Late Victorian Holocausts is perhaps one of those books which one can mistake as being profound and well researched, until, upon digging just a bit deeper, a much more sinister truth is unveiled. It is a very badly disguised polemic in monograph’s clothing. Since it was published at the turn of the twenty first century, it escaped criticism since the ostensibly honest citations and use of primary and secondary sources were taken at face value due to their inaccessibility to the vast majority of its readers. With the advance of the digital age, sunlight is at our fingertips. This pamphlet, disinfected is what we now present.
Davis' ultracrepidarianism set the stage for future nationalist (Dewey, 2019) or innocently anti-imperialist "books" (Morrison, 2019). The formula of Davis' disciples or books inspired by his pamphlet is recognisable.
Certain facts are hidden. History i.e. real history is being suppressed by the British government or ruling class. The British/Occidental peoples must be informed. The "history books" are marketed as informed and sorely needed studies on recondite facts. Sweeping generalisations are made, modern scholarship ignored or worse, distorted/misrepresented. Entire paragraphs are reduced to convenient quotes.
As always, we will only be addressing the claims made regarding the Indian subcontinent in this pamphlet, as we lack sufficient expertise in the other geographical and political units covered in its remaining portions.
The Cry of “Speculation”, “Hoarding” and Exports
Davis begins his pamphlet with the well trodden and now familiar diatribe against what he variously terms as “merchant inventories”, “cash nexus”, as replacing the utopian commodity exchange that existed in pre-colonial Western and Southern India. To take but two examples that are representative of his position:
The worsening depression in world trade had been spreading misery and igniting discontent throughout cotton-exporting districts of the Deccan, where in any case forest enclosures and the displacement of gram by cotton had greatly reduced local food security. The traditional system of household and village grain reserves regulated by complex networks of patrimonial obligation had been largely supplanted since the Mutiny by merchant inventories and the cash nexus.
Although rice and wheat production in the rest of India (which now included bonanzas of coarse rice from the recently conquered Irrawaddy delta) had been above average for the past three years, much of the surplus had been exported to England.4 Londoners were in effect eating India’s bread. "It seems an anomaly,” wrote a troubled observer, "that, with her famines on hand, India is able to supply food for other parts of the world.”
There were other "anomalies.” The newly constructed railroads, lauded as institutional safeguards against famine, were instead used by merchants to ship grain inventories from outlying drought-stricken districts to central depots for hoarding (as well as protection from rioters). Likewise the telegraph ensured that price hikes were coordinated in a thousand towns at once, regardless of local supply trends.
Moreover, British antipathy to price control invited anyone who had the money to join in the frenzy of grain speculation. "Besides regular traders,” a British official reported from Meerut in late 1876, "men of all sorts embarked in it who had or could raise any capital; jewelers and cloth dealers pledging their stocks, even their wives’ jewels, to engage in business and import grain.”6 Buckingham, not a free-trade fundamentalist, was appalled by the speed with which modern markets accelerated rather than relieved the famine… (p. 26)
The questions that thus emerge: Are Davis' indictments sound? Are the results reported accurate? To begin, there is Mr. Davis' naive (and as usual we're being magnanimous) assumption of the utopian self sufficient Indian village, blissfully quarantined from deleterious commercialisation and fortified with adequate reserves of grain. Such a picture, while comforting and convenient for Davis, is simply fictitious. Rural Western and Southern India were highly commercialised decades, nay centuries before the British took up the reigns of administration.
‘The Madras Consultations of the 1660s and 1670s bear ample testimony to the wealth and the extensive commercial operations throughout southern India of Kasi Viranna, who was born a Muslim under the name of Hasan Khan. When he died suddenly in 1680 the Fort St George Council ordered a thirty-gun salute to be fired in his memory.’ Similarly, a certain Virji Vora was a legendary rich man belonging to Surat. An entire hierarchy of merchants existed, from the banjaras at the “pedlar” level to the legendary rich merchants. In fact, ‘a whole nexus of credit relationships permeated Indian economic life…’ (Chaudhuri, 1978, 137-36, 143).
In fact, as astutely pointed out by Ludden regarding pre-colonial South India, ‘Thus financial transactions connecting villages to the state were much more complex than is suggested by imagery made famous by Company polemics of rapacious renters and officials extracting revenue from peasants. Imagining isolated, self-sufficient peasant villages was a polemical act, sensible in Company politics’ (Ludden, 1988, 506). The revenue system that came into being in 1823, was merely a modified form of the pre-British South Indian revenue system.
Likewise, trade was an important part of the Vijaynagar Empire, which went so far as to encourage cultivation of cash crops like cotton and indigo (Seeniah, 1987; Stein, 1990, 24-5). Likewise the idea of the self sufficient pre British village unit, typical of the subcontinent, has been questioned since the 1960s (Srinivas & Shah, 1960).
Similarly, doubts can be raised about his broad claims regarding monetisation in India and the existence of traditional “grain reserves”, which were supposedly destroyed by the “cash nexus”. Of course, this assumes the absence of monetisation in pre colonial India, which is simply not true, as can be seen from the trend towards monetisation in Western India, as well as the stress laid upon collecting revenues in cash by the Mughals (Richards, 2012, 412; Gordon, 1993, 188; Richards, 1981, 297).
