Indian Antiquary Vol 52

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Stephen Meredyth Edwardes, Krishnaswami Aiyangar
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 253

SEPTEMBER, 1923 1
EARLY HISTORY OF INDIAN FAMINES
237
revenue was remitted to the extent of £1,333,000. Subscriptions amounting to thousands of pounds were poured into India. Many noble Englishmen laid down their lives in bravely combating the evils of famine. The lives of such men indeed are the seed-and the sap-of Empire. I cannot pause to enumerate in detail the claborate measures adopted to deal with the great famine. Those interested may read a graphic account of the “Plague and Famine" in Lovat Fraser's India under Curzon and After.
It is these glaring disparities that have provoked the witty remark of an eminent French writer, M. de la Mazelière (Essai sur l'évolution de la civilisation indienne, vol. ii, p. 427): "Les adversaires de gouvernement pretendent que les famines sont beaucoup plus nom. breuses qu' autrefois. C'est prouvé par les mot : autrefois on appelait famine une famine où des centaines de milliers de gens mouraient de faim : aujourd'hui l'on dit que le Bengale et l'Oudh ont souffert d'une famine en 1900-1 alors que cette mème année la mortalité n'avait augmenté ni dans l'une ni dans l'autre province."
"In A.D. 1631-32," says Sir W. W. Hunter (History of British India, vol. II, ch. i, p. 59), "a calamity fell upon Guzerat which enables us to realise the terrible meaning of the word
famine'in India under Native rule. In A.D. 1631 a Dutch merchant reported that only eleven of the 260 families at Swally survived. He found the road thence to Surat covered with bodies decaying on the highway where they died, (there) being no one to bury them. In Surat, the great and crowded city, he could hardly see any living persons; but the corpses at the corner of the streets lay twenty together, nobody burying them. Thirty thousand had perished in the town alone. Pestilence followed famine. The President and ten or eleven of the English factors fell victims "with divers inferiors now taken into Abraham's bosom--threefourths of one whole settlement. No man could go in the streets, without giving great alms or being in danger of being murdered, for the poor people cried aloud, 'Give us sustenance or kill us.' Thus, what was once in a manner the garden of the world was turned into a wilderness." This great famine of Gujarat was known as the Satiksakal or famine of Samvat 1687 (A.D. 1631)-(Burgess' Chronology of Modern India, p. 86).
According to James Mill (History of India, vol. II, bk, iii, ch. iv, p. 329), in A.D. 1640-55 a dreadful famine resulting from several years of excessive drought prevailed throughout India and a great part of Asia, and added by its horrors to the calamities which overwhelmed the inhabitants of the Deccan. During the famine, religion had made the Hindus desert cultivation and betake themselves to supplications, penances and ceremonies pleasing to their gods. The calamities which sprung from this act of devotion may be easily imagined. A severe famine in A.D. 1646-47 adversely affected the Madura district; it is not possible to say whether the distress extended further South (The Tinnevelly Gazetteer, ch. viii, p. 247). A famine lasting several years devastated Ahmadabad in A.D. 1650 ; it was primarily caused by an extensive outbreak of cattle disease, the ravages of locusts, and pestilence. Grain was imported; and relief measures were undertaken (Loveday, History of Indian Famines, p. 165). The Madura Gazetteer records a severe famine in Madura in A.D. 1669-62 during the reign of Muttu Alakadri of the Nayakkan dynasty, when the cruel devastation of the Musulman invaders produced & severe looal famine and pestilence, in which 10,000 Christians alone are said to have perished from want (cf. Madura Gazetteer, p. 50). A terrible famine of the three great necessaries of life-grain, grass, water-called in the country tirkal or terrible famine, an account of which has been handed down in writing, occurred in Rajputana in A.D: 1661.
The long reign of Aurangzeb is disfigured by recurring famines. The court historian Khafi Khan, in his Muntakhabu'l-Lubab (Elliot and Dowson, History of India, vol. VII, p. 246 and fol.), makes the following record : "The movements of large armies through the country,