Studies in the

Nature and Causes of Famines

in Colonial India

Brahma Nand

AAS–ICAS Special Joint Conference 2011

Association for Asian Studies
International Convention of Asia Scholars
Honolulu, Hawaii (U.S.A.)
March 31-April 3, 2011
 NATURE AND CAUSES OF FAMINES IN COLONIAL INDIA

History is a study of the present by means of the past. The present

is a prisoner of the past in many ways. Its persistent and all pervasive
influence is present all around us.1 Despite all the apparent advances, the
contemporary civilization is plagued with persistent problems of mass
poverty, chronic hunger and starvation. Over nine million people worldwide
die each year due to hunger and malnutrition or related diseases, that is,
about thirty five thousand everyday, a death every three and half seconds.2
On September 11, 2001 the terrorists attacked the World Trade Centre in
the United States killing 2973 innocent people. On the same day, about
twelve times that number, an estimated 35,000 were killed by hunger around
the world. Those who die of hunger are but a tiny fraction of the nine
hundred million suffering silently around the world, one-tenth of the world
population who lack adequate food and nutrition.
Even in the United States, the richest nation in the world, thirty-five million
people are considered “food-insecure”– that is, they are not sure where the
next meal is coming from.3 The tragedy that occurred at the World Trade
Centre was highly visible, unpredictable and largely unpreventable. Other
tragedies are less visible, monotonously predictable and readily preventable
as the world produces enough food to feed all its inhabitants. Our perceptions
of contemporary problems are too much conditioned by the electronic and
print media. The worldwide hunger and starvation goes largely unnoticed
because it is not in the focus of media glare. It is beyond the scope of this
paper to investigate, analyse or suggest remedial measures for the
complexities of the contemporary problems. It is presented with a modest
aim of highlighting the historical genesis of the problem to enable us to
understand how the past informs the present, impinges upon it and even
determines it in many ways. Afterall, all history is contemporary history, as
Beneditto Croce said.

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1. A BRIEF HISTORY OF FAMINES UNDER BRITISH RULE.
The entire period of British rule in India was marked by recurrent
famines and epidemics. Millions of human beings, alongwith their livestock,
were swept away by these recurrent famines which struck the colonial
countryside with increasing intensity and alarming rapidity. Epidemics often
followed the famines on close heels. The impact was exceptionally intense
on the masses of population already famished and enfeebled by
undernourishment and malnourishment. Famines were not unknown in pre-
British India but their nature had undergone considerable change. It is evident
from numerous novel features displayed in the famines during colonial rule.
During the pre-British period and in the early years of the British rule, local
scarcity of foodgrains due to failure of harvest on account of scanty or
unusual rainfall led to upward spiral of prices and easily turned into a famine.
Famines were mostly local events. It was not unusual to find famines in
one region co-existing with bountiful harvest in surrounding areas. The
poor transport and trade network hindered smooth flow of foodgrains and
fodder, and further intensified the suffering.4 With the advent of British
rule, the situation altered considerably. As the nineteenth century advanced,
famines extended in geographical scale. They covered comparatively larger
area, affected larger number of people, increased in intensity and virtually
turned into national calamities. During the latter half of the nineteenth century,
each successive famine tended to embrace an ever wider area.5 Surprisingly,
this happened despite the introduction of improved and modern network of
transport like roads, railways, harbours and the integration into international
market. It means that the causes which led to famines in pre-colonial period
were no more operative. If famines were still occurring, and they were
definitely occurring with increasing intensity, then they were occurring due
to entirely different reasons.

For pre-British period, serious famines were recorded in the years

1345, 1396, 1472, 1556-57, 1596, 1631 and 1661, which implied that a
major famine occurred once in every fifty years. William Digby listed 14
famines from the beginning of the fourteenth to the end of the seventeenth
century which gives the same frequency. Most of these famines were limited
in geographical space.6 Famines pressed with increasing frequency with the
advent of colonial rule. There were twelve serious famines and four severe
scarcities during the period of ninety years for 1765 to 1858. Between
1860 and 1908, there were famines or severe scarcity in some region or

2
other in 20 out of 49 years. The history of Bengal from 1770 to 1943 is a
harrowing tale of famine regime.7 During 1802-03 to 1902-03, there were
30 famines or severe scarcities in western India, twelve of them being
severe famines. Widespread and acute crisis occurred in 1819-20, 1824-25,
1832-33, 1845-46, 1853, 1862, 1876-77, 1891-92, 1896-97 and 1899-1902.
Again serious scarcities and famines were reported in 1905-06, 1911-13,
1918-19, 1920-21, 1936-38, 1939-40, 1941-43 and 1946-47. Famines had
become a recurrent phenomena during the colonial rule and their frequency
seems to have increased.8 Going by Irfan Habib’s account it would appear
that famines were no less frequent an occurrence in medieval India than
British rule. Irfan Habib’s account includes scarcities into same category as
famines.9 However, if a similar account is prepared for British India on a
regional scale, it would be extremely difficult to find a normal year. Famines
had become a regular feature of life under British rule. It will be difficult to
say whether their intensity had also increased during the British rule. We do
have sufficient material in the form of observations by travellers and other
chroniclers to convey the horrors of earlier famines and the havoc played
by them upon the society. The narratives tell a sordid tale of break up of
family life, loss of agricultural capital, aimless wandering, voluntary
enslavement, deaths from suicides or sheer starvation, a very high level of
mortality among humans and livestock and cannibalism.10 A Dutch merchant
who was an eyewitness to the horrors of 1630-31 famine, left behind an
appalling and disgusting description of it :
As famine increased, men abandoned towns and villages and
wandered helplessly. It was easy to recognise their condition : eyes
sunk deep in their head, lips pale and covered with slime, the skin
hard, with the bones showing through, the belly nothing but a pouch
hanging down empty, knuckles and knee-caps showing prominently.
One would cry and howl for hunger, while another lay stretched on
the ground dying in misery, wherever you went you saw nothing
but corpses…. Some families took poison, and so died together,
others threw themselves into the rivers….. men lying in the street,
not yet dead, were cut up by others, and men fed on living men…. A
mother had killed and cooked her only son…. The whole country
was covered with corpses lying unburied which caused such a stench
that the whole air was filled and infected with it…. Even worse was
it in the village of Susuntra where human flesh was sold in open
market.11
The extreme horrors of cannibalism were also recorded during the

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earlier famines in 1556-57 and 1596.12 Such extremes as cannibalism were
not reported in famines under British rule, despite intense suffering of the
people. In 1899-1900, when food, fodder and water famine combined
together, eyewitness saw
“groups of refugees pacing the burning dust with lips and
throats too parched for speech, their garments often in shreds, and
their eyes hollow with hunger… the majority were distressed,
exhausted and reduced… the haggard, hunted faces of the women,
turned to hideousness by a life of misery ; the tottering skeletons of
old men… and the naked children with distended stomachs and flies
at the corner of their eyes… people and cattle are suffering and
dying without tears or moans… the condition of the people was
terrible, half of them at least being the merest skelton…” It was “a
procession of the most pitiful phantoms, …starved beyond belief,
their lips drawn back over their teeth, their eyes burning with fever
in their deep sunk sockets.”13
It is difficult to assess the intensity of famines on the basis of
these observations as they are quite subjective in nature and exaggeration or
accuracy is dependent on the individual observer. There are other indicators
available such as human and livestock mortality figures, though these figures
are rather estimates, by no means accurate. Even the figures of British
period are at best estimates since countless people died on roads, in forests
or in the dry beds of river, and such deaths were not recorded.
In the pre-British famines, the heaviest mortality was reported during
1630-31 famine when about three million people died in Gujarat and one
million in Ahmednagar. The cities of Gujarat were, by death or flight reduced
to almost one-tenth of their former size. The whole country was strewed
with human skulls and bones.14 During 1702-4, over two million people
died in the Deccan. In 1396, a dreadful famine had commenced over Deccan
known as Durga Dewee which, according to legends lasted 12 years and
the entire Deccan was depopulated so thoroughly that it yielded a scanty
revenue for the next thirty years. No estimates are given regarding human
or livestock mortality. In 1670 famine in Bihar multitudes perished on route
and about 90 thousand were estimated to have died in Patna alone. During
the famine of 1540, two-third population of Vijaynagar is said to have been
wiped out, and in the famine of 1677, “all persons were destroyed by
famine excepting two or three in each village.” 15
In 1770 famine, the first most severe one during the British East

4
India Company rule, the entire Bengal was devastated, in which about 10
million people or one-third population of Bengal perished.16 And, in the first
half of the nineteenth century, under East India Company’s rule, 14 million
famine deaths were recorded.17 The Guntur district in Madras Presidency
lost about one-third of its inhabitants in the famines during 1832-33. The
official figures of mortality were two million for 1860-61 famine which
struck North Western Provinces, Punjab, Rajasthan and Kutch. The famine
of 1866-67 claimed one million lives and its impact was most severe in
Orissa which lost 8.14 lakh people and Bihar where 1.35 lakh people died.
During 1868-70 about 4.19 lakh people died, and the toll was heaviest in
Central Provinces which lost 2.5 lakh people and Rajasthan another 1.06
lakh. Also, Rajasthan lost 90 percent of its cattle.18 During 1876-78, India
lost four millions of human beings more than the population of Ireland in
those days.19 The distress was widespread over Bombay, Madras, Mysore,
Hyderabad and North Western Provinces. The famines pressed with
exceptional severity towards the close of the nineteenth century. In 1896-
97 famine which was widespread over most of India including Bombay,
Bengal, Madras, Central Provinces and Berar, Hyderabad and Rajasthan,
about 5.15 million people died.20 The famine of 1899-1900, described as
“the greatest famine ever” over western, North-Western and Central India,
resulted in extremely severe loss of population. The Bombay Presidency
alone lost about 3 million people. The official figures for the entire India
were one million only.21 According to the Indian Special Correspondent for
the Lancet newspaper, India lost about nineteen million people during 1899-
1900 famine, whereas William Digby estimated the human loss during 1891-
1901 at about 36.3 million people. The official figures of mortality from
1854 to 1901 were 28.8 million people. The loss of life due to wars in the
entire world during 1793 to 1900 was estimated at 5 million.22 During 1905-
06 Bombay Presidency lost 2.35 lakh people. The Bengal famine of 1943
decimated 1.5 million lives according to official statistics and 3.5 million
lives according to unofficial estimates. For the number of recorded deaths,
one should add equal number of unrecorded deaths.23 The number of deaths
in Great Britain due to the Second World War were reported to be less than
2.5 lakh.24 On the whole, it would appear that the frequency and intensity
of famines had increased under colonial period compared to the pre-colonial
period.
Famines were invariably followed by the outbreak of epidemics,
though it would be difficult to separate the two. The emaciated and famished

5
people fell an easy prey to cholera, plague, dysentery or some other epidemic.
Similar pattern seemed to follow in lrish famines of 1846-48 where half
starved people became victims of epidemics. During 1896 to 1930 about
1.75 million people or 11 percent of the total population in Maharashtra was
decimated by plague. The influenza epidemic, which swept world wide in
1918 and claimed more than 20 million lives around the world, decimated
about 7.13 lakh people in the Bombay Presidency following the aftermath
of famines in 1918.25 M.B. McAlpin argued that during 1891-1921, there
were 8.34 lakh deaths from famines, 11.6 lakh deaths from plague and 7.13
lakh deaths from influenza in the Bombay Presidency as a whole. M.B.
McAlpin has tried to argue that epidemics played increasingly more significant
role in causing excessive mortality than famines. It should be pointed out
that official estimates of famine mortality are far from being accurate, and
in fact gross underestimates. We do not have an idea of unreported deaths
during the famine period. Since there was no breakdown of plague mortality
in official data, M.B. McAlpin has assigned 61 percent of deaths to plague
in the division of Gujarat, Karnatak and Deccan, again a very doubtful
assumption from methodological point of view. But such assumptions are
typical of M.B. McAlpin’s method.26 As such, both famines and epidemics
were inseparable because both were results of undernourishment or
malnourishment. Strictly speaking, the intensity of famines during pre-British
and British period is not comparable for two basic reasons. Firstly, the
figures of mortality for both periods, as stated earlier, are only estimates
and not accurate. Secondly, the social conditions had altered so considerably
that any such comparison may not be historically tenable. But if mortality
estimates are any indicators, the famines pressed with unprecedented intensity
during the British rule. There is no doubt about it.
The loss of livestock was also enormous and crippled the agricultural
economy for many years. During the famines of 1899-1902, Bombay
Presidency lost 31 percent of its livestock. The loss was unevenly distributed
among various categories of cattleheads and various regions. Gujarat lost
as much as 70 percent, Deccan and Karnatak about 20 percent.27 The loss
was as heavy as 60 percent in the native state of Baroda and 90 percent in
Marwar.28 The actual figures are staggering. During 1899-1900, in Bombay
Presidency 18.24 lakh cattle perished. In Baroda 7.64 lakh animals were
swept away by famine. Marwar lost 3 to 4 million cattle.29
The increasing frequency and intensity of famines in India under
colonial rule attracted the attention of many eminent contemporaries. They

6
analysed and investigated the problem and advanced different explanations
and solutions. The analysis of the problem and the solutions suggested
depended on the assumptions and framework of reference and differed
widely. We will examine some of these in a subsequent section.