On the issue of the malignant spread of cash crops, such a belief is an article of faith instead of an honest, truthful study. Cotton as a cash crop was widely prevalent in Western India since at least the reign of the Marathas (Patel & Patel, 2001, 8). Nor was the acreage occupied by non-food crops or industrial crops large enough to “displace” food grains cultivation. In fact, gram didn’t form the most ubiquitous and large part of Western and Southern India at all. It was either millets, or rice (Famine Commission: Appendix I, 1881, 40).
Neither does the claim of ubiquitous communal grain storage in villages hold water. ‘The heavy toll of life during famines...suggests that the contemporary idea of the part of the produce necessary for the peasant’s subsistence took into account only normal times and did not allow for savings (in the form of reserve stocks of foodgrains) to provide sustenance to the peasant and his family in times of famine’ (Habib, 1999, 231, fn. 6).
Similarly, Davis cavils at exports. He makes the astonishing claim that the majority of the rice and wheat surplus of India had been exported to England. How true is it?
The total exports of all food grains from India against the average surplus is enumerated in Table 6. It will be seen that, food exported was a mere 2.7% of the total food out-turn at most! However, these tables have a fundamental problem, as they do not differentiate between rice and wheat, and we cannot state that the proportions of exports for these two crops to their respective out-turns are similar, or even close.
One way we can work around this is to compare the export figures of rice with the Commission’s figures for Bengal’s and Burma’s total food crop out-turn, as these two are famous rice provinces (Hunter, 1886, 484). The figures, and their ratios to the average normal surplus of Bengal and Burma, are tabulated in Table 1 and 2. Table 1’s figures exclude Burma, while Table 2 includes it.
The results are extremely surprising. Not even 1/3rd of the rice surplus of Bengal and Burma was exported to Europe, and if Burma is excluded, exports to Europe are a minority of total Indian exports. Similarly, other patterns emerge. The preponderance of Burmese rice exports to the West (to the degree that excluding it, European share in Indian rice exports remains minor) perhaps has several explanations.
One possible explanation could be that while Bengal rice found its way to markets west of the Malay peninsula because of the preponderance of Bengali coolies in those regions who preferred Bengal rice, Burmese rice therefore had a better market for industrial uses in Europe (Latham & Neal, 1983, 260-61). Another explanation has been forwarded that the concentration of European rice mills in Burma meant that the European market had the first claims on the rice produced at these mills (Hwa, 1963, 298-99).
However, during time of scarcity in India, ‘Indian merchants, who dominated this market, were willing to pay such high prices in order to obtain as much rice and paddy as possible that European and Chinese merchants were forced to withdraw from the market temporarily and even cancel previously arranged contracts in an attempt to cut losses (ibid., 312-4).
This same process can of course be applied to wheat, and to bias the results in favour of Davis, the export figures of wheat are compared solely to the average surplus of the Punjab in that decade. The results are tabulated in Table 3. One will notice that in the case of wheat, the situation is slightly more variegated. Although a small part of the surplus was exported to Europe in India before 1876, there was a sharp spike in that year and the following year (i.e. 1877), before it decreased again going into the next decade.
This spike for the two years 1876 and 1877 was almost entirely due to the Russo-Turkish War, as noted in 1877, ‘It appears not unlikely that one result of the present war may be to give a permanent stimulus to the wheat trade of India’ (Bengal Administration:1876-77, 1878, 165), and again noted in 1878, ‘Two sets of powerful influences at home and abroad combined during the past year to stimulate the export of the important staples comprised under the heading of grain and pulse… By virtually closing the Black Sea ports and cutting off one of the main sources of the wheat supply of Europe, the war in Turkey had a direct tendency to increase the exports of wheat from India (Bengal Administration: 1877-78, 1878, 184).
It will also seem that short crops in the United States was another reason for this anomalous increase in wheat exports in these two years. ‘The wheat trade was stimulated in 1876-77 and 1877-78 by special circumstances. Short crops in America, the practical exclusion of the produce of Southern Russia from the markets of Europe, and an abundant outturn in this country, all operated to make the exports exceptionally brisk’ (Bengal Administration: 1878-79, 1879, 176).
Therefore the two exceptional (being as they were a result of exogenous factors) years cannot be taken as evidence of the veracity of Davis' claim. Ergo, we must in good conscience, label Davis' charge as one redolent of terminological inexactitude.
In a similar strain, he of course sings the standard Hindu nationalist strain of railways being a negative force for agriculture. Of course, that is not true at all.
It is hardly possible to overstate the immense benefits of the railways. There is ample evidence to show that railways in fact, reduced mortality due to local productivity fluctuations, raised agricultural incomes, and dramatically reduced the extent mortality rates in India depended on the fickleness of the monsoon (Donaldson, 2009, 88, 125). Although it certainly increased trade volumes, it reduced the ‘responsiveness of prices to nominal shocks.’ It also, similarly, reduced real income responsiveness to local productivity shocks. Therefore, any statement of railways having exacerbated the famine is categorically wrong.
Speculation and hoarding are, of course, common complaints, and often go hand in hand. Hoarding seems to be a most common yet strange concept, almost always a charge leveled on the basis of little evidence. It seems strange to believe that traders and merchants would, instead of selling grain at high prices during a famine, simply hold on to them, just for the novelty of hoarding it, and risk constant depreciation due to spoilage, even if one doesn’t consider the considerable storage costs to house massive stocks of grain.
