Introduction
Having consolidated control after the establishment of crown rule in 1858, the Government of India's attention turned to the twin priorities of developing the economy according to the economic orthodoxies of the day, and demonstrating the legitimacy of imperial administration through the benefits of efficient governance. This led to extensive debate, both within and outside the government, over the proper limits to the role of the state. Famine policy—which was much discussed following the hopelessly mismanaged Orissa famine of 1866 and during campaigns in 1874 and 1876–78, before being formally codified in the 1880s—was at the centre of such debates. Alongside the threat of further revolt, famines were a critical concern for the British in the late nineteenth century. Mass mortality and dislocation undermined the strength and perceived beneficence of colonial rule; and the frequency of famines in late nineteenth-century India raised questions about economic management. While it was widely accepted at the bureaucratic level that the ideal solution to famine lay in laissez-faire economics,Footnote 1 policy makers were divided between those who saw no role for the state beyond reaction to famine, and those who sought to alleviate it on a lasting basis through development of infrastructure. There were also a few who argued that the physical and economic strength of the people should be maintained at as high a level as possible by investing in agriculture.Footnote 2 Debates about famine policy were therefore influenced by—and influential in—broader discussions of political economy and ideals of governance.
This article is concerned less with the outcomes of such debates than with the ways in which they were conducted. The desire for rational, modern administration had encouraged the emergence of a bureaucratic ideology, whose most significant tool, both metaphorically and in practice, was statistics. As Appadurai suggests, policy making by numbers allowed administrators to compress social reality and create a misleading impression of thoroughness and objectivity.Footnote 3 This was then used to justify the dismissal of protests about government strategy as ill-informed or politicised. Yet it also opened up new battlegrounds for dissent. Other agents could compile data with which to hold the state to account, including journalists and Indian campaigning groups such as the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha. Bayly labels this appropriation of rhetoric valorising public statistics by critics of government as ‘statistical liberalism’, arguing that it was more influential on early nationalist thought than ideological debates.Footnote 4 Even within the colonial state, officers qualified to analyse statistics—especially technically complex ones involving issues that were not widely understood, such as nutrition and disease—were increasingly liable to come into conflict with those concerned with maintaining policy outcomes and legitimacy. Statistics thus contributed to the making of the idea of expertise, which could be used both by and against the upper echelons of the bureaucracy.Footnote 5 On the one hand, expertise could imply theoretical knowledge, for example, of political economy or physiology. On the other, it could suggest detailed empirical knowledge of, for example, social conditions in particular villages, or the effects of eating particular foods. This article explores ways in which disputes between different kinds of ‘expert'—medical and political, empirical, and theoretical—were played out in debates about famine and relief.
Specific conflicts revolved around the weight and validity of different evidence. The distinction between theoretical logic and empirical challenges to it was not clear-cut. All commentators on the famines of the era shared at least some presuppositions, and there were many district officers whose experience did not lead them away from doctrinal views. It is not always easy to distinguish between field reports written empirically, impressionistically or with the aim of reporting what superior officers wanted to hear. In some instances, however, eyewitness evidence and scientific expertise found themselves ranged against more powerful political paradigms. The aim here is to explore ways in which the latter were perpetuated at science's expense. This will require examination of the bureaucratic hierarchy—particularly in the late 1870s, when the autocracy of Sir John Strachey at the centre of government did much to discourage internal debates—and the limited influence of non-state actors. As well as structural factors, attention will be paid to colonial discourse, showing some of the more subtle ways used to deflect both ideological and empirical opposition and continue to set the terms of debates.
Debates over relief wages and famine mortality statistics
Two specific issues during the South Indian famine of 1876–78 resulted in particularly bitter disputes between administrators and scientific opponents: The minimum relief ration that could safely be provided to a working man, and how to calculate the extent of famine mortality. These problems epitomised the state's priorities in responding to famine and its methods of self-justification. Both were widely commented on at the time—and remain concerns for present-day relief practitioners as well as for scholars. They were also the subject of specific, passionate, and highly publicised disputes between Sir Richard Temple, who became Governor of Bombay Presidency in May 1877 after representing the Government of India as a special envoy to Madras earlier in the famine campaign, and Surgeon-Major W. R. Cornish, the Sanitary Commissioner of Madras.
By the beginning of 1877, Temple was an administrator of surprisingly great experience to find himself touring the famine districts of Madras, having been dispatched without notice from the Delhi Durbar by Viceroy Lord Lytton and Sir John Strachey. His star had risen in the 1860s, by his own admission, thanks to his friendship with Lord Lawrence, culminating in a spell as Finance Member of the Government of India from 1868 to 1873.Footnote 6 His involvement with famine started in 1874, when Lord Northbrook appointed him as Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal at the outbreak of severe scarcity in Bihar. Temple ran a remarkable campaign based on state imports of grain and generous relief, which prevented all mortality and enabled peasants to return to their fields promptly when rain returned. He was chastened, however, by strong criticism of his excessive expenditure.Footnote 7 There were striking differences in the mean and unsympathetic campaign he managed in Bombay—and recommended in Madras—3 years later. His relief tactics now reflected the Government of India's tighter priorities of economy, efficiency, and control. Although a thorough and proactive famine administrator, the contradictory principles that he expounded in the two campaigns imply that his considerable experience was not his chief guide in deciding policy, thus diminishing his claims to real expertise.