2. SHIFTING NATURE OF FAMINES FROM PRE-MODERN TO MODERN PERIOD.

Historically speaking , all societies without exceptions whether Asian
or European (India and Britain both included) were susceptible to famines
in the pre-industrial world. The nature and pattern of famines was same
everywhere and their essential features were more or less similar. The causes
leading to the famines were also the same and were natural. Any local
scarcity of foodgrain on account of a local crop failure arising from droughts
or unseasonal rains easily turned into a famine. The famines were often
local phenomena confined to small geographical boundaries. It was often
the poor transport network which hindered the movement of grain from
the surrounding regions of plentiful harvest. It was not unusual to find a
locality in the grip of terrible famine surrounded by areas of bountiful harvests
all around. Everywhere primitive form of production prevailed in agriculture
and handicrafts and mode of transport was also primitive everywhere. The
level of living of the masses was also primitive in all societies and average
life expectancy hovered around 25 years. Naturally, no society was immune
to natural calamities like famines. This was the case in early modern Europe
also.30 James Vernon writes :
In the centuries between the Renaissance and the
Enlightenment, the continent of Europe was gripped by hunger.
Processions of emaciated beggars and vagrants struggled to stay
on their feet, scavenging and stealing, passing the rotting corpses
of those who had stopped to rest and had not gotten up again. The
survivors kept ceaselessly on the move in quest of work they were
too weak to do. The perpetual pangs of hunger spawned a variety
of practices–plugging the anus to keep the bowels feeling full, eating
dung, drinking urine, and of course, engaging in cannibalism–that
later, in more plentiful times came to be understood as crazed. Yet
Comporesi insists that madness was attendant on hunger : illness
and intoxication, often induced by putrid and rotting food, enabled
people to forget the clawing pangs in their gut and the sense of
impotence they caused. Even in Europe, a few centuries ago, hunger
was considered an inevitable part of the human condition, for it was
sent as divine retribution for man’s sinful way.31

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 With the advent of industrial revolution, however, nature and pattern
of famines changed completely. While the industrial societies became immune
to famines in the modern world, famines increasingly became confined to
the colonial and semi–colonial societies in which production and exports
were predominantly foodgrains or agrarian products. In industrial societies,
there was a shift in population and production from agricultural to industrial
sector, and consequently, industrial societies had a nearly perpetual shortfall
of agricultural production in the domestic economy in comparison to their
domestic needs. Yet, industrial societies acquired immunity to famines as
their extensive trade network on global scale met the domestic deficit of
foodgrains. In Britain, the annual shortfall of foodgrains was about 40 percent
of total requirements which was met from colonial imports. Charles Blair
who was the first to observe this strange and paradoxical phenomena found
it astonishing that England, despite being an industrial country with chronic
shortage of foodgrains in domestic production, did not face famines ; while
India, its colony with agriculture as the main pursuit, and despite being a
regular exporter of foodgrains to England and Europe was ravaged by
recurrent famines. For the lack of a better term, we shall refer this historical
phenomena as Charles Blair’s paradox. He wrote highlighting this difference
between metropolitan and colonial context :

England is already dependent on foreign countries to a very

great extent for her food supplies ; that is, there is insufficiency of
grain in the country for the support of her population–in short,
there is a famine yearly in Britain, and instead of its being the
normal state of affairs that India should at times be subject to famine
and that England should be exempt, we find that England is always
in chronic state of famines, and that famine is the exception in
India.32 (Emphasis Original)

In attempting to resolve this paradox, Charles Blair tried to explain

this historical phenomena through a number of potent and real causes. One
of the reasons for the immunity to famines in industrial societies, Charles
Blair believed, could be their advanced network of transport in the form of
railways, roads, canals and harbours whereby food could be distributed at
any point with a minimum of delay, of distance, of transport and of expense.
The length of railways in England in 1872 was double the length of that
open in India. The total coast-line of England was estimated at 3500 miles
in length, making it much easier to distribute food compared to India.33

8
Secondly, advanced industrial countries were protected by a world wide
network of shipping linked to major international markets. England had a
merchant ship service at its command which no other nation could equal.
If the cry for food were from England, this service would be all activity,
every vessel available would be off in search of grain. Thirdly, the industrial
societies controlled large number of colonies, and therefore, had alternative
sources of supply open to them. Should the crisis occur at one source
either due to natural or political causes like civil war, they could obtain the
required supply from other colonial sources. This avenue was not open to
the colonies. Fourthly, the normal structure of production and exchange
pre-empted occurrence of famines in the industrial countries. The industrial
societies produced surplus industrial or manufactured goods and exported
them worldwide, and in turn imported grain or raw materials from abroad.
In colonies, production and trade was centred around foodgrains and raw-
materials. In case of crop failure, import of grain became problematical as
the return freight would be empty and no ship could be chartered except at
a preposterous rate. This prevented import of foodgrains. Charles Blair, in
his enquiry, also hinted at possible factors contributing to famines in India
though these are not part of his over-arching narrative. For instance,
improved transport network rendered a large standing grain-store an
impossibility and would have depleted the conventional grain reserves in the
colonial countryside.34 Also, in discussing the famine of 1803 in the Ceded
Provinces (later named North-Western Provinces) he noted that it was partly
due to the short-sighted policy of the British Government having imposed,
simultaneously with drought, heavier rates of revenue, which the people
were unable to bear.35 He also mentioned that famines were unknown in
Malwa in pre-British period, and it was considered a land of plenty. Under
British rule Malwa was given upto opium, leading to scarcity of food and
fodder.36 He, however, dismissed the press criticism that the Government
officials were fools and the Government was to blame for putting the square
men in round holes. He also believed that British Government was trying to
mitigate the misery caused by famines and it was reflected in the rising
cost of relief per head in successive famines. The cost of relief per head
was 0.17 shilling in 1837, which increased to 0.30 shilling in 1860, and
further to 4.95 shilling in Orissa famine of 1866 and to 7.62 shilling in
Bengal famine of 1868.37 So, there was no lapse on official part. This had
led some immature writers to conclude the colonial state was philanthropic
in nature.38 We shall examine this issue of state policy in a later section in

9
details. Anyway, all the abovementioned potent causes, according to Charles
Blair were insufficient explanations for famines. The real cause was income
disparities between industrial metropolis and colonial hinterland. The level
of incomes was higher in industrial countries and people could purchase
foodgrains at higher prices ; and hence, it was easier to import foodgrains.
In colonial societies, the level of incomes was low and depressed. Even if
the grain was to be imported from abroad, the purchasing power of the
general masses was too low to afford this importation. In answering the
paradox Charles Blair concluded :
The reason is simply that we are wealthy nation and can afford
to import whatever there is in the world which is necessary to us…
Again, we have merchant ship service at our command which no
other nation can equal. Were the cry for food to proceed from
England, this service would be all activity, every vessel available
would be off in search of grain, but in this very instance of Bengal
famine, what happens? Trade between England and India stagnates;
there is rumour that grain exports from the latter country are to be
stopped, return freights are therefore problematical, and immediately
no ship can be chartered for Indian service, except at preposterous
rates.39

It is difficult to find fault with Charles Blair’s argument. Many of

the assertions made by him are historically valid. There is some element of
truth in the assertion that the nature of famines underwent change with the
advent of industrial revolution and capitalism. It is true that the industrial
countries acquired immunity from famines and famines were banished from
them. It is true that after industrial revolution colonial, semi-colonial and
agrarian countries became main victims of famines. It is also true that the
difference in transport, shipping and railroads were incidental and not the
real explanation for this phenomena. The real cause was difference in the
level of incomes between industrial metropolis and colonial countries. There
is great deal of truth in this assertion made by Charles Blair and his diagnosis
regarding the disparities in international level of incomes as causing factor
for famines was also true.

However, the problem that Charles Blair did not posit, and it was a
major limitation in his argument as to what caused the emergence of
disparities in the level of incomes between the industrial metropolis and
colonial countries? If the level of production, level of living, average life

10
expectancy and social conditions were same everywhere before industrial
revolution, why was it that certain societies (ostensibly industrial metropolis)
began to develop whereas others (namely colonial agrarian societies) were
economically depressed or relapsed into atrophy and parasitic decay? Why
only some societies became wealthy or acquired high level of income and
living while others were impoverished? Charles Blair was unconcerned about
the root of the problem regarding the underlying differences in incomes at
international level or their historical genesis. The problem did not merit any
consideration for him, situated as he was in the comfortable condition in
the metropolis. The colonial people were blamed for their misfortunes and
misery, for their lethargy and outdated institutions where dominant caste
like Brahmins and Parda Nasheen high caste women were averse to work
ethics, so on and so forth. The British rule on its part was not be blamed.
Firstly, they inherited a society which was in a disorganised state ; secondly,
the British on their part tried to mitigate the misery as is demonstrated in
the rising pre-capita expenses in successive famines. Afterall, hell was paved
with good intentions. The problem that Charles Blair failed to posit, and that
was the crux of the paradox : why certain societies (that is, industrial ones)
emerge as developed and prosperous, whereas others (that is, colonial, semi-
colonial, agrarian) emerge as underdeveloped and impoverished out of the
process of industrial revolution? Consequently, it never occurred to Charles
Blair that there could possibly be an interconnection between the two, or in
other words, prosperity generated in the industrial societies could be at the
expense of the colonial societies. This was, in fact, the case. Colonialism
was a crucial condition in the historical process of capitalist accumulation
on a global scale. Charles Blair was essentially correct in positing the problem
in the form of a paradox. His solution of the paradox was also partially
correct. But his solution was partial and incomplete. He did not carry his
enquiry to its logical conclusion. Charles Blair was trapped in a social milieu
which narrowed his vision. In the following section we shall try to investigate
how the process of development and underdevelopment, of prosperity in
industrial metropolis and poverty in the colonial societies was interrelated,
interdependent and inter-connected ; and in fact, twin aspects of the unfolding
of the same historical phenomena with a singular quintessence, and this
was the real solution to the paradox posited by Charles Blair. While Charles
Blair posed the problem and paradox correctly and also resolved the paradox
partially, there remained an unresolved and unanswered part in the paradox
which merit analytical attention and historical investigation.

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3. COLONIALISM AND THE RISE OF THE MODERN WEST.
The beginning of industrial revolution and emergence of capitalism
required primitive accumulation of capital which was made possible by
colonial plunder, drain of wealth, slave trade and monopoly profits in
international trade. The process of accumulation of wealth in the modern
west was dependent upon impoverishment, destitution, devastation and
decimation of the people of colonial societies. Both these processes were
simultaneous, interlinked and interconnected. The form of exploitation of
colonial societies differed in Asia, Africa and Latin America ; and consequently,
manifestation of social crisis in these societies was also vastly different.
The wholesale decimation of indigenous population in Latin America was
followed by forced export of able-bodied Africans as slave labour, a movement
unprecedented in world history in scale and magnitude. In Asia, millions of
people died in the waves of frequent intense and recurrent famines.
Since the days of its inception, capitalism has been invariably linked
with the problems of mass poverty and uneven development. The advent of
capitalism was preceded by the pauperisation and uprooting of the serf
peasantry from the feudal estates as an essential premise and pre-condition
for the emergence for free wage labour in the rising urban industrial centres.40
The loosening of the ties between land and labour appeared in the form of
flight of serf labour from land which had hitherto functioned as its natural
laboratory, and the problem of vagabondage and vagrancy had become so
alarming in the times of Henry VIII that he got nearly seventy two thousands
of them hanged.41 In the early phase, the emerging pauperized class of
industrial labourers lived under miserable conditions clustered in urban slums
with low wages, long working hours, without proper sanitation and no
legislative protection.42 The plunder and siphoning off vast amount of social
surplus from the colonies accelerated the accumulation of capital and a
fraction of it undoubtedly went to improve the condition of industrial
proletariat in Western Europe, but crisis resurfaced with redoubled intensity
in the colonies which were gripped with intense poverty, acute hunger and
recurrent famines. Capitalism, by exporting its social crisis and mass poverty,
created perpetual conditions of vegetative decay and long-term structure of
underdevelopment in the colonies. It left behind its deep imprints of decay
and degeneration in the colonial societies which in most cases are still
struggling desperately to overcome that legacy of the past and are subdued
into neo-colonial slavery by transnational companies and chained into
subservience through international debt mechanism.

12
 Apart from mass poverty and emergence of internal disparities of
income among social classes in industrial societies, of which capitalists and
labourers were extreme expressions, similar phenomena replicated itself at
an international scale. The world became divided into imperialist and colonial
countries. The uneven development was evident even at the inception of
industrial revolution in Britain itself with a wide gulf between England and
the Celtic fringe. The glaring regional disparities in the level of industrial
development between England on the one hand, and the surrounding pathetic
deplorable conditions of Ireland, Scotland and Wales which were virtually
the earliest internal colonies of England on the other hand, stood in sharp
contrast.43 Poverty, and not charity in the present case, began at home. It
was soon to invade the surrounding non-capitalist world which became
external territorial colony of imperialism. In the year 1800, Europeans
occupied or controlled 35 percent of the land surface of the world, by
1878 the figure had risen to 67 percent and by 1914 over 84 percent of the
world’s land area was European dominated.44 The British Empire alone
already formidable in 1800 with a land area of 1.5 million square miles and
a population of 20 million, increased its land area seven fold and its population
twenty fold in the following 100 years.45

The history of colonialism, however, had started much earlier. It

dates back to the 16th century invasions and conquest of Latin America by
Spanish Conquistadores. The early phase of industrial revolution coincided
with the conquest of Aztec (Mexico) and lncas (Peru) and subsequent
plunder of gold and silver form Latin America by brutal, archaic and
uncivilized methods, with unbridled greed the local population was soon
decimated. The historical process was akin to genocide on an unprecedented
scale. In a century the Indian population was reduced by 90 percent in
Mexico (from 25 million to 1.5 million), and by 95 percent in Peru. Between
1495 and 1503, more than 3 million people disappeared from the islands of
the New World. They were slain in war, sent to Castile as slaves or consumed
in the mines or other labour. Colonial conquest began with pillage, plunder
and devastation. According to official figures, 18,000 tons of silver and
200 tons of gold were transferred from America to Spain between 1521
and 1660 ; according to unofficial estimates, double this amount. From
1720 to 1780 production of gold in Spanish America and Brazil averaged
twenty tons per year, whereas during the previous century it had been at
most ten tons per year.46 (Table I)

13
 Table I Estimates of Influx of Bullion from Latin America to
Spain (Annual Average Figures)

1493 1544 1600

Gold (Lakhs of Kg.) 5.5 8.15 11.92

Silver (Millions of Kg.) 7 9 20

Sources : Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America, M.R. Press New York
1971, pp.21-70 ; Michel Beaud, A History of Capitalism, 1500-2000, op.cit.,
pp.15-27, V.I. Rutenburg et. al., Feudal Society and its Culture, Moscow,
1988, pp. 41-43.