Similarly, the complaints against so-called “speculation” and the accusation that there were coordinated price hikes due to the telegraph seem to be badly thought out criticisms of market integration. Telegrams indeed helped in market integration, although not to the same extent as railways (Andrabi et al., 2020). However, complaints against market integration are completely specious, as Donaldson has authoritatively shown that ‘real incomes respond less to a given productivity shocks in an open economy than a relatively closed one…’ (Donaldson, 2009, 125). Therefore, the entire basis of Mr Davis’ argument begins to fall apart.
Mr Davis perhaps fails to notice the irony in his argument when he quotes that the famine was caused by the rise in prices alone and not an absolute shortage of food, despite complaining of food exports out of India just a few paragraphs above. Neither does his source support him. In fact, the Nineteenth Century specifically states the following, which Mr Davis has conveniently neglected, ‘The dreadful famine now desolating Southern India has lately, it is to be feared, entered on a new and terrible phase. The harvest of 1876-7 failed throughout a great part of Bombay, Madras, Mysore, and the Nizam’s Dominions, but in the rest of India the crops were everywhere fair, and in some places unusually good.
To supply the wants of the famine-stricken tracts, therefore, were available not only their own reserves from former years, but also the surplus grains of other provinces, practically limited in quantity only by difficulties of transport. Hence, the dearth…’ (Knowles, n.d., 177, emphasis ours). Not only is the journal stating that there was a harvest failure, aka a shortage of food grains in the southern Indian provinces, there was not an absolute nationwide shortage. This distinction is important, and it is fairly obvious, the bad climatic conditions of 1876-77 were restricted primarily to South India. For some reason, Mr Davis ignores the qualifier that transport was necessary for the surplus regions to supply the deficit ones, as it implicitly praises the role of the railways, yet he bellows about how railways caused famine.
One can't help but wonder why the pertinent paragraph of The Nineteenth Century wasn't quoted wholly? Whatever could be the reason? Magnanimous that we are, we'll trod the road of quietism and reserve judgment. In order to drive home that there was indeed a shortage, the Famine Commission estimated that there was an absolute shortage of 4.75 million tons in the provinces of Madras, Bombay and Mysore (Report of the Indian Famine Commission: Part I, 1880, 50-1).
Further, Mr Davis parrots the falsehood of rapacious taxation of the peasants. It is an undeniable fact that the tax burden on peasants lightened with each settlement in Bombay and Madras (McAlpin, 1983, 249-60). A similar thing was pointed out by the Famine Commission, which rather astutely noted, ‘The landed classes pay about five shillings and sixpence (44 annas) per head; but, excluding the revenue they pay for their land to the State, their share of taxation is one shilling and ninepence (14 annas) per head. The agricultural labourers pay taxes on their liquor and salt, amounting to one shilling and eightpence (or 131/2 annas) per head, or each family pays about a fortnight’s wages in the year. The artisans pay about two shillings (16 annas) each, or about the average earnings of five working days. Traders pay three shillings and threepence (26 annas) each. But any native of India who does not trade or own land, and who chooses to drink no spirituous liquor and to use no English cloth or iron, need pay in taxation only about sevenpence a year on account of the salt he consumes personally; and on a family of three persons the charge amounts to 1s. 9d., or about four days’ wages of a labouring man and his wife’ (Report of the Indian Famine Commission: Part II, 1880, 93, emphasis ours).
Nor does the assertion about Tanjore being famously free of famines stand up to scrutiny. We know of at least two famines in pre-colonial Tanjore, one in 1736-37 and another in 1774, when when the ‘Scarcity was so great as almost to amount to a Famine’ (Brown, 1855, 10; The Parliamentary Register, 1782, 227). If we look even earlier, we know of at least two more famines, one in 1645, and another in 1689, when ‘thousands of people from Tanjore, mostly girls and little boys, were sold into slavery and exported’ (Vink, 2015, 289-291). Likewise, Mr Davis seems to exhibit a fundamental lack of understanding of inflation, its effect on prices, and even a complete ignorance about the nature of food “imports” into India.
It is true that the gold value of silver (which was the basis of the rupee) started declining from about 1872 (Reports of Currency Committees, 1928, 87). However, in the period under review, the index of exchange between prices and wages did not decrease significantly (except the obvious significant decrease in the famine years), which is sufficient proof that inflation of the silver didn’t necessarily have any adverse effect on the purchasing power of the agricultural labourer in the period under consideration (Tables 4 and 5).
Once again, Davis doesn’t realise that the food imports would not be affected by silver’s depreciation against gold, as the majority of the relief imports were intra Indian, and from Burma (import statistics during the famine will be discussed in more detail below). We're afraid that the above is typical of this pamphlet.
Lord Lytton: Hero or Nero?
This entire section of the book is filled with lies about the character and details regarding Edward Robert Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton, who server as Viceroy of India. It of course starts with the complaint that the Grand Delhi Durbar was organised when famine was raging in South India, and another complaint about the costs.
If perhaps Mr. Davis had bothered to read his own sources and perhaps do some archival research, the following facts would have come to his attention; the planning for the Durbar started as early April 1876, which of course precludes almost instantly maliciousness on the part of the Viceroy in the coincidence of dates between the famine and the event (Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1983, 186; Harlan, 1946, 220).
