From the New York Times archive, an extended excerpt from the book by Mike Davis used as the introduction to the review by Nobel Laureate (economics) Amartya Sen, February 18, 2001:
"Here's the northeast monsoon at last,"
said Hon. Robert Ellis, C.B., junior member of the Governor's Council,
Madras, as a heavy shower of rain fell at Coonoor, on a day towards the
end of October 1876, when the members of the Madras
Government were returning from their
summer sojourn on the hills.
"I am afraid that is not the monsoon," said the gentleman to whom the remark was made.
"Not the monsoon?" rejoined Mr.
Ellis. "Good God! It must be the monsoon. If it is not, and if the
monsoon does not come, there will be an awful famine."
The British rulers of Madras had every
reason to be apprehensive. The life-giving southwest monsoon had already
failed much of southern and central India the previous summer. The
Madras Observatory would record only 6.3 inches of precipitation for all
of 1876 in contrast to the annual
average of 27.6 inches during the previous decade. The fate of millions
now hung on the timely arrival of generous winter rains. Despite Ellis's
warning, the governor of Madras, Richard
Grenville, the Duke of Buckingham and
Chandos, who was a greenhorn to India and its discontents, sailed away
on a leisurely tour of the Andaman Islands, Burma and Ceylon. When he
finally reached Colombo, he found urgent
cables detailing the grain riots
sweeping the so-called Ceded Districts of Kurnool, Cuddapah and Bellary
in the wake of another monsoon failure. Popular outbursts against
impossibly high prices were likewise occurring in
the Deccan districts of the neighboring
Bombay Presidency, especially in Ahmednagar and Sholapur. Having tried
to survive on roots while awaiting the rains, multitudes of peasants and
laborers were now on the move, fleeing
a slowly dying countryside.
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
throughout 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 coarse 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. "It seems an anomaly," wrote a
troubled observer, "that, with her famines on hand, India is able to
supply food for other parts of the world."
There were other "anomalies." 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). Likewise the telegraph ensured
that price hikes were coordinated in a thousand towns at once,
regardless of local supply trends. Moreover, British
antipathy to price control invited
anyone who had the money to join in the frenzy of grain speculation.
"Besides regular traders," a British official reported from Meerut in
late 1876, "men of all sorts embarked
in it who had or could raise any
capital; jewelers and cloth dealers pledging their stocks, even their
wives' jewels, to engage in business and import grain." Buckingham, not a
free-trade fundamentalist, was appalled
by the speed with which modern markets
accelerated rather than relieved the famine:
The rise [of prices] was so
extraordinary, and the available supply, as compared with well-known
requirements, so scanty that merchants and dealers, hopeful of enormous
future gains, appeared determined to hold their stocks for some
indefinite time and
not to part with the article which was
becoming of such unwonted value. It was apparent to the Government that
facilities for moving grain by the rail were rapidly raising prices
everywhere, and that the activity of apparent
importation and railway transit, did not
indicate any addition to the food stocks of the Presidency ... retail
trade up-country was almost at standstill. Either prices were asked
which were beyond the means of the multitude
to pay, or shops remained entirely
closed.
As a result, food prices soared out
of the reach of outcaste labourers, displaced weavers, sharecroppers and
poor peasants. "The dearth," as The Nineteenth Century pointed
out a few months
later, "was one of money and of labour
rather than of food." The earlier optimism of mid-Victorian observers —
Karl Marx as well as Lord Salisbury — about the velocity of economic
transformation
in India, especially the railroad
revolution, had failed to adequately discount for the fiscal impact of
such "modernization." The taxes that financed the railroads had also
crushed the ryots. Their inability
to purchase subsistence was further
compounded by the depreciation of the rupee due to the new international
Gold Standard (which India had not adopted), which steeply raised the
cost of imports. Thanks to the price explosion,
the poor began to starve to death even
in well-watered districts like Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu, "reputed to be
immune to food shortages." Sepoys meanwhile encountered increasing
difficulty in enforcing order in
the panic-stricken bazaars and villages
as famine engulfed the vast Deccan plateau. Roadblocks were hastily
established to stem the flood of stick-thin country people into Bombay
and Poona, while in Madras the police forcibly
expelled some 25,000 famine refugees.
