by Sunil Amrith
“The rains failed.” The phrase recurs in almost every account of these catastrophes, always intransitive. What this meant is that the rains failed to behave as they were expected to—they failed to fall when, as much, or where they usually did. The rains failed to obey the patterns upon which human societies had organized their material lives. The suffering of those years reached as far as China, Java, Egypt, and Brazil’s northeast. In China five northern provinces—Shandong, Zhili, Shanxi, Henan, and Shaanxi—bore the brunt of the suffering. Between 9.5 and 13 million people died in China, most of them from diseases that spread hand-in-glove with starvation. We know now that failures of rainfall in the late nineteenth century were caused by El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events of exceptional intensity. El Niño is a quasiperiodic rise in sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific, with effects on global atmospheric circulation. Local fishers off the coast of Peru had identified the phenomenon as early as the seventeenth century, and had called it El Niño (Christ child), since it tended to appear near Christmas time. Those who tried to make sense of it in the nineteenth century had only a growing sense that the droughts were global in reach—somehow connected.1
More searching questions followed. The rains failed—did individuals, societies, and governments fail, too? In an era when technology promised to collapse both time and space—as so many enthusiastic observers of rail and steam foresaw—need drought always turn to starvation? In an era when the British Empire proclaimed its superiority and its benevolence, did the colonial authorities act with foresight and justice? Could the famines have been prevented? These questions animated supporters and critics of colonial policy, economists, and meteorologists; they haunted administrators who carried the guilt for starvation in their districts. Drought and famine sparked many discussions about the future of water, for it was water’s absence that had spelled disaster. Water unleashed new claims upon states by journalists and humanitarians and engineers; water unleashed new claims by states upon their subjects. Here, in the realm of ideas—in competing visions of the future, in the articulation of fears about nature and hopes of betterment—lay the lasting legacies of the nineteenth century’s nightmares. We live with them still.
I
The first portent of trouble in southwestern India came with the drought that set in over the princely state of Mysore in 1875. The following year, rainfall during the southwest monsoon was much lower than usual over the whole Deccan plateau. By October, as local supplies were exhausted, the first murmurings of famine began to be heard in districts across Madras and Bombay. In the western Indian countryside of Bombay Presidency, the alarm was raised early on by workers of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha. Founded in 1870, the association was, in the words of its constitution, a “mediating body” between the state and “the people.” The Sabha was a bold experiment in representative politics—each member had to produce a mukhtiarnama (a power of attorney) signed by at least fifty people, authorizing him to speak on their behalf. Dominated by the landed and the wealthy, exclusively male in membership, the Sabha flourished under the leadership of Mahadev Govind Ranade, a judge and social reformer who carried a reputation as an orator when he moved from Bombay to Poona in 1871. The Sabha pioneered a new tradition of social investigation in India. The British kept close watch, sensing that the Sabha, in the words of one official, “threatens to grow into an imperium in imperio,” noting that “popular representation is a sharp weapon, and a very perilous one to play with.”2 The Sabha’s growth coincided with the worst famine to hit the region in living memory—from the start, the Sabha played an important role in drawing attention to the suffering.
