1876-1878 Famine in India

1876-1878 Famine in India describes a massive famine that hit British controlled India in from about 1876 to 1878. The famine initially struck the Deccan Plateau, which makes up "the entire southern peninsula of India south of the Narmada River." This area, with an average elevation of 2000 ft (600m) above sea level, is drier than the coasts. It includes the modern Indian states of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu. The famine later hit a northern interior part of India that included modern day Uttar Pradesh, Rājasthān, Haryana and some of Madhya Pradesh. The official British estimate of the death toll was 5.5 million deaths, a number that is "undoubtedly too low." A later estimate in a 1984 study found that at least 7.1 million died in India, but even that study excluded the famine's "mortality shadow" that occurred as deaths continued even after the droughts ended in 1878-79.

Seasons of India

To understand the impact of changes in the climate at the time of the famine, it is essential to understand how the climate usually functions on India. Most important to the climate is the monsoon:

"The climate of India is dominated by the great wind system known as the Asiatic monsoon. This is completely unlike the prevailing wind system that operates in many countries, i.e., a wind that prevails from the same direction throughout the year. The monsoon reverses direction at certain times of the year. For some months it will blow steadily from the southwest; for other months, from the northeast."

From December to February (Winter), India experiences its coolest, driest weather. "Summer" occurs from March until May, when weather is still dry but becomes hot. Then, in June, the wind blows from the southwest, bringing the monsoon. The monsoon season lasts from June to September:

"On average, the arrival of the rains - the 'burst of the monsoon', as it is called - comes to the south of India during late May or early June. It will reach the north about six weeks later. In some years, the rains will be torrential; in other years they may be light or locally variable, in which case the monsoon will be said to have 'failed'."

Last, is the post-monsoon season, from October to December, when the wind blows from the northeast. While the rainfall is completely gone from much of India, this is when Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Kerala receive rain.

Indian Agricultural Seasons

In Indian agriculture, two crops are sown each year. The first, known as kharif crops, are grown during the monsoon season. The second, planted around November, grown during the winter, and harvested in spring, are called rabi crops.

Timeline of the Famine

1876: Failed Monsoon

The monsoon had failed in 1876 in much of central and southern India. Without "the timely arrival of generous winter rains" the area faced a famine. Peasants tried to hang on by eating roots, but without the ability to grow more food, they would not be able to survive.

British Famine Relief

The British responded to the situation with minimal famine relief. "The famine campaign in Lytton's conception was a semi-military demonstration of Britain's necessary guardianship over a people unable to help themselves." Heavy labor was required for those who sought relief, and relief consisted of fewer calories than were provided to inmates of Nazi concentration camps. Those who were incapable of heavy labor fled to Hyderabad, and many died on the way.

Early 1877: Peasants Lose Their Means of Production

As winter is commonly dry in India, so was the winter of 1877. Peasants "in district after district sold their "bullocks, field implements, the thatch of the roofs, the frames of their doors and windows" to survive the terrible first year of the drought. Without essential means of production, however, they were unable to take advantage of the little rain that fell in April-May 1877 to sow emergency crops of rape and cumboo. As a result they died in their myriads in August and September."

Late 1877: A Second Failed Monsoon

In the second half of 1877, the monsoon failed again for a second year. During this period, grain prices doubled. Coupled with the British "famine relief," this was deadly. Additionally, cholera broke out. Ironically, jails were some of the safest places to ride out the famine.

Late 1877: The Famine Heads North

In 1877, the monsoon failed in the north of India too. "The North-West Provinces, the Punjab, Rájputána, and the Central Provinces alike suffered from drought through all the summer of 1877, and from its consequences well into the following year." "Even more than in the south, however, drought was consciously made into famine by the decisions taken in palaces of rajas and viceroys." Those who could bought up grain to sell at high prices.

In the North Western Provinces and Oud, "as well as adjoining districts of the Punjab, where famine killed at least 1.25 million people in 1878-79," famine and death occurred for fairly obvious reasons.

"In contrast to the south, the northern harvests were abundant in 1974-76 and ordinarily would have provided ample reserves to deal with the kharif deficit in 1878. But subsistence farming in many parts of the North Western Provinces had been recently converted into a captive export sector to stabilize British grain prices. Poor harvests and high prices in England during 1876-77 generated a demand that absorbed most of the region's wheat surplus. Likewise, most of the provinces' cruder grain stocks like millet were commercially exported to the famine districts in Bombay and Madras Presidencies, leaving local peasants with no hedge against drought. The profits from grain exports, meanwhile, were pocketed by richer zaminders, moneylenders and grain merchants - not the direct producers."