India's Nero
The central government under the leadership of Queen Victoria's favorite poet, Lord Lytton, vehemently opposed efforts by Buckingham and some of his district officers to stockpile grain or otherwise interfere with market forces. All through the autumn of 1876, while the vital kharif crop was withering in the fields of southern India, Lytton had been absorbed in organizing the immense Imperial Assemblage in Delhi to proclaim Victoria Empress of India (Kaiser-i-Hind). As The Times's special correspondent described it, "The Viceroy seemed to have made the tales of Arabian fiction true ... nothing was too rich, nothing too costly." "Lytton put on a spectacle," adds a biographer of Lord Salisbury (the secretary of state for India), "which achieved the two criteria Salisbury had set him six months earlier, of being `gaudy enough to impress the orientals' ... and furthermore a pageant which hid `the nakedness of the sword on which we really rely.'" Its "climacteric ceremonial" included a week-long feast for 68,000 officials, satraps and maharajas: the most colossal and expensive meal in world history. An English journalist later estimated that 100,000 of the Queen-Empress's subjects starved to death in Madras and Mysore in the course of Lytton's spectacular durbar. Indians in future generations justifiably would remember him as their Nero. Following this triumph, the viceroy
seemed to regard the growing famine as a tiresome distraction from the
Great Game of preempting Russia in Central Asia by fomenting war with
the blameless Sher Ali, the
Emir of Afghanistan. Lytton, according
to Salisbury, was "burning with anxiety to distinguish himself in a
great war." Serendipitously for him, the Czar was on a collision course
with Turkey in the Balkans, and
Disraeli and Salisbury were eager to
show the Union Jack on the Khyber Pass. Lytton's warrant, as he was
constantly reminded by his chief budgetary adviser, Sir John Strachey,
was to ensure that Indian, not English,
taxpayers paid the costs of what Radical
critics later denounced as "a war of deliberately planned aggression."
The depreciation of the rupee made strict parsimony in the non-military
budget even more urgent.
The 44-year-old Lytton, the former
minister to Lisbon, had replaced the Earl of Northbrook after the latter
had honorably refused to acquiesce in Disraeli's machiavellian
"forward" policy on
the northwest frontier. He was a strange
and troubling choice (actually, only fourth on Salisbury's short list)
to exercise paramount authority over a starving subcontinent of 250
million people. A writer, seemingly
admired only by Victoria, who wrote
"vast, stale poems" and ponderous novels under the nom de plume of Owen Meredith, he had been accused of plagiarism by both Swinburne and his own father, Bulwer-Lytton
(author of The
Last Days of Pompeii). Moreover, it was widely suspected that the
new viceroy's judgement was addled by opium and incipient insanity.
Since a nervous breakdown in 1868, Lytton had repeatedly exhibited wild
swings between megalomania and self-lacerating
despair.
Although his possible psychosis
("Lytton's mind tends violently to exaggeration" complained Salisbury to
Disraeli) was allowed free rein over famine policy, it became a cabinet
scandal after
he denounced his own government in
October 1877 for "allegedly attempting to create an Anglo-Franco-Russian
coalition against Germany." As one of Salisbury's biographers has
emphasized, this was "about
as absurd a contention as it was
possible to make at the time, even from the distance of Simla," and it
produced an explosion inside Whitehall. "Salisbury explained the
Viceroy's ravings by admitting that
he was `a little mad'. It was known that
both Lytton and his father had used opium, and when Derby read the
`inconceivable' memorandum, he concluded that Lytton was dangerous and
should resign: `When a man inherits
insanity from one parent, and limitless
conceit from the other, he has a ready-made excuse for almost any
extravagance which he may commit.'"