Surgeon-Major Robert Cornish, on the other hand, had a specific knowledge of the issues he was to debate with Temple well before 1877.Footnote 8 He had researched the diets of prisoners and the agricultural population in 1864, dealing directly with the minimum nutritional requirements of men undergoing hard labour.Footnote 9 His lengthy work on the 1871 Madras Census also demonstrated his capacity not only to interpret statistics but also to perceive the significance of their flaws.Footnote 10 He was selected as an Additional Member of the Madras Legislative Council in 1883, but while he occasionally took up political issues in a public and abrasive manner, his philosophy was that of a scientist who saw no value in hiding his hard thought-out opinions when they could usefully be applied. In the personal commentary running through his census report, he remarked, ‘My previous experience of statistical work sufficed to impress upon me the truth that bare figures are never read or digested by the general public’.Footnote 11
In January 1877, after 2 weeks inspecting relief works in Madras, Temple provoked the biggest controversy of the famine campaign by suggesting that the governments of Madras and Bombay should experiment with a reduced relief wage, which for men was sufficient to purchase 1 pound of grain per day. The argument that they should be granted the smallest amount possible for survival was justified by the supposition that offering over-generous wages would ‘demoralise’, and reduce people's inclination to industry, a theory which he himself had scoffed at in 1874 and was to reject again after returning to England.Footnote 12 His greater aim was to look for ways of saving the state's money, remarking in Gladstonian fashion that it would be unjust to the public interest to exceed the minimum needs of the starving.
Although Cornish had himself only just returned from a 2-year furlough, his earlier prison study had primed him with antipathy towards just such arbitrary declarations by politicians who had not consulted nutritional ‘experts’ on the impact of dietary reductions. Temple dismissed Cornish's protestations as ‘a matter of opinion’ on the basis of ‘abstract scientific theory’ and succeeded in persuading the wary Madras Government to experiment with the wage.Footnote 13 He was probably genuinely uncertain whether it would be enough, especially as he had stood by the 1874 ration of 1½ pounds of grain per man as recently as his arrival in Madras—a point quickly taken up by Cornish, who criticised the cruelty of experimentation at a time when the subjects were in poor condition and the administration was unable to record results with any accuracy. The dispute thus centred on the value of visual evidence from different observers during the famine and in the past. Although he originally only suggested a fortnight's trial, Temple argued at the end of the famine that because the Madras Government had reverted to a higher rate of pay after his departure for Bombay 4 months later, it had never been adequately tested.Footnote 14 This did not prevent him from contradicting Cornish's observations of physical deterioration, however, with the evidence of his own eyes and that of a series of other officers, including Surgeon-Major T. G. Hewlett, Cornish's Bombay counterpart, and Dr Townsend, the Sanitary Commissioner of the Government of India.
When it came to the theoretical arguments about the possibility of 1 pound being sufficient, though, Cornish was able to pick holes in Temple's defence at will. He readily conceded the starting premises that Indians required less to eat than Europeans and that the minimum subsistence diet should be granted during famines, consequently revising down his suggested prison diets of at least 30 ounces per day.Footnote 15 However, he insisted that the minimum still required proper calculation. When Temple attempted to invoke scientific enquiry, by suggesting that the amount of food consumed was less significant than its nutritional content, Cornish responded that therefore only scientists could measure appropriate needs, and that 1 pound of grain would not even replace the nitrogenous waste of a resting Indian. His scorn was still greater when Temple cited evidence from the Madras Manual of Hygiene that the weekly ration for a soldier on board ship was 4 ounces of bread, pointing out that this was a transcription error from the Madras Medical Code, which only someone with no knowledge of the field could fail to realise meant 4 pounds.Footnote 16
Cornish calculated that death rates on relief in the 10 weeks following the introduction of the lower wage (including those reduced to entering poorhouses, whom Temple discounted in assessing its success) would amount to 930.8 per thousand per annum. Moreover, a diet so insufficient that it caused irreversible muscle wastage would mean that many cultivators were unable to return to work in the aftermath of famine.Footnote 17 This had a significant impact on Madras opinion via the press, who hailed Cornish for demonstrating the government's ‘blunder’.Footnote 18 Temple's estimate, however, had been based less on nutritional need than on economic logic. Relief wages had to be set below market rates—in order to discourage those who could work elsewhere from applying. But at a time when drought had left no work in the fields, the laws of supply and demand in normally impoverished circumstances meant that market wages were inevitably below subsistence requirements. Thus, whether intentionally or not, Cornish's science was a direct challenge to the science of political economy. By weakening the population, the state lost more in revenue and negative economic growth than it would have had to spend keeping people strong by importing its own grain stocks for both sale and adequate relief, regardless of the principles of free trade. Cornish did not use this argument himself, but it was strongly propounded by Sir William Robinson, the leader of the Madras Council,Footnote 19 famine commissioners H. E. Sullivan and James Caird in their dissent to the final report,Footnote 20 and indeed had been propounded by Temple himself in 1874.Footnote 21
Temple was able to deflect some of the criticism of the 1-pound ration by pointing out problems in its application. Initially, entire families had often been dependent on a single man's wage, and some relief supervisors were guilty of short waging.Footnote 22 However, when the famine commissioners asked district officers’ views on the wage rates, 12 Madras collectors (and one in Bombay) reported that the condition of the people seemed to have been adversely affected by them.Footnote 23 Temple himself told them that it was ‘a matter upon which I am unwilling to dogmatise’,Footnote 24 and the famine codes ultimately omitted his wage rate, despite drawing on the Bombay campaign extensively as a model.
