode at “the most sacred sanctuary of South Indian vapidity: I mean the bar of the Madras Club,” where he heard two men, “Jones and Brown of the Civil Service,” denigrating Arthur Cotton’s achievements as driven by vanity and wasteful expenditure. After a strong defense of Cotton’s genius, echoing Cotton’s belief that water was the key to India’s security and prosperity, Philindus set out his main claim: the “disastrous action of drought in Southern India” owed much to the “enormous extent” to which “the jungles of the Carnatic, and of the Peninsula generally, have been cut down during the past century.” He invoked the authority of the American geographer George Perkins Marsh, whose influential 1865 book contained the first global account of environmental transformation by human hands. Marsh had seen that “as forests are cut down, the springs which flow from them, and consequently the water-courses which are fed by these, diminish in number, continuity and volume.” Philindus approved: he was quite certain that “the most crying of the evils” afflicting South India was “the increasing desiccation of the country from the reckless destruction of its trees and forests.”²⁴ In the first of their “Famine Narratives,” published for India’s growing reading public, the Sabha’s reformers invoked a similar sense of drought being caused by human intervention: “Owing to denudation of forests and the absorption of waste lands under the mischievous system of a wrongly conceived revenue settlement,” they argued, “the occasional rain that falls is never retained by the soil.”²⁵

At the peak of the great famine, the Government of India’s Forest Act of 1878 brought India’s forests under public ownership. Was this the avant-garde of global conservation, or a land grab that dispossessed India’s most marginal people? It was both.²⁶ The attempt to limit the pace at which India’s forests were being cut down began with a material concern about rapid depletion of a profitable resource, vital not least to India’s railways. By the 1870s, the ecological argument pushed in the same direction, spurred by concerns about the long-term climatic harm that deforestation brought. By the same token, the Forest Act compounded the creeping attack on the rights of India’s adivasis. Wrote Valentine Ball, an Irish geologist and anthropologist who had spent many years in central India: “The reservation of forest tracts which prohibits the inhabitants from taking a blade of grass from within the boundaries” had the effect of leaving people “cut off from… food sources throughout wide areas.”²⁷ Forests were a refuge particularly in lean times: a source of tubers, fruits, and other foodstuffs that staved off starvation, even if they were no defense against hunger. The encroachment of the state upon India’s forests threatened the lifestyles as well as the livelihoods of adivasi communities.

II

The famine provoked a searching look at Indian society; most of all, it turned the spotlight on the state. The British government’s inaction, its seeming indifference to Indian lives, catalyzed criticism from within and from outside.

The most immediate charge was that the government of India had neglected the most basic precautions in advance of the drought, driven by a damaging parsimony. It had neglected southern India’s web of tanks; by the 1870s, many of them lay in ruins. One British observer lamented that “the former rulers of India, if not so great or so powerful, yet had more of that simple craft and homely benevolence which show themselves in storing the rain and diverting the torrent to the first necessities of man.”²⁸ In these humble tasks, the British colonial state failed. Their failure was evident when the rains at last came, late in the summer of 1877—so much rain that “the famine year of 1877 will appear in the Madras meteorological records as the year of the heaviest rainfall in a long period.” The maintenance of tanks had fallen victim to the state’s drive to cut spending, but many saw that “when economy is required, [tanks] are the very last thing that should be tampered with.” The neglect of India’s infrastructure of water allowed “a flow towards the sea of a precious fluid which represents in passing away unused a sacrifice of human lives.”²⁹ Florence Nightingale observed that the Madras rains of 1877 “were lost, because the tanks were left unfinished in the autumn of 1876; the order having been issued for the stoppage of all public works” as a measure to cut government spending. The result: “Millions of tons of precious water so ran to waste,” and millions of people starved for want of water.³⁰ From this point on, the “waste” of India’s water came to be a battle cry for humanitarians, engineers, and critics of colonial policy.