The amount spent on the Durbar was a pittance when compared with the amount spent on famine relief from late 1876 upto March 1877. A mere Rs. 5,00,000 (Rs. 500,000) was spent on the Delhi Assemblage [aka the Durbar] (The Gazette of India, Extraordinary, 1877, 59), which can of course be contrasted with the amount spent on relief in 1876-77 alone to the tune of Rs. 3,48,80,000 (Rs. 34,880,000) in Bombay and Madras alone at a very conservative estimate ( The Gazette of India, Extraordinary, 1877, 53), and the total expenditure on famine relief of Rs. 11,19,43,200 (Rs. 111,943,200) on the famine of 1876-78 (Report of the Indian Famine Commission: Part I, 1880, 24).
The charge that the amount spent on the Assemblage was of so great a magnitude that it hindered and or hampered spending on famine relief, has no basis in reality. Unlike Mr Davis, while we condemn and label as baseless his character assassination of The Thrice Honourable and Puissant Seignior, Robert Earl of Lytton, we shall refrain from saying something further since unlike, Mr Davis, we shy away and are uninterested in amateurish rhetoric which is designed to elicit a knee jerk reaction, with little regard for the facts or truth.
Similarly, a bizarre claim is made that Lytton’s so-called obsession with laissez-faire meant that he was against famine relief. Perhaps Mr. Davis doesn’t realise the very basics of the policy followed by the Viceroy. Likewise, as his main clincher against depending on the markets to alleviate a crisis, Mr Davis rather lamely mentions that 6.3 million cwt of wheat was exported out of India in 1877-78, strangely ignoring that South Indians didn’t have wheat in their diet and for all intents and purposes wheat wouldn’t have made any difference in their relief (Appendix A).
Perhaps a full, and a proper, accurate description of the famine as it progressed is suitable here, along with a further description on the relief measures taken, and the expenditure on them.
Most of the rice crop of Madras was sown during June-October and harvested in December-March, jowar is sown in June-November and harvested in October-February, bajra is sown in June-September and harvested in September-February, while ragi is sown in June-September and harvested in September-January* (Abstract of Agricultural Statistics of India 1936-37 to 1945-46, n.d., 175, 221, 264) . It will be wise to point out the difference in the dates of the main monsoon seasons of the famine areas under consideration. The majority of the Bombay Presidency receives its rains due to the South-West Monsoon winds, in the months from June to September (Kumar et al., 1999), while the Madras State (currently called Tamil Nadu), which comprised the majority of the Madras Province, receives the majority of its rainfall from the North-East Monsoon winds, in the months from October to December, in the ratio that it receives 47% of its rainfall from the North East Winds, and 34% from the South West Winds (Dhar & Rakhecha, 1983, 1).
This explains the time lag between the reporting of distress in Madras Presidency, as compared to the Bombay Presidency. Therefore, it is only to be expected that the first signs of distress appeared in the Bombay Presidency in August, as the South Western monsoon winds failed to bring rain by June and July. The Bombay Government almost immediately started relief operations, and Rs. 30,000 was sanctioned for the construction of a road in Dharwar district at the request of its Collector (Index: Revenue, Agriculture, Commerce, Jan-Dec 1876, November 1876, Appendix A, 3). By 9th October 1876, relief works had been started in almost the entirety of Southern Mahratta Country and Eastern Deccan, in the districts of Sholapur, Nasik, Khandesh, Ahmednagar, Poona, Kaladgi, and of course, Dharwar (Index: Revenue, Agriculture, Commerce, Jan-Dec 1876, November 1876, Appendix A, 1).
Similarly, the districts of the Madras Presidency that were dependent on the South-West monsoon started reporting by October, i.e., the districts of Bellary, Kurnool, Cuddapah, Salem, North Arcot and to some degree even in Nellore, which is dependent for the most part on the North-East Monsoon (Index: Revenue, Agriculture, Commerce, Jan-Dec 1876, November 1876, Proceeding No. 41, Appendix F, 1-2; Madras Administration: 1876-77, 1878, Part II, 152-3).
Of these, by the end of October relief works had been started or been arranged in the districts of Bellary, Kurnool, Cuddapah, and North Arcot (Index: Revenue, Agriculture, Commerce, Jan-Dec 1876, 30th October 1876, Madras Government, Revenue Department, Proceeding No. 275).
Private trade rose almost immediately to the challenge. By the second half of November 1876, the Great Peninsular Railway had a shortage of wagons, railway sidings, and accommodations due to the sheer quantity of food grains being imported into the distressed districts of the Bombay Presidency, which prompted the Agent to recommend suspending further orders of grain, which was refused (Index: Revenue, Agriculture, Commerce, Jan-Dec 1876, Prog. No. 11., 62).
On the 9th of November, Conder ‘reports on 9th., ten thousand tons on line between Egutpoora and Tanna...And in past three weeks, twenty-one thousand tons conveyed to Poona and stations beyond…’ (Index: Revenue, Agriculture, Commerce, Jan-Dec 1876, Prog. No. 48, 33). In the month of November 1876, the most distressed districts of Bellary, Kurnool, and Cuddapah had imported over 17 thousand tons of foodgrains through the railway alone.
If one counts from September, the total net importation of foodgrains into these districts in the three months of September, October and November was over 30 thousand tons by railway alone (Clark, 1880, 172). By December 1876, Madras Presidency had managed to import over 79 thousand tons of foodgrains by sea, the mass of it being supplied by Bengal (Clark, 1880, 168). This flood of foodgrains into the distressed districts continued well into October 1877.
