The consequences of these famines were quite dramatic. South Asian scholars like Kinsley Davis, Tim Dyson and others who study demography and productivity agree that between 1870 and 1920 the life expectancy fell by 20%, population declined by 10% and net cropped area decreased by 12%.i It can also be argued that although the colonial state reluctantly recognized only three famines in the late 19th century, yet drought like conditions prevailed in general throughout Central India taking a heavy toll of human and cattle lives.
Despite extracting millions of pounds in revenues, the state developed cold feet when it came to spending on public relief. The government was always worried about commensurate returns on its investments. And expenditure on famine relief was considered wasteful and uneconomic. In fact it was even looked down upon in official circles. Keeping in line with the imperial ideology, every effort was made to discourage people from seeking relief. The relief camps were not only hard to reach but were in fact deliberately kept in remote locations and beyond the reach of the physically weakened population. And those who somehow managed to reach these camps soon found that the conditions were more horrifying then the villages they had left behind. The sanitation was often very poor and prison like conditions prevailed while the relief camps gained notoriety as centers of epidemic diseases. It will be worth repeating here that all government relief was conditional upon heavy work in colonial projects on which both cash and kind wages were deliberately kept low.ii And in general, the state did not show much interest in famine relief.
But even in this weakened state, there was resistance to what Partha Chatterjee has called the ‘colonial [in]difference.’iii There are innumerable recorded instances of grain riots, attacks on grain trains, protest against high prices and grain exports, hoarding and speculative trading, house trespass, bazaar unrest, offence against property, raids on standing debt crops held by moneylenders, raids on government establishments, robberies, thefts, incendiaries, and dacoities.iv Some of them like the Deccan Riots in Poona in 1870s became symbols of bigger protests launched by the nationalist organizations like the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha and the Indian National Congress.v
Coda for the Victims of Famine in Colonial India:
In conclusion then, the laissez-faire ideology of the British Empire prevented state intervention in times of calamities such as droughts and famines. Western technology like the railways took grains out and brought famine even to surplus areas. This paper argues that the famines were caused not so much by the failure of rains but by artificial price inflations driven by the colonial policies and export trade. In an oppressive situation of colonial subjection and imperial domination over forests, grazing lands, and agriculture, the society remained socially and economically involuted. But most significantly it got exposed to droughts and famines that mercilessly decimated millions in the late 19th century. However, even in their weakened state the people resisted to their last breadth and gave birth the Indian nationalism.
