An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

  Before the British came, Indian rulers had supported the people in times of food scarcity by policies of tax relief, fixing grain prices and banning food exports from famine-affected regions. There was also a strong tradition of personal charity, especially during periods of scarcity. In tough times, wealthier Indians, including landowners and merchants, often took on the responsibility of helping the poor by offering them work, giving them food or even subsidizing the cost of grain by selling it below market prices. The East India Company took a dim view of this kind of Indian almsgiving, dismissing it as undiscerning charity which irresponsibly attracted the wandering poor; one writer called it ‘indiscriminate indigenous almsgiving motivated by superstition and ostentation’. The British therefore declared that they would ‘provide employment for the able-bodied’ but not ‘gratuitous relief’ to the general public.

  The Company’s governmental successors were no better. Throughout, the imperial rulers were far less concerned about the welfare of the Indian poor than about their fear—based, at least partly, on the experience of the British poor laws, reformed in 1834, which many feared had encouraged pauperism—that institutionalized famine relief would create a culture of dependence on government support.

  Many British officials also drew a distinction between the ‘necessitous poor’ and the ‘religious mendicants’ whom they considered undeserving of assistance. Indian donors drew no such lines; they had been used for millennia to sants and sadhus, monks and renunciates, going respectably from door to door and village to village, expecting to be fed by householders on the way. The British may have considered them ‘mendicants’, social leeches undeserving of assistance, but Indians were happy to help them. Indian ideas of charity differed greatly from prevalent British mores. Affluent Indians were meant to help the general public in ways that did not come naturally to the British in India. Indeed some Indians in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were critical of the British for returning home with their vast Company fortunes without having done a thing for the people they had exploited and left behind digging wells, making reservoirs, building bridges or planting trees, in the long-established Indian tradition.

  In keeping with established British policy, Viceroy Lord Lytton notoriously issued orders prohibiting any reduction in the price of food during a famine. ‘There is to be no interference of any kind on the part of Government with the object of reducing the price of food’, he declared, instructing district officers to ‘discourage relief works in every possible way… Mere distress is not a sufficient reason for opening a relief work’. The historian Professor Mike Davis notes that Lytton’s pronouncements were noteworthy for combining non-intervention with a unique aversion to ‘cheap sentiment’ the prerogative of the unaccountable appointee to high office who is immune to public needs. (Ironically, Lord Lytton’s only qualification for the job of viceroy was that, as Robert Bulwer-Lytton, he was Queen Victoria’s favourite poet.)

  Lytton was more outspoken than many, accusing his British critics of indulging in ‘humanitarian hysterics’ and inviting them to foot the bill if they wanted to save Indian lives. In keeping with his determination to encourage fiscal prudence and cut down government costs, Lytton dispatched an official named Sir Richard Temple to Madras during the famine of 1876-77 with instructions not to listen to the ‘humanitarian humbugs’ and to reduce the cost of relief measures. This was achieved, of course, with little regard for popular suffering; the condition of the populace was secondary to the state of the government’s account books. When Temple had, in the earlier Orissa Famine of 1866, imported rice from Burma for starving Oriyas, The Economist bitterly attacked him for allowing Indians to think ‘it is the duty of the Government to keep them alive’. The Temple of 1877 was a different man. Though the British created ‘work camps’ as a form of famine relief (so the starving could use their labour to earn their bread), the most significant legacy this official left behind was the ‘Temple wage’ which, in Mike Davis’s words, ‘provided less sustenance for hard labour’ in British labour camps during the famine than the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp inmates would receive eighty years later.

  In other words, the British cannot be accused of ‘doing nothing’ during the 1876-77 famine, but rather of doing much to worsen its impact. India’s grain continued to be exported to global markets, just as Stalin was to do during the ‘collectivization famines’ that beset Russia and Ukraine in the 1930s: in effect, as Professor Mike Davis has written, ‘London was eating India’s bread’ while Indians were dying in a famine. To add insult to injury, the British increased taxes on the peasantry, and railed against those too hungry to be productive as ‘indolent’ and ‘unused to work’. When some Englishmen of conscience objected and mounted relief operations of their own, the British government threatened them with imprisonment. A Mr MacMinn, who out of his own money distributed grain to the starving, was ‘severely reprimanded, threatened with degradation, and ordered to close the work immediately’.

  One first-hand witness, Lieutenant Colonel Ronald Osborne, has written movingly of the horror in 1877: ‘Scores of corpses were tumbled into old wells, because the deaths were too numerous for the miserable relatives to perform the usual funeral rites. Mothers sold their children for a single scanty meal. Husbands flung their wives into ponds, to escape the torment of seeing them perish by the lingering agonies of hunger. Amid these scenes of death, the government of India kept its serenity and cheerfulness unimpaired. The [newspapers] were persuaded into silence. Strict orders were given to civilians under no circumstances to countenance the pretence that civilians were dying of hunger.’