Although the wage debate had focused on the condition of those requiring relief, there was never any question of paying attention to their own views. Robinson, for example, defended them against abuse specifically on the grounds that ‘we are dealing with the lowest and least interesting classes of an alien people, with whose condition our sympathies are least lively’.Footnote 25 However, some did respond to wage reductions by choosing to discharge themselves. In both Madras and particularly Bombay, where 102,000 people left famine relief works voluntarily between January and March 1877,Footnote 26 these exoduses sometimes involved large numbers simultaneously. Temple claimed that they were organized by political groups, notably the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, but it is more likely that the 1-pound wage meant that taking relief was an inadequate survival strategy. Indeed the Government of Bombay saved more through reduced numbers on relief than through lower payments per se—and Temple argued that relatively low numbers on relief (under 10% of the population in Bombay Presidency) reflected the success of his campaign and the resilience of the people and local economy.Footnote 27
This unrealistic assessment was reflected in Temple's estimate of the final death toll of the famine—the second issue on which his methods of calculation were challenged on both medical and political grounds. His figures were again in particularly sharp contrast with Cornish's. Temple recorded that 49,187 people had died on relief in Bombay, and then estimated that around another 100,000 deaths in the province had been famine related.Footnote 28 His logic in deducting a further 336,302 recorded deaths in the affected districts was twofold. Firstly, the death rate seemed higher because mortality had been recorded more accurately during the famine than usual. Secondly, deaths attributable to cholera, smallpox and even some to ‘fever’ were due to epidemics unrelated to the famine. He was backed in these estimates by Hewlett, who argued that 1877 had been an ‘exceptionally unhealthy’ year. The Bombay Sanitary Commissioner provided a range in which the total of famine deaths should fall of 94,472 to 216,498, in order not to be seen to be trying to under-estimate. That a doctor should make such a disclaimer suggests that he was aware that his figures would be used as a measure of the success of Temple's campaign. He also echoed Temple's implication that people who had died after foolishly discharging themselves from relief should not count.Footnote 29
Most historical demographers,Footnote 30 however, have tended to concur with Cornish that hunger, social disruption and ‘massing the people in unusual crowds on relief works and in camps’ were direct causes of increased levels of disease—and also that mortality statistics were actually less well-recorded than usual during famines because of problems of scale and confusion.Footnote 31 Thus, Cornish concluded, ‘there can be no reasonable doubt that excess mortality was famine mortality and nothing else’.Footnote 32 His estimate for Madras ran to 2 million deaths, as well as a diminishment in the birth rate by a further million.Footnote 33 While the famine in Madras was on a much greater scale than in Bombay, this huge discrepancy can be explained only by the very different criteria applied in calculation, especially considering that Bombay newspapers were reporting cases of starvation as early as in October 1876.Footnote 34
The 1880 Famine Commission report again contradicted Temple on this issue, accepting medical arguments that disease deaths were caused by famine, and concluding that the 1877–78 total for both presidencies was approximately five and a quarter million.Footnote 35 Remarkably, they added that this was not necessarily a significant figure when viewed nationally over time and compared with other causes of demographic fluctuation, though dissenters Sullivan and Caird were quick to disassociate themselves from acceptance of a mortality level greater than the population of Ireland (a deliberately poignant choice of reference).Footnote 36 It was not surprising that Sullivan, the Madras representative on the Famine Commission, should draw on Cornish's results to condemn the whole campaign. Caird, a London-based agricultural economist, must also have been aware of the political significance of mortality estimates. If Temple had succeeded in convincing the public at home that deaths had been few, it would have taken less interest in famine.
