Puri's Collector Reported General Destitution in December 1865, and the Order to Import Rice Into Orissa Came on 29 May 1866, as the Monsoon Began Closing the Ports

On 29 December 1865 G. N. Barlow, the magistrate and collector of Puri, finished a tour of the worst-hit part of his district and summed it up in the four words of an earlier telegram: “Destitution general and complete.” The order to import rice into Orissa came from the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, Sir Cecil Beadon, on 29 May 1866, five months later, as the south-west monsoon began to close the coast to shipping (the wind system: the science of the monsoon). Odia memory calls the famine Na’anka durbhiksha, the famine of the ninth regnal year of the Gajapati king Divyasingha Deva, and the commission that inquired into it reported on 6 April 1867. The province is now Odisha.

The rains that stopped in September 1865

The commission’s own summary, as C. E. Buckland set it out in his history of Bengal’s Lieutenant-Governors, names the natural cause as the early end of the rains in the middle of September 1865. Puri recorded 36.3 inches that year against an average of 60 to 65. The Indian Famine Commission of 1880 reckoned the winter rice crop, on which the province mainly lived, at less than a third of the average, in an area of about 12,000 square miles.

Stocks were thin. Orissa had exported about 20,000 tons of rice a year over the six years before 1865, and 33,000 tons in the last of them, 28,000 of it from Balasore. George Campbell, who chaired the commission, wrote in 1893 that Bengal’s officers had come to regard famine as improbable, since nothing of the kind had happened in the Bengal provinces for nearly a century.

Collectors ask for rice and the Board of Revenue declines

The alarm began in the districts. On 10 October 1865 a report from the south of Puri was already alarming, and when 20 October passed without rain the rice trade stopped and the bazaars at Cuttack and Puri closed. On 26 October Balasore’s collector, Muspratt, forwarded a petition from zamindars (landlords) asking for time to pay their revenue; the Board of Revenue in Calcutta rejected it as “inadmissible” on 9 November.

The Board’s report of 25 November, written on information it admitted was “very imperfect”, set the policy. Prices would be published, public works would give paid labour, and if famine came the chief reliance would be private charity through local relief committees. The Bengal government approved it on 11 December. The Famine Commissioners read it as telling local officers that the government would not interfere in the grain trade.

On 26 January 1866 the secretary of the Public Works Department, on Beadon’s instructions, approved the refusal of Barlow’s request for an advance to buy rice for his road labourers: “This department cannot have any concern with providing rice.” The Board ordered the same day that wages be paid in cash. The Commissioner of Orissa, T. E. Ravenshaw, telegraphed on 31 January: “Famine relief is at a standstill.” The Board replied on 1 February: “The Government decline to import rice into Puri.” The commission later said those January telegrams marked the point at which importation or a special inquiry should have been ordered. Beadon told it that he did not recall the cash-wages order reaching him and that he would have disapproved it.

Around then a ship carrying rice was wrecked on the beach at Puri. Campbell records that the magistrate wanted to buy the cargo, that questions of insurance followed, and that it stayed under police guard until the end of February, when the captain shipped it away.

A tour in February and a departure in April

Beadon visited Orissa from 15 to 19 February, mostly at Cuttack, where he held a levee and a darbar and saw the East India Irrigation Company’s canal works. He told the commission that the rice difficulty never came to his knowledge. The commission added that the officers had not pressed him and had already received what they took as final orders. His darbar speech, which was circulated, said of price control: “If I were to attempt to do this, I should consider myself no better than a dacoit or thief.” The commission recorded that it produced considerable disaffection.

On 28 March the Bengal government told the Government of India there was no prospect of famine in Bengal. Beadon left Calcutta for Darjeeling on 15 April. Ravenshaw left Balasore on 20 April for Mayurbhanj after a telegram telling him to go, and the division was without its head for upwards of a month. On 30 April Puri’s Superintendent of Police wrote in his diary: “No steps are being taken that I am aware of by Government in the matter of the famine in this district.”

Ravenshaw returned on 27 May and found the troops and government offices at Cuttack on the point of starvation. He telegraphed on 28 May recommending importation, and Beadon ordered it on 29 May.

Ports the monsoon had shut

The 1880 Famine Commission describes what the delay meant, and adds that Orissa’s one road to Calcutta was unmetalled and unbridged. The exhaustion of food stocks was found in May, “the southern monsoon had now begun”, and importation by sea or land became nearly impossible. W. W. Hunter, writing in 1872, noted that in the six months of the summer monsoon no vessel approached the coast.

The commission also found that nothing had been prepared for landing rice. The roadstead at False Point was underused, and no staff existed to land the grain and carry it inland. H. A. Harris, who went to buoy the Dhamra river, and the Irrigation Company’s officers were singled out for praise. Balasore’s collector later estimated that four-fifths of the 3,505 tons imported into his district for relief came ashore by the Dhamra.