But in adopting a strict
laissez-faire approach to famine, Lytton, demented or not, could claim
to be extravagance's greatest enemy. He clearly conceived himself to be
standing on the shoulders of giants,
or, at least, the sacerdotal authority
of Adam Smith, who a century earlier in The Wealth of Nations had asserted (vis-à-vis
the terrible Bengal drought-famine of 1770) that "famine has never
arisen
from any other cause but the violence of
government attempting, by improper means, to remedy the inconvenience
of dearth." Smith's injunction against state attempts to regulate the
price of grain during famine
had been taught for years in the East
India Company's famous college at Haileybury. Thus the viceroy was only
repeating orthodox curriculum when he lectured Buckingham that high
prices, by stimulating imports and limiting
consumption, were the "natural saviours
of the situation." He issued strict, "semi-theological" orders that
"there is to be no interference of any kind on the part of Government
with the object
of reducing the price of food," and "in
his letters home to the India Office and to politicians of both parties,
he denounced `humanitarian hysterics'." "Let the British public foot
the bill for
its `cheap sentiment,' if it wished to
save life at a cost that would bankrupt India." By official dictate,
India like Ireland before it had become a Utilitarian laboratory where
millions of lives were wagered
against dogmatic faith in omnipotent
markets overcoming the "inconvenience of dearth." Grain merchants, in
fact, preferred to export a record 6.4 million cwt. of wheat to Europe
in 1877-78 rather than relieve
starvation in India.
Lytton, to be fair, probably believed
that he was in any case balancing budgets against lives that were
already doomed or devalued of any civilized human quality. The grim
doctrines of Thomas Malthus, former
Chair of Political Economy at
Haileybury, still held great sway over the white rajas. Although it was
bad manners to openly air such opinions in front of the natives in
Calcutta, Malthusian principles, updated by Social
Darwinism, were regularly invoked to
legitimize Indian famine policy at home in England. Lytton, who
justified his stringencies to the Legislative Council in 1877 by arguing
that the Indian population "has a tendency
to increase more rapidly than the food
it raises from the soil," most likely subscribed to the melancholy
viewpoint expressed by Sir Evelyn Baring (afterwards Lord Cromer), the
finance minister, in a later debate on
the government's conduct during the
1876-79 catastrophe. "[E]very benevolent attempt made to mitigate the
effects of famine and defective sanitation serves but to enhance the
evils resulting from overpopulation."
In the same vein, an 1881 report
"concluded that 80% of the famine mortality were drawn from the poorest
20% of the population, and if such deaths were prevented this stratum of
the population would still be unable
to adopt prudential restraint. Thus, if
the government spent more of its revenue on famine relief, an even
larger proportion of the population would become penurious." As in
Ireland thirty years before, those with
the power to relieve famine convinced
themselves that overly heroic exertions against implacable natural laws,
whether of market prices or population growth, were worse than no
effort at all.
His recent biographers claim that
Salisbury, the gray eminence of Indian policy, was privately tormented
by these Malthusian calculations. A decade earlier, during his first
stint as secretary of state for
India, he had followed the advice of the
Council in Calcutta and refused to intervene in the early stages of a
deadly famine in Orissa. "I did nothing for two months," he later
confessed. "Before that time
the monsoon had closed the ports of
Orissa — help was impossible — and — it is said — a million people died.
The Governments of India and Bengal had taken in effect no precautions
whatever....
I never could feel that I was free from
all blame for the result." Accordingly, he harbored a lifelong distrust
of officials who "worshipped political economy as a sort of `fetish'" as
well as Englishmen
in India who accepted "famine as a
salutary cure for over-population." Yet, whatever his private
misgivings, Salisbury had urged appointment of the laissez-faire fanatic
Lytton and publicly congratulated Disraeli
for repudiating "the growing idea that
England ought to pay tribute to India for having conquered her." Indeed,
when his own advisers later protested the repeal of cotton duties in
the face of the fiscal emergency
of the famine, Salisbury denounced as a
"species of International Communism" the idea "that a rich Britain
should consent to penalize her trade for the sake of a poor India."
Like other architects of the
Victorian Raj, Salisbury was terrified of setting any precedent for the
permanent maintenance of the Indian poor. As the Calcutta
Review pointed out in 1877, "In India there is no legal provision
made for the poor, either in British territory, or in the native states;
[although] the need for it is said by medical men and others, to be
exceedingly great." Both Calcutta
and London feared that "enthusiastic
prodigality" like Buckingham's would become a trojan horse for an Indian
Poor Law. In its final report, the Famine Commission of 1878-80
approvingly underscored Lord Lytton's
skinflint reasoning: "The doctrine that
in time of famine the poor are entitled to demand relief ... would
probably lead to the doctrine that they are entitled to such relief at
all times, and thus the foundation would
be laid of a system of general poor
relief, which we cannot contemplate without serious apprehension...."