The civilisation of Aztecs in Mexico and Incas in Peru were wiped

out from the world. The decimation of the local population and immense
amount of gold and silver extracted from Latin America left a permanent
mark of damage and devastation on that continent and became a source
of affluence and wealth on the Iberian peninsula which soon spilled over
to the entire Europe ; Britain, France, Germany, Holland and Belgium
being the main beneficiaries of this process. It is noteworthy that Spain
remained primarily a primitive pastoral economy despite this fabulous flow
of wealth due to specificity of historical circumstances. The socio-
economic conditions of Spain were not conducive to industrial development.
Spain was dominated by feudal nobility engaged in pastoral and agricultural
pursuits, without any significant artisan and mercantile class. Gentry wasted
this ill acquired wealth on buying estates or conspicuous expenses on
luxury items. The share of wealth acquired by state was wasted in holy
religious wars or high salaries to administrative and military officials. As
a result of religious crusades, Muslim and Jew merchants were expelled
from Spain and rest of the Iberian peninsula, and due to the lack of
indigenous mercantile class, this trade fell in the hands of British, French
or Dutch merchants. Under the Catholic influence, Protestant artisans were
expelled from Spain who later settled in Britain and contributed to increasing
industrial production and material prosperity there. Most important of all,
Spain and its colonies became dependent on Britain and France for luxury
merchandise, with Britain sending about 1200 ships and France about 800
ships of merchandise every year and indirectly encouraged industrial activity
there. As if by a historical accident, a poor metropolis had acquired a
rich colony, yet did not benefit from it. Spain owned the cow, and the
entire Europe drank the milk from it.47

14
 Likewise, it was Britain which benefited from Portuguese acquisition
of Brazil. The gold flow started from Brazil with Portugal signing Methuen
Treaty with England in 1703. Portuguese opened its own and its colonies
markets to British manufacturers in return for some illusory advantages for
its wines in the English markets. As it happens in all unequal contests,
British were quick to benefit from it. It was not with wine that English
textiles were paid for, but with Brazilian gold, destroying in process
Portuguese and Brazilian manufactures. The English had conquered Portugal
without the trouble of a conquest. Britain was supplying two-third of the
merchandise requirement of Portugal and its colonies and controlled the
whole of the Portuguese trade. Celso Furtado has noted that Britain used
Brazilian gold to pay for essential imports from other countries and could
thus concentrate on investments in the manufacturing sector. The value of
Brazilian gold arriving in London reached £50,000 a week.48
The decimation of local population soon presented Spanish
Conquistadores with the problem of labour shortages. The continent was
rich source of wealth, especially in the mining of gold, silver and other
minerals, plantations of cotton, sugar, tobacco and rubber, but these
resources could not be exploited without labour. The solution was found in
the form of import of cheap slave labour from Africa. Apart from extracting
cheap mining and plantation resources from Latin America, the slave trade
itself became a source of enormous wealth for the European traders. In
fact, Eric Williams has argued that the entire industrial development of Europe
was financed by slave trade, leave aside the plunder of Latin America and
Asia and benefits of the monopoly of international trade.49 And as we shall
see, he may not be quite wrong. Half the slaves died in transit. Uprooted
from their families and exposed to an unhospitable climate the other half
were subjected to harsh labour in plantation and mining. On tobacco plantation
slave labourer survived on an average for five years, on sugar plantation for
ten years. The loss had to be made good by fresh imports. The unending
stream of slaves, quickly compensated for the loss. The employment of
slave labour was a profitable venture despite heavy losses of life. The size
and number of ships engaged in Trans-Atlantic slave trade increased
continuously. The number of ships employed in slave trade by Liverpool
merchants increased from 15 in 1730 to 132 in 1792, and the size of the
ships expanded enormously overtime, giving a fillip to the British ship-building
industry.50 (Table II) Liverpool slave merchants made a profit of £1.1 million
a year, not including their enormous profits from the additional trade, and

15
that at a time when the average cost of living of an Englishman was £6 a
year.51
Table II Liverpool Ships Employed in Slave Trade, 1730-1792 (Number)
Year No. of Ships
1730 15
1751 53
1760 74
1770 96
1792 132

Source : Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Mascow 1977 p.711.

The exact number of African slaves shipped across Atlantic is not

known, but according to all estimates the figure was very large. The profits
extracted from slave trade were also enormous, and Eric Williams was not
wrong in his assertion that the entire industrial revolution could have been
financed from the profits of the slave trade alone. During 1700 to 1850, the
number of slaves transported across Atlantic was not less than 12 million.
On an average, every slave brought a profit of £100 according to conservative
estimates and £200 according to liberal estimates.52 The estimate has been
put at $600 per slave by Eduardo Galeano. The flow of profits from slave
trade was enormous, leaving aside additional profits from the triangular
trade (Table III) and again, it must be stressed that the figures are far from
being complete.
Table III Estimates of European Profits from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.
Period No. of African Profits Accrued to Europe
Slaves Sold Estimate I Estimate II Estimate III
(millions of £) (million of £) (million of $)
16th century 9 lakhs 90 180 540
th
17 century 37.5 lakhs 375 750 2250
th
18 century 9 million 900 1800 5400
19th century 4 million 400 800 2400
(upto 1860)
Aggregate 17.65 million 1765 3530 10590
Estimates
Sources : Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World, London, 1984, p.440 ; Roland

16
 Oliver & J.D. Fage, A Short History of Africa, Penguin, 1964, pp.112-135 ;
Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America, Newyork 1974, p.95.
After losing colonial control over America in 1776, Asia became
the main source of surplus extraction for Britain. In Asian continent,
subjugation of India and China to colonial or semi-colonial status started
with plunder and was followed by systematic structural changes in the
internal economy to suit the requirements of industrial revolution and to
generate profits. The economy of India began to disintegrate with the onset
of the colonial rule.53 The British East India Company was obtaining the
supply of Indian goods by exports of treasure amounting £482,219 in 1700
or about 83.3 percent its total exports and £1,101,921 in 1750 or about
78.3 percent of its total exports. The Company’s exports of treasure fell
from £797, 167 in 1757 to £143,400 in 1760, and its treasure imports into
India at Rs. 3.1 million in 1757-58 stopped completely.54 The collection of
revenue in Bengal increased from £2.26 million in 1765-66 to £3.33 million
in 1770-71. During 1765-66 to 1770-71, the gross collection was £20,133,579
of which more than one-third was remitted out of the country. During
1766-68, Bengal exported goods and treasure worth £6,311,250 and imports
amounted only £624,375 that means Bengal sent out about ten times what it
received. The plunder of Bengal resulted in an extremely severe famine in
1770 in which about one-third of the population of Bengal or about ten
million people were estimated to have died according to the official records.
Even after the great famine of 1770, plunder of Bengal continued or rather
intensified. The revenue collection increased from £3.26 million in 1771-72
to £3.38 million in 1778-79. Similar results followed in other parts of India
wherever colonial rule was established. In Deccan and Bombay, for instance,
in 1817 revenue collection was £800,000 in 1818 it was raised to £1,150,000
and in a few more years to £1,500,000. The East India Company had also
piled up a Public Debt of £70 million by 1858. They had also drawn a
tribute exceeding £150 million. For a century British East India Company
had gone on draining from two to three or sometime four million pound
sterling annually from India, according to the most modest and conservative
estimates.55 The drain of capital and resources from India to Britain had a
crippling effect on the Indian economy and consequently led to intense
famines.
The British derived their income from India in various forms. The
East India Company paid an annual dividend of 10.5 percent to its shareholders
on the paid-up capital amounting £630,000 annually. It also paid salaries

17
and pensions to the Company’s Directors and other recipients of patronage.
The emoluments of numerous civil, clerical, medical, military and naval
personnel varied from $2500 to 50,000 per annum. The average salary of a
civil servant was $8,000 with additional perks and allowances. The Company
paid an annual tribute of $15 to 20 million to England from its income in
India by way of pensions, interests and dividends. This did not include
profits siphoned off by private traders and merchants, speculators and
planters (indigo, sugar, tea, coffee) which were considerable. The Indian
revenues were also used for military and naval expenses of Burmese, Afghan,
Chinese, Persian and Russian wars. The Mangol invaders came like a swarm
of locusts during Middle Ages devouring everything that came in their way
but soon passed away on their erratic course whereas British system of
exploitation was a methodic, regular and continuous plunder of resources
and therefore, more disastrous than the earlier invaders. Their agrarian
settlements whether Zamindari, a caricature of English landlordism ; Ryotwari,
a caricature of French peasant proprietorship ; or Mahalwari, a caricature
of Indian system itself, all left the ryots pauperized akin to pauperization of
tenantry of Ireland in the backyard of British capitalism. British rule was
squeezing land revenue through torture and oppression of the peasantry,
and agriculture was deteriorating due to neglect of irrigation. The apologists
of imperialism argued that the average taxation per head in India was very
low compared to Europe. By mid-19th century per head tax burden in India
was £0-3-8 whereas in England it was £1-19-4, in France £1-12-0 and in
Prussia £0-19-3. However, the apologists of imperialism overlooked the
fact that the average wages of a labourer in England were twelve times and
a French worker seven times their Indian counterpart.56
Moreover, in India land revenue collected by colonial state was a
continuous drain from the resources of the country unlike metropolis where
it was re-circulated in society creating a multiplier effect. Part of the colonial
state revenues comprising nearly half the budget were set aside to purchase
goods for sales in Europe or elsewhere and this was referred as investment.57
These resources were permanently lost to the society and never came back.
Initially, balance of payment with China was settled from revenues collected
from Bengal. Soon, a novel mode of payment was found in the form of
opium. The Indian cultivators cultivated poppy plant to meet heavy land
revenue demand. The production and trade in opium was a monopoly of
the colonial state, so the entire produce was acquired from the cultivators
by the colonial state at an unremunerative price and sold at an enormous

18
profit in the Chinese markets as a contraband item. A chest of opium
weighing about 133 lbs. cost the colonial state Rs. 250 at Calcutta port and
it was auctioned for Rs. 1210 to Rs 1600. The opium exports to China
were valued at £2.50 million in 1816. In 1837, the value of opium export
was $25 million and in 1856 at $35 million.58 When China tried to resist the
smuggling of opium, it was subdued into semi-colonial status through
infamous Opium Wars in 1840-42. The opium trade obviated the necessity
of payment of balance of trade to China through silver, and the commodity
was an enormous source of profit to colonial government in India. It yielded
a revenue of about $25 million to Anglo-Indian government every year around
mid-19th century owing to monopoly control. As the profits continued to
increase, so did the exports to China. (Table IV)
Table IV British Opium Exports to China, 1767-1860. (Chest = 133.lb.)

Year Chests
1767 200
1800 2,000
1820 5,147
1821 7,000
1824 12,639
1834 21,765
1837 39,000
1860 50,000

Source : Karl Marx, On Colonialism, op.cit., pp.217-219.

With opium from India, the East India Company could collect tea,
silk, porcelain and other Chinese goods virtually free. India’s positive balance
of payment with China was used by Britain to liquidate its negative balance
with China. After the second Opium War, the export of opium to China
further increased from Rs. 10.8 crore in 1858 to Rs. 13.6 crore in 1880.
They were still at Rs. 12.8 crore in 1910.59 The exports of tea and silk
from China increased in the same proportion as import of opium into China.
The annual Home Charges from India also sharply increased after 1858 and
amounted to between £7 to £10 million until the 1870s, rising to over £20
million towards the end of the century. Britain’s favourable balance of
payments with India has been estimated at £25 million in 1880 and Britain
settled more than a third of her trade deficit with the United States and

19
Europe through India.60 The colonial trade in 19th century was not a simple
linear affair. Europe shipped to Africa copper, cloth, trinkets, slave beads,
guns and ammunition which were bartered for slaves on the coast of West
Africa. Then the ships sailed to the New World with slaves who were sold
in Caribbean or American colonies. From West Indies they were loaded
with sugar, rum, molasses, Virginia tobacco and hemp and returned to Europe
completing the cycle. It will be difficult to estimate the amount of profits
harvested from multilateral trade links on an international scale. 61

It has been sometime argued that colonies were not beneficial to

industrial societies. In fact, colonies were a burden as they entailed heavy
expenses on the development of infrastructure like roads and railways, on
administration and military. The gains accrued were very few compared to
the costs. The cost-benefit analysis of the colonial societies according to
these writers, shows that they were a losing concern to the capitalist
countries.62 This argument appeared only around mid-20th century when
colonies had been so thoroughly exploited that mere skelton was left and it
was not possible to exploit them further without developing them. By mid-
20th century, it is true, the territorial colonialism had ceased to be a profitable
venture, for it entailed enormous expenses on administration and military
maintenance and Europe was locked in two World Wars on account of
inter-imperialist rivalries over the colonies. After the Second World War,
territorial colonial empires were increasingly substituted by informal invisible
worldwide colonial empires. It must be stressed that all forms of colonialism,
whether formal or informal were a source of enormous profits for industrial
countries. The British imperialism in its classical phase reaped a profit of
nearly 70 percent on its international investments during 1870 to 1913 ;
matched by similar profits made by American neo-imperialism during 1950
to 1963. (Table V). If colonies were losing concern then how come the
Table V Profits on Capital Investment Abroad, 1870-1963.
Country Period Capital Income From Profits Percentage
Investment Abroad Accrued of
Abroad Profit on
Investment
U.K. 1870-1913 £2.4 billion £4.1 billion £1.7 billion 70.83%
U.S.A 1950-1963 $17.4 billion $29.4 billion $12.0 billion 68.9%
Source : Paul Sweezy, Modern Capitalism and Other Essays, M.R. Press, New York,
1972, pp.22-23.