A greater indictment of colonial rule arose from what the famine revealed about the conditions of life in India—it was as if the catastrophe lifted a veil covering the everyday workings of Indian society and economy. The reason that so many people in India were so vulnerable to the failure of the rains, many argued, was that British domination had impoverished them, eroded their defenses. “A people must be poverty-stricken beforehand to be thus absolutely cut down by want of food,” an American observer of the famine wrote.³¹ The idea that British misrule had undermined Indian economic independence was not novel; Adam Smith had been damning in his assessment in The Wealth of Nations. By the 1860s, the notion of a “drain of wealth” from India was most closely associated with the writings of Dadabhai Naoroji, a Parsi merchant and scholar who would go on to be elected the first Indian member of the British Parliament. Naoroji penned a devastating verdict on the economic effects of British rule in India. The famines of the 1870s sharpened his scalpel. The vast bulk of India’s people were “living from hand to mouth,” he wrote, so much so that “the very touch of famine carries away hundreds of thousands.” Despite this, he argued, the Indian peasantry bore a “crushing” burden of land tax—India essentially paid for its own colonization through the “home charges” remitted each year to Britain. “Every single ounce of rice… taken from the ‘scanty subsistence’” of India’s people, Naoroji charged, “is to them so much starvation.” Heedless of India’s suffering, British rule, in contravention of its own stated principles, “moves in a wrong, unnatural, and suicidal groove.”³²

Naoroji’s analysis was all the more powerful for being couched in the language of loyalty to empire: his fury was measured, every sentence backed by the colonial government’s own statistics. Like so many political economists at the time, Naoroji was fond of fluid metaphors—he wrote of a “drain” of wealth from India, of “flows” in the wrong direction. India’s closeness to the brink of disaster and the fragility of its people’s subsistence arose from its acute dependence on water. In the view of so many critics of British policy in the 1870s, to mitigate that dependence—to secure life against the “very touch of famine”—ought to be the overriding concern of government.

AS THE DISASTER UNFOLDED, THE MOST PRESSING CHARGE AGAINST the British government was that it had failed to provide adequate relief to starving people: it was too slow, too callous, too divided within itself, too concerned with economy, or simply too incompetent. The deliberate withholding of relief by the state, underpinned by an unrelenting faith in free markets and notwithstanding plentiful stocks of food in other regions of India—this remains at the core of historians’ later attempts to provide a moral reckoning of India’s nineteenth-century famines.³³

William Digby (1849–1904) wrote the most detailed account of the Madras famine, in two exhaustive volumes that appeared in 1878. Digby was a journalist and campaigner. From a humble start at his local paper, the Isle of Ely and Wisbech Advertiser, Digby edited the Ceylon Observer and, from 1877, the Madras Times.³⁴ Digby’s account is a tragedy in slow motion: a story of warnings ignored, precautions abandoned, decency abrogated. A recurrent theme in his account of the famine is the conflict between local officials, many of them humane and observant, and an imperial government hidebound by ideology. As the first reports of starvation deaths began to filter through to the government in the last months of 1876, every village magistrate in North Arcot district received a warning from the collector that they would be “held responsible for the safety of individuals whose deaths may have been occasioned by starvation.” But responsibility was precisely what the imperial government wished to avoid. Late in 1876, as it seemed more likely that large-scale famine relief would be necessary, the Madras government tried to bolster its granary by purchasing food in secret, acting through Messrs Arbuthnot & Co. The Madras government was at pains to do so anonymously so as not to interfere with the market, but its actions drew the ire of the imperial government, which ordered an immediate halt to the practice: “The supreme authorities objected to interference with trade,” Digby observed laconically.