  In fact, in addition to keeping a tight leash on expenditure during the 1877–78 South Indian famine, the British government was also anxious not to appear to rely on charitable donations to save lives. As Georgina Brewis describes it: ‘When in August 1877 the leading citizens of Madras, both Indian and European, appealed in Britain for donations to a famine relief fund, Lytton viewed this as an act of insubordination and acted swiftly to suppress the fund, sending a coded telegram to the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal. This move provoked outcry when leaked to the Indian and British press. As the newspapers were quick to point out, Lytton’s opposition to the fund placed all donors in the wrong, including the newly designated “Empress” of India and a host of former Governor-Generals who had headed the subscription lists in Britain. A leader in The Times expressed great regret that “the Viceroy should have interposed to repress the impulses of private charity” and denounced his policy of pursuing famine relief “solely with economy in mind”. Lord Lytton was eventually forced to sanction the existence of the relief fund and to donate Rupees 10,000 (£1,000) himself, a gesture he admitted privately he made with “an ill will”. The fund, which eventually totalled £820,000, was raised through millions of small contributions from individuals, schools, churches and regiments throughout the British world. However, until December 1877, Lytton continued to describe the fund as “a complete nuisance” and to issue dire warnings that all the money would be wasted by an irresponsible committee.’

  After this episode the British Government of India took command of famine relief more formally, drawing up rules defining the ‘legitimate’ objectives of charitable relief, giving itself the power to sanction international appeals and oversee volunteers. When a fresh famine broke out in October 1896, with Lytton mercifully long gone, the government engaged itself studying the rules rather than responding to the suffering. It was only when public opinion in England could no longer be ignored that an international appeal was finally issued in January 1897, four months after the famine began and many lives had been lost.

  The facts of British culpability, even at the height of the ‘civilizing mission’ in the late nineteenth century, are overwhelming, but modern-day apologists continue to gloss over it. One, Lawrence James, says in blithe disregard of the evidence, that British imperial rulers of India ‘were humane men and, although hampered by inadeq
uate administrative machinery and limited resources, they made a determined effort to feed the hungry’ during the famines of the 1870s and 1890s. The only proof he offers for this is that during the famine period of 1871–1901, India’s population increased by 30 million. India is a big country and famine did not strike everywhere; in the regions where it did, the effect was calamitous and millions died, but elsewhere life went on, and as a result the total population of India rose. But this does not mean people did not die in the millions where famine struck. By James’s logic the increase in China’s population under Mao and the Soviet Union’s under Stalin should equally give the lie to the gory tales of mass starvation in those countries. The rise in both deaths and malnutrition in the famine-affected years would be a better indicator, but James avoids mentioning those figures.

  Human beings were not the only victims of British-induced famines; cattle died too. It is striking that the export trade in hides and skins rose from 5 million rupees in 1859 to nearly 115 million rupees in 1901, an astonishing increase especially in a culture where the death of a cow was devastating, not only for religious reasons but because cows were crucial to farming, and also served as a means of transportation and as status symbols in rural society. The deaths of quite so many cows suggest severe rural distress; farmers know few setbacks worse than the death of their cattle, which would be a major blow to their present prospects and darken their future hopes. Indeed, some officials seemed to consider the deaths of cows worse than those of people: one report on famines noted that ‘[i]n its influence on agriculture, [cattle mortality] is perhaps a more serious and lasting evil than the loss of population. As a rule, those who die of hunger must be old or helpless, whereas the able-bodied and useful escape. But if the cattle perish, cultivation is almost impossible.’

  The loss of cattle directly impacted agricultural productivity, which would take years, if not decades, to be restored to pre-famine levels. The poorest farmers suffered most, since their existence was always on the margins of economic viability, but their loss of livestock was never compensated by official relief policies, which preferred to target ‘healthy’ cattle for help usually the cattle of those who could afford to feed them better. Even when ‘cattle camps’ were set up during famines, the aim was to keep their expenses to a bare minimum and recover most of the expenditure from charitable contributions. Though nine camps were established in the Bombay Presidency during the famine of 1899-1900, for instance, 75 per cent of the costs to run them were recovered by the government. Fiscal prudence consistently trumped ‘humanitarian humbug’. Indians proved more generous whenever they were not themselves laid low by famine, and ‘native charity’ was often available to rescue cattle, including often aid from the village zamindar, who felt a social obligation to provide whatever relief he could to save his people and their cows.

  It is instructive, too, that one of the challenges faced in pre-British India—the lack of adequate infrastructure and transportation to get food from areas where it was plentiful to areas of scarcity, which was cited by Florence Nightingale as a major reason for famines—was irrelevant to British India after the advent of the railways. And yet the worst famines of the nineteenth century occurred after thousands of miles of railway lines had been built. There could be no more searing proof that the responsibility for famines lay with the authorities and their policies.