A comparison of Madras’ total net rice imports during 1876-77 with 1875-76 can perhaps be made. Madras had a net import of nearly 220 thousand tons in 1876-77, as compared with a net export of 103 thousand tons in 1875-76 (Madras Administration: 1876-77, 1878, 186).
Interprovincial and cross-Presidency transport of foodgrains by inland routes was not inconsiderable. This can be deduced from the preponderance of Madras notes in the Bombay currency circle, which was attributed to ‘payments made for grain sent to the distressed districts of the Southern Presidency’ (Bombay Administration: 1876-77, 1877, 298). Similarly, Orissa exported 15 thousand tons of rice to Madras by land, which was registered at the frontier station of Rumbha (Bengal Administration:1876-77, 1878, 181).
Clearly any statement that implies or explicates that the famine districts were exporting food due to the malevolence of the British, capitalism and “speculation” while they were starving is a judgment devoid of truth. All one has to do is to read the net figures and one will notice the surge in imports by the distressed Presidencies, Provinces and districts. In the distressed Bombay districts, throughout the months of October to December 1876, 124,239 tons of foodgrains was imported into the distressed districts by the railways (Clark, 1880, 4).
Similarly the sheer scale of famine relief was exceptionally large. In Madras, by January 1877, 1,055,000 people were employed on relief works of all kinds, while 110,000 were being fed gratuitously (ibid., 1880, 18). It must be kept these figures are underestimated, as the author notes that at the time of completion information was incomplete. In the Bombay Presidency, by January 1876, 309,079 people were employed on relief works, encompassing both the Public Works Department and the Civil Works Department (ibid., 1880, 8).
The peak figure of 402,540 relief workers was reached in June, the overwhelming majority of which was comprised of relief workers working under the Public Works Department. In Madras, the massive figure of 2,346,692 total was reached in September, the majority of which was comprised of a whopping 1,633,437 persons on gratuitous relief.
From the figures of persons on relief by the government given above, one can easily estimate that the expenditure on famine relief was necessarily extremely massive, and it indeed was. Bombay gross expenditure on public works during the famine was roughly something above a whopping Rs. 1,15,00,000 (Rs. 11,500,000), and expenditure on gratuitous relief was roughly Rs. 13,00,000 (Rs 1,300,000).
The net cost was initially estimated at a little over Rs. 60,00,000 (Rs. 6,000,000), but the Famine Commission gave the net cost of the famine for Bombay at over Rs. 1,00,00,000 (Rs. 10,000,000) (Bombay Administration: 1877-78, 1878, xvii; Report of the Indian Famine Commission: Part I, 1880, 24. Pound to rupee conversion done using the rupee value of a pence for 1877-78 given in Reports of Currency Committees, 1928, 87).
The expenditure in Madras Presidency is similarly staggering. Although a full breakdown of the expenditure of Madras Presidency during the famine isn’t available, total cost given by the Commission after deducting loss of land revenue comes at a remarkably high Rs. 6,82,00,000 (Rs. 68,200,000) (Report of the Indian Famine Commission: Part I, 1880, 24). Therefore, any claims of the nature that the Government of India was feasting while India starved are baseless.
The Temple Wage Controversy
No discussion of Mr. Davis’ polemic is complete without a thorough dissection of the so-called Temple Wage. It is quite pertinent to point out several facts about this Wage, which has been deliberately omitted by Mr. Davis.
Perhaps the point should be made that the so-called Temple Wage, had, in fact, no relation to Sir Richard Temple at all, and wasn’t introduced or innovated by him. The figures of the ‘Temple Wage’, which gave a man the value of 1 lb. of the staple grain according to the market price of that region, and half an anna, was reduced from the previous 1 lb. of grain according to market price of grain plus one anna on 13th December 1876, by an order of the Bombay Government, at a time when, Sir Richard wasn’t in Bombay, but in Delhi attending the Durbar! In fact, the first visit of Sir Richard to Bombay was as late as January 1877 (Temple, 1882, 442-3; Index to Proceedings of the Department of Revenue, Agriculture, and Commerce, May-December 1877, n.d., 622. For the resolution of 5th January 1877 which deputed Sir Richard to visit Bombay and Madras, see Notification No. 1T, 1877, Gazette of India, Extraordinary).
The only connection of this wage to him would be him arguing in favour of it to the Madras government in January 1877 (Report of the Indian Famine Commission: Part I, 1880, 19), and his defence of that wage both as a delegate during his time of touring in the affected Presidencies and as Governor of Bombay Presidency (for a compilation of the debate and Sir Richard’s involvement in it, see Digby, 1878, 175-210).
We can now turn our attention to the most pressing issue regarding this wage. Was it sufficient enough to provide a subsistence to the people employed? Before addressing this issue, it is essential to draw a very clear distinction between the workers of the Civil Agency and the Public Works Department. The reduced so-called ‘Temple Wage’ only applies to the Civil Agency workers (Index to Proceedings of the Department of Revenue, Agriculture, and Commerce, May-December 1877, n.d., 623). Therefore, we will restrict the discussion about its sufficiency solely to the workers of the Civil Agency.
In a minute written in January 1877, Sir Richard startlingly pointed out that a ‘vast majority of relief workers’ do not do the full day’s work that is expected of them. Perhaps that is only to be expected when very few officers actually fully were able to supervise the workers (one rather extreme example would be the case of a certain Mr Oldham, who had a single officer Captain Hamilton controlling nearly 70,000 workers in Adoni taluka in Bellary district). In fact, even the ferocious critic of the reduced wage, Dr. W. Cornish, admitted that the relief works in the country were ‘indifferently supervised’ (ibid., 561, 967, 563).
