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"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.

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