Within India in 1877–78, however, it was efficiency and economy that dominated the higher levels of famine policy discussion from the beginning of relief to the conclusions of the Famine Commission, resounding through the directives of the Government of India and relegating mortality statistics to a secondary criterion. Charles Elliott—who was later to draft the famine codes—summarised their insignificance by declaring that the state ‘must be prepared to face and contradict the cry that increased death rates (up to a certain limit) mean unsuccessful administration. The campaign against famine, like other wars, if properly conducted, must have its butcher's bill’.Footnote 37 This was predictably poorly received by the local press, which condemned cutbacks on relief by comparison with the 1874 campaign, despite the Government of India's declaration after the 1866 Orissa famine that no one should ever be allowed to die of starvation. Dnyan Prakash particularly condemned the refusal to borrow to save lives because it established an ongoing debate over the relative importance of economy and mortality prevention.Footnote 38The Native Opinion went further, insisting that the ‘New Famine Policy’ was based on the desire to spend less on relief because of external economic imperatives.Footnote 39 Given the relative outcomes of the 1874 and 1876–78 campaigns, this could scarcely be denied. Yet, in spite of the humanitarian—and even economic—unease which this caused in Madras, Bombay and beyond, it was the ‘New Famine Policy’ that was codified in the 1880s and not abandoned in principle before independence. This suggests that powerful influences were working to sustain it.
The conduct of famine debates: Hierarchy, accountability and claims to expertise
Native Opinion had no doubt who was responsible for the change of direction in famine policy. Dominating Lord Lytton's council as finance member, Sir John Strachey has been described as the most radical proponent of an autocratic form of colonialism, which ‘almost prided itself on its estrangement from its subjects’,Footnote 40 and was renowned for his ‘cold and economic views’.Footnote 41 There was little new for him about stringent relief, having written an influential minute on the subject as early as in 1861, when he was Collector of Moradabad. Even in 1874, when his beliefs were not applied, the man charged by Temple to collate lessons from past famines as a guide suggested that this minute—which was actually written on furlough in England before Strachey had even experienced the North-West Province famine—‘may be regarded as expressing the views of the Government of India at the present time.’Footnote 42 It is possible that he felt personally slighted by Northbrook's more generous tactics, and was among those who made no secret of their criticism of Temple's expenditure.
In government, he had no desire for consensus or popularity, treating local governments’ deviations from central economic policy with stern displeasure, as demonstrated by his aggressive response to maverick policy in Madras in 1877. It is only curious that Temple was willing to be his agent. Strachey's own view of his influence rejected ‘false humility’, pointing out that he and his brother Richard had held virtually every major post in India, culminating at a time when the administration was to be praised ‘for having taken the first steps towards introducing a policy of complete free trade’.Footnote 43 Richard stood in for John on the viceroy's council when he was ill in 1878 and, more importantly, chaired the 1880 Famine Commission. Lytton sometimes proposed that the pair discuss famine issues between themselves before meeting him, and demonstrated his own unawareness of the hard politics surrounding the composition of the Famine Commission by suggesting that was ‘always rather in favour’ of journalist William Digby.Footnote 44 Though Digby was an experienced commentator on famine, it was inconceivable that the Stracheys would include an open critic of the 1876–78 campaign.Footnote 45 The commission was set up to endorse uniformly stringent, laissez-faire policy, upon which permanent famine codes were then based.
While there can be little doubt that the Madras Government was sincere in believing its interventionist approach to famine relief to be the best, its battles with the Government of India were overtly over control. Temple reported their attitude as that ‘Madras is being sat upon’.Footnote 46 Although the import of grain was stopped, however, the presidency's intransigence did earn them some autonomy, as their ultimate reversal of the 1-pound wage showed. Temple complained to Lord Salisbury that he had been given insufficient authority to implement John Strachey's directives,Footnote 47 and then to Lytton that the Madras Council attempted to undermine his orders through appeals to the Secretary of State and English opinion.Footnote 48 As well as taking advantage of the division of powers above them, Madras authorities were aware that no one could replace them in the midst of a famine, and that they could gain by withholding the knowledge that would empower their superiors. Their famine campaign was launched without even informing Calcutta, and when they were requested to provide detailed statistics on the state of crops, prices and the population, they only responded, incompletely, in May 1877. The Government of India was right that this represented an unscientific and dis-organised approach in Madras, but it also prevented them from being saddled with specific instructions concerning budgets, tests and numbers on relief, as the Bombay Government was after completing its returns by the end of 1876.Footnote 49