Famines had recurred periodically in India through the nineteenth century. British responses were ad hoc: they depended on the proclivities of the officials in charge at the time; they drew on local precedents and memories of earlier dearth; they were shaped by the security or fragility of colonial control over the affected areas. The most recent crisis before the disasters of 1876–1878, the Bihar famine of 1873–1874, was anomalous: on that occasion British intervention in the face of food shortages was unusually energetic and effective. Rather than imposing controls on the grain trade, the government imported directly 480,000 tons of rice from Burma, which by that time was emerging as India’s new rice frontier. With regular and plentiful rainfall in the Irrawaddy delta, Burma seemed immune from the fluctuations of climatic fortune that bedeviled Indian agriculture. More locally, the state purchased grain incognito, acting through agency houses to stockpile food without creating panic in the market. Local people were employed on relief works for a cash wage. By contrast with common British practice, eligibility tests for relief were neither exacting nor punitive: the administration trusted the knowledge of village leaders and local-level officials. Even by the standards of, say, the late twentieth century, British intervention in the Bihar famine was a success. The official in charge of relief was Richard Temple.³⁵

Far from celebrating the policy’s success in Bihar, public reaction in England was harsh. The Economist condemned the large expenditure on famine relief, concerned that it had led Indians to believe that it was “the duty of the Government to keep them alive.”³⁶ Worse was to follow. A tract titled The Black Pamphlet of Calcutta, circulated in 1876, turned its fire on Temple in particular, describing his policies as “an economic catastrophe, a culmination of unthrift and unreason.”³⁷ It was published anonymously but its author was soon revealed as Charles O’Donnell, an Irishman who served in the colonial government of India. In these critics’ eyes, the famine was a fiction, because for all the money spent, hardly a single death from starvation was recorded; they refused to see that this may rather have confirmed the policy’s wisdom.

Temple was stung by humiliation. An ambitious man, he was determined to learn from the experience, and more determined to see that it did not hold back his advancement. When Temple was appointed the viceroy’s envoy to the famine districts in 1877, there were murmurings that he might be too generous. He set out to prove them wrong. As Digby pointed out, “Sir Richard was commissioned to the distressed districts to economise, and it was known… that he would exercise economy.” Temple fought to trim the scale of relief that the Madras government was providing to its starving subjects—in what became notorious as the “Temple Wage,” he cut wages on relief works to (or even below) the level of basic subsistence. A newspaper in Ceylon pointed out with dark humor that the scale of rations provided in the famine relief camps of Madras was significantly lower than those enjoyed by a prisoner, Juan Appu, “recently convicted of knocking out the brains of a near relative.”³⁸ In a missive “from the affected districts,” a missionary correspondent took aim at Temple’s “extra-economical theory of managing a famine”—perhaps there is a double meaning here, suggesting both that Temple’s policy was excessively stingy, and that it was “extra-economical” in the sense of being motivated by ideology more than by economy. The letter concluded: “The duty of a great Government is not only to prevent its subjects from dying of starvation but to save life.”³⁹

Others around the world drew different lessons from India’s famine. In Shanghai, as news of the horror of North China’s famine reached the port city’s elite, a feature in Shenbao—one of China’s first modern newspapers—praised the British response to India’s famine to underline the paper’s charge that the Chinese state had failed to relieve its suffering subjects. The reference to India was mostly rhetorical, a way to call attention to the Chinese state’s weakness. It was not based on a deep understanding of the Indian famine; rather, Shenbao’s account of the Indian famine drew largely on the accounts of Shanghai’s British press, which reflected the ideological orthodoxy in support of Temple’s parsimony.⁴⁰

BY THE TIME THE SUMMER MONSOON ARRIVED IN 1878, SWATHS OF India lay in ruins. At a most cautious estimate, 5 million people had died from starvation or from disease. When the British government appointed a commission of inquiry to investigate the catastrophe, it was all set to be a whitewash. The viceroy, Lord Lytton, sought vindication in the face of widespread criticism at home and abroad; the finance minister, John Strachey, pushed for the appointment of his brother, Richard, as chair of the committee.⁴¹ Despite its origins, despite a heavy dose of self-justification, the Famine Enquiry Commission’s 1880 report was an “intellectual and administrative masterpiece,” in the words of one of the most astute observers of hunger and famine in late-twentieth-century India.⁴² Under Strachey’s leadership, the commission included (as “English” member) the Irishman James Caird, Madras official H. E. Sullivan, and C. Rangacharlu and Mahadeo Wasadeo Barve, officials of the princely states of Mysore and Kohlapur. They toured the country. They accumulated hundreds of hours of testimony. One theme dominated their report—water.

