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The Famine of 1876–78 in Vidarbha: A Colonial-Era Catastrophe

The Famine of 1876–78 in Vidarbha: A Colonial-Era Catastrophe
The Famine of 1876–78 in Vidarbha: A Colonial-Era Catastrophe

For two years, between 1876 and 1878, a devastating famine swept through the region of Vidarbha in central India. This crisis, part of the larger Great Famine that ravaged India under British colonial rule, left a trail of death and despair in its wake. It was triggered by a severe drought that caused crops to wither across the Deccan plateau, and the misery in Vidarbha was made worse by colonial economic policies and an inadequate official response.


Villages emptied out as starving families migrated in search of food, and diseases like cholera followed on the heels of hunger.


By the time the famine subsided, millions were dead across India, including countless lives lost in Vidarbha, making it one of the worst human disasters of the 19th century.


Drought and Crop Failure in the Deccan


In 1876, the monsoon rains failed catastrophically over much of the Deccan region, which encompasses present-day Vidarbha. Fields that normally turned green with rice, millets, and cotton were scorched brown under an intense drought.


This was not an isolated local event but part of a broader climate calamity: a strong El Niño weather pattern had disrupted rainfall across India and even other continents.


By late 1876, crops had largely failed in the Bombay Presidency (which included western parts of today’s Maharashtra) and the princely state of Hyderabad to the south. What began as a southern Indian famine soon spread northwards.


By mid-1877, the hunger had extended into the Central Provinces, which covered Nagpur and surrounding districts in Vidarbha, as well as farther north into parts of the Punjab.

The immediate impact on agrarian communities was brutal. With almost no harvest to gather, rural families exhausted any grain reserves within weeks. Fodder for cattle disappeared, leading to the mass death of livestock and crippling the draft power needed for the next planting.


Contemporary accounts from Maharashtra described how quickly normal life collapsed. In one district of Solapur, for example, over half of the 123 villages’ inhabitants abandoned their homes once their food ran out; five or six entire villages were left completely deserted as people fled in desperation.


In many areas, three-quarters of the cattle perished, depriving families of milk and farming animals. The price of grain skyrocketed beyond the reach of poor labourers. Fear and lawlessness grew. Some grain merchants shuttered their shops to avoid being looted by hungry crowds.


By the end of 1876, newspapers were filled with grim reports of hunger. The Marathi-language press in western regions (adjacent to Vidarbha) recounted villagers surviving on wild berries and roots from the forests. One report noted that the population of a town had shrunk to merely one-tenth of its normal size as people either died or wandered off in search of food. Public roads turned unsafe, dotted with starving travellers and rumours of banditry born of desperation.


An editorial in the newspaper Dnyan Prakash described the situation as an “impending famine” in which a largely agrarian society, living hand-to-mouth, had no cushion for a rain failure. The failure of the monsoon led directly to mass starvation, outbreaks of epidemic disease, and even a spike in crime, as the paper observed.


By early 1877, these same horrors were unfolding in the villages of Vidarbha. The normally resilient rural cycle was broken, with no grain in the barns, and people had no choice but to leave or die.

Many who survived the initial starvation would not survive the diseases that followed in the wake of hunger.


Vidarbha’s Colonial Burdens


Even before the drought, Vidarbha’s farmers were living under heavy pressures that made them especially vulnerable to a food crisis.


Under British rule, the region (then often referred to as Berar and Nagpur) had been reshaped into a major producer of cash crops for export.

In fact, by 1867, Berar (present-day Vidarbha) was supplying as much raw cotton to Britain’s textile mills in Manchester as the entire country of Egypt. Vast expanses of fertile black soil were devoted to cotton, a lucrative crop, but one that did not fill local granaries. Colonial officials and traders encouraged this shift to cash crops, as cotton from central India helped fuel the booming textile industry in England.


However, reliance on cotton meant local farmers became more dependent on buying food from the market. When drought struck and grain prices soared, Vidarbha’s cotton growers had little to fall back on. The diversification into export agriculture had come at the cost of regional food security.


British economic policies compounded the problem. The colonial revenue system extracted an oppressive share of whatever meagre harvest the peasants produced. Historical records indicate that the land tax in the Deccan under British administration was roughly one-third of gross produce, about double the customary rate under prior Maratha or Mughal rule.


Unlike the old regimes, which would adjust or waive taxes in a bad year, the British Raj insisted that taxes be paid even when crops failed.


In practice, peasants in Vidarbha had to surrender grain to government depots or moneylenders to meet revenue demands, leaving very little in village stores for times of scarcity.

By 1877, the colonial administration had also implemented a new land tenure system in Berar (Vidarbha) known as the khatedari settlement. This policy essentially abolished the remaining large landholders and recognised peasant farmers as direct tenants of the state, but it also made the British government the ultimate owner of the land. Many traditional landlords were dispossessed or impoverished by these changes, and cultivators often ended up deeper in debt to absentee moneylenders who now held mortgages on their fields. The outcome was a rural society stripped of its buffers: small farmers with tiny landholdings, large debts, and no savings to withstand a calamity.


When the skies dried up in 1876–77, these structural weaknesses turned a drought into a deadly famine. There was little grain stored in villages or in the market. Much of the region’s normal surplus had been drawn out for export or tax. Indeed, even as the famine raged, the export of food continued almost unabated.


Mountains of Indian wheat and rice were still being shipped overseas from ports like Bombay and Madras.


