Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire

Famines, Fevers and the Literary Cultures of South Asia

U. Mukherjee

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137001122
• eBook ISBN: 9781137001139
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire looks at the relationship between epidemics and famines in south Asia and Victorian literature and culture. It suggests that much of how we think today about disasters, state and society can be traced back to the 19th-century British imperial experience.

1

The Empire of Disasters

‘To mitigate evil’

In 1873, just over a century after the worst famine in Bengal’s recorded history, a rural poet of that province composed a song-cycle about the disaster where around 10 million people, or nearly a third of the population, had died of hunger. The songs, which became immensely popular, spoke not of droughts or divine wrath (conventionally understood as the causes of famine). Instead, they took as their subject the legendary figure of Majnu Shah, a Muslim fakir or religious mendicant, who had organised a widespread insurgency against the British East India Company in the aftermath of the disaster:

There was a mazar of Darvish Hamid/In the domain of Asaduzzaman/There in the Khanaq of the old Pir Khadim/Came Majnu Fakir to offer his salam/Khadim urged Majnu in despair/‘Lakhs of people are dying in famine,/Try to Save their lives!/The Company’s agents and paiks/torture artisans and ryots/For exorbitant revenue and/people are deserting villages […]/Take up arms […] distribute all provisions among the starved,/And drive out the English/As no alternative is left’. (Dasgupta, 1992, pp. 62–3)

There was little doubt in the mind of Jamiruddin Dafadar, the poet of Majnu Shaher Hakikat, that the famine that visited his land a century ago was not primarily ‘natural’, but engineered by the political and economic imperatives of British colonial rule.

A little over two decades after Dafadar wrote his popular songs, a young English writer composed, in a sustained burst of creativity over several years, a cycle of short stories that thrust him into global spotlight as the pre-eminent voice of British empire. And in several of these stories, such as ‘William the Conqueror’, Rudyard Kipling would imagine the same disaster event that had haunted the relatively obscure (in global terms) Bengali poet – famine:

They clamoured for rice – […] and, when they found that there was none, broke away weeping from the sides of the cart […] The starving crept away to their bark and weeds, grubs, leaves, and clay, and left the open sacks untouched. But sometimes the women laid their phantoms of children at Scott’s feet, looking back as they staggered away. (1898, p. 189)

Yet, in this and other Kipling short stories, famine is often both a natural disaster and a necessary one. Thus, in ‘Without Benefit of Clergy’, famine is a ‘red and heavy audit’, but it arrives as a relief to the land that was ‘very sick indeed and needed a little breathing-space ere the torrent of cheap life should flood it anew’. And this flood of ‘cheap life’ was the consequence of the benevolence of the British government that had ‘allowed thirty million people four years of plenty, wherein men fed well and the crops were certain, and the birth-rate rose year by year’ (Kipling, 1891, p. 149). Amidst this havoc, that iconic Kipling character, the imperial administrator, can be found in a story like ‘On the City Wall’, toiling silently and selflessly to mitigate in whatever modest way he can, the sufferings of the subjects:

These die, or kill themselves by overwork, or are worried to death, or broken in health and hope in order that the land may be protected from death and sickness, famine and war, and eventually become capable of standing alone. It will never stand alone, but the idea is a pretty one […] If an advance is made all credit is given to the native, while the Englishmen stand back and wipe their foreheads. If a failure occurs the Englishmen step forward and take the blame. (Lycett, 2005, vol. i, p. 428)

If famine is ‘natural’ here, then empire is the palliative agent that eases the pains of those who are afflicted by it.