The famine commissioners’ diagnosis of the root cause of India’s famines was unequivocal: “All Indian famines,” they wrote, were “caused by drought.” The commissioners saw that India’s task was to find means for the “protection of the people of India from the effects of the uncertainty of the seasons.” The seasonality and unpredictability of the monsoon was at the heart of the matter. The report’s opening sketch of India’s geography takes the form of a narrative map of water, an account, by now familiar, of the frontiers of wet and dry lands. Strachey’s long-standing interest in meteorology was one reason why the committee’s report went beyond justifying imperial policy: Strachey saw, here, an occasion for the elevation of meteorology to a position of greater prominence in India’s future. To Strachey’s dismay, there was vigorous debate within the committee. The final report was accompanied by a dissenting note by Caird and Sullivan. They disagreed with the majority view that the government of India was right not to intervene in the grain trade. Caird and Sullivan condemned the reliance on harsh “tests” to determine eligibility for relief; above all, they advocated for the establishment of public granaries in remote districts, where private trade was unlikely to reach. India’s suffering, they saw, came from a “want of timely preparation to meet a calamity, which though irregular in its interval, is periodical and inevitable.”⁴³

If there was disagreement on how far the state should intervene in markets, on the “inevitability” of drought all agreed. Turning to the question of whether droughts may better be predicted, the famine commission dismissed an idea that was fashionable at the time—the theory that sunspots, dark and cool patches on the sun’s surface caused by magnetic flux, followed eleven-year cycles correlated with droughts across large parts of Earth. The theory was championed by figures including the economist W. Stanley Jevons, famed logician and proponent of the “marginalist revolution” in economics, and William Wilson Hunter, editor of the Gazetteer of India.⁴⁴ The commissioners, however, concluded that sunspots “cannot be said to be in any sufficient degree established, still less to be generally accepted”—they had been “contested on various grounds, such as that the evidence is directedly opposed to them.”⁴⁵ Instead, the commissioners lauded the patient work of meteorological observation. “As at present no power exists of foreseeing the atmospheric changes effective in producing the rain-fall, or of determining beforehand its probable amount in any season,” the commissioners concluded, “the necessity becomes greater for watching with close attention the daily progress of each season as it passes, for ascertaining with accuracy and promptitude the actual quantity of rain in all parts of the country.” They observed that “within the last few years a very satisfactory system of meteorological observations has been established all over British India”—there were more than one hundred rainfall observation stations across the country by 1880, and these tracked the progress and development of the monsoon across the country. The famine commissioners insisted that “it is of primary importance” that this infrastructure “shall be maintained in complete efficiency.”⁴⁶

The most important institutional innovation of the commission lay in the Famine Codes, which sought to break the link between drought and famine. They consisted of prescriptions for local government officials faced with scarcity. Their ultimate tool was the provision of large-scale public works in famine-affected areas to generate employment income, and to attract food supplies to the area by boosting purchasing power. The codes were, by definition, an emergency measure, but they also stimulated thinking about how to reduce India’s dependence on the vagaries of the monsoon. “Among the means that may be adopted for giving India direct protection from famine arising from drought,” the famine commission concluded, “the first place must unquestionably be assigned to works of irrigation.”⁴⁷ The famine commission’s overriding conclusion was that India’s water resources needed to be managed better.