The 1880 Commission puts government imports at about 10,000 tons by the end of November and says they saved many thousands of lives. By September nearly all the centres giving cooked food were open: 43 in Cuttack, 22 in Balasore and 23 in Puri. Mortality peaked in the second week of August, in heavy rain and storms that came before the floods. Beadon held that the floods caused the greatest mortality, but the commissioners ranked them a secondary cause.

Who spoke up outside the government

An appeal by Puri’s Indian deputy magistrate appeared in the Hindu Patriot in early March, and Buckland says it did not attract special attention. On 14 April J. S. Sykes, a young Calcutta merchant, advertised an Orissa Famine Fund, and it collected upwards of Rs 18,000. When destitute people reached Calcutta, Buckland records, 15,000 to 18,000 of them were fed largely through the gifts of wealthy Indian residents, and a general relief committee formed on 13 August set up a camp at Chitpur.

The first Odia newspaper, Utkala Deepika, began as a weekly on 4 August 1866 under Gourishankar Ray, and Sambad English says it set out to carry the sufferers’ condition to the administration. Campbell wrote that the Odia people lacked a newspaper press like the Bengalis’ and so “they did not make themselves heard as Bengalees would have done”.

The commission praised, among others, Barlow, Muspratt, Sykes and the Raja of Parikud. Hunter’s figures for the Parikud estate give the local scale: 11,179 people at the start of 1866, 5,375 dead in the famine over the next eighteen months, 1,250 emigrated, and 4,519 left in 1867. The writer Fakir Mohan Senapati of Balasore, then 23, wrote in his autobiography: “As many as three million people died in the space of one year.” His figure is far above any official estimate.

The Campbell Commission and the count

A despatch from the Secretary of State on 9 October 1866 ordered the inquiry. The Government of India appointed the commission that December, with George Campbell, a High Court judge, as president and Colonel W. E. Morton and H. L. Dampier as members. Its brief was the causes, whether timely measures were taken, and how to prevent a recurrence. It visited Orissa and Midnapore, took statements from 130 people, and signed its report on 6 April 1867, in two large folio volumes. Campbell later called the famine “by far the most acute famine experienced in any part of India in the present century”.

The commissioners put the delays down to three groups of causes: circumstances nobody could have avoided, the way Lower Bengal was administered, and errors by individual officers. They said that even the most watchful government could not have thrown in enough grain in early 1866 to meet every need. They also found that the Board of Revenue had applied to Orissa rules suited only to Bengal’s permanently settled districts, that Ravenshaw had given too much weight to the belief that dealers were hoarding, and that Beadon had taken too sanguine a view. They acknowledged Ravenshaw’s exertions once the crisis was recognised.

On deaths, the commission quoted Ravenshaw putting mortality at one quarter of a population “not below three millions”, and Beadon at one fifth. It could not tell which was nearer, and it could not “take on ourselves to say that the estimate of one-fourth is too high”. The Spectator wrote in July 1867 that the report treated an official figure of 700,000 deaths in Orissa as no exaggeration. Hunter wrote in 1872 that 750,000 people died, one quarter of the population, and Seymour gave the Commons the same 750,000. The 1880 Famine Commission wrote that it was estimated about a third, or nearly a million, died. The denominators differ too: the 1880 Commission gives about four million for the worst-hit area, and Hunter about three million for the province. Campbell wrote in 1893 that the commission had not itself said one quarter, and that he later doubted the toll because the 1871 census showed an unexpectedly large population. No census preceded the famine, and every source calls the loss enormous.

What came after

In the Commons debate of 2 August 1867 on Henry Seymour’s motion, Sir Stafford Northcote, the Secretary of State for India, said Beadon had ceased to be Lieutenant-Governor and that the system of Boards of Revenue was a bad one. The land settlement of Orissa, due to expire, was renewed for thirty years without raising rents, which Campbell’s commission had recommended on condition that tenants’ rights be recorded. Hunter put the revenue given up at £16,828 a year. The East India Irrigation Company’s canals were taken over by the government on 31 December 1868 at an estimated £941,368, although Campbell’s commission had advised against buying them. The 1880 Commission found the Orissa canals financially disappointing, and also recorded that in the drought of 1873 to 1874 they saved 159,500 acres of rice worth not less than £600,000. Hunter calculated that the 100,000 acres put under irrigation after the 1870 to 1871 drought represented about 750,000 hundredweight of husked rice, against the 175,000 hundredweight the government landed in 1866. The commission also urged a trunk road from Cuttack to Calcutta and navigable canals, and the Coast Canal opened throughout on 1 September 1887.

The 1880 Commission, set up after the famine of 1876 to 1878 (see Lytton and the famine), says that in 1868 each district officer in the North-West Provinces was reminded he would be held personally responsible for avoidable starvation deaths, and that “memories of Orissa” shaped the lavish relief of the 1873 to 1874 Bihar famine. It wrote of Orissa itself that relief cost about Rs 1,45,00,000 and was “at once less efficient and more costly” than earlier relief. Its own report, under General Richard Strachey, attached a model famine code and asked each provincial government to draw up its own, with the responsibility that, as far as the State could prevent it, “no one shall be allowed to die for want of food”.