20
leading business countries incurred these losses for over two centuries and
fought furiously in two World Wars.
It has been argued by Patric O’Brien that the role of periphery
was insignificant in West European industrial development. Paul Bairoch
has also argued that colonialism was not important in triggering industrial
revolution.63 In fact, he goes on to say that colonialism was a consequence
and not the cause of the industrial revolution. This scholarship (that is,
if this respectable term can at all be used for this kind of subterfuge) is
very superficial. They swim in shallow waters. Their argument betrays
an utter lack of understanding of elemental historical processes or an
over sight inherent in the Eurocentric bias A great deal of historical evidence
is ignored while making these dubious assertions. The portrayal of colonial
societies as archaic, barbarian and primitive and colonial people as dark
and inferior races is a deliberate creation of the late 19th century liberal
historiography. John M. Hobson, in a detailed historical analysis has
demonstrated that the world economy was dominated by China snd India
during 500 to 1800 A.D. in terms of international trade and industrial
production.64 Still further, deep in the days of Roman antiquity, Rome had
trade deficit of 50 million sesterces with India and 100 million sesterces
for India, China and Arabia taken together.65 Roman Civilization was
dependent upon Sub-Saharan Africa for supply of gold. According to reliable
archeological sources, Nubia during the second milleneum B.C. was
supplying Europe with about forty thousand kilograms of gold every year,
an amount which was never again reached in world production until the
19th century.66 Till the discovery of gold in the New World, Sudan was
the single important source of gold for European economy.67 So, Asia and
Africa were far ahead of Europe till the beginning of the industrial
revolution. To ignore the destruction of Aztec and Inca civilization and to
consider the plunder of Latin America, Asia and slave trade of Africa as
insignificant or inconsequential episodes of world history tantamounts to
rejecting history and creating fiction where convenient lies are preferable
to inconvenient truths. It is futile to comment of this. Even some
respectable scholars have tended to believe that slave trade had no
impoverishing effect on the African economy. When millions of able-bodied
human beings were taken away, it was bound to depress all branches of
the economic activity, production, exchange, consumption. After centuries
of slave labour export the African economy was reduced to a mere
skelton.

21
4. DISCUSSION ON CAUSATION.
In the previous section, we have observed that famines were
basically a manifestation of social crisis in colonial societies resulting from
the process of primitive accumulation of capital in industrial societies. The
dislocation or disruption of pre-modern societies differed widely across
different continents ranging from wholesale decimation of indigenous people
in Latin America to export of slave labour in Africa and destitution and
famines in Asia. The nature of crisis originated from similar processes though
forms of manifestation differed in different regions over different periods.
The diagnosis of the causes of these crisis differ vastly and there is no
unanimity in the assessment among the writers on the theme. The
explanations differ as they are based on different set of assumptions, notions
and premises, and not all of them are correct, accurate or precise. It is
necessary to go behind these assumptions and notions and to critically
evaluate them in order to obtain an objective view of the causes that led to
destitution, starvation and famines. It is also necessary to examine the
framework of reference within which different writers have tried to locate
the problem. In this section, we shall try to evaluate the relevance of different
frameworks of references as explanation of causes leading to starvations
and famines in colonial context with special reference to India. The earliest
imperialist narratives compiled by the colonial administrators explained
famines as simple natural phenomena. According to them famines were
caused by rainfailures or droughts resulting from erratic monsoons or
unseasonal rains which led to crop failures. The failure of harvests led to
decline in the availability of foodgrains which in turn caused widespread
scarcities, starvations and deaths. This view was also shared by many later
writers like M.B. McAlpin who focused on the immediate factors and
ignored the long-term historical causes. Rainfailures or droughts by
themselves, however, were not sufficient causes for famines. Also, not
infrequently, the imperialist narratives condemned colonial societies as
primitive, backward and barbarian with inherent archaic institutions as root
of all the problems. The Asian and African people were condemned as dark
and inferior races. They had come on a “civilising mission” to these societies
as a part of their noble, divine and moral duty to bring progress, freedom
and enlightenment.
Within Britain there was a dissent of opinion against the prevailing
official view which often goes unnoticed. The writers like Harold Mann,
William Digby, Vaughan Nash and John Hobson strongly disapproved the

22
prevailing official notion. Harold Mann, Director of Agriculture in Bombay
Presidency, was a personal witness to the misery, horror and suffering of
humans and animals during the famines of 1918 and subsequent periodic
scarcities. He was deeply distressed by the scenes of calamities. He had
seen hordes of men and beasts wearily dragging themselves alongside the
roads in a state of exhaustion and starvation in search of food and work,
and not infrequently, they became unfit, partially or totally, for any work.
He decided to conduct detailed investigation later on to find out if there was
any link between rainfall and famines. He analysed the entire recorded data
on the pattern of rainfall in the famine-prone districts of Deccan. The districts
of Poona, Ahmednagar, Sholapur and Bijapur, which fell in the rainshadow
zone and where rainfall was erratic and uncertain, were chosen for enquiry.
The rainfall data for these areas had been recorded regularly since 1868.
The increasing frequency and intensity with which famines struck
India under colonial rule especially during the late 19th century did not indicate
in anyway that rainfall had become more precarious during this period. In
an analysis of the data on Deccan, Harold Mann found no general tendency
for rainfall to increase or diminish during the seventy years from 1869 to
1938. There was no evidence that the effective rainfall in the Deccan was
changing. It is true that rainfall was precarious in the Deccan, but it was as
precarious in 1867 as it was, say in 1938. From the early Jamabandi Reports
it would appear that the cultivator got good crop about once in three years,
that of the other two, one was year of almost complete failure, and the
other of middling crop only. Taking 1915-16 as a standard good year, Harold
Mann noted that during 1886 to 1938, the average return for Poona district
was 60.8 percent ; for Ahmednagar district 57 percent, for Sholapur 67
percent, and for Bijapur 59.5 percent. For the above period 58.5 percent of
the years gave this produce or more for Poona district, 51 percent of the
years for Ahmednagar, 49 percent of the years for Sholapur, and 56.6
percent of the years for Bijapur district. Rainfall as well as outturn of the
crops has been very uncertain in the Deccan , but this uncertainty was the
normal condition of agricultural production in the Deccan. Hence, it was
not that weather patterns had suddenly changed dramatically or rainfall had
suddenly become erratic.(68) (Charts I & II). If nature and weather patterns
had not changed in any remarkable way during this period, social conditions
had definitely altered considerably and irrevocably. Recently, Mike Davis
has argued that the global subsistence crisis of the late 19th century in the
famines of 1876-79, 1889-91 and 1899-1901 spreading from Egypt to China

23
24
25
claiming 30 to 50 million lives can not be adequately explained in terms of
El Nino alone. The climatic disturbances are not sufficient explanation for
famines. The inequality of nations was as profound as the inequality of
classes.69
The immediate cause of famines was invariably drought or
unseasonal rains. There is not much disagreement on this point. Even
nationalists like R.C. Dutt have accepted this. There is, however, a difference
of emphasis. For instance, M.B. McAlpin emphasized weather conditions
to the exclusion of all other factors and considered drought to be the sole
cause of famines.70 The error lies in the myopic and lop-sided emphasis on
this point. As pointed out earlier, the most terrible and devastating famines
occurred under colonial rule in regions like Bengal and Malwa, which were
hitherto considered to be more or less immune to famines and where rainfall
was comparatively more certain. 71 It is also worthy of note that famines in
India tended to coincide not so much with good or bad weathers, but with
good or bad governments. The irrigation network hitherto maintained by
the state, was neglected under colonial rule, which led to rapid deterioration
of agriculture and ultimately resulted in famines. The investment in irrigation
as also in agriculture remained negligible under British rule compared with
their large collections of land revenue.72 Also, traditionally, cultivators had
the habit of storing grain in pits (pevs, as they were called) which were
often used in the lean years. Under British rule, as a result of compulsive
involvement in the market, induced by colonial state with heavy and rigid
land revenue demand and the resultant domination of usury and merchant
capital, this surplus was siphoned off through railway network and grain
stocks with ordinary cultivators fell dangerously low. That is why under
pre-British regimes the cultivators could tide over two or three lean years in
succession but became vulnerable to famine in the first year of drought
under colonial rule.73
The measure of extending irrigation network in famine prone zones,
suggested by the Irrigation Commission (1903) after the devastating famines
of 1899-1900, were ineffectual as under colonial rule famines has already
become endemic in regions where rainfall was more certain and irrigation
network was already extensive. For instance, Bengal and Malwa which had
enjoyed comparative certainty of rains and immunity from famines in pre-
British period and considered prosperous regions had surprisingly become
the worst victims of famines. It appears that rainfall or irrigation were not
at the root of the problem. Harold Mann was not at all wrong in his analysis

26
and assertion on this issue. Paul Gravin in analyzing the lrish famine of
1846-48 made similar observation. He asked if famines were caused by
natural factors then how come the potato blight in continental Europe did
not result in famines, while the same potato blight led to devastating famine
in Ireland?74 It implied that real causes for famine were unrelated to rainfailure
or crop failures.
During the great famine of 1900 Vaughan Nash came to visit India
and left an eyewitness account of the horrors he experienced in the forms
of letters addressed to the Manchester Guardian which later appeared in
the form of a book from London. This small volume is in sharp contrast to
the voluminous reports of the Indian Famine Commission on the subject.
The real causes of famines were unconnected with the failure of the monsoon,
Vaughan Nash observed, and it was the British rule itself which was
responsible for the famine. The rigid and coercive land revenue system
under colonial rule compelled the cultivators to borrow from the moneylenders
at usurious rate of interest. The position of the moneylenders had been
strengthened by British laws and legal institutions which extended all possible
support to him. It was the joint exploitation of the cultivators by the British
and the Banya which ruined them. He observed :
…the inflexible tribute system is the nether millstone, and the gathering
burden of indebtedness is the upper millstone with which we are grinding
India…the British Raj and the Bunya Raj eat up his (cultivator’s) crops,
and what one leaves, the other devours. 75
The cultivator who lived under British rule became a permanently
famine stricken man. The British land revenue system was rigid and inflexible
in nature. It was fixed on good and bad years alike. The official logic was that
the cultivator should pay for bad years out of the surplus he enjoyed in the
good one. So much so that even in famine years, every possible rupee was
collected. The only flaw in the official argument was that the ryot had really
no surplus at all, the reason being that the Banya took his entire surplus. The
ryot, at any rate, did not pay. The man who paid the land revenue was the
Banya who was gradually getting control over the cultivator’s land. The Banya
was indispensable to the government in his capacity as advancer of land
revenue. The cultivator lacked staying power and was always living on the
brink of ruin, without reserves of cash or kind or credit. When the
moneylenders had taken their share, the cultivator had nothing left for a rainy,
or rather, a rainless day. After extensive travel through the famine stricken
country Vaughan Nash had finally categorically stated that :

27
 …the English system is itself one of the chief causes that make for
famine.76 Land revenue demand was fixed burden which had to be met
twice a year, crops or no crops, rain or drought. It was the creditor who
often paid the land revenue and took the crop from the threshing floor.
Once so involved, the peasant, in five cases out of six, was doomed. It
created perpetual conditions of famine even without any failure of the
monsoon.
How it is, asked Vaughan Nash, that a generation of railways and
more than a generation of trading with the west, find the people touching
bottom, with nothing, and less than nothing to show for all the exports and
imports and internal development.77

William Digby was sharply critical of official attitude. He argued

that India was progressively and continuously being impoverished under
British rule, and that was the crux of the problem. It was the main cause
behind the recurrent famines. The per diem per capita income had diminished
from 2d. in 1850 to 1.5d. in 1882,which further came down to 0.75 d. by
1900.78 The prosperity of England owed its origin to the plunder of India
amounting to the drain of something like £500 million to £1000 million
between 1757 and 1815. In 1880, there were 40 million people in India
with insufficient food, by 1900 the figure had risen to 70 million, which
was a very conservative estimate, the actual figure may have been somewhere
near 100 million mark.79 So, even without famines, India under British rule
was in a state of chronic starvation. Half the agricultural population was
always on the verge of starvation. Within Britain, there were honest and
sincere people who acknowledged that British rule was a curse for colonial
India, and not a boon as the colonial administrators claimed. John Hobson
dismissed the liberal utopia or rather camouflage about the “civilizing mission”
of imperialism in the East and demonstrated its parasitic character and the
process of social decay inherent in it. The so-called civilizing mission of
imperialism was merely a mask and deception around it. He sharply
condemned the notion of civilizing mission contemptuously. He noted :
It is now hardly possible for anyone who has carefully followed
these events to speak of Europe undertaking a “mission of civilization” in
China without his tongue in his cheek. Imperialism in the Far East is
stripped nearly bare of all motives and methods save those of distinctively
commercial origin…Nor can it be maintained that the new industrialism of
machinery and factories, which we have introduced, is civilizing India, or
even adding to her material prosperity…the decay or forcible supersession
of the native industrial arts is still more deplorable, for these always

28
 constitute the poetry of common life, the free play of the imaginative
faculty of a nation in the ordinary work of life. He further went on to say
that …millions of peasants in India are struggling to live on half an acre.
Their existence is a constant struggle with starvation, ending too often in
defeat. Their difficulty is not to live human lives upto the level of their
poor standard of comfort – but to live at all and not die…we may truly say
that in India, except in the irrigated tracts, famine is chronic — endemic.80