It was perhaps more coincidence than respect that made Bombay readier to accede to the Government of India famine policy before Temple's arrival. While Madras objected to central spending controls so wholeheartedly that they ultimately spent £6.3 million on the famine and remitted a further £1.9 million of revenue,Footnote 50 the Bombay Government was so hard up anyway that as late as 1871 it had sidestepped recommendations to prepare relief works in advance, ironically on the grounds that the province was at no risk of famine.Footnote 51 Indeed their opposition may have been greater to the earlier dictums against mortality, which Temple described as a ‘severe strain’ on junior officers.Footnote 52 It was only after the famine that Bombay came into serious conflict with Calcutta over policy, when Temple proposed a local cess to continue with the construction of works to mitigate the effects of future famines. With revenue limited following the abolition of income tax in 1873, this amounted to a provincial challenge to central control over resources, as well as a personal one to John Strachey's reactive ‘famine insurance’ proposal.Footnote 53 Temple was right to see the latter as insufficient to cover relief costs, but failed to perceive the unpopularity of taxing the famished to finance their own relief. Brennan has suggested that the insurance plan, along with the Famine Commission itself, was a conspiracy between the Stracheys, Lytton and Salisbury ‘to save ourselves from the Irrigation quacks’ who sought significant public expenditure on famine prevention.Footnote 54 After his Madras mission, Temple was shocked to be so categorised as profligate. On receipt of a ‘crabbed and discouraging’Footnote 55 letter from the Government of India, implying that Bombay was seeking to supplement its resources because of characteristic financial mismanagement, he scribbled objections in the margin that his railway and canal plans could not be financed out of his annual budget. For all his rage, however, his reply repeated his promiseFootnote 56 to make Bombay respect the Government of India's superiority: ‘I have done my utmost, ex animo, to promote in this Presidency the financial policy of the Govt of India. I am anxious to continue doing so. If anything more is required in this respect, I shall always be glad to be instructed accordingly’.Footnote 57
It was perhaps surprising that India's two ryotwari provinces should find themselves at odds with each other during the 1876–78 famine. Their greatest differences stemmed from the manner in which they presented themselves as famine managers, and to whom. Temple's mortality figures and remarkable economy—Bombay's total famine expenditure was £1.14 million, less than any of five different budget estimates, despite a second rain failure in 1877—gave an impression of loyal efficiency to Strachey, but did not earn him broader acclaim. Indeed by 1901, the consensus was that he had been not only ineffective but also inefficient.Footnote 58 Madras, on the other hand, sought the moral high ground, especially courting public opinion in Britain, but they could not win the point that Government of India restrictions had emasculated their campaign. By emphasising the woeful extent of mortality despite such hefty expenditure, they reflected badly upon themselves, and were left open to suggestions that willing adherence to prescribed policy might have worked better.
Temple's belief in hierarchical loyalty—what he called ‘imperial discipline’Footnote 59—meant that he was averse to criticism from below, however empirically based. This extended to local officers as well as provincial governments. Answers to the Famine Commission's questions about the 1-pound wage suggest that they were all too aware of this. While varying opinions were expressed in both Bombay and Madras, far fewer in Bombay opposed it.Footnote 60 It may have been that the rate indeed proved more successful there, or that more Bombay officers instinctively shared Temple's opinions, but the likelihood is that many had their eyes on their present and future careers.Footnote 61 When Lytton visited Poona, on his way to a showdown in Madras, Dnyan Prakash warned that he would learn nothing if he ignored native associations and only spoke to local officers, who had ‘various motives’ to provide untrustworthy accounts.Footnote 62
It was an irony that a native newspaper should so dismiss the evidence of district-level bureaucrats. If central powers tended to do the same for opposite reasons, their attitude towards non-bureaucratic opinion alternated between indifference and hostility. Nonetheless, both press and popular associations like the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha staked their claim as legitimate commentators on famine. The Sabha presented a series of well-researched narratives, ostensibly to help the government in their campaign,Footnote 63 although their self-proclaimed loyalty did not extend to agreement with the meanness of relief in Bombay. Nonetheless, outright attacks on government were rare; traders and the uncharitable rich bearing the brunt of the criticism. Rather, Indian opinion sought to hold the government to account on its own terms in a number of ways.
Initial criticisms were based on eyewitness records of the consequences of limited relief. Conditions in the mofussil and on camps were regularly reported, with examples of mortality, specific abuses or harsh regulations highlighted, in an attempt to persuade the government of its folly through the weight of evidence. Newspapers also, however, contested British perceptions of their own good governance, drawing on metaphor to question colonial legitimacy ‘as the ruler, as the protector and the universal landlord’.Footnote 64 In particular, it was held that after the inappropriately extravagant Delhi Durbar in January 1877, the wider benefits of imperial rule needed to be demonstrated. Shubha Suchak insisted that ‘Contingencies like the present are inseparable from a great and extensive empire like the British Indian one, and Government must be prepared to meet them when they arrive’,Footnote 65 whereas Arunodaya took the opposite approach, invoking the Queen as it asked if ungenerous famine relief was ‘the first indication of the new imperial regime, which has been introduced into this country with so much pomp and eclat?’Footnote 66 The enlightenment as well as the power of the state was judged by its dealing with its subjects’ sufferings, in line with the Hindu concept of rajadharma, the ruler's duty. British failures were condemned by references to other exploiters: taxation as ‘Muglai’,Footnote 67 limited relief as reflecting a ‘Marwari spirit’.Footnote 68 Christian compassion was also appealed to—not least in campaigns for relief to be given to resting workers on Sundays.
Ram has suggested that although colonialism was necessarily anti-democratic, its basis in the rule of law encouraged an adversarial form of debate, which enabled pressure groups and newspapers to argue for expanded entitlements without attempting to overthrow the state, which they did ‘in some sort of pre-historical or early form in the 1870s’.Footnote 69 However, while Indian newspapers probably saw their own role in those terms, they had little impact on the government. In April 1877, Indu Prakash complained bitterly that its long campaign against the 1-pound wage had gone entirely unheeded, while its evidence that cholera deaths were famine related had met only with the wrath of unbelieving local officers.Footnote 70 Indeed it is possible that press support for Cornish's public pronouncements on these issues weakened his credibility within the colonial edifice.