This must be compounded by the fact that the Civil Agency workers were expected to work less than their better paid Public Works counterparts. Dr. Lyon estimated that the theoretical value of the work done by a Civil Agency worker was two-thirds of the work required by workers under Public Works superintendence, the tasks of the Civil Agency workers being very light (ibid., 706, 623). Therefore, Mr Davis has already committed an error by categorising the workers on the ‘Temple Wage’ as being on ‘heavy labour’.
In his memorandum of 7th May 1877, Surgeon-Major Lyon noted that out of the 534 prisoners discharged in 1876 from the Bombay Correction House, 295 gained weight of 4 lbs. 8 oz. on an average, 102 lost weight of 3 lbs. 8 oz. on an average, and 137 neither gained nor lost any weight. These prisoners were subjected to heavy labour in the gaol (since it was a gaol, we can safely assume that supervision was better and much more stricter than the relief works), and had a diet of 1 lb. of cereals, comprised of majority rice (8 oz.), to some degree wheat (4.57 oz.), bajri (3.43 oz.), plus 5 oz. of dhall, 8 oz. of vegetables, and 0.5 oz. of fat.
This list is of course exclusive of salt and other condiments. As wheat could not have been procurable in South India and was not a staple foodgrain either, if the wheat portion was replaced by bajri or ragi (more common in South India) by a peasant being paid the ‘Temple Wage’, he would in fact be consuming more calorie wise compared to the gaol ration, as both bajri and ragi have higher calories per 100 grammes than wheat (ibid., 641; Health Bulletin, 1937, 18-21). We should however keep in mind that the inmates were on heavy labour and yet gained weight, and the relief workers, as shown above, cannot be said to have been on heavy labour. It almost seems that the ‘Temple Wage’ was perhaps a very minimum ration of subsistence.
Dr Cornish’s response to Sir Richard using this Memorandum in defence of the wage was that Surgeon-Major Lyon had not made any analysis of the death rates and incidence of bowel and other diseases in the Bombay gaol to make any comment that the diet was sufficient to maintain the people in ordinary health (Index to Proceedings of the Department of Revenue, Agriculture, and Commerce, May-December 1877, n.d., 908).
However, an examination of the Jail Administration reports from both Madras and Bombay, show that despite Madras having a larger ration with frequent days where meat was included in the ration in its gaols as compared to Bombay, specifically the Correction House (Bombay Jail: 1882, n.d., Statement IX; Madras Jail:1881, n.d., Statement IX. It should be noted that the diet as was given above regarding 1lb cereal, etc, was followed in Bombay in the years used as examples.), the mortality rates and the health of the Bombay prisons (with special reference to the Correction House), were similar, if not better, than those of the Madras gaols (see the statement Showing the Sickness and Mortality among the Convicts in the Jails of the Bombay[also Madras] Presidency during the year 1881 [and 1882] in the Jail Administration Reports of Madras and Annual Reports of the Bombay Jails from the years 1881 and 1882). Thus, Dr Cornish’s objection does not seem to hold much water.
Why then was the death rate in these works so high? Perhaps the answer lies in the newcomers. Lord Lytton noted in a camp in Bellary that most of the mortality occurred among the newcomers, who usually arrived extremely weakened to the camps. He also mentioned that the deaths near the camps were also counted among the camp deaths, thus inflating the number (“Correspondence,” n.d., 175).
What little evidence we have and have collected above seems to point towards the reduced wage being sufficient for a bare subsistence. As an interesting addendum, we may perhaps point out that the Civil Agency works employed a minority of the total workers on relief works, and that remained the case throughout the first half of the famine in Bombay (Index to Proceedings of the Department of Revenue, Agriculture, and Commerce, May-December 1877, n.d., 622).
Famine Fund Controversy
This is a remarkably strange controversy. What makes it even more bizarre is the non-existence of this so-called famine fund which Mr. Davis claimed was misappropriated and spent on funding the Afghan war. This seems to stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of the tax reforms of 1878, the speeches given by Sir John Strachey, and Lord Lytton. In fact, in his speech where he first introduced the idea of levying extra taxation in order to obtain an increase in the revenue, Stachey explicitly mentioned that there was no contemplation of a separate ‘statutory fund’, and added an important qualifier that Government ‘cannot fetter their successors’ regarding the usage of the surplus amount during extraordinary times in the future. The very idea of the famine insurance was to ensure a permanent rise in the revenue of the state as some sort of ‘insurance’ against loss of revenue and relief required to be provided during a famine (LCI: December 27, 1877, 1877, 579, 543-555).
The surplus, during non-famine years, was expended on either public works, or for reducing debt, with reduction in debt being the major usage in the years 1878-1880 (Supplement to the Gazette of India; March 13, 1880, n.d., 676-7), which can be observed in the reduction of debt held in India and London in the years 1878-79 and 1879-80 (Statistical Abstract: 1876/7 to 1885/6, 1887, 94). One would however, notice that there was a sharp increase in debt in the years 1880-81 and 1881-82, and this may lead to the mistaken assumption that the increase in the surplus was wiped off and the Indian population was ‘defrauded’.