There is a strong resemblance in the arguments advanced by William

Digby and Vaughan Nash with the Nationalist School regarding the causes
leading to famines in colonial India. In fact, there is a near unanimity of
opinion on the issue that poverty was the root cause of famines, and the
British rule in India was the root cause of poverty. Moreover, the evidence
used by William Digby and Vaughan Nash was mostly from the official
records which lends credibility to their arguments and there is apparently
no distortion or manipulation in handling the evidence. Evidently, the analysis
and issues raised by the nationalists were substantially sustainable. The
nationalist writers argued that famines were caused by social conditions of
mass poverty under colonial rule. The mass poverty was caused by British
rule in India. It appeared very astonishing and paradoxical to Dadabhai
Naoroji that the British rule which produced industrial revolution and created
prosperity in Britain led to the problem of economic backwardness and
created poverty and misery in India. He reconciled the paradox by stating
that in was an Un-British rule. The continuous drain of wealth from India
to Britain was responsible for the persistent problem of poverty.
The drain occurred through numerous channels. The first was
dividend to East India Company’s shareholders and interest on foreign debts
on account of wars of conquests in India or public works such as railways,
irrigation or infrastructure. The Public Debt of East India Company was
£70 million before 1757 ; by 1900 it had touched £224 million. The second
was war expenses incurred in Burma, Afghanistan, China, Ethiopia credited
to Indian accounts. The army expenditure also included the salaries, perks,
conveyance and pensions for British soldiers stationed in India. The third
channel was interest paid on foreign capital investments in railways, roads,
shipyards on which a guaranteed interest was paid. The state also paid for
public and army purchases made in Britain. The fourth channel was in the
form of Home Charges including salaries and pensions to British officials,
establishment charges for India Office in London, diplomats or commercial
emissaries in China, Egypt or elsewhere.81 India had an excess of exports

29
over imports and the deficit was not met from import of merchandise or
treasure. It constituted an element of increasing drain upon India’s resources.
During 1835-39, the annual average excess of exports over imports was
£5.34 million, it rose to £7.45 million during 1850-54 ; further rising to
£17.3 million during 1860-64, and touching £27.4 million by 1870-72.82
M.G. Ranade argued that poverty was a result of the progressive ruralisation
of the Indian economy under British rule. The continuing tendency of events
since the British occupation of the country had been to turn the people
more and more towards agriculture and less and less towards manufactures,
a process that later came to be recognised as de-industrialization. Due to
decline of handicrafts, artisans were falling back on agriculture. The operation
of a strict monopoly of heavy transit duties in India amounting to Rs. 44
lakh per annum and of heavy and ruinous import duties in England amounting
to no less than 75 percent continued to repress all the exertions of local
industry. The introduction of Manchester goods was accompanied by the
collapse of indigenous industries.83
The primary cause of peasant’s poverty was the British land revenue
system, according to R.C. Dutt. He argued that land revenue burden under
British rule was excessive, fluctuating and uncertain. It paralysed agriculture,
prevented saving and kept the cultivator in a state of abject poverty and
indebtedness. It was also the main reason behind the increased frequency
and intensity of famines during the nineteenth century. He observed :
Famines in India are directly due to deficiency in the annual rainfall ;
but the intensity of such famines and the loss of lives caused by them are
largely due to the chronic poverty of the people. If the people were generally
in a prosperous condition, they would make up for local failure of crops
by purchases from neighbouring provinces, and there would be no loss of
life. But when the people are absolutely resourceless, they cannot buy
from surrounding tracts, and they perish in hundreds of thousands, or in
millions whenever there is a local failure of crops.84

He further argued that British rule repressed Indian manufactures

and encouraged British manufactures. The import of Indian goods to Europe
was repressed by prohibitive duties ; the export of British goods to India
was encouraged by almost nominal duties. The production of raw-material
in India for British industries, and the consumption of British manufactures
in India were the twofold objects of the early commercial policy of England.
The wealth of India was siphoned off through various channels to Britain.
The increasing Public Debt was draining resources of India. During East

30
India Company rule (1757-1857), public debt was £69.5 million, to which
1857 uprising added £40 million. By 1877, it reached £139 million excluding
East India company’s debt and by 1900 it had touched £224 million figure.
It resulted in an outflow of one-half of the net revenues of India, which
were at £44 million a year by 1901. The Home Charges alone accounted
for nearly one-fourth of all the revenues derived in India, and practically the
entire land revenue of India. He observed :
The total Land Revenue of India was £17½ millions in 1900-1. The
total of Home Charges in the same year came to £17 millions. It will be
seen, therefore, that an amount equivalent to all that is raised from the soil
in all the provinces of India, is annually remitted out of the country as
Home Charges. 85
The nationalist writers ignored the issue of internal exploitation of
peasantry by landlords, and moneylenders. In 1874, R.C. Dutt had highlighted
the exploitation of cultivators by landlords through heavy rents, illegal cesses
and tributes. He had, at that time, stressed that landlord’s rents were uncertain
and increasing exaction ; and called for permanent fixation of rent like land
revenue. By 1901, however, it was forgotten, or deliberately dropped from
the agenda, perhaps as part of the anti-imperialist strategy of nationalism.
The same weakness is evident in almost all the contemporary nationalist
writings.
Lord Curzon questioned the validity of R.C. Dutt’s criticism. In a
reply to R.C. Dutt, Lord Curzon contended that British land revenue demand
was neither onerous nor excessive and that equity and moderation were the
underlying principles of the land revenue system. He stressed that assessment
amounted to no more than 1/15th to 1/20th of the gross produce in Deccan
and from 1/5th to 1/8th of gross produce in Gujarat.86 This, of course, was
not entirely true. During the early 19th century, the land revenue burden was
undoubtedly too heavy and oppressive. The British land revenue demand
was rigid and inflexible in nature, fixed on good and bad years alike. It led
the cultivator into debt trap and the entire produce of he cultivator was
swept away by usury.
Advancing Curzon’s argument further M.B. McAlpin suggested that
there was a decline in the land revenue demand during the late nineteenth
century in terms of real produce which indirectly implied an increase in
peasant’s incomes. The peasantry was becoming prosperous due to expansion
of area under cultivation, at a rapid pace during 1840-70, and then at a
reduced pace during 1870 to 1920. The peasantry also benefited from the

31
expansion of railroad network resulting in the integration of peasant economy
in the wider markets. The sale of surplus agricultural produce and rising
prices brought higher incomes to the cultivators. On the whole, there was
no impoverishment of the peasantry. Famines did occur, but they occurred
due to rain failures and not from the mass poverty of the peasantry.87 The
first part of M.B. McAlpin’s argument, that land revenue in terms of real
produce had a tendency to decline, is true ; the second part that it implied
an increase in peasant prosperity is not true. For Gujarat, J.M. Mehta found
that measured in terms of cotton or millet land revenue per acre increased
during the first half of the 19th century, but declined in the latter half of the
19th century.88 The expansion of net cultivated area was on marginal soils
which added uncertainty to agricultural production and brought lower yields
per acre with a higher cost input per acre. The railways and market
integration drained the grain reserves and depleted the surplus otherwise
available during lean years. With increasing prices, cost of production and
cost of living also increased. Moreover, price increase was more often
caused by scarcities and famines. The increased prices were, therefore,
symptomatic of scarcity, of misfortune and misery rather than of increased
prosperity.89
The historical evidence does not lend credence to increasing peasant
prosperity. In 1824, fifty seven villages of Indapur taluka in Poona district
were said to be deserted.90 Even in Khandesh, which was relatively a more
prosperous region, there were numerous deserted villages around mid-19th
century. Out of 4032 villages, about 1243 were totally deserted, while 413
were partially deserted. Out of the totally deserted villages, 97 were reported
to be completely lost and were recorded as non-traceable or gumgaon.91 In
1861, in Virdal sub-division of Khandesh, out of 93 villages, 76 were inhabited
and 17 were deserted.92 A vast proportion of farms under colonial rule
were operating on loss and were covering this loss by incurring debts. In
1852 farm budgets compiled by Alexander Mackay showed that farmer had
little or nothing left with him after paying his rent and the cost of cultivation.
Instead of realizing the profits of a farmer, he simply earned the wages of
a labourer.93 According to Mr. S.P. Patro who investigated into economic
conditions in the Madras Presidency in 1917, the budget of an average ryot
showed a deficit of Rs. 22-9 every year and it was not possible to obtain a
full meal every day. They had full meals only from January to May.94 In
1937-38, D.R. Gadgil in a survey of 557 farms in 21 villages of Wai taluka
in Satara district observed that if fodder, seed and manure, which were

32
both produced and used on the farm, were counted neither as receipts nor
as expenses, the total receipts at farm came to Rs. 297.6 and total
expenditure to Rs. 209.1 per farm, leaving the average farmer with a surplus
of Rs. 88.5 per farm. However, if modest allowance was made for total
investment at an average interest of 3 percent and wages were allowed at
the market rate for family labour used, average net loss for the whole
sample was Rs. 99 per farm. This implied that farming did not provide the
peasant family with the wages which it could have earned, had they worked
as pure wage labourers.95 The analysis of the net incomes for 1215 families
for 54 villages in Matar taluka of Kheda district in 1931 showed that 408
families or 33.58 percent of the total sample of peasant households lived in
perpetual loss and 12 of these had a loss over Rs 500 each. For another
453 families annual income per family was below Rs. 100. So, 847 families
or about 70 percent of the peasant households lived in loss or with very
low income.96
Under colonial rule, usury was spreading like obnoxious parasitic
weeds due to heavy and rigid land revenue demand and the help extended
by colonial law and legal institutions. In his evidence before the Indian
Famine Commission of 1880, Sir Richard Temple, the Governor of Bombay
stated :
A great many lenders in the principal cities in the interior of India
are not so flourishing as they used to be and have not such large concerns
as formerly, but the petty moneylenders in the villages in many parts of
India has increased, almost multiplied, under British rule. For instance , in
the Deccan before British rule the moneylenders were almost entirely
Brahmins with a few Marwaris added. Now, after half a century of British
rule, the Brahmins mostly remain, and to them has been added a class of
Marwaris who are one of the wealthiest and the most powerful and largely
ramified classes in the country.97
Similar observation was made by Vaughan Nash while visiting India
during the devastating famine of 1900. He noted :
I am told that in Upper Burmah, where the money-lender was
unknown under native rule, he has come like a flood since annexation.98
The usurer often took possession of cultivator’s movable property,
livestock, deadstock etc. before proceeding to take possession of his
agricultural land. The process of land alienation was gradual and protracted
and often occurred through a series of mortgages. In Bombay Presidency
moneylenders had about 10 percent of the agricultural land in their possession

33
in 1917, by 1943 it had increased to 31 percent.99 Land was undoubtedly
passing into the hands of the usurers as a result of the growing indebtedness
of the peasantry. After being expropriated from their holdings, peasants
were sliding downward in social scale to swell up the ranks of dwarfholding
cultivators, tenants and agricultural labourers. The marginal farmers or
dwarfholding cultivators below five acres constituted about three-fourth of
the total agriculturists in the Konkani districts of Maharashtra and the
proportion was very large in other areas also. (Table VI)
As the moneylenders started extracting the entire surplus from the
cultivator and often removing his subsistence at the time of harvesting, the
dependence of the peasantry on usury increased. In 1888, Dufferin enquiry
found that a very large proportion of cultivators were in chronic short
Table VI : Proportion of Dwarfholdings (below 5 acres) to the Total No. of
Holdings in various Districts of Bombay Presidency (Percent)

Districts 1874-75 1880-81 1901-22 1920-21 1936-37

Poona 17.71 17.66 18.48 47.23 46.00

Ahmednagar 5.52 5.97 5.88 27.10 29.08
Satara 25.15 26.28 25.01 61.46 60.28
Sholapur 3.01 3.41 3.63 20.13 23.84
Khandesh (East) 10.65* 9.51* 9.26 31.58 42.29
(West) — — 8.39 12.55 20.57
Nasik 12.93 15.53 14.84 32.70 34.72
Ahmedabad 37.33 37.54 42.71 54.17 55.43
Kheda 57.91 56.37 61.49 76.79 76.16
Panch Mahals 51.05 47.11 39.43 49.69 59.18**
Broach 43.39 44.05 46.13 50.32 —
Surat 75.22 74.74 51.80 70.57 68.86
Thana 56.93 57.32 59.65 69.79 69.13
Kolaba 59.45 58.97 67.59 74.65 71.46
Kanara 52.66 53.27 56.69 65.79 72.31
Ratnagiri 56.89 56.2 63.36 73.27 78.22
Belgaum 13.98 14.01 15.34 49.40 52.45
Bijapur 4.28 4.45 4.53 20.81 24.69
Dharwad 8.79 9.94 10.59 38.26 37.63

Sources : Annual Jamabandi Reports, 1875-81; Statistical Atlas of Bombay Presidency,

1906-25; Land Revenue Admn. Report, 1936-37.
* Combined figures for East and West Khandesh
** Combined Figures for Broach and Panch Mahals.

34
supply of foodgrains. They had supplies only for 4 to 6 months in the year.
For the rest of the period, they had to depend on the village Banya to feed
their families and to meet the cost of production. Hence, a large proportion
of peasantry was in a state of semi-starvation even in normal years. It
made them liable to frequent famines. (Table VII)

Table VII : Proportion of Cultivators with Chronic Short Supply of Foodgrains

in Bombay Presidency, 1888.

Districts Percentage of Total No. of Months of Time Devoted

Cultivators with Months of Supply after to Cultivating
Short Supply Supply Paying Debt Operations
(Months)
Khandesh 15-66 12 6-8 —
Ahmednagar 25 6-8 — 9
Nasik 50-80 12 6 4-8
Poona 33-50 6-8 — 12 (with
intermission)
Sholapur 40 12 — 3-6
Satara 20-50 4-8 — —
Belgaum 40-63 3-6 3-6 6
Dharwad 33-50 6-9 6-9 6-7
Bijapur 4 6-8 6-8 4-6
Thana 10-30 12 4-5 6-11
Kolaba 35-75 8-10 2-5 10-12
Ratnagiri 50-85 12-18 4-6 4-8
Kanara N.A. 6-9 N.A. 5

Source : Dufferin Enquiry Report, 1888, pp. 30, 37, 42.