On the other hand, the diminishment of internal discussion may itself have served to externalise the forum for debate. The timing of the Vernacular Press Act, expressly banning criticisms of the government, in June 1878, suggests particular sensitivity on the question of its famine management. Nonetheless, alternative opinion necessarily remained harder to control when it was aired in public than within the bureaucracy. Yet famine policy provides a good example of an issue on which autocratic central standardisation reduced the balancing effects of wider internal deliberation, whether adversarial or consensual. The ship of state was sailing on a narrower and therefore less even keel, as it were; its inflexible captaincy paradoxically giving greater leeway to external pressures. By the 1890s, the emergence of nationalism coincided with significantly increased attacks on government famine policy, notably by Romesh Dutt and Dadabhai Naoroji.Footnote 71
Perhaps ironically, London also helped to erode the certainty of the Government of India's perspective on famine policy. Digby was particularly important, having long challenged the colonial state's right to set the agenda on such issues through his campaigning publications. Following the support and publicity he gave to the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha in 1876–78, he helped to create the Indian Political Agency in 1887. The Sabha itself sent its material on the 1-pound wage to the Secretary of State, and also to The Times, which in 1874 had matched native newspaper suggestions that Queen Victoria should hold the Government of India to account for combating the effects of famine.Footnote 72 Of course, similar suggestions received short shrift in India in 1876–78, but the influence of press coverage on English opinion, including the House of Commons, steadily grew, particularly after the advent of photography. Thus, as Calcutta staunchly defended its financial independence, its relationship with London by the turn of the century became almost akin to its own treatment of Bombay and Madras in the 1870s, with pressure to adopt renewed responsibility for adequate relief not backed by British government aid.
The challenge of science to colonial discourse on famine
If debates over famine policy were won and lost in the 1870s primarily through the relative strength of the proponents of each viewpoint within the bureaucratic hierarchy, the justifying logic of their arguments did not go unchallenged. It was easy to ignore opinion from outside the government—and to constrain contrary voices within it—by recourse to the laws of political economy, which only well-trained bureaucrats could fully understand. But the challenge of science was another matter. Although not always incompatible with political economy, the increasing importance attached to statistical measurement and investigation at this time made it, potentially, an alternative belief system and source of authority. It also gave weight and depth to empirical criticisms of specific government policies—as was shown in the debate over the 1-pound wage—and justifications—as the controversy over mortality statistics demonstrated. Broadly, the reaction of politicians to this challenge was twofold: to use science to their own advantage, both as a defence of their tactics and as a tool for the display of colonial superiority, and to dismiss the claims to expertise of those scientists who, like Cornish, produced uncomfortable conclusions.
In an attempt to undermine Cornish's credibility, Temple relied on the internal hierarchy within the medical service itself. The use of Townsend to contradict Cornish's findings relied on respect for his superior position, even though the Government of India's man had far less experience in the field of nutrition, and no previous knowledge of the condition of Madrassi ryots with which to compare his observations. In questioning how empirical Cornish's findings were, Temple cast doubt on the value of ‘theoretical notions’ generally, and denigrated Cornish's specific opinions as based on ‘some scientific data not now admitted by the faculty’.Footnote 73 Thus, the dispute was cast as within medicine, with Temple accepting the arguments that confirmed his own. It was also made clear that medicine was not entitled to make public challenges to policy. Dnyan Prakash observed that Hewlett's disappointing silence about wage rates in Bombay was unsurprising, considering that ‘whenever the Sanitary Commissioner [of Madras] has ventured to express himself against the present famine policy, the Government has shewed its displeasure, and told the Sanitary Commissioner to mind his own proper business’.Footnote 74
Even the Madras Government was irritated that Cornish's criticisms appeared in newspapers, but it also sought to emphasise the qualities of its star witness in much the same way as Temple had denied them. Robinson declared Cornish to be ‘a famine authority of whom all India will one day be proud’.Footnote 75 Similarly, the press reversed Temple's empirical point by calling his own persistence with the 1-pound wage in Bombay the prioritisation of ‘theory against the strongest arguments of science and experience’.Footnote 76 However, Cornish himself had less political intent, arguing only that relevant science should be recognised as valuable within the bureaucracy, after the impressionism and ignorance that had characterised colonial observation up till then. He had expressed bewilderment in the 1871 census that Indian Civil Service entrance examinations still required a knowledge of Greek plays but not of agricultural science,Footnote 77 and pointed out in his 1864 nutrition study that even the laws of supply and demand could not determine the needs of a human body more logically than nature itself, which should therefore be fully understood.Footnote 78
This can be seen as much as a call for more research as an assertion of the supremacy of scientific knowledge. Progress was slow in Indian science and it was indeed subject to the internal dissension that Temple accentuated. No evidence or explanation was enough to prove anything categorically. Cornish could conceive a sophisticated connection between hunger and epidemic disease, and his data still look impressive, yet he, like all his contemporaries in India, was a stranger to the germ theory. He never claimed that science was a neutral arbiter on the social and political impacts of famine or its response. For example, despite his realisation in 1864 that ideal average diets were far from the norm in everyday rural life in Madras,Footnote 79 Cornish did not attempt to raise the question of chronic malnutrition in debates over famine policy—although it is conceivable that proponents of more comprehensive relief may have prevailed had he done so. This suggests either that he shared the Malthusian view that government was not accountable for the ordinary condition of the people, or else that he recognised that he could not have won either of his specific debates with Temple if he had started by challenging such premises.
