Did British policy cause the famines of 1876–1900?

The short answer

• The Crown’s promise and its limits. Queen Victoria’s proclamation of 1858 promised that Indians would be “freely and impartially admitted” to office, and educated Indians took the promise literally, while the Raj did not. The ICS examination was held only in London, and in 1876 the Secretary of State, Lord Salisbury, cut its upper age limit to nineteen (from the examination of 1878), which made it nearly impossible for Indian graduates to compete, so only a handful entered the service before the end of the century. A generation of lawyers and teachers learned that the Raj’s liberal language and its practice were different things, and they organised to close the gap.
• The Ilbert Bill and the lesson of agitation. The Ilbert Bill taught educated Indians how organised pressure worked, because they watched British residents use it against them. In 1883 the Viceroy, Lord Ripon, backed a bill drafted by his law member, Courtenay Ilbert, to let senior Indian magistrates try Europeans in rural courts. British planters, merchants and officials in Calcutta answered with an openly racial campaign, and in 1884 the government retreated to a compromise that let a European accused demand a jury at least half European. Indians drew two conclusions: that the Raj would bend to organised pressure, and that they had no comparable organisation of their own. Two years later they built one of their own, the Indian National Congress.
• Railways, print and English made an all-India public. The Raj unified India physically and intellectually in ways it did not intend. Railways let delegates from Madras, Lahore and Calcutta meet in a single city; the telegraph and cheap newspapers carried debates across provinces; and English, the language of the universities founded at Calcutta, Bombay and Madras in 1857, gave Bengalis, Marathas and Tamils a shared political language. Congress met in a different city each December, which only the railway made possible. The infrastructure of empire supplied nationalism with its delegates, its readers and its vocabulary.
• Famine and the economic case against the Raj. The famines gave nationalist economists their strongest evidence. Dadabhai Naoroji, whose estimates of income per head from the 1870s were collected in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901), argued that a “drain” of tribute to Britain, through pensions, army costs and interest, kept India poor and therefore defenceless against drought. Romesh Chunder Dutt’s Economic History of India (1902–04) blamed heavy land revenue for the famines directly. The argument mattered because it turned British rule from a question of dignity into a question of livelihood, which any peasant could understand.

What it changed

Moderates and extremists. Within twenty years Congress divided over method. Moderates such as Gokhale believed that reasoned petitions to British liberals would win reform step by step. Tilak, sentenced to eighteen months for sedition in 1897 over articles in his newspaper Kesari, which had also attacked the plague searches in Poona, argued that only pressure would move the Raj, and he used the Ganapati and Shivaji festivals to carry nationalism into the street. The split became open at Surat in 1907, two chapters on, and its question, whether petition or pressure moved the Raj, ran through every later phase of the movement.

Muslim politics takes its own road. Sayyid Ahmad Khan believed that Muslims, about a fifth of the population and behind Hindus in English education, would be outvoted under any elected system, and in 1887–88 he urged them to keep out of Congress. His college at Aligarh trained the generation that founded the All-India Muslim League in 1906. The argument over whether India’s Muslims were a minority to be protected or a nation in their own right began here, half a century before anyone spoke of Pakistan.

Curzon inherits a confident empire. Lord Curzon inherited an empire that looked unshakeable, and he governed as if it were. When he became Viceroy in 1899 the Raj had absorbed Upper Burma, survived two great famines and kept Congress to annual petitions. He read that record as proof of permanence, staging the Delhi durbar, an imperial pageant, in 1903 and partitioning Bengal in 1905 with little regard for Indian opinion. That confidence is the starting point of the next chapter and its overreach the subject of the one after, because a ruler sure of permanence stops asking what his subjects will accept.

The drain becomes a nationalist creed. The economic critique built by Naoroji and Dutt gave Congress a programme that outlived its petitions. Swadeshi, the campaign begun in 1905 to buy goods made in India and boycott British ones, was the drain theory turned into action, and Gandhi later drew on the same arguments when he made homespun cloth the symbol of independence. The famines of 1876–1900 were the evidence the critique pointed to, which is why Indian economic nationalism began as a theory of hunger.