According to the liberal writers, famines or other economic crisis

resulted from the market dislocations or disruptions. It was premised upon
variety of assumptions which have kept shifting with the passage of history.
To Adam Smith, markets were sacrosanct and the true regulators of
everything. Whereas dearths could be caused by crop failures or wars,
famines were invariably the results of too much intervention by governments
into market functioning. The solution to the problem derived from this
diagnosis was laissez-faire laissez-aller policy. The markets should be freed
from all restraints, and the problem will resolve itself on its own. He observed :

35
 The freedom of the corn trade is almost everywhere more or less
restrained, and, in many countries, is confined by such absurd regulations
as frequently aggravate the unavoidable misfortune of a dearth into the
dreadful calamity of a famine…The unlimited, unrestrained freedom of the
corn trade, as it is the only effectual preventative of the miseries of a
famine, so it is the best palliative of the inconveniences of a dearth…100
Without such misguided interference of the governments, the market
would find its natural rhythm, generate the wealth of nations, and create a
world without hunger. This blind faith in the market, as we learn from
history, was misplaced. Also, the so-called night watchman state has
historically never existed, not even in the most liberal regimes of industrial
capitalism, except in theory as a limiting hypothesis. 101 But this faith was
undoubted and unshakable among all the liberal writers of the nineteenth
century. To Robert Malthus, famines were natural, necessary, inevitable
and even desirable. Though he was also a champion of the free market, he
had a pessimistic view of the capacity of the world to get rid of hunger ; he
was not even convinced of the necessity of doing so. He wrote :
Famine seems to be the last, the most dreadful resource of nature.
The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to
produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or
other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers
of depopulation, but should their success be still incomplete, gigantic
inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the
population with the food of the world.102
Again, technological advance that followed, disproved Malthus. By
th
early 20 century, this liberal perspective had undergone sea change. The
unshakable faith in the markets was shaken by the recurrent economic
crisis and the Great Depression of 1929 delivered a final mighty blow to
this conception. There was no dearth of commodities, but of buyers for
them. There was not too little but too much of everything ; goods, capital,
everything was aplenty ; yet, there was no demand for them. The production,
trade and investment stagnated; business faced slump, economy collapsed.
Say’s law, that supply will create its own demand, had failed to pass through
the acid test of history.103 In sharp contrast to Adam Smith, Sir Lord John
Maynard Keynes was firmly convinced that the unregulated markets were
unruly, unwieldy, chaotic and the root cause of economic problems. The
state intervention was immediately and urgently called for to remedy the
situation. The state, by investing in public works and employing the
unemployed could generate income and increase the effective demand. 104

36
What was considered to be a panacea for all evils in 1776 by Adam Smith
had become a deadly poison in 1929 as diagnosed by Keynes. From Keynes
to Amartya Sen, the liberal philosophy had been premised upon the necessity
of external intervention to regulate the unruly and unwieldy market. The
entitlement theory of Amartya Sen is premised upon the central Keynesian
assumption which stresses the necessity of an external intervention as
regulator of chaotic market. But even this cannot remedy the root cause of
the problem behind the recurrent economic crisis of capitalism, which
manifest themselves in manifold dimensions whether of chronic starvation
or credit and economic crisis of 2008 type, as these measures do not address
the inherent underlying problems of mass poverty and uneven development
on the global scale which result in frequent internal and international
imbalances, dislocations and disruptions.105
It was K.L. Datta who was first to observe that in pre-modern
period famines resulted from an absolute scarcity of food, rich and poor all
suffered alike, whereas in modern famines food was always available in the
market but its prices reached so high that the poorer strata could not
purchase it and succumbed to starvation. So, according to K.L. Datta’s
price syndrome theory, it was the rising price spiral which caused recurrent
famines in modern period. K.L. Datta, following this line of enquiry, made
a detailed investigation into the causes leading to the rise of foodgrain prices
in late 19th century colonial India. There was sharp rise in exports of
foodgrains like wheat and rice and nonfood crops like cotton, oilseeds,
sugar and tobacco to Europe under the impetus of market demand. The
process was greatly facilitated by the lowering of transport costs with advent
of railways and opening of Suez Canal. The area under nonfood crops
expanded sharply compared with foodcrops. Also, foodcrops were displaced
from fertile soils and pushed to inferior soils resulting in the decline in the
per-capita availability of foodgrains. The scarcity of foodgrains owing to
their substitution by nonfood crops and exports to international markets
was responsible for a sharp rise in the prices of foodgrains in the internal
market of India.106 No doubt, the increasing exports of food and raw-materials
partly explained the rising price spiral, but more often it was a consequence
of scarcities and famines, and not the cause, as stated by K.L. Datta and
accepted by eminent economic historians like B.M. Bhatia and Amartya
Sen.
Surprisingly, the conclusions drawn by M.B. McAlpin were in sharp
contrast to K.L. Dutta. According to M.B. McAlpin, the increasing prices

37
signified rising incomes and increasing prosperity of the peasantry. While
K.L. Datta regarded price rise as prime and potent cause for famines, M.B.
McAlpin considered it as source of peasant prosperity ; K.L. Datta argued
that increase in geographical spread and intensity of famines was due to
increasing depletion of grain reserves attributable to expanding railway
network, to M.B. McAlpin expanding transport network implied closer market
integration of peasantry bringing them higher profits. However, this argument
leads M.B. McAlpin into an inescapable mouse trap : if the peasantry was
becoming prosperous, then why were they dying by millions? We have
heard of prosperous people dying of obesity and heart attacks, but no one
ever heard of prosperous people dying of hunger and starvation. So, the
price-induced prosperity thesis of M.B. McAlpin has no legs to stand upon.
Though B.M. Bhatia conceded that in modern famines there was
no absolute scarcity of grain and grain was always available in the market
but famines occurred when it went beyond the purchasing power of the
poor and while rich were immune, poor alone were the victims ; but he
contended that this relationship between prices and famines was not simple
and direct as K.L. Datta had assumed. According to B.M. Bhatia famines in
colonial India resulted from the fundamental socio-economic and political
changes taking place during that period. Under colonial rule the changing
agrarian relations affected both production and distribution. As land was
passing into the hands of moneylenders and other propertied classes, a
larger share of agricultural production was appropriated by landlords and
moneylenders in the form of rack-renting and exorbitant interest charges
which impoverished the cultivators. Prices, including those of foodgrains
and other essential commodities, increased very sharply while wages for
the most part remained stationary. The commercial revolution induced by
colonial rule made the foodgrains the largest single item in India’s export
trade during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The domestic reserves of
grain, which cultivators used to keep in the past, disappeared. The export
of grain continued even during the famine years. Railways extended scarcity
of foodgrain over larger area of the country. Also there was rampant
hoarding and speculation of grain by merchants, moneylenders and wealthy
cultivators which added to the scarcity of grain and further accentuated
food crisis. Most of these changes were attendant upon and closely related
to the advent of colonial rule in India.107
The rising prices and increasing integration of agriculture into market
economy had resulted in shift from subsistence to commercial production

38
in agriculture. The area under the cultivation of commercial crops expanded
faster than food crops. Apart from opium and indigo, cotton, jute, sugarcane
and groundnut became important cash crops. Even foodgrains like wheat
and rice became commercial crops. According to George Blyn, the area
under foodgrains increased by 16 percent during 1901-37, whereas area
under sugarcane increased by 69 percent, cotton by 59 percent, oilseeds by
36 percent and jute by 14 percent. During 1891 to 1946, the decennial
increase in the productivity per acre for nonfood crops was 13 percent
whereas productivity of food crops increased by one percent only. The
decennial increase in output of nonfood crops during this period was 8.5
percent while in the case of foods crops there was a decline of 2 percent.
According to Gorge Blyn and Siva Subramanian per-capita foodgrain
availability had declined by 30 percent during 1901-46, the average annual
rate of decline being 1.14 percent. According to the conservative estimates
of Alan Heston this decline in foodgrain availability was 6.88 percent.108
The decline in foodgrain availability has been considered to be an
important cause for the recurrent famines. Amartya Sen has argued that
neither poverty nor foodgrain availability decline are sufficient explanations
for famines. In modern world, famines are a function of entitlements, and
not of food availability as such. Some of the worst famines including the
Bengal famine of 1943 have occurred without any significant decline in
food availability per head. Amartya Sen’s entitlement approach to starvation
and famines concentrates on the ability of the people to command food
through the legal means available in the society including the use of production
possibilities, trade opportunities, entitlement vis-à-vis the state, and other
methods of acquiring food. Starvation is a result of entitlement failure or
deprivation, according to Amartya Sen. In the case of Bengal famine of
1943, Amartya Sen pointed out, the available food stocks were only 5 percent
below the average of preceding five years, and actually 13 percent above
1941. The inflationary pressure caused by excessive printing and circulation
of money on account of large expansion in public expenditure due to war
increased the purchasing power of trading and commercial classes who
fuelled the upward trend in rice price by hoarding and speculation. The
wages of agricultural labourers and other categories of rural workers did
not increase. As a result rice went beyond the reach of the purchasing
power of these classes causing entitlement failure and subsequent famine.
Urban area, especially Calcutta was largely insulated from rising food prices
by subsidized state distribution system despite limited power of industrial

39
workers and increased price of rice. Amartya Sen has argued that a serious
famine occurred in Bengal without any substantial shortfall in the production
of foodgrains. Any monocausal explanation of a complex social phenomena
is always inadequate. Amartya Sen is no exception. His analysis is purely
conjectural, based on short term evidence confined to five years. It does
not disprove the long-term historical tendency.
Amartya Sen has tried to explain famines in terms of entitlement
failure. But it should be noted that entitlement failure was a prevailing
condition during most of the famines. It was a symptom of the disease and
not the disease itself. One should go further and ask what led to entitlement
failure? Why market mechanism led to exchange deprivation only in colonial
societies and not in metropolis or industrialised societies? Why is it that all
the societies were equally liable to famines under pre-modern conditions,
while with the advent of industrial civilization some societies (ostensibly
industrial ones) became immune to famines, and others (mostly colonial
and agrarian) increasingly became liable to famines? All these questions
apparently do not concern Amartya Sen. Amartya Sen has also raised another
important question : who were the main victims of famines? Here, mainly
poorer strata of rural society are listed, including agricultural labourers,
artisans and craftsmen, fishermen, transport workers and paddy huskers.
This is not an original formulation. Even K.L. Datta and B.M. Bhatia had
noted that in modern famines poor alone were the victims while rich became
immune. But here again, Amartya Sen does not go further to ask who
victimized them? Which agencies were responsible for their social
deprivation? To Amartya Sen, entitlement depended upon economic
endowment, but there is no analysis of the forces that determined the
endowment of various social classes in a colonial mitieu. It is surprising
that Amartya Sen is silent on the crucial role played by the colonial state.
Except for the oblique references to the administrative inefficiency, there is
no serious discussion on the nature and policies of the colonial state. We
shall try to evaluate this in the last section of this paper.
The long-term historical evidence does not support Amartya Sen’s
contention. For instance, the origins of the Bengal famine of 1943 have
been traced to a century of decline in agriculture, a shift from an independent
prosperous farming to a subsistence share cropping economy by Paul R.
Greenough. By 1939, about 34.7 percent of Bengal agricultural population
comprised of sharecroppers and agricultural labourers, and tenant cultivators
accounted for 62 percent of households. The average per-capita consumption

40
of rice had declined from a minimum average of 797 gms. in 1862 to an
average maximum of 482 gms. during 1936-42. So, Bengal was already
living under the conditions of semi-starvation long before the famine of
1943. This does not give much credence to Amartya Sen’s thesis. Between
1830 and 1860, export of rice from Calcutta increased twenty fold reaching
2,80,000 tons annually. By the end of the 19th century, cheep grade Burmese
rice was imported in Bengal to feed the rural and urban poor while the
aromatic rice of fine quality was being exported abroad. By 1930, Bengal
had ceased to be a net exporter of rice and increasingly relied upon the
import of cheap Burmese rice to meet deficit in home market. According to
Saugata Mukherji, the Bengal cultivators were exporting superior rice and
using the cheap imported Burmese rice for home consumption between
1891 and 1938, an unfailing sign of impoverishment and immiserisation of
the colonial peasantry. The rice output was declining at the rate of 0.77
percent per annum during 1891-1947 according to George Blyn or at 0.3
percent per annum during 1920-46 according to the conservative estimates
of M.M. Islam. The decrease in per-capita output of foodgrain amounted to
about 38 percent during 1901-47. By 1930s about 15 million persons
comprising rural and urban wage labourers or about 25 percent population
of Bengal was dependent on the market for food grains. Any decline in
production or imports was bound to have disastrous effect on this segment
of population. George Blyn and Paul Greenough do not rule out the impact
of the immediate factors like dislocation caused by the Second World War,
cyclones and floods, and aberrant rice market during the famines. During
1943, nearly one-third of the crop was destroyed by floods and cyclones in
Bengal.109 Evidently, commercialization of agriculture was no immunity against
famines. As pointed out by Laxman Dass Satya, the cotton producing regions
of Central Provinces and Berar became victims of famines despite integration
in the world capitalist market.110 In 1874, Charles Blair had hinted that
cultivation of crops like opium and indigo in Malwa and Bangal created
conditions for famines in these regions. The reason was that this shift had
not brought any profits to the actual cultivators, the benefits were appropriated
either by the colonial state or intermediaries.
Whereas Nationalist writers highlighted the external drain of wealth
as main reason for impoverishment, according to Marxists and Radical
writers poverty and famines in colonies were result of both external and
internal exploitation. Marx himself considered exploitation of colonies as
inevitable part of the process of primitive accumulation of capital and famines

41
in colonies as inevitable consequence of colonial exploitation. The drain of
capital and resources from India to Britain had a crippling effect on the
Indian economy and consequently led to intense famines. In a letter to N.F.
Danielson, Marx had observed :
In India serious complications if not a general outbreak, are in store
for the British government. What the English take from them annually in
the form of rents, dividends for railways useless to Hindus ; pensions for
military and civil serviceman, for Afghanistan and other wars, etc, etc,–
what they take from them without any equivalent and quite apart from
what they appropriate to themselves annually within India,–speaking only
of the value of the commodities the Indians have gratuitously and annually
to send over to England – it amounts to more than the total sum of income
of the 60 millions of agricultural and industrial labourers of India! This is
a bleeding process with a vengeance! The famine years are pressing each
other and in dimensions till now not yet suspected in Europe!111