June 1878: Normal Monsoons Return

At last, in 1878, the monsoon returned on schedule, in June. Still, India was not back to normal.

"Much of the seed grain distributed by relief committees was bad, while that which sprouted and pushed its way above the ground was instantly devoured by great plagues of locusts."

Another problem was that so many people had sold off their assets (cattle and, most importantly, their land) during the famine. Those who didn't do so in order to eat often had to do so in order to pay their taxes. "The resulting auction of lands in arrears may have been a windfall for rich peasants and moneylenders, who had already profited from famine-induced sacrifice sales of cattle and land mortgages, but it crippled the recovery of an agrarian economy that traditionally depended on the energy of (now ruined) smallholders to bring cultivable wastes under plough."

Causes

"As the old-hands at Fort St. George undoubtedly realized, the semi-arid interior of India was primed for disaster. The worsening depression in world trade had been spreading misery and igniting discontent through the cotton-exporting districts of the Deccan, where in any case forest enclosures and the displacement of gram by cotton had greatly reduced local food security. The traditional system of household and village grain reserves regulated by complex networks of patrimonial obligation had been largely supplanted since the Mutiny by merchant inventories and the cash nexus. Although rice and wheat production in the rest of India (which now included bonanzas of course rice from the recently conquered Irrawaddy delta) had been above average for the past three years, much of the surplus had been exported to England. Londoners were in effect eating India's bread."

As food hoarding occurred, prices rose. "Moreover, British antipathy to price control invited anyone who had the money to join in the frenzy of grain speculation." Thus, even where food was available, it was not affordable to "outcaste laborers, displaced weavers, sharecroppers and poor peasants."

In addition to hoarding, and other factors mentioned above (displacement of food crops by cotton, use of railroads to remove food from areas where it was scarce, and export of previous surpluses), contributing factors include crushing taxes imposed on Indians by the British and the "depreciation of the rupee due to the new international Gold Standard (which India had not adopted), which steeply raised the cost of imports." The British, represented in India at this time by Lord Lytton as Viceroy, operated under a laissez-faire capitalist orthodoxy, preferring to put their faith in the power of the unfettered free market over their interest in saving Indian lives.

Role of the Railroads

"The newly constructed railroads, lauded as institutional safeguards against famine, were instead used by merchants to ship grain inventories from outlying drought-stricken districts to central depots for hoarding (as well as protection from rioters)."

After the famine, the 1878-80 Famine Commission found that areas with railroads fared worse than areas without them during the famine.

British Taxes Imposed on India

During this time, the British hoped to finance their war efforts in central Asia through taxes paid by Indians. The simultaneous depreciation of the rupee made this more difficult, as it required collecting even more money in taxes. The "militarized campaign to collect the tax" during the height of the famine added much insult to injury in India. One "typical example of a village in the late nineteenth-century Bombay Deccan" is "where the government collected nearly 19,000 rupees annually in taxes but returned only 2,000 rupees in expenditure, largely on official salaries and a rundown school."

Enclosures

In traditional Indian villages, peasants used the common lands to collect items needed to get by: "dry grass for fodder, shrub grass for rope, wood and dung for fuel, dung, leaves, and forest debris for fertilizer, clay for plastering houses, and, above all, clean water." While all classes used these resources, for the poor they made up the difference between life and death. However, under British rule, common lands became property of the state. "Common lands - or "waste" in the symptomatic vocabulary of the Raj - were either transformed into taxable private property or state monopolies." And thus, the free resources on these lands were no longer free.

Forests

"Until 1870 all forests (20 percent of India's land area) had been communally managed; by the end of the decade they were completely encosed by armed agents of the state. For plough agriculturalists the forests were not only essential for wood, but also for leaf manure and grass and leaf fodder."

The British interest in the forests was ensuring a continual supply of wood, both for fuel and for building railroads.

Grasslands

After 1857, the British "pursued a relentless campaign" against nomads and shifting cultivators.

"Although the agroecology of the Deccan for centuries had been dependent on the symbiosis of the peasant and nomad, valley agriculture and hill-slope pastoralism, the colonial state's voracious appetite for new revenue generated irresistable pressure on the ryots [peasants] to convert "waste" into taxable agriculture. Punitive grazing taxes (which tripled between 1870 and 1920) drove pastoralists off the land, while cultivators were lured into the pastoral margins with special leases, even patelships."

