"Famine is India's specialty. Everywhere famines are inconsequential
incidents; in India they are devastating cataclysms," wrote
a Victorian traveler who witnessed the horrors of the 1896
famine in southern India. Famine was endemic in India for
thousands of years, until railroads and improved communications
made the shipment of grain and other food supplies to hungry
villages a practical relief strategy. In 1344-1345 such a
severe famine affected India that even royalty starved. The
famine of 1631, following the failure of the monsoon rains
in 1629 and again in 1630, devastated all of monsoon Asia.
Entire rural districts were depopulated as people moved elsewhere
to escape hunger and died by the roadside. Millions of cattle
perished. Cholera epidemics carried away entire villages.
Many areas did not recover for half a century. Another major
drought came in 1685-1688. A century later the famine of
1770 caused a third of Bengal to lie "waste and silent" for
two decades. An Indian army official, Colonel Baird Smith,
described how food prices rose inexorably as the rains faltered
in two previous years. By January 1770, fifty people a day
were dying of starvation in northern Bengal. Smith saw the
dead "left uninterred; dogs, jackals, and vultures were
the sole scavengers." The historian Thomas Babington Macaulay
described how "tender and delicate women, whose veils had
never been lifted before the public gaze . . . threw themselves
on the earth before the passer-by, and with loud wailings
implore a handful of rice for their children." The streets
of Calcutta were blocked by the dead and dying.
The South Asian monsoon failed again in 1789. A year later
droughts also descended on Australia, Mexico, the island
of Saint Helena in the south Atlantic, and southern Africa.
The Nile River fell to record lows. The Indian drought endured
until 1792, interspersed with destructive rainstorms. In
three days in late October 1791, 650 millimeters of rain
fell on Madras. A year later at least 600,000 people in the
northern Madras region starved to death as the drought returned.
No one connected the famines in India and southern Africa
and the summer crop failures in distant Europe to a global
weather event. They lacked the observation tools
to do so.
Excerpted from Floods, Famines, and
Emperors by Brian Fagan (pages 4-8). Basic Books, a Member of the Perseus
Books group. 1999. ISBN number 0-465-01120-9.
This excerpt is used here solely for non-profit
educational purposes.
Page 3 of
3
|
|
 |
Cholera
View the
full,
printable version
of the glossary
|
 |
|