None of the principal players on either side of the House of Commons
disagreed with the supreme principle that
India was to be governed as a revenue
plantation, not an almshouse.
The `Temple Wage'
Over the next year, the gathering horror of the drought-famine spread from the Madras Presidency through Mysore, the Bombay Deccan and eventually into the North Western Provinces. The crop losses in many districts of the Deccan plateau and Tamilnad plains (see Table 1.2) were nothing short of catastrophic. Ryots 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. Millions more had reached the stage
of acute malnutrition, characterized by hunger edema and anemia, that
modern health workers call skeletonization. Village officers wrote to
their superiors from Nellore
and other ravaged districts of the
Madras Deccan that the only well-fed part of the local population were
the pariah dogs, "fat as sheep," that feasted on the bodies of dead
children:
[A]fter a couple of minutes' search, I
came upon two dogs worrying over the body of a girl about eight years
old. They had newly attacked it, and had only torn one of the legs a
little, but the corpse was so enormously bloated that it was only from
the total length of the figure one could
tell it was a child's. The sight and smell of the locality were so
revolting, and the dogs so dangerous, that I did not stay to look for a
second body; but I saw two skulls
and a backbone which had been freshly
picked.
Officials, however, were not eager to
share such horrors with the English or educated Indian publics, and the
vernacular press charged that starvation deaths were being deliberately
misreported as cholera or dysentery mortality in order to disguise the
true magnitude of the famine.
Conditions were equally desperate
across the linguistic and administrative boundary in the Bombay Deccan.
Almost two-thirds of the harvest was lost in nine Maharashtran districts
affecting 8 million people,
with virtually no crop at all in
Sholapur and Kaladgi. The disaster befell a peasantry already ground
down by exorbitant taxation and extortionate debt. In the Ahmednagar
region officials reported that no less than three-fifths
of the peasantry was "hopelessly
indebted," while in Sholapur the district officer had warned his
superiors in May 1875: "I see no reason to doubt the fact stated to me
by many apparently trustworthy witnesses
and which my own personal observation
confirms, that in many cases the assessments are only paid by selling
ornaments or cattle." (As Jairus Banaji comments, "A household without
cattle was a household on the
verge of extinction.") Ahmednagar with
Poona had been the center of the famous Deccan Riots in May-June 1875,
when ryots beat up moneylenders and destroyed debt records....
And the review by Mr. Sen:
It is hard/impossible to overstate just how important* the monsoon is....
And as noted exiting May 2025's "Can India use AI to predict extreme weather events?":
....On a much more serious note, the December 2000 book Late Victorian holocausts : El Niño famines and the making of the third world
examines how the crop failures combined with British administrative
mismanagement resulted in the deaths of some 60 million people.
The
fact is that since the 1866 -1869 famines in Sweden and Finland famine
is a political decision or lack of decision. The technology exists to
move food to where it is needed.
Actually, in many respects the Irish famine years of the 1840's, two decades earlier, were the first of the political famines.
*How important? June 2018:
Complex chaotic systems are some of the toughest things for the human
mind to understand and one of the biggest challenges for model makers.
(another of the big challenges is model makers recognizing their own
biases)
On a related subject, the current trend in supercomputer construction is
to use a combination of CPUs and GPUs connected by superfast links
which puts the Graphics Processing Unit manufacturers such as NVIDIA in
an enviable position. Both the planned-to-be-fastest-in-the-world 'puter
at Oak Ridge and the current 2nd fastest at ORNL use this approach as
does the just upgraded Swiss machine (7th fastest)....
A
failure of the rainy phase
of the monsoon cycle combined with crop failures in any one of the
world's breadbaskets, Australia, Brazil, Canada, USA, Ukraine would lead
to higher prices if it lasted one year, malnutrition if the combination
lasted two years and outright starvation if it got to three growing
seasons.
On the other hand a rainy season that is too intense can kill thousands/tens of thousands across south Asia.