Contrary to the common conception, expansion of markets did not

signify increasing prosperity of the masses, Lenin clarified. The expansion
of market could, and historically did, occur alongwith increasing
impoverishment of the masses of people, and in fact, was premised upon
this process. Lenin also observed that markets were not to be understood
as places where goods were bought or sold as bourgeois economists
understood, but as social relations into which people entered for exchange
of labour power as embodied in the commodities or means of production.
As capitalism advanced, labourer was alienated from land and other means
of production and entered the market as seller of labour power to earn
wages for subsistence, and was compelled to exchange wages for means
of subsistence. So, network of exchanges continually went on expanding
alongside with expropriation of labour from land and other means of
production. Those expropriated from land and means of production appeared
as sellers of labour power to earn wages and then appeared as purchasers
of food and means of subsistence against the wages earned by sale of
labour power. So, there was no contradiction between expanding market
and growing impoverishment of masses. In fact, both processes occurred
simultaneously.112
With the advent of capitalism, modern agriculture was subjected to
novel pressures and forces. In all agrarian countries, whether colonial, semi-
colonial or independent, peasants were forced to sell their production in the
market under the increasing pressure of land taxes and debts. Their exports

42
of foodgrains and raw materials to European industrial countries continued
to increase even when indigenous peasantry was on the verge of starvation.
The increasing export of grain did not bring profits to farmers. It did not
imply that their barns were full but that their stomachs were empty. Karl
Kautsky cited the example of India and Russia towards the close of the 19th
century. Both followed similar historical trajectory and intense famines
became inevitable when they were integrated into the vortex of international
market economy as supplier of cheap foodgrain and raw material for
European markets. India with its recurrent famines was exporting twenty
to thirty million quintals of rice in 1900. In Russia, similar situation prevailed.
The peasants produced annually around 1387 million poods of grain. Their
own consumption requirement was 1286 million poods of rye plus 477
million poods of fodder. So, they had a deficit of 376 million poods which
they needed to buy from outside. Instead, they actually sold grain to pay
off state taxes and redemption dues. The Russian exports of grain to Western
Europe continued even during famines. Apparently, the construction of
railway network in the colonies was a simple, natural, democratic, cultural
and civilizing enterprise but as a matter of fact they were instruments of
oppression and exploitation reaching the deep hinterland and draining
resources, and creating conditions of widespread and intense famines by
depleting conventional reserves of foodgrains and fodder in the countryside.113
Rosa Luxemburg advanced a theory of the dynamic development
of capitalism. Whereas simple reproduction with a constant stock of capital
was possible within a closed home market, the extended reproduction with
capital accumulating created a chronic excess of potential supply of real
capital over the demand for it. Investment could take place in an ever
accumulating stock of capital only if the capitalists were assured of an
ever-expanding market for the goods which the capital would produce
otherwise the system would fall into chronic depression. But it had not
happened historically. Rosa Luxemburg asked why? What kept capital
accumulation going? Rosa Luxemburg argued that it was the invasion of
primitive economies by capitalism which kept the system alive. Historically,
capitalism required a province of non-capitalist sector in the form of colonies
for the process of accumulation, but not everyone of its form served its
purpose. Therefore, it struggled against natural economy and peasant
economy in colonial societies and sought to displace and substitute them
with commodity economy. The capitalist system by trade, conquest and
theft swallowed up the pre-capitalist economies and fed itself upon their

43
ruin.114 It was pointed out by later critics that theoretically capitalism could
realize its surplus and make profits within home economy, it invaded the
pre-capitalist sector to maximize the rate of profit. The historical essence
of Rosa Luxemburg’s argument has never been questioned and remains
essentially correct.
André Gunder Frank argued that the process of development in the
metropolis is interlinked with the process of underdevelopment in the
colonies. The development of capitalism in an underdeveloped country
retained and conserved pre-capitalist structure reflected in the profitability
of usury. A relationship of dependency develops between the colonial and
metropolitan countries which perpetuates structure of underdevelopment in
the colonies. The underdeveloped structure, according to Celso Furtado,
emerged as a dual economy, an unbalanced and unintegrated economy,
characterized by the co-existence of a dynamic ‘modern’ sector of
production, typically export-oriented, and a traditional sector of subsistence
agriculture inhibiting the development of an internal market. The basic
dynamic factor continued to be external demand.115 Within underdeveloped
countries, observed T. Dos Santos, we find a system of internal exploitation
linked to international system and as a consequence of that an internal market
was not created. He further noted that underdevelopment far from
constituting a state of backwardness prior to capitalism was rather a
consequence and a particular form of capitalist development known as
dependent capitalism. The process under consideration rather than being
one of satelization, as A.G. Frank believed, was the case of the formation of
a certain type of internal structure conditioned by international relationship
of dependence. Dependence can be considered as a conditioning situation
in which economies of one group of countries are conditioned by the
development and expansion of others. When some countries could expand
through self impulsion while others, being in a dependent position, could
only expand as a reflection of the expansion of the dominant countries.116
In the present day world, famines constitute a complex social
phenomena in which starvation is a biological manifestation of
underdevelopment, a process triggered by the evolutionary rhythm of human
history on a global scale shaped by unfolding of the processes inherent in
the development of capitalism. According to Josué de Castro, hunger is
rooted in social relations, in imperialist, colonial, neo-colonial or class
formation and has nothing to do with natural causes. In United States the
number of farms had decreased from 6.5 million in the mid-1930s to 2.9

44
million by mid-1970s. Most of these were “ghost” farms, 50 percent were
so marginal that they provided less than 13 percent of family income. At
the other end of the spectrum, 1,50,000 farms – 5 percent of the total –
accounted for 50 percent of sales. These large, more powerful and more
efficient farms constituted the core of U.S. agriculture. They were geared
to the market and relied upon the State planning and U.S. multinational
corporations for profit maximization. The world food market is controlled
by a small group of capitalist countries dominated by the United States. In
1973, the United States accounted for 44 percent of world wheat exports,
Canada for 17 percent, Australia for 9 percent, and France for 13 percent ;
a situation which could be described as monopolistic. A handful of
multinational corporations, most of them based in the United States control
export trade and agribusiness through operations like storage, transportation
and processing of grain, oilseeds, etc.117 During the world food crisis of
1972-74, the masses of people had starved in underdeveloped countries and
low-income classes of developed countries had suffered badly from increase
in food prices, while the United States and its agribusiness complexes were
the great beneficiaries of the crisis. The export of agricultural products
rose from $8 billion in 1972 to $21.3 billion in 1974. It is always to the
advantage of the multinational corporations to induce conditions of artificial
scarcities in the international market to maximize their profits, no matter
how the other half dies. Today three companies, Archer Daniels Midland,
Cargill, and Bunge control the world’s grain trade. Chemical giant Montsanto
controls three-fifth of seed production. Unsurprisingly, in the last quarter of
2007, even as the world’s food crisis was breaking, Archer Daniels Midland’s
profits jumped 20 percent, Montsanto 45 percent and Cargill 60 percent.118
The recent famines in Somalia, Zimbabwe, Rwanda and other Sub-
Saharan African countries were not so much the results of the vagaries of
drought and environmental degradation but the IMF-World Bank intervention
in the early 1980s, according to Michel Chossudovsky. The structural
adjustment programme reinforced their dependence on imported grain
destroying the indigenous pastoral economy and small farmers. Grain imports
for Sub-Saharan Africa expanded from 3.72 million tons in 1974 to 8.47
million tons in 1993. Food aid increased form 910,000 tons in 1974 to 6.64
million tons 1993. Food-aid went not to drought stricken countries but to
countries which were more or less self-sufficient in food. Zimbabwe, once
the bread basket of Southern Africa was severely affected by the famine
and drought which swept Southern Africa in 1992. The maize output declined

45
by 90 percent while at the height of drought tobacco produced a bumper
harvest. Much of the Zimbabwe’s tobacco exports were used to service
external debt. In Malawi, maize production declined by 40 percent while
tobacco output doubled between 1986 and 1993. The famines today are not
a consequence of scarcity of food but of a structure of global oversupply
which undermines food security and destroys national food agriculture.
The international agribusiness corporations regulate and control this
oversupply to systematically undermine and impoverish the position of
farmers throughout the world. The deprivation today is not a result of the
entitlement failure, but either a deliberately engineered policy of the structural
adjustment programme of the Bretton Woods institutions or monopoly of
the multinational agribusiness houses over the world food market.119 The
root cause of the problem is imperialism.

5. COLONIAL STATE POLICY.

We have noted earlier that Charles Blair argued that British policy
tried to mitigate famines and it was reflected in the increasing per-capita
expenditure on famine relief during the 19th century. This, in general, was
also the feeling of the British imperialist officials. Even among the current
writers like M.B. McAlpin and Sanjay Sharma, this assertion finds occasional
utterances. It should be noted at the very outset that the nature of the
colonial state was quite unlike the West European constitutional bourgeois
democratic states. The state in the colonial context was alien to civil society
and colonial law was essentially an imposition from the above. Within the
Marxist tradition, the concept of the capitalist state differ considerably among
various schools. The instrumentalists regarded state as an expression of the
interest of dominant social class or classes, that is, an instrument of
domination in the hands of ruling classes ; whereas structuralists believed
that the state played a decisive role in mediating social contradictions and
providing a factor of unity in a social formation ; still further, Frankfurt
School considered state as a mystification, that is, a concrete institution
which served the interests of the dominant class but sought to portray itself
as serving the nation as a whole thereby obscuring the basic lines of
antagonism.120 It should be stressed that in advanced capitalist societies
state had an organic link with the dominant class of society, and hence
mediation, or mystification was necessary. Under colonial conditions, such
mediations or mystifications were neither possible nor considered necessary.
Its legal forms were also essentially coercive in nature, or we may say that

46
coercion was given a legalized form.
The colonial state was governed by the interests of the dominant
class or federative of dominant classes in the imperialist countries. Under
imperialism, monopoly capital and state organisation were intricately
interlocked on a global scale.121 Colonial state was primarily an instrument
for extracting social surplus from colonies and for subordinating colonies
to the interests of imperialism.122 The historical moment of its inception
was a moment of political intervention (that is, war of conquest) in colonial
societies and an essential prelude or pre-condition for an intervention on a
much larger scale in the economy. The colonial state did not exist simply as
a politico-juridical organisation in a narrow sense whose functions were
limited to the safeguarding of public order and respect for the laws. The
so-called nightwatchman state with the free trade ideology of laissez-faire
laissez-aller has historically never existed except in theory as a limiting
hypothesis.123 The colonial state established a rule of law, no doubt, but it
was a law of the rulers. Colonial law was an instrument of domination of
imperialism over the colonies, and hence, essentially repressive in nature.
Colonial law could not serve an ideological function as it did under the
constitutional democratic states. It could mystify nothing mask nothing where
the state was outrightly coercive in nature. Deception was evidently difficult
under colonial rule. It could not impart legitimacy to an alien and repressive
imperialist state.
In Britain, the imperialist state followed laissez-faire lassez-aller and
free trade policy through most of the 19th century whose spokesman were
Adam Smith and his followers. According to this ideology, imposition of
state taxes on trade and industry will lead to decline in mercantile and industrial
profits, and consequently, retardation in economic activity and act as an
obstacle to primitive accumulation of capital and advance of industry. Hence,
state intervention in trade, industry and other economic activity was not
desirable. It was advisable that the state confined its domain to maintenance
of law and order. In Britain, this policy was followed in theory and practice.124
In the colonial context, it was not possible to maintain this stance. So, the
colonial state paid a lip service to this theory and often deviated from this
principle in practice. During famines, of course, this ideology was used as
an excuse against critics arguing that it was not desirable for the state to
interfere with market forces, which often aggravated the intensity of famines.
The real reason for not following this stance in practice was that colonial
India was destined to fulfill the needs of surplus extraction for British industry

47
and an active intervention of colonial state was crucial in this process.
British policy was not sui generis but determined by socio-economic and
historical conditions. What was good for Britain was not necessarily good
for India. Whereas industry was good for Britain, for India agriculture was
considered good. For India, argued Sir John Maynard Keynes, industry
was neither desirable nor possible. Whereas representative government was
good for Britain, a repressive and autocratic government was good for
Indians because Indians were not capable of a civilized order. Whereas
state intervention was not good in economic affairs for Britain, it was not
so bad for India, if colonial state intervened judiciously in the economy.
The colonial state intervened wherever it was to the British advantage,
it did not intervene whenever it was not to their advantage, a policy described
as discriminatory interventionism by S. Bhattacharya.125 India was conquered
at the cost of Indian resources and Indian people. It was like frying the fish
in the fish oil itself. The humor is bitter but true. It was the colonial state
intervention which created conditions for famines, as observed by Vaughan
Nash. The land revenue burden was increased and made rigid and inflexible
to facilitate the drain of social surplus. The increased burden of land revenue
strengthened usury which crystallized in the countryside by taking advantage
of the colonial laws and legal institutions. In order to meet heavy land
revenue obligations, cultivators were compelled to shift production from
conventional food grains to nonfood crops for international market like
opium, indigo, cotton, tobacco, tea, oilseeds, jute etc ; which met the colonial
requirement in two ways ; firstly, it ensured timely and smooth collection
of land revenue ; and secondly, it fulfilled the needs of cheap raw-material
for Britain or settled British negative balance of trade through the network
of multilateral exchanges. The colonial state was also instrumental in
encouraging import of manufactured goods from Britain and in creating
infrastructure like railroads, which apart from generating demand for British
capital goods industry and helping British industry, also expanded market
for British manufactured goods in India and made cheap transport of
foodgrains and raw-materials to Britain possible. The colonial state, apart
from facilitating the drain of wealth from India to Britain, was also the
biggest single buyer for military goods and capital goods from Britain on
behalf of India. To answer the question whether the British colonial state
mitigated or aggravated famines in India, it is not sufficient to take into
account the increasing per-capita expenditure on famines, it is necessary to
go beyond this narrow and myopic framework and to consider the

