In 1772 Warren Hastings's Council Put the Dead of the Bengal Famine of 1770 at One Third of the Province, and Estimates Since Run From One Million to Ten Million

The famine that struck Bengal, Bihar and Orissa in 1769 and 1770 killed somewhere between one million and ten million people, and the estimates rest on contemporary guesses at the population rather than on a count. The best-known figure comes from a letter of 3 November 1772, in which the Company’s Council at Fort William, under Warren Hastings, wrote of “the loss of at least one-third of the Inhabitants of the Province.”

That sentence was written to defend a revenue record. The same letter says the net collections of 1771 exceeded those of 1768, and that the revenue had been “violently kept up to its former Standard.” The two statements sit side by side in the Company’s papers, and the argument over the famine has turned on their relationship ever since.

The rains that stopped in September 1769

In Bengali the famine is Chhiyattarer Manwantar, the Great Famine of 1176 in the Bengali calendar. William Hunter, the Bengal civil servant who published the Council’s records in The Annals of Rural Bengal (1868), dated its cause to September 1769, when the monsoon ended early and the rice that depended on it withered. An Indian revenue officer at Bishenpore wrote that the fields had become “like fields of dried straw.” The December harvest failed, the spring crop of 1770 was scanty, and the rains came back only in July.

The failure was uneven. A consultation of April 1770 names Purnea, Rajmahal, Birbhum and part of Rajshahi as the worst hit, and says the districts around Dacca (Dhaka) and the low-lying east had made no complaint of drought. Hunter prints Council letters showing abundant harvests in September and December 1770, and calls it a one year’s famine. Banglapedia, the encyclopedia published in Dhaka, adds that heavy rain in 1770 flooded rivers and damaged standing crops.

A revenue never so closely collected

The Company’s right to collect the revenue of the three provinces dated from the diwani grant that Shah Alam II issued on 12 August 1765, which the Battle of Buxar article covers. Abdul Majed Khan’s study of the period says the grant made Muhammad Reza Khan, the Nawab’s minister, the Company’s chief instrument of administrative control. English supervisors were posted to the divisions in 1769, and Hunter says their job was to check “the gross mismanagement and extortion practised by those who levied” the tax.

Richard Becher, appointed Resident at the Durbar (the Company’s agent at the Nawab’s court in Murshidabad) in January 1769, reported on 7 February that “The Revenues were never so closely collected before.” Hunter writes that remissions were “constantly proposed” in 1769 to 1770 and, except in a very few places, not granted. Of a land-tax demand he gives as £1,380,269, only £65,355 was remitted, about 4.7 per cent. For the next year the Council, on the advice of its Indian finance minister, raised the demand to £1,524,567, about 10 per cent higher.

Hastings’s letter gives the receipts in rupees: Rs 1.53 crore (15.3 million) in 1768 to 1769, Rs 1.31 crore in the year of dearth, about Rs 1.40 crore in the famine year and Rs 1.57 crore in 1771 to 1772. It also explains how the money was found. A levy called najay, put on the surviving inhabitants to cover the rents of neighbours who had died or fled, “fell heaviest upon the wretched Survivors of those Villages which had suffered the greatest Depopulation.” The letter says the levy had no government sanction. In February 1771 the Birbhum supervisor, Higginson, reported that a collector had made peasants pay at three rupees a measure of paddy against one rupee in earlier years, and that many had fled.

John Lidwell-Durnin’s chapter in an Oxford University Press study of famine records that revenue demands in the 1760s and 1770s “rose at tremendous rates (even if collection lagged).”

Becher, Alexander and the warnings

The Council’s first recorded response, on 23 October 1769, was to lay in 120,000 maunds (a traditional unit of weight) of grain for the army within six months, taking 80,000 from Patna and 40,000 from Dinajpur and Purnea. Hunter notes that Patna and Purnea were among the worst-hit districts.

On 20 November 1769 the Resident at the Durbar, who was Becher, told the Council that the province faced desolation from the flight of cultivators and the want of cultivation. Hunter’s abstract says the report had been held back “for fear of causing alarm.” In Bihar the supervisor James Alexander wrote on 18 January 1770 that fifty to sixty people were dying of hunger in the streets of Patna every day and that “each day lost in deliberation adds to the calamity,” in Hunter’s quotation. Raja Shitab Roy at Patna was serving rice daily at the Company’s expense and proposed to set aside about two lakh (200,000) rupees for the poor. Hunter’s abstract says Alexander could not sanction the sum without permission.

Hunter’s judgement is that the Council took in the scale of the loss only in the second week of May 1770, when it wrote that “Above one-third of the inhabitants have perished in the once plentiful province of Purneah.” His reasons are that district officers had raised alarms so often that the Governor declined to pass one on, and that the Council believed until mid-February that the matter was chiefly one of revenue. Becher reported on 2 June that in several parts “the living have fed on the dead,” and that deaths in the worst-hit provinces stood at six in sixteen of the inhabitants. In July he counted more than five hundred starving to death each day in Murshidabad city and wrote that relief would come with the harvest “if people survive to gather it in.”

Khan notes that an epidemic of smallpox ran alongside the famine and claimed the Nawab among its victims.