However, a careful examination of the government’s expenditure figures reveal a very remarkable fact. Despite the table of Famine Relief and Insurance in the Statistical Abstract showing remarkably low expenditure from the so called proceeds of the new taxes of 1878, one will notice a whopping increase of Rs. 1,67,09,510 (Rs. 16,709,510) under the Construction of Railways column in the year 1880-81.
An increase of a similar scale is observed under the head of expenditure of Railway Revenue Account in the year 1881-82 of Rs. 1,55,99,540 (Rs. 15,599,540). These two figures actually exceed the planned revenue increase that was supposed to take place with the new taxes, which was planned at ￡1,500,000 (LCI: December 27, 1877, 1877, 555, a rate of conversion of 1 pound = 10 rupees is used to compare rupee figures with pound figures). This of course excludes minor increases under irrigation, etc. Further details of the expenditures of the famine grant specifically after 1880 can be found in Vakil (Vakil, n.d., 264).
To complain therefore, of the famine grant having been misappropriated is a purely semantic argument made in bad faith. The government followed through on its promise by increasing investments in critical infrastructure i.e. railways, which were effective in preventing famines (see Donaldson (2009), cited above), by the same absolute magnitude as it levied extra taxes from its populace since 1878.
Miscellaneous Errors
In this section, we will finally give a compilation of the miscellaneous other errors present in his first chapter which will not fall under any of the other broader categories.
Mr. Davis states thus ‘Roadblocks were hastily established to stem the flood of stickthin country people into Bombay and Poona, while in Madras the police forcibly expelled some 25,000 famine refugees’ (p. 28). Here, he is guilty of divorcing this claim from context, and for making a citation error. He cites this claim to Digby’s book Famine Campaign in Southern India and gives the page numbers 38, and 361. However, the page that does mention the figure for 25,000 refugees is page 63, and the claim actually made in context is much different from what Mr Davis seems to imply. The full quote goes thus: ‘Sir Richard describes the Madras town relief camps (three in the city and one at Red Hills) as then containing a population of 10,000 immigrant pariah families, mostly from the neighbouring districts of Chingleput, North Arcot, Nellore, and Cuddapah, ' who had come down to Madras to seek for work and food, either because relief works near their homes had not been opened, or because they had heard rumours of charity to be had there for the asking. Many of them had walked far, . . . and had become much reduced.' 25,000 had then been picked off the streets by the police, fed up in camps, and set to work’ (Digby, 1878, 63, emphasis ours). Not only is Mr Davis here guilty of having cited the wrong page numbers from his sources, he has also incompetently at best, maliciously at worst, jettisoned context from a claim to suit his agenda.
For this it’s best we quote pp 39: ‘He completed his cost-saving expedition to Madras by imposing the Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877, which prohibited at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market-fixing of grain price.’ The end note says ‘Digby pp. 55, 74-5, 113 and 135…’. The edition is from the year 1900. We could not find anyone else citing that year’s edition. However, we do have the 1878 edition. And what does it say? It referred to the act as a ‘skit’ (Digby, 1878, 55). That’s right, the ‘Anti Charitable Contributions Act of 1877’ was fictitious. It never existed. At this point one wonders, did Mr Davis even bother to read his own sources? Or is there something rotten in the state of Davis?
On pg. 55 of his book, Davis bizarrely claims that the price of salt was raised from 2 annas to 40 annas a maund in 1878 as part of the tax reform due to the Famine Tax. His own source doesn’t say that. It specifically says that the 2 anna figure was exclusive of the salt tax or duty (Bandyopadhyay, 1958, 101). If one includes duty before and after the tax reform, the actual increase was by 11 annas in Bombay and Madras, a reduction of 12 annas in Lower Bengal and 8 annas in the North-West Provinces, and a decrease of 12 annas in the rest (Hansard, 2 April 1878, cols. 464-465). The salt tax reform of 1878 was nothing more than an equalisation of the salt tax over the entire country. Mr. Davis, once again, demonstrates a shocking lack of knowledge and mastery over his own sources.
In citation no. 4 of page no. 26 in his book, Mr Davis quotes ‘pg. 191’ of the Indian Famine Commission 1880, part 1. This is exceptionally bizarre, as there is no page 191 in the first part of the Famine Commission Report. The whole report (Parts I and II ) is only 185 pages long!
Mr Davis skirts close to Holocaust denial (and almost certain Holocaust trivialisation, see the crass title), in page 39 of his pamphlet, when he presents a figure of 1750 calories as the ration in the Buchenwald concentration camps, in order to show the supposed inhumanity of the British administration of India. The calorie figures are blatantly false. The rations of the prisoners in the Buchenwald camp came at an exceptionally measly range of 600-700 calories per day (“Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal,” 1949, 617, 159-L). It is truly horrific that he has attempted to undermine the sufferings of the victims of the Holocaust to further his polemic agenda.
In the same page as above (i.e. Pg. 39), Mr Davis uses the figure 1500 calories as the basal metabolism of an adult male. However, his own source in the page cited, gives no such figure for such a thing (Biswas & Andersen, 1985, 7). This is indicative again of either malicious misreading of his sources or gross incompetence.
Conclusions
We can draw several conclusions from the observations above. This pamphlet is a horribly polemical tract. We’ve ONLY analysed the first chapter thus far. And what do we find? (Magnanimous souls that we are, we’ll refrain from accusations).