Thus, in spite of his empirical evidence, Cornish did not prevent the colonial state from defusing the links between the horrors of famine and its own policy. Hewlett, for example, has won praise from surprising quarters for covering his mortality under-estimates with the claim that starvation was almost unquantifiable from existing information—when Bombay, unlike Madras, had chosen not to publish weekly mortality statistics during the 1876–78 famine.Footnote 80 Statistical data were used to reflect presuppositions about famine as often as they challenged them. A single appendix to the 1880 Famine Commission report contained papers on the connection between rainfall and sunspots (by Richard Strachey himself, who later chaired the Meteorological Council for over 20 years),Footnote 81 patterns in agricultural statistics, experiments to improve crop yields, agricultural training, the size and condition of the population and the impacts of railways and irrigation.Footnote 82 Further enquiries were made about deforestation and the consumption of ‘famine foods’. Some of these were analyses of potential famine prevention, while others—such as Strachey's paper—interpreted famine as an unavoidable natural disaster, even though rainfall in certain regions was always capricious. But above all, none of them could persuade the commission to accept blame on the government's behalf, or to recommend a markedly different approach from that used by Temple in Bombay.
On the other hand, the gathering of such information did reflect an attempt by the state to try to comprehend and respond to famine. Both the early commencement of census taking in India and the rapid expansion of the transport network were directly attributed to the desire to manage it through the benefits of modern knowledge.Footnote 83 After the 1874 campaign, Temple commissioned a statistical review of both the indicators of famine and the operation of relief.Footnote 84 Its author was astute enough to realise by the time of its completion that his assumption of success in Bihar would not become a guide to future state policy, as that matter had ‘passed the stage of discussion in a report such as this, and. . . become an Imperial question ripe for solution’,Footnote 85 but the data collected by the Government of India in 1876–77 were similar. Detailed information on the extent of crop failure, the state of markets and people's responses created the capacity for central control of famine policy, but also for improved effectiveness. In some cases, it was suggested, collectors’ efforts in gathering such material would help them to realise the magnitude of the task ahead of them.Footnote 86
Once statistics had been compiled, however, they were used selectively by administrators. Temple, for example, justified his intervention in the 1874 famine because it affected a greater population than that of 1866. Later, though, he argued that this did not set a precedent for complete mortality prevention in still larger famines, such as that of 1876–78.Footnote 87 The expense of the Bihar campaign was explained by the need for the government to transport its own grain in difficult conditions, and the surplus of 100,000 tons of grain at the end of relief by the unusually good harvest of autumn 1874, which could not have been safely anticipated. The failure of rains in 1877 as well as 1876 was blamed for much of the mortality in that famine, alongside the prevalence of disease, which had not been a factor in 1874. Yet in fact he had recorded the existence of cholera in Bihar as early as January.Footnote 88 The suggestion that its spread may have been controlled by adequate relief was not made, and Temple's belief that the good harvest in 1874 was partly due to the peasants’ continuing strength due to generous relief did not affect his future strategies.
Though self-serving, such arguments were at least based on logic. There was also a powerful emotional content to colonial discourse, capable of counteracting the visible impact of famines. The ways in which central ideologies tended to over-ride the significance of field-level experience have been discussed, but this was not just a simple case of seeing versus believing. Economic, political, racial and even moral theories influenced all those involved. They often tended to accentuate the effects of physical distance, but could also affect people who saw the famine at close hand, as Temple's experience shows especially clearly. In 1874, those who argued that private trade had been hampered by state imports were attacked as ‘unacquainted with the facts’,Footnote 89 with Temple lamenting particularly that Indians seemed better able to understand the reality of the situation than Europeans who were not on the spot.Footnote 90 Yet such ignorance did not prevent European opinions from becoming the generally accepted ones after the famine. To John Strachey, and by 1877 to Temple too, ‘understanding’ had more to do with knowledge of the laws of John Stuart Mill than local hearsay.