What the Council did, and what it spent

The relief was small, and the Company’s records say so. At Murshidabad the Council sanctioned a rice distribution of Rs 87,000, of which the Company paid Rs 40,000 and the Nawab Rs 47,000. In Rangpur a provincial council allowed ten shillings’ worth of rice a day for a district Hunter puts at 400,000 starving people. Alexander wrote on 28 April 1770 that he was paying out Rs 380 a day at Patna on the Company’s account, through himself, the Raja and others, while 150 people were dying in the city in a day. Hunter puts the Company’s own outlay on charity and imported grain at about £6,000, with about £3,000 more in the western districts and £4,700 from Indian subscribers, and calls the effort “painfully inadequate” for a province he put at thirty million people.

The Council also forbade hoarding and banned the export of grain. Hunter argued that this discouraged merchants from carrying food to hungry districts. Becher and Muhammad Reza Khan had accused the agents of English gentlemen of buying up grain and forcing peasants to sell their seed, without naming anyone. The Court of Directors wrote on 28 August 1771 that the Council had held no inquiry, and that the culprits must be “persons of some rank in our service.” Hunter reports that no satisfactory investigation followed and that the only high official tried was Muhammad Reza Khan, who was acquitted. Lidwell-Durnin writes that Company servants in the rice trade faced no serious consequences.

The one third, and who counted

Hastings took charge in Calcutta in 1772, and Lidwell-Durnin notes that he arrived after the worst had passed. Hunter, who accepted the one-third figure, added arithmetic of his own: with the population twenty years later put at 24 to 30 million, one third came to ten million lives lost in nine months. He names the historians Mill and Auber as having accepted it before him.

The estimates, by who made them:

• The Council, 9 May 1770: above one third of the inhabitants of Purnea district.
• Becher, 2 June 1770: six in sixteen, or three in eight, in the worst-hit provinces.
• Supervisor Ducarel, December 1770: nearly 200,000 dead in Purnea district.
• The Council, 3 November 1772: at least one third of the province.
• Hunter, 1868: ten million.
• Lidwell-Durnin: published estimates run from one million to ten million.

Tim Dyson, the demographer, writes in the abstract of his chapter in A Population History of India (2018) that the number of deaths has “almost certainly been overstated.” In his Encyclopedia of Population entry on South Asian famines he says the claim of perhaps 10 million deaths among 30 million people “must be regarded with great caution.” Lidwell-Durnin reports that contemporary guesses at the province’s population ran from seven to fifteen million. A third of seven million is about 2.3 million, a third of fifteen million is 5 million, and a third of Hunter’s thirty million is ten million. In a footnote he adds that Rajat Datta, using population figures from the 1820s, has questioned whether the depopulation had a lasting effect. A History of Bangladesh (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Banglapedia still give about one third, or 10 million.

Why historians weigh the causes differently

The sources named here agree that the rains failed and that the revenue stayed high. Hunter wrote that in a province with so few roads, no relief could have done much once the famine was under way, and he cautioned against overrating the harm done by its absence. Banglapedia says the Company blamed nature, and argues that the revenue system and grain middlemen made the suffering worse. Its general entry on famine uses Amartya Sen’s idea of entitlement: people can starve when food exists but they cannot obtain it.

Rajat Datta, in Lidwell-Durnin’s account, held that food availability did fall and that disruption of the food markets then drove the high death rates, with the poor doomed whenever a harvest failed. Lidwell-Durnin adds that some historians argue the farming population was paying more than ever before. Those positions give the markets, the revenue and the relief different weights.

What changed afterwards

In 1772 the Company dropped the Indian intermediaries between the taxpayer and the supervisors. Hunter writes that the supervisors became the collectors of the land revenue under a plan of Hastings’s adopted on 21 August 1772, and the November letter reports a decision to move the seat of revenue business to Calcutta. Within two years, Hunter says, the English collectors were recalled and the work went back to Indian agents.

In 1786 the Golghar, a granary, was built at Patna. Incredible India, the Ministry of Tourism’s portal, says it went up on the orders of Warren Hastings in response to the famine, to hold up to 140,000 tons of grain, and that its inward-opening door made unloading hard, so it never reached full capacity. The Patna district website credits Captain John Garstin as the builder.

Hunter adds that when Lord Cornwallis proposed to make the land settlement permanent in 1789, John Shore objected that a country half-peopled, with a third of its surface waste, was not ready. Shore had landed in Calcutta at the start of the famine. The Permanent Settlement followed in 1793. Ranajit Guha’s A Rule of Property for Bengal (1963), which its publisher Duke University Press calls a classic, studies the idea behind it.

In Bengali memory

Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s novel Anandamath (1882) opens in 1176 of the Bengali calendar. Its first chapter, in Nares Chandra Sen-Gupta’s English translation of 1906, says the people were in distress “but the State realised its dues to the last penny,” and that Muhammad Reza Khan raised the assessment by 10 per cent. Hunter records the same 10 per cent rise and adds that the Council acted on the advice of its Indian finance minister. The song in the novel is covered in our Vande Mataram article. Bankim’s preface to the third edition says the novel is not history and that its battles did not happen where the book places them.