Historian Mike Davis noted that in 1877–78, at the peak of starvation, a record 320,000 tons of wheat were exported from India under government policies that did not restrict grain trade.

In other words, food was leaving the country while people at home were collapsing from hunger. This grim paradox did not go unnoticed at the time. Critics pointed out that “feeding the empire” had taken priority over feeding the Indian poor.


The London-based Times newspaper commented with horror that export warehouses were full “while a famine-stricken population dies in sight of them.” Fuelled by the laissez-faire ideology of the era, Lord Lytton’s administration in India refused to ban grain exports or control prices, arguing that the free market would ultimately distribute food where needed. This policy stance, that “the market alone would suffice to feed the starving”, proved disastrously wrong. For Vidarbha’s villagers, it meant that whatever grain they could not grow or afford locally was simply unavailable, even if supplies existed within India.


Starvation and Relief


Starvation and Relief in the Vidarbha Famine
Starvation and Relief

As famine swept through Vidarbha, the human toll was appalling. Eyewitness descriptions from the time evoke scenes of utter despair. Families, skeletal from months of malnutrition, wandered in search of relief. Local officials recorded long lines of emaciated people trudging to larger towns, hoping to find food or work.


Many never made it. Along the roadsides, the bodies of those who had collapsed were a common sight. Disease was rampant among the weakened populace.

Outbreaks of cholera and dysentery tore through makeshift famine camps and villages alike, killing those already feeble from hunger. “They die on the roads and their corpses lie unburied,” wrote one report from early 1877, detailing how carts of dead had to be hauled away each morning from some relief outposts. In the towns of Vidarbha, bazaars fell silent and work halted as the focus shifted to sheer survival. Contemporary estimates of the overall mortality vary, but it is believed that at least 5 million people perished in the Great Famine of 1876–78, and some later analyses put the figure closer to 10 million when accounting for famine-induced diseases.


In the Central Provinces (which include Vidarbha), tens of thousands of deaths were officially recorded, and many more likely went uncounted in remote areas.


The British colonial government did attempt relief measures, but these efforts were often too little and too late, and sometimes shockingly harsh in their execution. By order of the Viceroy’s council, relief camps and “works” were set up where famine victims could earn a meagre ration by labouring on projects like road building and canal digging.


In theory, this provided some food in exchange for work. In practice, the policies guiding these camps were rigid and ungenerous. Sir Richard Temple, the official in charge of famine relief, feared that giving too much aid would make the Indian poor “dependent” on charity. He instituted what came to be known as the “Temple wage,” a drastically low daily food ration for those on relief works.


An adult man was given about one pound (around 450 grams) of rice or grain in a day, plus one anna (a few pennies) in wages, and women and children received even less. This ration was well below the minimum nutritional needs for someone performing hard labour under the tropical sun. As a result, workers in the relief camps continued to starve slowly even while employed full-time.


Many people were simply too weak to work at all; they were turned away or left to beg. British records note that to qualify for relief, starving peasants often had to travel long distances on foot.

A “distance test” was sometimes imposed. In the notorious rule, anyone living within 10 miles of a relief centre was denied food, on the assumption they could fend for themselves, forcing the hungry to walk over 10 miles to prove their desperation.

Once admitted, they toiled on gruelling tasks such as breaking stones or digging soil. If a labourer failed to meet strict work targets due to exhaustion, the overseers would even cut their already paltry rations as a penalty.


These draconian measures drew criticism from some observers at the time. One British journalist, William Digby, who witnessed the famine in southern India, famously pointed out that “a famine can scarcely be said to be adequately controlled which leaves one fourth of the people dead.”


By early 1877, while officials like Temple were reporting to London that the situation was “under control,” the reality on the ground told a different story. A missionary in the Central Provinces wrote of people “too weak to stand” queuing for relief, and whole families found dead in their huts. The Government of India eventually spent about 9.5 million rupees on relief over the two-year famine period, a large sum on paper, but one that provided only minimal help to millions of affected people.


In many villages of Vidarbha, community elders and surviving residents had to organise what aid they could among themselves, sharing scraps and helping cremate or bury the dead.

The long-awaited return of normal monsoon rains in 1878 finally brought an end to the immediate famine. By late 1878, green shoots were again visible in the fields, and the colonial authorities hastily closed most of the relief camps, eager to declare the crisis over. But for Vidarbha’s population, the nightmare had already exacted an irrevocable cost in human life.



For Vidarbha and the rest of India, the famine of 1876–78 stands as a stark reminder of how natural disaster and misrule combined to create a catastrophe.


The calamity not only killed millions and emptied villages, but it also exposed the failings of colonial governance. In the aftermath, even the British government was forced to acknowledge the need for change.


A Famine Commission was appointed in 1880 to investigate what went wrong, and it ultimately led to new Famine Codes (enacted in 1883) aimed at better detecting and alleviating future scarcities. These reforms were a tacit admission that policies during the Vidarbha famine had been woefully inadequate.


Yet for those who lived through the great hunger, such measures came too late. The images of starving peasants labouring on roadwork for a handful of grain, of markets full of exported food beyond local reach, and whole communities erased by starvation and disease left an indelible mark on the region’s memory.


Nearly a century and a half later, the 1876–78 famine in Vidarbha remains one of the darkest chapters in the area’s history. A human tragedy born from the lethal convergence of environmental crisis and colonial policy failure.


References



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