48
cumulative impact of the entire range of colonial policies on the Indian
society.
The colonial state policy for famine relief also proved grossly
inadequate and defective. The collection of land revenue was very strict
even during the famine years. Land revenue had to be paid, crops or no
crops. During the devastating famine of 1899-1900, a little more than 31
percent of land revenue demand was suspended. In Gujarat, the original
estimates of probable suspension submitted by the local officials amounted
to Rs. 35 lakh. They were cut down by the Government to Rs. 16.25
lakhs.126 in Bijapur district, where crops had failed entirely during 1896-97,
no revenue was remitted, and less than one-fifth of the demand was
suspended. The recovery of the 94 percent of the demand was regarded as
a striking proof of the general prosperity among the agricultural classes and
not of extreme oppression and cruelty of the state apparatus during the
famine.127 Amartya Sen complains of administrative inefficiency during
famines. But we find that the administration was exceptionally efficient in
the collection of land revenue, though it may have been inefficient in providing
relief to the famine victims. The land revenue system was arbitrary, oppressive
and empirical, and not enough allowance was made for erratic rainfall.
Even in the face of famine, government was determined to collect land
revenue from the starving ryots. Whereas in the Native States, there was
no talk of the land revenue in the years of extreme scarcity and the state
tried to help the cultivators in all possible ways ; in British territories violent
and oppressive means of recovery of land revenue were adopted during the
worst famines.128 A virtual reign of terror was established in the villages and
money was squeezed from the cultivators through assault, ill-treatment and
beating of ryots, attachment of houses or property, mortgage of land or
pledge of ornaments. In some case, assessment was paid from tagai loans.129
During 1889-98, which included several years of poor crops, average land
revenue collection in Poona district was 98.4 percent. It was a strange
irony that the Government took farmer’s last rupee with one hand and
offered him a job on the relief camps with the other.130
It was another strange irony that in the relief camps, most of the
famine victims were put on the task of stone breaking and road making
rather than construction of irrigation canals. It was a hard and unusual
work for the agriculturists, malnourishment and undernourishment during
the famines made it far worse. In Ahmednagar district where work on an
irrigation project was also on during 1900 famine, half the labour was

49
employed on stone-breaking. When India needed bread, it was better that
she should have received water than stones, but for one reason or another,
stones were more in official favour than water. The digging of irrigation
canals was superior to stone breaking as it involved unskilled and
comparatively light labour and protected against famines, though it might
have been exacting under summer conditions. Its functional utility for famine-
prone areas was much higher.131
The conditions at famine camps were very unsatisfactory. Prisons
were better than famine camps. A prison was far cooler a place than sites
of famine camps which were always exceedingly hot and unsheltered. The
work in the prison was light and daily ration was double that of a famine
minimum. In famine camps diet was poor and condition unhygienic. Further,
the wages in famine camps were calculated on hypothetical ration in money.
The wage system was not of piece work but task work with a low minimum
and maximum. The wages of the individual were determined by the out
turn of the gang. The gangs performing half the maximum task (which
was an imaginary standard) were to be paid 25 percent below the minimum
wages. At the famines camps engaged in stone breaking, surveyed by Vaughan
Nash, no gang had performed the required task, which implied that wage
of men and women were reduced to 7.5 annas from 10.5 annas, while
children received 4.5 annas. The penal wage policy tantamounted to
introducing starvation into the famine relief works, as the ration of wage
labourers engaged in famine camps originally fixed at 15 ounces per day
was reduced by one-quarter. This created condition for cholera and famine
diseases. People were unused to this sort of hardwork and stones were
difficult to crack, yet they were supposed to work 9 hours a day from
sunrise to sunset on stone breaking under the heat of Indian summer sun.
The famine relief works had a shortage of administrators, Engineers, Doctors,
Medical Assistant, material and even tools for workers. The principles of
the Famine Code were not followed in practice. The Code assured that huts
should be provided to all the famine workers. In Poona they were provided
in Ahmednagar they were not. Fuel was to be given free, but it was nowhere
the case. When the famine workers collected fuel from the government
forests, it was seized by the forest officials. In fact, fuel absorbed about
one-seventh of the weekly wages. There was a shortage of blankets
everywhere and people used threadbare kamblis often in shreds, if they
had. The wages were calculated on the assumed price of 16 lbs. of grain
per rupee ; in actual practice, workers at Poona received 14 lbs. per rupee,

50
or if on credit, which was usually the case, one or half lb. still less. The
Famine Code had stipulated that wages be paid twice a week, in actual
practice, the system of single weekly payment prevailed. Famine workers
were in the grip of Banya who took their wages and gave them what he
chose. The Code had also provided for relief in taxation but the collection
of land revenue went on steadily. The penal minimum ration was bound to
leave the workers hungry and reduced. As noted above, the famine workers
were getting less ration than convicts. The punishment for defaulting famine
workers was indiscriminate and severe. It was not the individual worker
but the entire gang of thirty or so which received the reduced wages. The
reduced ration made them unfit for work and opened door for attack of
famine diseases.132
The colonial state was irresponsive even to the mildest demands
from the society. For instance, a public meeting held at Bombay on 17th
October 1899 sent a petition to the Viceroy requesting adoption of certain
measures for the alleviation of famine distress. The suggestion included a
total prohibition on export of food and fodder from India, abolition of import
duties on food articles, reduction in railway freights on grain and fodder
within India, abolition of town and excise duties on the transit of grain in
India ; and further to prevent recurrence of famines, to establish agricultural
bank for providing financial assistance to poor agriculturists, to open canals
for irrigation and navigation throughout India, and to make permanent
settlement of land revenue. The state officials believed that interference
with ordinary operations of trade would be injudicious, the freight rates had
already been readjusted, the evils of speculative grain transaction were not
much and did not require Government interference, permanent settlement
was not necessary as suspension of land revenue were being given, that
feasibility of agricultural banks was being considered and irrigation works
were being extended. In short, state did not need to do anything beyond
what it had already done. The people at famine camps were being granted
an allowance which was neither more nor less than a refined form of
starvation. The Government was often too late in opening the relief works
and much too late in realizing that its deterrent policy was merely subsidising
death.133
6. PROBLEMS IN THE CONTEMPORARY CONTEXT.
Today, human civilization in confronted with an unfinished battle
against hunger. The problem is assuming an alarming and vicious dimension.
With integration in the international markets, the third world peasantry has

51
been subjected to unprecedented and unforeseen novel pressures. In 2006,
there were 854 million hungry people in the world, the economic downturn
in 2008 added about 40 million and in 2009 another 100 million. The number
of people on the verge of starvation in 2008 was about 915 million, in 2009
it reached 1.02 billion, by 2010 it touched 1.2 billion. That means, nearly
one-sixth of the humanity is in the grip of hunger and starvation today.134
The highest number of hungry people are in Asia-Pacific, about 642 million.
In Sub–Saharan Africa there are 265 million or 32 percent of the regional
population. In 1984 famine, about one million people perished in Ethiopia.
In 1992-1994 famines, about 20 million people were affected in 10 Sub-
Saharan African countries. In Ethiopia 6.9 million were affected, in Rwanda
and Zaire 4.0 million, in Sudan 4.9 million in Burundi 1.7 million, in Eritrea
1.5 million, in Kenya 1.4 million.135 During 2008 about 15 million were on
the verge of starvation in Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Kenya and Uganda.136
During 2009, about 23 million with threatened by famine in Sub-Saharan
Africa.137 It is not that population growth is outstripping food supply. There
is more than enough food in the world to feed everyone—at least 1.5 times
current demand. Over the last 20 years, food production has risen steadily
at over 2 percent a year, while the rate of population growth has dropped to
1.14 percent a year. Yet the number of hungry people is increasing. There
is food on the shelves but people are priced out of the market. As of March
2008, average world wheat prices were 130 percent above their level a year
earlier, soya prices were 87 percent higher, rice had climbed 74 percent,
and maize was up 31 percent.138 About 80 percent of the world production
is consumed by the wealthiest 20 percent of the world. While about nine
million people worldwide die each year due to hunger and malnutrition, in
U.S.A. about 40 to 50 percent of the harvest is never eaten, households
waste 14 percent of food. In Sweden, families throw away 25 percent of
the food they buy. In Britain, 30 to 40 percent food is never eaten ; about
15 percent of the food is thrown in the dustbin. The root cause of hunger
and mass poverty is inequality in the distribution of resources.139 During
1969 to 1994, the share of the richest 20 percent population in the world
resources increased from 69 percent to 86 percent, while the share of the
poorest 20 percent of the population declined during the same period from
2.3 percent to 1.1 percent. 140 In 2005, the wealthiest 20 percent of the
world population accounted for 76.6 percent of total private consumption,
the poorest 20 percent for 1.5 percent. Since the industrial revolution, the
income disparities between the richest and the poorest countries have widened

52
continuously. In 1820, income disparities were in the ratio of 3 to 1 ; by
1913, the ratio was 11 to 1, by 1950 it was 35 to 1, by 1973 it was 44 to
1 ; and by 1992 it has reached 72 to 1.141 So, the enormous concentration
of wealth goes on side by side with the increasing poverty of the masses.
The prosperity of the few that is premised upon the poverty of the masses
cannot be stable, safe and secure. And hence the crisis of the recurrent
famines, and the Great Depression of 1929 and the credit crisis of 2008.
These are inter-related and inter-dependant phenomena.
With the increasing dependence on international markets the
peasantry in India and Third World countries has become dependent to
external credit for production. The debt trap threatens to become death trap
with increasing number of farmers committing distress suicides in the
prosperous regions of Maharashtra, Punjab, Andhra and elsewhere.142 During
1997 to 2008 about 2 lakh farmers committed suicide in India.143 The essence
of the crisis is same everywhere. Under capitalism, production is for the
market and for maximization of profits. When profitability becomes zero or
negative, production, investment and trade comes to a standstill and crisis
begin. This was the reason behind the collapse of the credit institutions in
United States in 2008. The same root cause leads to distress suicides of
farmers across India. With nearly 10 lakh farmers, Punjab had per-capita
debt of Rs. 42 thousand compared to the national average of Rs. 15 thousand.
On March 31, 2004, Punjab farmers owed Rs. 25,400 crore. 144 In
Maharashtra, the Government had to declare a loan waiver of of Rs. 17
thousand crores after increasing distress suicides in cotton belt. (Table VIII)

Table VIII : Distress Suicides by Farmers in Maharashtra 1999-2006

Year No. of Distress Suicides

1999 36
2000 46
2001 54
2002 102
2003 156
2004 324
2005 412
2006 1050
Source : Times of India, January 30, 2007, p.1

53
 In Punjab, government offered Rs. 2 lakh as compensation to the
families of farmers who committed suicide. The move was ridiculed
contemptuously by the press as an incentive to commit suicide. On an
average, a small or marginal farmer in India was operating at a loss of Rs.
8,000 per annum. He was accumulating an average debt of Rs. 12000 per
annum. These marginal farmers constituted 88 percent of the whole farming
community. About 40 percent farmers wanted to quit farming for other
avenues and 26 percent said that farming was an unprofitable venture. These
were the results of the National Sample Surveys conducted by the
Government of India in 2003.145 The grim pictures of deprivation were
published in newspapers from Ganne village, about 45 km. east of Allahabad
in U.P. where children suffering from malnourishment learnt to eat mud.146
The enormity of the problem is baffling. It is also frightening. But
it is not insoluble. It is an immense task before all the integral intellectuals
to acknowledge and analyse the problem. The Keynesian and neo-Keynesian
paradigm or prescription will not suffice. The world in 2008 or 2011 is not
the same as 1929. The historical conditions have changed, nature of problem
has also undergone sea change, and new analytical tools and new remedial
measures are urgently called for.

✪✪✪

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am extremely grateful to the following for the kind help extended by them :
ANAND SINGH, UNIVERSITY OF DELHI (RAMJAS COLLEGE).
SHAMS TABREJ, UNIVERSITY OF DELHI (ZAKIR HUSSAIN COLLEGE)
VIJAY KUMAR THANGEPALLI, UNIVERSITY OF ERITREA.
LAXMAN DASS SATYA, LOCKHAVEN UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA.
RUSEED WADIA, AN EMINENT HISTORIAN, BOMBAY.
SHRI KRISHAN, NEHRU MEMORIAL MUSEUM AND LIBRARY.
SABYASACHI BHATTACHARYA, INDIAN COUNCIL OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH.

The University Grants Commission, New Delhi extended the travel grant and
other financial assistance to attend the conference. However, none of the above is in any
way responsible for the opinion expressed herein or hereafter.

54
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58
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119. Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalisation of Poverty : Impacts of IMF and World
Bank Reforms, London, 1997, pp.101-122.

60
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131. Ibid., pp.36-42.
132. Ibid., 18-21, 28-35, 51-61, 166.
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135. Times of India, 23 Aug. 1994.
136. CNN, 24 July, 2008 ; Newsvine.com, Aug 23,2008.
137. BBC, October 22 2009.
138. Eric Holt-Giménez and Loren Peabody, From Food Rebellions to Food Sovereignty :
Urgent call to fix a Broken Food System, Institute for Food and Development
Policy, May 16, 2008.
139. Anup Shah, “Causes of Hunger are Related to Poverty”, in Global Issues, Oct 3,
2010.
140. Michel Beaud, A History of Capitalism : 1500-2000, New Delhi Reprint 2004,
pp.277-283.

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141. Human Development Report, UNDP, 1999.
142. Meeta and Rajiv Lochan, Farmers Suicide, Pune, 2006.
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