It is tempting to suppose that these contrasting views of famine – one suggesting it was nature’s red audit, and the other, that it was produced by the enforcement of British governance, corresponded to positions on the opposite sides of the colonial or imperial divide – for the rulers, famine appeared to be a part of the ‘disaster environment’ of their tropical possessions, the mitigation of whose effects (along with the battle against chronic poverty and other symptoms of socio-historical ‘backwardness’) was seen as the raison d’être of colonialism and imperialism; for the ruled, famine was a direct product of the conquest of their lands by the germs, guns and the profit motives of the European powers. Yet, if we have learnt anything from historians of modern imperialism and postcolonial cultural criticism, it is that such simple binaries serve merely to obscure the much more layered, complicated, conflicted and nuanced social relationships that structured our modern era.¹

Famines and epidemics, the archetypical ‘disaster events’ of British South Asia, were at the heart of a number of conflicting material practices and ideological positions within the British elements of the empire. This is certainly not to suggest that this was not the case with the colonized Indians, or that the conflicts and contradictions in their ideologies, practices and structures of feeling were in any way derived from the existing tensions among the colonizers. Rather, I want to look at how these disasters formed a crucial node in the Victorian British understanding and practices of empire, progress, development and civilization; how the debate about their ‘natural’ or ‘historical’ origins dramatized the crucial paradoxes and contradictions within the practices of colonialism and imperialism; and finally, how this debate circulated within not just the textualities of governance (parliamentary papers, administrative reports, medical texts, historical and anthropological studies) but also among the literary narratives such as novels, short stories, autobiographies and travel writing. Indeed, as in the recent works of scholars such as Sukanya Banerjee, I intend to follow the energies that connect literary and non-literary writings since this enables a better mapping of the techniques and strategies of imperialism without collapsing the distinctions between their specific modes of operation. Just as reading political and scientific tracts in the gothic mode, as Bannerjee does, can reveal hitherto unnoted connections between the adjacent fields of culture, politics, history, economics and science, my readings of famine reports, medical tracts, novels and stories together in a variety of registers can go some way towards mapping the narrative force field that accompanied the practices of imperial and colonial rulership (Banerjee, 2010, pp. 14–16).

As we have seen in the previous chapter, the issue of representing ‘disaster events’ such as famines is a salient and perplexing one. As Margaret Kelleher puts it, these events insistently raises questions about the limits of language but at the same time finds in literature’s ‘quasi-intuitiveness’ the most powerful coding of apocalyptic crises (1997, pp. 3–4). One of my contentions here is that the habitation within the chronic ‘disaster environment’ of imperial South Asia conferred a representative imperative on the Victorian writers that we will look at, and this meant they had to constantly stretch and re-mould the literary forms they were working with. We are used to explaining deviations, innovations and paradigm shifts in literary forms or styles in terms of individual authorial idiosyncrasies (what we might call the ‘charismatic’ principle of authorship), or in terms of the internal shifts within literary genres (what we might call the ‘formalist’ principle of literary history). While I in no way want to discount the importance of what T.S. Eliot long ago formulated as the dynamics of ‘tradition and the individual talent’, I would want to submit here is that it was the pressures generated by the historical environment of disaster – exactly coeval with modern imperialism – that also shaped the literary moves of a Kipling, an Emily Eden, or a Flora Annie Steel. New modes of literary articulation like the imperial gothic, or the bureaucratic romance, spoke of a structure of feeling that registered the persistence, not the obsolescence, of the disasters of famines, fevers and floods in what was deemed to be the empire’s civilizing process. But before we come to the question of literary representation of famines and other disasters, let us distinguish some of the broad trends within the Victorian debates about disasters, and since famines played such a prominent role there, let us start there.

The Victorian imperial famine debates necessarily exposed some fundamental (not to say fundamentalist) ideas about governance, politics and economics held by the ruling classes. One was that governments should not respond with any welfarist measures to ease the distress of the famine-struck population, since this would be an unnatural interference against the natural laws of the market. If we recall for a moment Kipling’s Malthusian representation of famine as a manifestation of nature’s law against human excesses, we may note the conflation of market and nature in Victorian ideology. Disasters, in this understanding, were linked to the periodic crises in the capitalist market in that they were both seen to be ‘natural’, and any actions taken to mitigate or prevent such crises were said to be futile and wasteful gestures against the laws of nature. But in this ideologeme was also embodied a paradox of Victorian imperialism – if palliative governance was unnatural and futile, how could one sustain the claims of enlightened rule? We shall look at the cultural consequences of this paradox shortly.