III

Twenty years after the suffering of the 1870s, India experienced two more major famines that marked what historian Ira Klein has aptly called a “grim crescendo of death.”⁴⁸

The drought of 1896 was felt first in the “black soil” region of Bundelkhand in central India, in the nineteenth century a region at the frontier of cotton production for export. By the end of the year, the summer rains had fallen short; the suffering spread across central India, reaching up toward Punjab, down to Madras, and east to upper Burma. The return of the rains in 1897 then unleashed a lethal epidemic of malaria. The famine coincided with an epidemic of bubonic plague that arrived in Bombay in 1896. The epidemic would persist for a decade, thriving on the large-scale migration sparked by famine, feeding on a population weakened by hunger, spreading along the railway lines to rural areas. In the eastern region of Chota Nagpur, creeping deforestation and colonial forestry laws had imperiled local adivasi communities, which had no local source of subsistence left, even as they fell through the cracks of the minimal safety net provided by colonial relief works. Mass starvation ensued. Only three years later, the same regions of central India faced another failure of the summer monsoon. Rainfall in 1899 was the lowest ever recorded in India. The drought covered an expanse of a million square kilometers of territory—central India was again worst hit—affecting tens of millions of people. In Bombay, the famine of 1899 and 1900 was the worst of the nineteenth century.⁴⁹

By the 1890s, photographic technology had become cheaper and more portable than it had been two decades earlier. Haunting images of starving people in India circulated through missionary and humanitarian networks around the world. Fund-raising drives garnered millions of pounds in donations. Missionaries, writers, and photographers traveled to India. Among them was the American George Lambert, representing the Home and Foreign Relief Commission that drew its members from Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Nebraska, and Kansas. The famines of the 1890s helped to bring about a new global humanitarian sensibility on the part of middle-class publics in Britain, the United States, and Europe—a sense of identification with the suffering of distant strangers. But the same imagery that brought forth donations often reinforced the idea of a helpless India at the mercy of the elements, diverting attention from the political and economic subordination to British interests that left such a large number of Indians vulnerable to the monsoon. The question that had raised itself in the 1870s remained: was famine a “natural” disaster, or a political one?⁵⁰

The backdrop to so many of the photographs, and to so many famine travelogues by European and American missionaries and journalists, was the sheer dryness of the land. In 1899, the Times of India’s correspondent in the princely state of Kathiawar, in Gujarat, suggested that even a photograph might not be enough to convey the absence of water:

Were I an artist of the impressionist school and did I wish to represent the scene, I should dash in yellowish grey, a long diminishing streak, which would be the road throwing up the heat that made the distance shimmering and indistinct; a great splash of reddy-brown on either side would indicate the land where the crops should be; and above all a liberal dash of blue from the horizon to the top of my canvas would be the sky. I do not think I ever hated blue before; but I do now.⁵¹

Vaughan Nash (1861–1932), a British journalist and correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, described “tracts of dismal sun-cracked desert,” and “brown wilderness spreading to right and left”—there was “no water in the wells, no water in the rivers,” and the people he met at famine camps had their “lips and throats too parched for speech,” so much that “the silence is unbroken.” The famine camps offered a bare minimum. At a famine camp outside Poona, he wondered “whether the people can subsist on this penal allowance without ripening for cholera and other famine diseases.” “There must be something wrong with India,” he concluded, “when one finds a collapse like this.”⁵²

The “collapse” was not as severe as it had been in the 1870s. The Famine Codes had taken effect in 1883—each province had its own, modeled on the template proposed by the 1880 famine commission. Once a district officially declared that it had crossed from “scarcity” into “famine,” the codes’ machinery started up: public works were initiated to provide employment to boost local incomes, combined with relief for those not able to work. However, local governments worked under enduring, sometimes intolerable, pressure to economize; there was a clear incentive for district officials not to declare famines, and many waited until it was too late in 1897 and again in 1899. Nash pointed out that India’s Famine Codes were “excellent on paper,” but in reality local governments were “short of administrators, short of doctors, short of medical assistants, short of material.” The infrastructure of relief was creaky, but it was extensive. At the peak of the famine of 1896–1897, 6.5 million people were receiving public relief. The monsoon failures of the 1890s were more severe than those of the 1870s—1899 saw the greatest shortfall—but mortality was lower. Nevertheless, at the very least a million people died.

