The Paradox of the Raj 1
On an October morning in 1943, a scientist employed by the Government of Bengal was travelling by boat along the Brahmaputra river from Bahadurabad port to join his new job in Dhaka (now the capital of Bangladesh). All along the 120-mile journey, the horrified young man saw bodies of dead and dying men, women and children on both banks of the river. Hundreds of them. There was a war on, and the enemy was within a few hundred miles to the east. But these people did not die in the war. They were victims of a famine that had begun in the summer months of 1943 and continued until the end of the year. When the famine ended, anywhere between one and three million people had died of starvation and diseases.
A colossal disaster as this one was, the Bengal Famine was an insignificant event when compared with the three famines that visited the Deccan Plateau in southern India between 1876 and 1899. Unlike the Bengal Famine, the Deccan famines happened in peace times; and unlike fertile well-watered Bengal, happened in a vast semi-arid subtropical region where lives depended on the timely arrival of the monsoon rains. If the rains failed in the two successive seasons, July and December, a famine condition developed. The mighty British Indian state, the Raj, was responsible for delivering relief, a job it did poorly. So poorly that the Deccan famines symbolized, for some, the British rulers’ indifference to Indian people. Forty-four years later, The Bengal Famine revived the same negative image. A despotic and callous regime busy with its own warfare did not bother with relief. Famines, in one reading, represented the regime’s capacity to tolerate and inflict violence. 2
Nationalist critics of British India used the example of the famines to allege that the regime’s economic policy had caused poverty to increase. The Bengali civil servant, intellectual, and novelist Romesh Chunder Dutt (1848–1909) made this connection in a pamphlet, ‘Indian Famines: Their Causes and Prevention’, published in 1901. Trade with Britain, he said, drained the countryside of surplus food, and made famines more likely. What was this state good for, the nationalists asked when so many lives perished in starvation and disease?
Defenders of the empire felt compelled to respond. The most influential response was the administrator John Strachey’s book India: Administration and Progress, first published as lectures in 1888 and as a book in 1903. Strachey was the governor of an agricultural province in northern India, and later the equivalent of a finance minister in India in the 1880s. During his tenure as the head of finance, duties were reduced to encourage trade. Strachey listed the benefits of empire, such as, the growth of trade, a rule of law that rose above the inequity and diversity of Indian society, the spread of useful knowledge, and expansion in cultivation. Such sympathetic accounts still needed to explain what was going wrong in the countryside. For some administrators, the answer was the exploitative moneylender, a theory I shall discuss fully in Chapter 4.
The catalogue of benefits looked pitiful against the horrors of the holocaust. What good is law if millions of people starve? Most present-day assessments of British colonialism find in famines the clinching evidence to show what kind of rule it stood for: brutal, uncaring, and chaotic. The nationalists won. Passion was overwhelmingly on their side.
Were the facts on their side? Economic historians have the habit of looking long and hard at numbers. In the late 1970s, an American scholar Michelle McAlpin did that with the Deccan famines. This region, one of the driest agricultural zones of the world, had never been free of acute scarcities for more than 10–15 years at a stretch in the recorded history of famines in India. But famines disappeared here after 1899, McAlpin observed.
The significance of the end of famines was momentous, not just for India, for the world. It turned the population growth curve up. Between 1872 when censuses began and 1901, Deccan famines killed almost as many people as those added during two of the three decades that passed. A high death rate matched a high birth rate. After 1900, the birth rate remained high, the death rate fell because famines disappeared and because epidemic diseases were brought under control. If the unusual influenza epidemic of 1918 is excluded, people born after 1900 lived longer, and more children born after 1900 survived childhood diseases. The average life expectancy was 25 years for 1821–1871, fell to about 20 in 1871–1921 due to the unusual level of famine and influenza deaths, rising to about 35 in 1951. The Bengal Famine did not disturb that trajectory.
The British were still the rulers of India in the 40 odd years after the last of the Deccan famines when the mortality decline happened. Did colonial rule help end famines? If it did, perhaps despotic callousness of the rulers was not the reason famines had happened before? Perhaps famines happened because the state lacked the capacity to cope with disasters. The alternative explanation allows the possibility that the state slowly gained that capacity, and that famines disappeared because the regime built the means to deal with them. If the Deccan famines had happened for reasons other than the indifference, chaos or the brutality of the rule, perhaps there were other reasons at work in Bengal too?
An alternative view of famines emerged from attempts to answer these questions. Famines do not tell us much about Britain’s apathy towards Indian subjects. Famines show instead that the instruments necessary to know and deal with these events evolved gradually. The years of the Deccan famines saw unusual climatic conditions caused by the El Niño Southern Oscillation phenomenon. Weather shocks of similar severity repeated after 1900 in at least four years. ‘Yet the potential dangers were largely dealt with’. 3 The instruments were, a railway system that carried food quickly from low-price to high-price areas (as McAlpin noted); a statistical system to track weather and harvest conditions; knowledge of tropical diseases that killed many weakened by starvation; private charities; and a state-run relief system. The government worked to improve its ability to deal with famines. The strategy paid off.
A good illustration of such pattern of response is the same young man whose eyewitness account this chapter started with. S. Y. Padmanabhan was a mycologist, employed (in 1973, when he wrote this piece) in the Central Rice Research Institute, the last scientific research institution created by the British Indian government, in direct response to the Bengal Famine of 1943 when a part of the rice crop inexplicably failed. A more familiar example of the response is medical research at the turn of the twentieth century. The population miracle in 1899–1943 had owed to research done on some of the common killer diseases that spread quickly during and after famines, malaria, plague, cholera, and enteric diseases. The research concentrated in 1880–1900, the time span between the first and the last of the great Deccan famines.
In the same years, the technology of transporting food developed. The technology embodied in the railways came from Britain, though it had to adapt to Indian conditions. Railways were not just another item in the catalogue of ‘benefits’ of empire. It had a profound impact on ending famines. Current statistical research confirms McAlpin’s insight that the railways caused the end of famines and delivered the gift of life to generations of Indians born after 1900. 4
This book is about the economic legacies of British rule in India. It revisits the question, what the colonial rule was good for, and to answer it, draws on evidence-based studies done by economic historians in the last four decades. I have begun the book with the famines because it is especially hard to take a dispassionate view of the legacies of colonialism in this field. Start with famines, and you will conclude that the regime did not care about welfare. But start with the end-of-famines, and you will conclude that the regime’s attitude did not matter, its capacity to cope mattered more. It is necessary to keep both the successes and the failures in view. The book suggests that the legacy of colonialism is a paradox and that any story that tells us that it did more harm than good or the other way around is one-sided.
Besides the extreme context of famines, the question—what was colonial rule good for?—turns up also in the context of markets. Between 1850 and 1930, India was engaged in a globalization process, not unlike the one it has seen since the 1990s. The difference between these two times is that much of the region was under British colonial rule during the first episode and formed of nation-states in the second. The British Indian state did not write an economic policy statement, let alone working to one. But it behaved as if it wanted openness at all costs. The result of this policy was trade with low tariffs, zero barriers to migration, an open border to investment, and smooth transmission of technologies and institutions.
After 1850, openness had political and ideological backing, and it was also favoured by British exporters, bankers, and skilled migrants all of whom wanted opportunities in the colonies. Numerous Indian merchants and bankers, especially those who quickly expanded their business beyond India, from Natal to Aden to Central Asia to East Africa to Hong Kong, held with the European businesses of the time that the British Empire gave them a good deal. Merchants who traded overland in the Indo-Gangetic Basin agreed with that view and tacitly or openly supported British India against the rebels during the Great Indian Mu...