In a series of letters to the government of Bombay, written in the last few months of 1876, the Sabha gave an account of the famine’s spread: one of the letters insisted that it contained “details accessible only to those who, like the agents and correspondents deputed by the Sabha, live among, and form part of, the people overtaken by this calamity.” The Sabha’s workers mirrored the “tours” undertaken by British officials through their districts, but they presented a view closer to the ground. The dispatches are brief; village by village, they chart a looming catastrophe. One of the entries reads:
Pangaum, Oct 11—No rain except the first showers.… Drinking water scarce, as in the hot season. The tank will last for 3 months. No new water in the wells.… Neighbouring villages in a worse condition. The only relief work is to be commenced at Mohol. Great distress is expected of the respectable and poor people. Grains should be imported and sold gratis.3
The northeast monsoon brought no respite that winter, extending the drought to southeastern India. One contemporary observer noted that prices “sprang at a bound” to levels previously unknown. In a brutal reversal of what had been thought would be the impact of the railways, newly laid rail lines raised prices as grain was “hurriedly withdrawn by rail and sea from the more remote districts,” channeled to urban markets where speculators fed on fears of shortages to reap higher prices. In the summer of 1877, the monsoon was slow to begin and then patchy, followed by a deluge late in the season which destroyed many of the limited crops that had managed to take root. Water’s absence, followed by a short burst of excess, brought cultivators to ruin across Madras Presidency, their reserves depleted by the previous year’s crop failures. That summer the drought spread north; central India and parts of the northwest saw their lowest rainfall ever on record. They had few reserves to fall back on because so much grain had been exported from India, drawn by high prices on the London market. What began as a localized drought in Mysore became a catastrophic famine. The winter rains of 1877 brought some relief, but only in the summer of 1878 did “normal” rainfall produce a good harvest. The drought coincided with the most severe El Niño event in 150 years; its effect was global.4
Everywhere drought sparked a rapid rise in food prices accompanied by an abrupt loss of agricultural employment. Landless laborers in the worst-affected districts were the first to feel the effects. What followed was a collapse in the livelihoods and incomes of the most vulnerable sections of the population. Many people undertook long journeys in search of relief. By the end of 1876, starvation began to kill those who were most vulnerable. Illness thrived where immunity had been weakened by widespread starvation. Cholera and dysentery accompanied the movement of people, and social disruption contributed to their spread. The return of the rains in 1877, and then more fully in 1878, saw another spike in death: most likely as a result of malaria, which thrived in the sudden change in the ecology of water after a long dry spell.5
IN THE MIDST OF INDIA’S DISASTER, IN MAY 1877, RICHARD STRACHEY presented a lecture in London on the “Physical Causes of Indian Famines.” Strachey was from an aristocratic family deeply connected with empire. From the 1840s, as a member of the Bengal Engineers, he took an interest in irrigation. Meteorology was among his most enduring interests, and from 1867 to 1871 he served as director-general of irrigation. He would go on to lead the government of India’s Famine Enquiry Commission of 1880. He began his lecture by depicting a constant struggle between the forces of life and death: “Among the most active of forces are the conditions of local climate, and notably those of atmospheric heat and moisture.” Many contemporary observers saw climate as an active force in the world. In its late-nineteenth-century English usage, “agency”—from the medieval Latin agentia—was used as often to refer to natural as to human actions. India was overcome by the “agency of drought,” preyed on by “agencies of destruction.” These “devastating forces of tempest, drought, flood and disease” rendered human life fragile in their wake.6
As the drought gripped the Deccan region, administrators and journalists and missionaries followed its path. Drought appears in their accounts as an unwelcome visitor, leaving telltale marks upon the land: “The whole country is bare and brown,” one letter described; “tanks, which at this season of the year ought to be wide sheets of water, are now nothing but vast expanses of dry m
ud.”7 Drought left its fingerprint on market prices. The most widely traveled famine observer was Sir Richard Temple, sent to tour the affected districts by the imperial government in Calcutta. He had one overriding goal—to spend as little money on famine relief as possible. Critics charged that he barely dismounted from his carriage: he swept through the land and saw only what confirmed his prejudices. But his own pen left us a vivid description of monsoon failure. Temple recounts the progress of drought as if it were on a journey. “On the right or southern bank of the Toongabhadra river,” he reported, “the drought developed all its most destructive agencies, and showed its greatest force all along the frontier.” Drought “visited” the city of Madras, and then “rested for some time on the districts of South Arcot, Tanjore, and Trichinopoly, and threatened them with evil.” It had the force of a marauding army as it “extended itself with havoc throughout the southern peninsula, laying waste the districts of Madura and Tinnevelly, right down to the sea-shore near Cape Comorin.” Worse was to come. By the middle of 1877, “all hope of the south-west monsoon was given up,” the Madras government wrote to the British Indian capital in Calcutta. The government of southern India pleaded for resources. Endowed with a cruel propensity to tease, the clouds tantalized only to disappoint: “Very heavy showers would fall with a dash from blackened skies over a small area, whilst all around the skies continued as iron.”8