  Even as the British Crown failed Indians, in some quarters in Britain it became fashionable to be seen as generous benefactors dropping glittering coins into the begging bowls of India. The Daily Mail declared in 1897 that ‘it falls to us to defend our Empire from the spectral armies of hunger…our weapon is good honest British money’. In the same breath Indian charity was dismissed, as I have pointed out earlier. No matter how it was regarded by the British, the truth was that it was Indians who supported the majority of organized relief efforts during famines, where the inadequacy of the government was compounded by its official reluctance to act generously. The Indian diaspora contributed large sums to the funds raised in British colonies: Mahatma Gandhi, for instance, organized collections in South Africa for Indian famines in 1897 and 1900. Various Indian relief organizations arose to fill the breach left by the inattentive or unsupportive British government in India. Kitchens, orphanages, inexpensive grain shops for the poor, and poor-houses were constructed by Indian donors during the famines. Several non-governmental organizations, associations and sabhas, as well as reformist religious societies like the Arya Samaj, Brahmo Samaj and the Ramakrishna Mission saw relief work as a form of seva and worked with a will to compensate for the deficiencies of official relief efforts.

  Aside from indifference to the human victims of suffering, famine relief in India brought out another negative feature of the colonial regime—its unwillingness to acknowledge its own limitations and its ability to disguise mismanagement as wise policy. The British tended to dress up their inaction and the feebleness of their relief measures by a great show of statistical precision, as if to confirm that with the numbers at their fingertips, they had matters well in hand.

  One such example of what a scholar calls ‘numerical rhetoric’ as a tool in debates on famine could be discerned in a statement by Leopold Amery, the then Secretary of State for India, to the members of the House of Commons in 1943 about the Bengal Famine, which by the time the good Lord Amery spoke had taken close to 3 million lives. Amery compared the significant rise in India’s population with the general downturn in the food production rates: ‘In the past 12 years the population of India had increased by about 60 millions, and it had been estimated that the annual production of rice per head in Bengal had fallen from 384 lb to 283 lb in the last 30 years’. The British were doing their best but could not stave off a Malthusian catastrophe. Amery frequently resorted to numbers at the Commons, once in December giving figures for hospital admissions and deaths, carefully adding the caveat that some deaths may not have been due to starvation. There was, all too often, an inverse correlation between the precision of the numbers provided by the government and the effectiveness of the relief measures it was supposedly undertaking.

  As we have seen, by the time it ended, nearly 4 million Bengalis starved to death in the 1943 famine. Nothing can excuse the odious behaviour of Winston Churchill, who deliberately ordered the diversion of food from starving Indian civilians to well-supplied British soldiers and even to top up European stockpiles in Greece and elsewhere. ‘The starvation of anyway underfed Bengalis is less serious’ than that of ‘sturdy Greeks’, he argued. Grain for the Tommies, bread for home consumption in Britain (27 million tonnes of imported grains, a wildly excessive amount), and generous buffer stocks in Europe (for yet-to-be-liberated Greeks and Yugoslavs) were Churchill’s priorities, not the life or death of his Indian subjects. When reminded of the suffering of his victims his response was typically Churchillian: The famine was their own fault, he said, for ‘breeding like rabbits’. When officers of conscience pointed out in a telegram to the prime minister the scale of the tragedy caused by his decisions, Churchill’s only reaction was to ask peevishly: ‘why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?’

  As Madhusree Mukerjee’s richly-documented account of the Bengal Famine demonstrates, India’s own surplus foodgrains were exported to Ceylon; Australian wheat was sent sailing past Indian cities (where the bodies of those who had died of starvation littered the streets) to storage depots in the Mediterranean and the Balkans, to create stockpiles that could ease the pressure on post-War Britain, and offers of American and Canadian food aid were turned down. The colony was not permitted to spend its own sterling reserves, or indeed use its own ships, to import food. Even the laws of supply and demand couldn’t help: in order to ensure supplies for its troops elsewhere, the British government paid inflated prices for grain in the Indian open market, thereby making it unaffordable for ordinary Indians.

  From the behaviour of British officials and ministers during the Bengal Famine, a picture emerges that strips away the last shred
of moral justification for the Empire. The way in which Britain’s wartime financial arrangements and Indian supplies to the war effort laid the ground for famine; the exchanges between Secretary of State Amery and the bumptious Churchill, whose love of war trumped ‘such dreary matters as colonial economics’; the amoral racism of Churchill’s reprehensible aide, Paymaster-General Lord Cherwell, who denied India famine relief and recommended most of the logistical decisions that were to cost so many lives—all these are the culmination of two centuries of colonial cruelty. The only difference is that the evidence for British callousness and racism in 1943 is far better documented than for the dozen grotesque famines that preceded it.

  I have dwelt at length on famines because they offer such an outstanding example of British colonial malfeasance. One could have cited epidemic disease as well, which constantly laid Indians low under British rule while the authorities stood helplessly by. To take just the first four years of the twentieth century, as Durant did: 272,000 died of plague in 1901, 500,000 in 1902, 800,000 in 1903, and 1 million in 1904 the death toll rising every year. During the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918, 125 million cases of ‘flu were recorded (more than a third of the population), and India’s fatality rate was higher than any Western country’s: 12.5 million people died. As the American statesman (and three-time Democratic presidential candidate) William Jennings Bryan pointed out, many Britons were referring to the deaths caused by plague as ‘a providential remedy for overpopulation’. It was ironic, said Bryan, that British rule was sought to be justified on the grounds that ‘it keeps the people from killing each other, and the plague praised because it removes those whom the Government has saved from slaughter!’.