It can be noticed from the above table that as the land survey and settlement operations progressed, cultivated acreage dramatically increased from 45.7% to 71.3% of the total acreage. The result of this was a simultaneous decline in the unoccupied areas to the point of total extinction. This meant that the grazing lands and common grounds virtually disappeared under the onslaught of colonial commercialization. The official term for designating such areas was ‘wastelands.’ For the British this meant lands that did not generate revenues, hence uneconomic and therefore the need to make it productive and economic by putting it under the plough. But for people in the villages, these lands were a part of their daily life and survival in times of calamities such as famine and drought. Its disappearance had serious repercussions. In the most populated plain districts of Amraoti, Akola, and Buldana, the wastelands completely disappeared falling under 1%. In other districts also, it fell below 2%. In Wun district it stood at about 5%. Every district experienced the problem of space and overcrowding. Amraoti and Akola district suffered the worst because of the topography. When cotton cultivation expanded in the 1860s, these two districts were the very first to be denuded of all tree and forest cover. Most of the railways passed through these two districts. The population density got high and the ravage of drought, famine, disease, and death became intense.i
The Empire’s voracious appetite for revenues targeted the mobile people to sedentarize. The pressure of colonial institutions like the police, law and courts were employed to coerce pastoral nomads and forest dwellers to settle on the land and take up agriculture. Further pressure of imperial revenues forced pastures and common lands under the plough. Neeladri Bhattacharya in his study of the Punjab pastoralists shows how the extension of British control through punitive grazing taxes hit the transhumance pastoral nomads while depriving the peasantry of the traditional grazing runs and common lands.ii Thus the extension of the imperial arm deprived pastoralists of their main source of survival while survey operations extended and froze the boundaries of agriculture. Revenue and Agriculture Department was the largest and the most organized executive arm of the British Empire in India. In fact it extracted more then 85% of the imperial revenues and made sure that agriculture closed boundary with forests. It also encouraged cash crop cultivation and helped connect India to the London based world economy.iii
While commercialization of land and agriculture threatened the existence of pastoral nomads, control over forests put pressure on forest dwellers. Writing in the context of Central India, Mahesh Rangarajan has aptly described the colonial commercialization of timber and other resources as ‘fencing the forest.’iv From time immemorial everyone in the subcontinent had depended on forest and common land resources for their daily survival. According to Neil Charlesworth, the ratio of plough cattle to land in the Deccan plateau heavily depended on the availability of these resources.v As mentioned before, the people also fell back on these resources in times of drought, famine and other natural calamities. Ramachandra Guha in a recent article has suggested that historically, forests in South Asia had been under the management of local society and utilized as a common property resource.vi The forest dwellers and plains agriculturists had always exchanged goods and services on balance.vii The colonial Forest Department took control of forests and began putting restrictions on people’s access to its resources through a series of Forest Acts and Laws beginning 1866.viii The forest dwellers were gradually pushed out of their natural habitat and dhya (slash and burn agriculture) was prohibited. The forests were taken over and declared government reserves in order to serve the needs of imperial railways and the military.ix The commercialization of forest resources such as wood, leaf, manure, grass, fodder, wild grains, fruits, roots, nuts, honey, vegetables, flowers, medicinal herbs, gums, plants, spices, lac, game, etc., removed the famine and drought cushion on which the people had traditionally relied in times of crisis. According to the well known famine scholar B.M. Bhatia, this resulted in general environmental deterioration that transformed minor calamities into disastrous events taking millions of lives.x
Bipan Chandra, Sumit Sarkar, and Amiya Bagchi in their studies have shown that the lack of economic diversity was the reason for India’s backwardness and poverty under the British Empire. Society was restrained to remain agrarian and feudal. The British imperial policies prevented the transformation of Indian economy from agrarian to industrial by skimming off the raw material and revenues without plowing anything back in return. Trapped in this classical political economy of the British Raj, India exported raw material and consumed finished goods. State investments mostly went into maintaining the institutions of control like the vast army, police, bureaucracy, and the espionage network of the Empire. Very little was made available for the development of human capital resource or even the economic infrastructure that would benefit the general populace. The colonial state and local moneylenders became parasitic classes that were not interested in either economic development or improving the material condition of the peasantry. Commercial crops not only encroached on food grains but pushed peasants into a debt cycle from which it was impossible to get out because the primary producer lost control over the crops. The burden of high state revenue demand and government refusal to remit even in times of famine made the suffering of the people intense and death difficult to allude.xi
During the great famine of 1877-78, a noted Victorian journalist William Digby observed that the root causes of famines in India was railways and markets. Accordingly, the railways carried famine to grain surplus areas through artificial price inflation in the face of any government check or control.xii Many studies since then have shown that there was never a shortage of food grains even in years of official famines. The problem was with grain prices. They were so high that the people could not afford to buy it.xiii However, one thing remained unchanged in British India and that was the wages of labourers.xiv The wage stagnation and very little movement in per capita income made food grains beyond the reach of ordinary persons trying to eke out a living off their labour. The following table explains this phenomenon for the region of Berar in Central India.
the 19th century famines in Central India were basically price-induced famines that could have been avoided with timely government intervention. However, that never happened because of the official adherence to the laissez-faire ideology of non-interference. In fact there is even evidence of grains being exported to England and Europe for speculative trading in international market while millions were dying of disease and starvation in the sub-continent.i Similarly, the problem of food shortages in colonial Berar is associated with grain exports and high prices. It is rather appalling that while majority of the Berar’s population was suffering from poverty and hunger, the region was exporting food grains. This was in fact the case even during years of drought and famine. The following table illustrates exactly how much of food grains were actually exported. These food grains included the staple crop jowari (millet), wheat, and other edible grains such as gram, bajri, masur, tur, rice, urad, etc.