The expansion of cropland and the decrease in cattle undid the old Deccan tradition of "extensive crop rotation and long fallow" with heavy use of manure as fertilizer. As the number of cows per acre of cropland declined between 1850 and 1930, it became impossible to maintain the soil fertility of the amount of land under cultivation. In one estimate, cattle numbers fell by 5 million between 1843 and 1873. The famine killed off even more cows, and by 1986-97, in some areas women pulled plows instead of oxen.

As this occurred, export crops and non-food crops such as cotton displaced food crops. Areas converted from pasture could typically produce only one-third as much millet as the richer valley soils. With their overuse for crop cultivation, the poorer soils became useless for even grazing. "By the end of the colonial period, no less than 38 percent of the soil in the Deccan was estimated to be "highly eroded.""

Water

No less important was the British notion of water rights, which went hand in hand with private property. When a person owned land in British India, that person also owned the rights to the water on it. Prior to the British occupation, water in India had been communally managed. The new, British system led to the collapse of traditional water management structures.

Grain Exports to England

Even at the height of the famine, "Grain merchants, in fact, preferred to export a record 6.4 million cwt. [640 million pounds] of wheat to Europe in 1877-1878 rather than relieve starvation in India."

In the period leading up to the famine and even at the beginning of the famine, while the south of India was already experiencing crop failures, northern harvests were "abundant." However, the surplus wheat was not stored in case of future need; it was exported to England, which experienced a poor harvest and paid high prices for grain in 1876-1877. Nor were the growers of that wheat made rich from crop sales; the profits went to grain merchants, zaminders, and moneylenders. Crops grown for domestic consumption, such as millet, were not stored in the north either, as they were sold to the south. Thus, when the monsoons failed in north India after the famine in the Deccan was already well underway, north India had no grain stores to help it get by.

One region that grew wheat was the Central Provinces' Narmada Valley in modern day Madhya Pradesh. The "famous wheat boom" of 1861 to 1890 "was in reality subsidized by destructive soil mining and crushing household debt."

"The soaring export demand of the 1880s had been accommodated by the expansion of cultivation into areas of inferior soil, traditionally devoted to hardier millets, where harvests where strictly dependent on the unusual cycle of good monsoons from 1884 to 1894. Moreover, commercialization was accompanied by ecological crisis as the railroad ravaged the forests of the Satpuras for lumber, and commercial wheat acreage absorbed pasture lands that traditionally fed Narmada's cattle."

Global Trade in Cotton

A few major changes in the cotton trade occurred not long before the famine of 1877. During the years of the American Civil War, 1861-1865, U.S. cotton production and export was interrupted. Needing a continued supply to fuel its industrial revolution, the British "orchestrated the conversion of vast acreages of subsistence agriculture to cotton production." In 1860, the U.S. supplied 80 percent of raw cotton imported to the UK; India, only 15 percent. By 1865, that number shifted to 19 percent from the U.S. and 50 percent from India. But another five years shifted the balance once again, with the U.S. providing 54 percent of UK raw cotton imports in 19870, and only 25 percent coming from India. Following the end of the Civil War, "the boom had collapsed with the return of Southern cotton exports, stranding hundreds of thousands of small cultivators in poverty and debt." Whereas the average price of cotton in Britain was 15 old pence per pound between 1860-69, it was a mere 8 old pence per pound on average in the following decade.

One area facing famine in 1877 India was the Deccan, which had replaced much of its cultivation of traditional Indian pulses with cotton. Davis describes one area, Bellary, with a very dry climate. To produce enough food (in millet, which is drought tolerant) and pay taxes, a family needed 15-20 acres of land. However, in the 1870s, peasant families "were lucky to farm 7 acres." Before the British came, the peasants there supplemented their food by raising livestock and seasonal soldiering. With the British, serving as a mercenary was no longer an option, and the expansion of commercial agriculture removed the formerly available pasturelands. Instead of growing food, peasants grew and sold cotton in order to buy millet. Despite the declining cotton prices, cotton responds more to increased labor than millet. That is, the family could strive to make enough money to eat by growing cotton and working extremely hard. With millet, hard work would not increase production so significantly. As small farmers took up cotton (and went into debt to do so to do so), large landholders (who had grown cotton previously) found it more profitable to become money lenders and grain merchants.

In the Deccan, cotton often displaced legume crops, which contribute to soil fertility by fixing nitrogen. Cotton, on the other hand, is "notorious all over the world for its rapid depletion of soil nutrients and insatiable demand for virgin soil." Peasants switched to cotton out of their short term need for money, often due to debt, but sacrificed long term soil fertility in the process.