The more concerted response to famine in the 1890s cannot be ascribed to imperial benevolence, though there is no doubting the good intentions of many local officials. Rather the colonial state was newly aware of pressure from Indian civil society—from journalists, lawyers, industrialists, and activists who came together in a growing number of associations: professional associations, caste associations, religious associations, reformist associations. They met in study clubs and book rooms, in university halls and public parks; they expressed their views in an expanding universe of print, in multiple Indian languages as well as in English. If the British were quick to see the malign influence of “agitators” behind every criticism of their rule, they could not avoid growing public scrutiny of their actions—or their failure to act. The Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, which had played such an active role in documenting the 1876 famine, adopted a more confrontational approach under the leadership of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who took over in 1890. When before they petitioned government, now the Sabha convened large public meetings, speaking directly to kisans (farmers) about their rights to relief. The Sabha’s local informants produced reports that contradicted official statistics and fueled criticism. Unable to trust government to intervene, Indian civic leaders took famine relief into their own hands, often working with charities overseas. The private charity of wealthy families had always played a vital role in providing food to the hungry. Arguably it mattered more, for most of Indian history, than government policy; very often it was religiously motivated. But indigenous charity organized itself on a larger scale in the 1890s, mirroring as well as challenging state infrastructures. The two most prominent Hindu reformist movements of the age—the Arya Samaj and the Ramakrishna Mission—undertook large-scale charity work for the first time during the famines of the 1890s.⁵³ The famines of the late nineteenth century spurred the development of pan-Indian political anger and activism.

IV

More than a century after the great famines, the question of responsibility still haunts us. For Mike Davis, author of a path-breaking global history of the famines, the answer is present even in his title, Late Victorian Holocausts. “Imperial policies towards starving ‘subjects’ were often the exact moral equivalent of bombs dropped from 18,000 feet,” Davis writes; the millions who died during the late Victorian famines were “murdered… by the theological application of the sacred principles of Smith, Bentham and Mill.” Yes, the rains failed on a colossal scale; but what turned drought into disaster was imperial policy: in the long term, by undermining the resilience of rural communities in the process of dragging India into modern capitalism; in the short term, by denying relief to starving people because of an unflinching refusal to interfere with “free” markets. Far from alleviating famine, the railways encouraged speculation, sucked food out of regions where it was needed most, and hastened the spread of epidemics.⁵⁴

Without absolving colonial high officials of callousness, other writers paint a more ambivalent picture. They point to how life and livelihood in rural India had long been acutely dependent on rainfall; as long as India’s infrastructure remained patchy, this would continue to be the case. “Famines were frequent and devastating” in colonial India, writes geographer Sanjoy Chakravorty, “but were they more frequent or more devastating than famines in pre-colonial regimes? Very doubtful.”⁵⁵ Economists continue to believe that “railroads dramatically mitigated the scope for famine in India” and made Indian lives “less risky,” but they point out that it took until the early twentieth century for these effects to be widely felt.⁵⁶

In his global history of the nineteenth century, Jürgen Osterhammel draws a contrast between the Indian and Chinese famines of the 1870s. Osterhammel calls the Indian famine a “crisis of modernization,” which is to say, it was a crisis brought on by the uneven impact of global markets on the Indian countryside. The Chinese famine, by contrast, he called more a “crisis of production than a crisis of distribution.” The affected parts of North China were already under strain; they inhabited an “ecologically precarious niche, where for centuries state intervention had been able to ward off the worst consequences of disastrous weather conditions.” Still reeling from the massive rebellions that rocked China in the 1850s and 1860s—the Taiping Rebellion the largest of them—and under pressure from European encroachment, the Qing state was much less capable than it was in the past of responding to the crisis. Osterhammel is cautious in his assessment of the historical consequences of the great famines of the 1870s. They brought no real change, he argues. In China there was “no really significant increase in political or social protest”; in India, British rule “held firm.”⁵⁷

But beyond the immense suffering they caused, there is a sense in which the famines were profoundly consequential for the future. The catastrophes of the late nineteenth century left many people—Indian economists and British administrators, water engineers and humanitarian reformers—with an acute anxiety about climate and water. To borrow a phrase from an earlier work of Davis’s—a book about California and not India—climate was at the heart of a new “ecology of fear.”⁵⁸