Drought was an “agency” of famine; its prime characteristics were violence and caprice. In many eyes, a Christian God brought or withheld rain: “I now see but little chance” of rain, wrote Mr. Price, collector of Cuddapah district, “except by a special dispensation of Providence.”9 Some invoked Hindu cosmology: the rains rested in the power of “Indra and Vayu, the Watery Atmosphere and the Wind,” who were “still the prime dispensers of weal or woe to the Indian races.”10 Others turned to the language of science to describe the physical drivers of climate: “The true cause of all movements of the atmosphere which we describe as wind is wholly mechanical, being difference of pressure at neighboring places,” Strachey declared.11 Mechanical or divine, to see climate as an active force was also to attribute a certain inevitability to drought. Famine appeared to be a natural characteristic of India, no less than its landscape. At best, governments and communities could adapt to the certainty of periodic monsoon failure. In the shadows of this resignation lay a British reluctance to acknowledge that now, to an extent unimaginable fifty years earlier, the means were at hand to mitigate the impact of famine quite drastically. That, after all, was the boosters’ claim for the railways. But faced with the scale of the crisis, faced with demands to spend more money, it was easier to insist that famine was, and ever would be, India’s climatic fate.
IF THE DROUGHT WAS A FORCE OF NATURE, IT ALSO PRESENTED AN all-too-human crisis. Prolonged and exceptional in its severity, it threw into sharp relief the fractures of society. It exposed the fragile infrastructures of economic life. It pressed upon the limitations of the physical infrastructure—the word only came into widespread use in English in the early twentieth century, from the French—that had impressed so many observers of India’s landscape. In the late nineteenth century, human dependence on water—rains and rivers, wells and streams—began to be posed as a moral and political challenge.
In India, as in many parts of the world, the weather reflected moral concerns. Throughout Christian Europe, extreme weather and geological events—floods, droughts, eruptions, earthquakes—were seen as manifestations of divine judgment. China had a deep tradition of “moral meteorology,” as historian Mark Elvin describes: “Rainfall and sunshine were thought to be seasonal or unseasonal, appropriate or excessive, according to whether human behavior was moral or immoral”; the conduct of the Emperor mattered most of all. “The people of the empire bring floods, droughts, and famines on themselves,” the Yongzheng emperor declared in a decree of 1731. Because extremes of climate were unevenly distributed, a moral geography of rain and drought could be discerned—areas that suffered most, on this view, were those where standards of public behavior or administration had slipped. North America, too, had its version of “moral meteorology.” In the 1870s and 1880s, ideas about rainfall and virtue underpinned conflicting views of how land should be allocated in the Great Plains of the United States. The idea arose that “rain follows the plow”: industrious white settlers would transform the land, and their labor would in turn bring rain. Settlers, historian Richard White writes, saw themselves as “the agents of climate change.” Aridity was a form of cultural or spiritual malaise.12
A form of “moral meteorology” pervaded the writings of missionaries in India who observed the great drought—but it acquired a radical edge, as they suggested it was a judgment not on the morality of Indian society but rather on that of the British government. Florence Nightingale wrote from India in 1878 that “the land of India is not especially subject to famine”; she insisted that “the cultivators of the soil are industrious; the native races compare favorably with other races in capacity to take care of themselves.” The true nature of the problem was simple: “We,” the British, “do not care for the people of India.”13 “Famine in India is no invincible foe,” another observer wrote—“in a climate whose great danger is drought, and where Nature therefore teaches the necessity of precaution, we reap only a legitimate punishment when we suffer the penalties of imprudent neglect.”14 Here was a reversal of the language of Malthus: the “precaution” was lacking, the “imprudence” manifest on the part of the British rulers of India and not its people. An American writer in the New York Times went so far as to describe a “state of society in India whose only parallel in recent times was to be found in American slavery.”15 In a bold Tamil work depicting the great famine in verse, Villiyappa Pillai, court poet of the small kingdom of Sivagangai, turned the conventional view on its head. His bitingly satirical poem, published at the end of the nineteenth century, depicts the lord Sundarweswara (Siva) confessing to the starving people of the area that he was helpless in the face of their suffering—he directs them instead just to write a letter to the local zamindar.16 The “agencies of destruction” were not climatic—they were human.