Thus, faced with the demands of government relief in the famine that struck the provinces of Bengal and Orissa in 1865, R.B. Chapman wrote on behalf of the Indian Board of Revenue:

To mitigate this evil, the Board of Revenue have already arranged for the early and regular publication of the retail prices current in each district. This will ensure such remedy being applied to the case of each place as the ordinary laws of political economy can supply. The Board presumes that it is quite unnecessary for them to discuss any suggestions or projects that are not entirely in accordance with those laws. They have already said […] in a case of wide spread scarcity, such as the present, those laws alone can supply any real relief, and all that the Government can do is to encourage and facilitate their operation. (Bengal and Orissa Famine, 1867, p. 12)

We should note that the Board of Revenue frequently clashed with the other organs of the imperial government over its notorious intransigence on the question of taxation. Still, what Chapman articulates here is the creed of an economic fundamentalism that prevailed over much of the Victorian era and is again resurgent today. Giving his evidence to the Indian Famine Commission in 1898, J.E. O’Conor, the Director General of the statistics department of the government of India, declared that official intervention in the grain market during the time of famine was a ‘most colossal error’, since by its very size and nature governments were incapable of limited and rational action (Minutes of Evidence, vol. i, 1898, p. 6). When asked whether the British government should revive the old Indian practice of storing grain in every district as an insurance against scarcity, O’Conor caustically replied – ‘What? To establish public granaries in view to a time of dearth? Go back to the practice of the Pharaohs of Egypt? I think it would be an excellent arrangement for thieves and rats’ (p. 9). Between Chapman’s note in 1865 and O’Connor’s declaration in 1898, an estimated 11 million Indians starved to death in famines – collateral damage of the policy of non-intervention or limited intervention in the laws of market and nature as envisaged by the imperial rulers (Nand, 2007, pp. 1–2; Davis, 2001, p. 7).

A second shibboleth of Victorian governmentality was that by further refining and improving the bureaucratic, managerial and technological capacities, the imperial government would be able to bring effective relief to its famine-struck subjects. In this view, the horrifically large numbers of Indian deaths did not point to any systemic condition of modern imperialism, but to temporary and correctable glitches in the administrative machinery. Thus, a despatch to the government of India in 1867, the British Secretary of State Stafford Northcote began by admitting that although the ‘melancholy loss of life’ was due to ‘natural and inevitable causes’ – ‘there has been a most unfortunate want of foresight and of energy on the part of those who were charged with the administration of the province where it occurred’ (Bengal and Orissa Famine, 1867, p. 1). Northcote went on to enumerate the factors which made governing India difficult – tropical climate, dependency on monsoons, imperfect means of communication and an ignorant population (p. 1). But the major culprit that emerged from Northcote’s assessment of the 1865–66 famine events was the faulty command structure of the imperial government itself:

The position of the Lieutenant Governor of Bengal is, in many respects, a very difficult one. He is charged with the administration of an extensive and highly important presidency, and has to attend to a vast amount and a great variety of business, without being allowed the assistance of a Council […] or of a secretariat equal to those of Madras and Bombay […] It is not to be wondered at that, in the early period of the famine at all events, Sir Cecil Beadon should have placed implicit reliance upon the watchfulness and the sagacity of the Board of Revenue. I cannot but regret, however, that he should have continued that confidence so long. (p. 2)

The rest of the despatch is a stinging assessment of the various failures of the Board of Revenue and its faulty recommendations, but it is clear that the disaster of famine, for Northcote, is here an administrative or governance issue. The implication is that once the chain of command is clarified and rationalized, and appropriate managerial bodies instituted, such tragedies, if not entirely avoided, can be mitigated.