Cotton Cultivation in Berar

The following refers to Berar, which is the modern day Amravati Division in Maharashtra state, and Nagpore, which is now the third largest city in Maharashtra:

"Pried away from Hyderabad in 1853, the Marathi province of Berar, together with the adjoining district of Nagpore, had been selected by the Cotton Supply Association - an arm of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce - as platforms for specialized cotton monoculture."

"In the case of Berar, the Association encouraged the dismantling of the balutedari system through which dominant local clans or castes had exercised managerial control over a complex network of social production including communal irrigation and cotton weaving. The essence of the old order was that the upper castes had claims on agricultural produce but did not own the land itself. After purging "disloyal" leading families, the British spent seventeen years (1861-77) reorganizing the vast peasant universe of Berar (7000 villages and 10.5 million acres of cultivable land) into the so-called khatedari system... In reality the government became the supreme landlord with peasant tenure... strictly conditional upon punctual payment of revenue.

"The complicated reciprocities of the old balutedari system, Satya explains, gave way to brutal and unilateral relations of exploitation. Diversity and mobility = "the characteristic feature[s] of precolonial Berar" - were replaced by coercive "standardization and sedentarization." The collection of taxes as well as the local marketing of the cotton crop ended up in the hand of the moneylender/grain merchants who became the crucial intermediaries controlling almost all transactions between the village world, Calcutta and Manchester. Meanwhile punitive taxes on local woven goods and a flood of cheap English imports in the wake of the arrival of the Great India Peninsular Railway destroyed domestic manufacture and forced ruined artisans into the fields as propertyless laborers.

"Although massive sums of capital were sunk into the Association's export infrastructure, including railroad spurs, cotton yards, and metalled feeder roads, none of it percolated to the village level where degraded sanitary conditions, especially the contamination of drinking water by human waste, spread cholera and gastrointestinal disease as well as tuberculosis. Similarly, local food security was eroded by the advance not only of cotton production (which doubled its acreage in the last quarter of the century) but of grain exports as well. During the famine of 1899-1900, when 143,000 Berars died directly from starvation, the province exported not only tens of thousands of bales of cotton but an incredible 747,000 bushels of grain.

"Berar was not unique. Food security was also sacrificed to cotton export throughout the Deccan.

Other Non-Edible Cash Crops

Other non-edible cash crops which mostly did not play into this famine but did impact later famines include opium (grown in Bengal) and indigo (grown in Bihar). This was unique in that the peasants in the state of Bihar were forcibly coerced to grow indigo. "As an official report later corroborated, the 220,000 acres under indigo - a net loss of 150,000 acres of grain - in north Bihar represented the margin between survival and famine in a bad year." In Bengal, the 1878 poppy crop failed, which "nonetheless brought famine to many doorsteps."

Displacement of Indian Weavers by British Imports

"During the early modern period, India was the world’s main producer of cotton textiles, with a substantial export trade. Indian textiles were exported to Britain on a large scale from the seventeenth century."

Whereas cloth made for the local market was made all over India, "Fine cloth was produced for interregional and international markets, mainly in the four regions of Gujarat, the Punjab, the Coromandel Coast and Bengal." Once Britain began exporting industrially produced textiles around the world, they were able to compete with Indian textiles everywhere except in India. The average price (adjusted for inflation) of calico fabric in the UK fell by a factor of five between 1780-84 and 1825-29. That for muslin fell by a factor of 3.5 over the same period. Near the beginning of that period, between 1790 and 1799, India exported 4,500,000 pieces per year of cotton textiles. Just after that period, in the decade from 1830 to 1839, India only exported 3,000,000 pieces of cotton textiles per year. The decrease is almost entirely accounted for in the loss of India's access to the British domestic market: whereas India exported 2.2 million pieces of cotton textiles to Britain per year on average in the 1790s, by the 1830s, they only exported 271,000 pieces per year to Britain.

In the Indian market, due to the lack of transport costs, Indians still held the advantage even after Britain began producing and exporting cheaper textiles. In the years 1831-35, British imports made up just 3.9% of the Indian market. That increased to 35.3% by 1856-60. The Suez Canal opened in November of 1869, creating a faster (cheaper) route between India and England. By 1880-81, 58.4% of India's textile market was taken up by British exports.

British Use of Famine Victims as Cheap Labor

During the famine, the British took advantage of the starvation by recruiting "huge armies of indentured coolies - over 480,000 from Madras alone between 1876 and 1879 - for semi-slave labor under brutal conditions on British plantations in Ceylon, Mauritius, Guyana and Natal [South Africa]."

Articles and resources

Related SourceWatch articles

• Early Agriculture in India
• Famines in India
• Agriculture in India