Sheer incompetent erasure of context, citation errors, basic facts being jettisoned for convenient falsehoods and shades of Holocaust denial. It is most regrettable that this pamphlet has dominated the orthodoxy on Indian famines since it was first published in 2000. We can only hope that this book is used as an example for students of history and economic history as a perfect example of what not to do when carrying out original research or writing sound history.
*Millets is often used as a general term to refer to ragi, jowar and bajra, and we have used both the term millet and these three crop names separately (Report of the Indian Famine Commission: Part I, 1880, 78-9).
Appendix A
As India was a largely subsistence based economy in the 19th century, an idea of the cultivation of different crops in the Madras and Bombay Presidencies (specifically the Southern Mahratta districts of the Deccan affected by the famine) will be useful in giving an idea of the diets in these areas. Bombay had a mere 7% of its acreage under wheat, 83% under millets (ragi, jowar, bajra, etc), and 10% under rice. In Madras, wheat acreage was exceptionally minimal at 0.1% of the total cultivated area, 67% under millets, and 33% under rice (Report of the Indian Famine Commission: Part II, 1880, 81; Famine Commission: Appendix I, 1881, 40). From this tabulation alone one will notice the extreme insignificance of wheat in the Presidencies under consideration.
The Famine Commission pointed out that the main items of consumption in the Bombay Deccan and North Madras was millets, while the Brahmins lived on imported rice and wheat (the quantity of this wheat consumed however, could not have been large). In the southern part of Madras, the chief staples were millet and rice. Similar diets existed in Mysore (also affected by the Famine) (Report of the Indian Famine Commission: Part II, 1880, 80-1). Therefore, wheat exports wouldn’t possibly have affected food availability to hardly any significant extent in the famine affected tracts in Southern India during the 1876-78 famine. The objection might be raised that surely the wheat could have been substituted by the non-wheat consumers and that would have saved many lives.
There are, however, substantial reasons to doubt the veracity of this statement. Between 1949 and 1950 in independent India, the government made available improved wheat seeds in Hyderabad. However, cultivators refused to buy those seeds, as wheat was unpopular in Hyderabad. After 1951, despite the arrival of US wheat, the food crisis wasn’t alleviated, as wheat was alien to the rice based diet in Madras and Hyderabad, and ‘many refused to eat the imported food grains’ (Sherman, 2013, 579, 586-7). We also have the example of the victims of the Bengal famine, who refused to consume wheat, and even millets (to some degree), as it did not form part of their staple diet (Proceedings of the Nutrition Society, 1946, 21; Stevenson, 2005, 134; Keneally, 2011, 109; Hamilton, 1999, 197). Therefore, although wheat substitution sounds good, it is a specious argument, devoid of practical value.
Appendix B
Perhaps a comparison of the reduced wage with relief rations in other Asiatic nations will be useful for conveying a sense of scale. As later on in his book Mr Davis is gushing with praise about Qing Chinese famine relief, it is perhaps apt we compare the famine relief rations and system of British India and Qing China.
According to the statutes of the Board of Revenue, the rate of relief was ‘5 he of mi per day for each adult and half that amount for a child…’ (Li, 2007, 225). This works out roughly at 0.005 shi for an adult and 0.0025 shi for a child per day. Converting to lbs., it works out to 0.975 lbs for an adult per diem, and 0.4875 lbs for a child per diem (ibid., Weights and Measures. We have deliberately chosen the highest figure for conversion from shi to lbs. to bias the comparison in Qing China’s favour.).
This is of course, much smaller than the reduced wage that was started on 13 December 1877 in India. Li also mentions that even this ration was frequently not met in ‘later famines’ (ibid., 225). The distribution of relief was also restricted. ‘Famine relief, according to this logic, was only for producing farmers, and not general charity for others who might also be poor. The Zhenji was explicit, even harsh, on this point’ (ibid., 226). This can be compared to the indiscriminate distribution of relief for productive workers in the relief works and the infirm through gratuitous dole, both on the relief works and separately in British India.
Tables
Table 1
*The surplus figure of rice in India has been calculated as the sum of the total surplus foodgrains of Burma and Bengal given in the first part of the 1880 Famine Commission (Report of the Indian Famine Commission: Part I, 1880, 50), as these two provinces were majority rice cultivating areas. The surplus comes out at about 2,000,000 Imperial tons, or 44,800,136.298589 cwt. Erratum: The Asia column includes exports to both Asia and Mauritius.
Sources: The Administration Reports of Bengal, Madras, and Bombay.
Table 2
Sources: The Administration Reports of Bengal, Madras, Bombay and Burma.
Table 3
Notes: The Punjab surplus figures have been specifically chosen as precise official estimates of its average surplus in the time period under consideration are available (Punjab Report in Reply to The Inquiries Issued by The Famine Commission, 1878-79, Question 3, Chapter 1, 7). Erratum: The Asia column includes exports to both Asia and Mauritius.
Sources: Punjab Report in Reply to The Inquiries Issued by The Famine Commission, Vol. 1, and the Administration Reports of Bengal, Bombay and Madras.
Table 4
Sources: Compiled from Prices and Wages in India: Nineteenth Issue.
Table 5
Sources: Compiled from Prices and Wages in India: Nineteenth Issue.
Table 6
Sources: Compiled from the Statistical Abstracts of British India. Surplus figures from the Famine Commission (Report of the Indian Famine Commission: Part I, 1880, 50).
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