One way of easing the bureaucratic burden would be to harness the powers of new technology such as railways. The Indian Famine Commission of 1880 concluded that:

It is to the future extension of railways that we look as the most complete justification of our belief that the trade of the country may be confidently left to provide for the supply of food in time of scarcity […] with the growth of these means of communication and their continued use, all the requirements of every part of the country will be met by the natural operations of trade, without the necessity of interference on the part of the Government. (1880, p. 63)

It is precisely these new ‘means of communication’ like railways, telegraph and the ever-expanding domain of the print-capital that Benedict Anderson saw as the modes through which the ideology of empty homogeneous time was constructed during colonial modernity (1983). Glossing Anderson, Partha Chatterjee notes:

Empty homogeneous is the time of capital […] When it encounters an impediment, it thinks it has encountered another time – something out of pre-capital, something that belongs to the pre-modern. Such resistances to capital (or to modernity) are therefore understood as coming out of humanity’s past. (2004, p. 5)

The promise of technological solutions to their circulatory glitches helped Victorian administrators to imagine themselves as parts of a constantly progressive trajectory of the present – hurtling towards the future and projecting all obstacles and impediments to a planned obsolescence of the past. So, the criticisms of people like Northcote, the voluminous famine commission reports, and the various parliamentary enquiries, were seen as productive self-criticism – a reflective technique that guaranteed the regenerative capacities of a modern, progressive administration. We repeatedly see administrators and bureaucrats candidly discuss past failures of both British and Indian governments regarding responses to famine disasters in South Asia. The two Famine Commissions of 1880 and 1898, and influential authors like Charles Blair (1873) and R. Baird-Smith (1861) could be quite openly damning about the a variety of British governance practices, as long as it was assumed that such practices had now been rectified and overcome by modernity:

But the idea of systamatised and effectual action to prevent the suffering and mortality incidental to famine belongs necessarily to later times. While the Government was still unconsolidated […] while only the rudest guesses could be made at the effects of climactic disturbances on its food crops, – while no machinery existed for the collection of agricultural, economical, or vital statistics […] a famine was regarded, and with good reason, as a calamity wholly transcending the powers of man. (1880, p. 44)

The assumption here was that now that communication technology had added immeasurably to the stock of imperial knowledge, natural disasters could be tackled head on and with good effect. Such presentism was the response of each successive British administration to what it saw as faults in governance techniques. And each successive disaster event in the empire were confidently declared to be the final one, already relegated to a past from which the current administration had in question had successfully and decisively broken away.

A third key element in the Victorian conceptualization of famine, as we saw from the Northcote despatch, was what we might call the idea of ‘tropical backwardness’, where the indigenous historical and the climactic systems of South Asia themselves were seen as the agents and sources of disaster. The 1880 Famine Commission confidently declared:

The devastating famines to which the provinces of India have from time to time been liable, are in all cases to be traced directly to the occurrence of seasons of unusual drought, the failure of the customary rain-fall leading to the failure of food crops on which the subsistence of the population depends. (My emphasis, 1880, p. 13)

The vision of the disastrous history of a tropical, monsoonal subcontinent produced what might be called the realist strand of imperial governance – since disaster cannot be avoided, energy should be directed towards limiting some its effects, and certainly not towards devising strategies to shield the lives of most or all of the subjects from them. As Charles Blair put it, ‘India has been, and still is, in a chronic state of famine, and ever will continue so. The nature of her climate and soil cannot be altered, but the disadvantages attached thereto can fortunately be mitigated’ (1873, p. 6). We shall see below in some more details how this convergence between tropicality and disaster was achieved across several Victorian discursive fields, especially so in the case of medical writing. But let us mark for the moment how the idea of disastrous tropics was related dialectically to the idea of a palliative imperial governance.

If climate was one component in the construction of a disastrous tropicality, human history was another. Victorian acc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Empire of Disasters
• 2 Disaster Tourism: The Edens and Fanny Parks
• 3 Philip Meadows Taylor: The Bureaucrat as Healer
• 4 The Dead Who Did Not Die’: Rudyard Kipling and Cholera
• 5 Gendering Disaster: Flora Annie Steel
• Coda
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index