Who personified, or what embodied, the transformation sweeping India and leaving millions vulnerable to a failure of the rains? A clear culprit emerged from critical accounts of the famines of the 1870s: “the new class of capitalists.” They were described by W. G. Pedder, an official who had worked in Gujarat and Bombay, as “men possessed by no ennobling ideas of public duty, cowards by caste and confession, citizens in no sense beyond that of benefiting society by selfish accumulation.” Pedder insisted: “The dearth was one of money and labour rather than of food; the cultivators were without the resources their own fields should have furnished, the labourers could not obtain work and wages.” The core of Indian cultivators’ vulnerability, he observed, was their “constant relations with a mercantile class” who combined “the functions of general shopkeepers, dealers in agricultural produce, bankers, and money-lenders,” known as banias, or saukars. Already indebted to the local moneylender, cultivators found themselves trapped without reserves if the harvest should fail. Pedder juxtaposed the wily “unscrupulousness” of the lenders with the “ignorance and timidity of the peasants.”17
A lack of capital was the root cause of cultivators’ vulnerability. The railway commissioner Lushington had seen this as early as the 1850s, when he cautioned against undue optimism about the railways. Andrew Wedderburn, the collector of Coimbatore district in Madras—a humane and direct voice railing against official inaction during the famine—saw that “some villages have sold their brass vessels, their ornaments (even including their wives’ ‘talis’), their field implements, the thatch of the roofs, the frames of their doors and windows.” In Bombay, G. L. Hynes, the master of the mint, saw something similar: “Silver ornaments and melted country silver discs are pouring in,” he wrote, to the tune of 9 lakhs (900,000) of rupees each month.18
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nbsp; The leaders of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha also had the malign influence of the moneylender firmly in their sights. In the first issue of their journal, in 1878, they published their analysis of the famine. They argued that India’s cultivators “are found to be too poor, too hopeless of retaining their independence, too inextricably involved in debt to be able to undertake agricultural improvements.” The famine had served to “throw the Ryots [cultivators] more and more into the hands of the Sowcars [moneylenders], and leave them little ground to hope a change for the better.”19 Families fortunate enough to have sufficient resources to survive three seasons of drought now found “the savings of years utterly exhausted.” They, too, had no choice but to turn to the moneylenders—and, at once, “from free men they have been degraded into slaves.”20
WHILE HUMANITARIANS, SOCIAL REFORMERS, AND EVEN SOME COLONIAL officials attributed India’s vulnerability to famine to the grip of social and economic inequality, other observers drew a direct connection between nature’s “agencies of destruction” and human actions. In the eighteenth century, a group of European naturalists known as “desiccationists,” many of whom had traveled and worked in tropical lands, argued that cutting down trees caused drought. Deserts, on their view, were but ruined forests.21 This view gained prominence through the work of Alexander von Humboldt, who wrote in 1819 that “by the felling of trees that cover the tops and the sides of mountains, men in every climate prepare at once two calamities for future generations; the want of fuel and a scarcity of water.”22 Desiccationist views were common in British India by the middle of the nineteenth century; very often they were used to condemn local pastoralism and to restrict the use of forests by India’s tribal peoples, known today as adivasis. Justified by arguments for conservation, the colonial state encroached upon India’s forests, claiming more and more forest land, as well as uncultivated “wastelands” for itself; this limited the use rights of local people in a punitive way.