Berar was exporting precious food grains worth 979,910 maunds (40,176 tons). This enormous quantity was primarily snatched from the mouths of the hungry and the poor. With the average population of 2,637,958 persons at any given point between 1867 and 1901,i this loss amounted to approximately 30.4 lbs per person. According to the general administration report of 1882-83, an average individual required 0.96 lbs of food grain per diem for survival.ii Even if this relatively low consumption figure is applied, the surplus food grain that was exported could have sustained the entire population of Berar for up to 31.7 days. Even in the worst of famine and drought years (1877-79; 1896-97; and 1899-1900) a total of 2,375,509 maunds of food grains were exported out of the province. Similarly, the people of Berar never got anything in return for the raw cotton exports that formed on average 42.9% of the total exports in any given year. The colonial roads and railways became the artery of people’s misery. With such large quantities of grains leaving the province, the traditional custom of storing grains in ‘peos’ completely declined.iii Thus the high grain prices and exports did not necessarily translate into increasing incomes for peasants as Michele McAlphin and Morris D. Morris have surmised.iv Nor did it mean a change in their material condition. In fact it led to worsening of their lives.
Vasant Kaiwar in his studies of the Deccan has suggested that the incorporation of local economy into the world market network brought devastating famines to central India. The encroachment of imperial policies and imposition of a colonial infrastructure based on conditional private property in landv and a high rate of revenue demand undermined the traditional food security chain.vi Similarly, David Hardiman argues that the neglect of traditional water works by the colonial state brought drought and famine to the Deccan plateau. These water works in the form of small irrigation systems like tanks, masonry dams, anicuts, reservoirs, lakes, ponds, canals, etc., had successfully avoided the problem of salination and malaria by tapping water for local irrigation and daily use. In pre-colonial times, the maintenance of these water works had been through local communal labour financed by the state in a situation where land, grazing grounds and surrounding forests were a common property resource of the village. The introduction of conditional private property rights in land under colonial aegis and withdrawal of state support led to the decline of local irrigation works.vii Not surprisingly, one of the most acute problems during famine in Central India was that of water scarcity. Elizabeth Whitcombe, Ira Klein, and David Gilmartin have also suggested that the British neglect of small water works in favour of large irrigation canals were the chief cause of salination, silting, leaching, disease, and famine that were triggered by a general environmental collapse.viii
P.A. Elphinstone conducted extensive survey and settlement operations in the Deccan in 1860s and 70s. In his reports he poignantly noted the neglect of traditional water works and the acute problem of water scarcity.ix But every subsequent colonial official in this cotton rich region of Central India came to believe that there was no need to develop irrigation or water works because the black cotton soil was naturally rich and did not need much water to grow crops. A strong anti-irrigation lobby among the officials created this myth that Berar was immune from drought and famine. Therefore the need for a famine code or relief measures were neither felt nor devised. With this attitude, the officials in fact refused to even acknowledge that drought, disease, and famine related deaths were taking place.x This denial and failure to put in place even a semblance of infrastructure made the famine in Central India all the more devastating. Similarly, the sanitary commissioner’s reports actually drew a strong connection between contaminated water and diseases like cholera, malaria, diarrhea, dysentery and smallpox, not to mention undernourishment caused by the low calorie intake of the general mass of population.xi Yet, no public action was forthcoming. And when serious famines did hit the region (1877-78; 1896-97 and 1899-1900) and the state was forced to recognize it on account of millions of deaths, the blame was put on natural causes like the failure of rains and crops.xii However, a simple common sense query would demolish this colonialist argument. If the region is naturally rich with black cotton soil and does not need much water to grow crops, then how can failure of rain cause famines?
Radhika Ramasubban in her work on epidemic diseases and medicine in colonial India has argued that government sanitation measures were primarily geared towards protecting British cantonments and civil lines where most of the European population was concentrated. This ‘enclavist’ nature of colonial medicine failed to protect the vast majority of the people not just during famines but also in ordinary times.xiii And the railways took plague and cholera along with grains to every nook and corner of Central India from the port city of Bombay.xiv However, Irfan Habib states that the dark underlying cause of all famines in British India was the intense poverty of its masses. And this suggests a deep relationship between the colonial political economy of exploitation and the material condition of the masses.xv
As already mentioned, the extensive land survey operations conducted in Berar in 1860s and 70s were designed for revision every thirty years. The first revision took place in 1898-99, but unfortunately most of the revision settlement reports have either been lost or yet to be found. However, only one of the report survived through time and this report was done in 1900 for the Basim talukaxvi in Basim district by a one F. W. Francis, the Director of Land Records and Agriculture. In this report there is one extremely interesting data that shows a rather rare comparison in the people’s standard of living during these two time periods twenty-five years apart. It is worthwhile here to reproduce
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