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This is the revised text of the D D Kosambi Memorial Lecture organised by the Department of History, Ramnarain Ruia College, Mumbai, in March 2021. I am grateful to the organisers for giving me the chance to present this work. I warmly thank the audience, who asked many penetrating questions that helped me revise the text.
Tirthankar Roy ([email protected]) is Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom.
The end of the dryland famine around 1900 was of great significance in Indian history. Famine historiography, preoccupied with the Bengal famine of 1943 and shortages of food, obscures why the dryland famine ended and, therefore, misreads why they happened in the first place. This paper suggests that the dryland famines were caused primarily by a shortage of moisture, and secondarily, a shortage of food. Uncoordinated interventions targeting water supply and wider access to water, roughly occurring between 1880 and 1930, played a significant role in their end. It draws the inference that drought-induced famines in India’s past were not caused by food distribution failure, but water supply failure. As episodes of extreme dryness become more likely due to climate change, this history has relevance.
Indian famine historiography is a well-developed scholarship. Famines are probably the most written part of modern Indian economic history. It is, however, a deeply unbalanced and biased scholarship. It is unbalanced in the following way.
Problems with Famine History
The large-scale famines, on which substantial documentary sources exist to serve the historian, come in two blocks. The first block consists of the three drought-generated famines of the late 19th century, occurring in 1876, 1896, and 1898–99. All broke out in peninsular India, or the Deccan Plateau. The epicentre of the 1876–77 famine was the region earlier known as Madras–Deccan, consisting of Bellary and neighbouring districts. The epicentre of the 1896 and 1899 famines was western Maharashtra or the Deccan Traps region. After 1900s, no more famines occurred in the Deccan.
The second block consists of the Bengal famine of 1943. The Bengal famine happened in the backdrop of World War II. It is likely that without the war and without Bengal becoming the eastern front of the war after Japanese occupation of Burma, the famine...