In addition, complex political and economic issues surrounding famine and relief were disguised by their reduction to over-simplistic moral formulations purporting to analyse the character of the people. Frequently recurring terms indicated the patrician manner in which the famished were praised or blamed according to the ethics of their response to suffering, without emotion or consideration of the state's own ethical position. In the language of relief, the word most often used was ‘demoralisation’. This concept had a direct impact on policy, as the main justification for low relief wages, in order to discourage laziness and dependence, but it is worth considering the connotations of the word itself. In the contemporary Malthusian paradigm, famine was seen as a moral as much as a social and economic breakdown, and thus India's status as a land of famine reflected upon its people. Temple drew such a large distinction between the twin goals of material and moral progress in his evidence to the 1880 Famine Commission that he offered different regions as the most successful in each.Footnote 91 To some extent, Indian opposition accepted the moral agenda by turning the tables to hold the state morally accountable. Though their case carried some weight in London, it still dealt primarily with famine response, without questioning causation in any depth.
The choice of the term ‘demoralisation’ was itself ironic, given both the low morale that was widely recorded in relief camps, and the evidence that many peasants would break their own moral codes—and the law—before accepting state relief. Similarly, Temple was perhaps more literal than he intended in ordering village inspectors to assess the ‘helplessness’ of those too weak to leave their homes, so as to distinguish them from those who did not need help from the state.Footnote 92 Such morally superior language was at its height in Temple's final minute on the Bombay famine, where the word ‘poor’ appears as a collective term for people to be denigrated, along with the particularly unfortunate judgement that those who spurned the offer of food for work had been ‘eating the bread of idleness’.Footnote 93
In addition, language could be used to aid self-justification. It is striking that Temple's references in 1874 to ‘charitable’ relief for the housebound became ‘gratuitous’ relief in 1877. Often, too, his terms set parameters which implied the existence of disconcerting norms: the government would endeavour to relieve only those in ‘dangerous distress’;Footnote 94 medical supervision was provided for those previously receiving ‘ordinary food’ who now needed special dietsFootnote 95; none of the ‘peasant proprietory, who constitute the real agricultural community’, ever applied for relief.Footnote 96 As an ultimate disclaimer, his observations were also constantly interspersed with calls for ‘Providence’ to bring an end to the suffering.
Conclusion
Starting by focusing on controversies in 1876–78 over the wage to be granted on relief works and what constituted famine mortality, this article has examined the ways in which leading bureaucrats responded to challenges over famine policy. The influence of junior officers and the press was deliberately curtailed by Sir John Strachey—a famine specialist of sorts himself. Although scientific observation and analysis were invigorated by their success in specific debates, their wider impact was also limited. As statistics, technology and science became important components of the imperial project, the relationship between scientists and administrators was increasingly uneasy—as illustrated by the disputes between the two main ‘experts’ considered here. Both were also ambivalent in their own right.
It is hard to know what Sir Richard Temple's personal opinions on famine were, because he was so willing not only to carry out policies directed by others but also to argue their logic. By the time he left India to stand for parliament in 1880, he had won renown in famine management. But his real expertise, perhaps, had been within the financial bureaucracy, from where he had expected to depart India directly in 1873, after reaching the top of the tree. He was almost uniquely unwilling to fight Bombay's corner against the Government of India, even when he felt personally slighted—seeking, if anything, to take on a greater burden of local responsibility. Yet, having never opposed Strachey's views, he later hinted that he would prefer to approach famine again as he had in Bihar rather than Madras and Bombay.Footnote 97
Surgeon-Major Robert Cornish was concerned to advance the causes of science and medicine in India per se, more than with the apparently humanitarian logic of his specific arguments. Indeed, he had shown a willingness in 1864 to dabble in the eugenic implications of diet,Footnote 98 and there was a hint of social Darwinism even at the conclusion of his bitterest attack on Temple, when he suggested: ‘The survivors of the famine will be the strongest and best fitted of their race to continue the species, and when plenty again blesses the land, they will produce a vigorous race of descendants’.Footnote 99 His valiant arguments over the 1-pound wage proved useful to the Government of Madras, but he may not have shared their wider welfare interventionist views. It is as likely that Cornish's idea of good governance featured a bureaucracy cognisant with modern statistical techniques—consistent with both the aims of John Strachey and twenty-first-century usage of the term.
The 1876–78 famine was one of the biggest in Indian history, killing twice as many people as that of 1943. While the political significance of the latter is well understood, the former had until recently slipped from view.Footnote 100 Yet not only an ill-founded famine policy but the entire laissez-faire paradigm was reinforced by the suppression of debate in the 1870s.Footnote 101 Discussions of famine causation as well as relief had the potential to change conceptions of economic management and governance, in which welfare mattered as much as fiscal control. It has been argued here that clashes over famine administration were, to some extent, avoided by the too willing separation of the scientific and political significance of their outcomes. However, the 1876–78 campaign did have a lasting political impact, disquieting home opinion as well as that of administrators involved like William Wedderburn and A. O. Hume. Their subsequent encouragement of nationalists such as Naoroji epitomised the way in which the foreclosure of internal debate on famine stimulated lasting external critiques of colonialism. It was a nice irony that, to be heard, Naoroji was elected to parliament in 1892 in support of Gladstone, the doyen of fiscal stringency—the cause for which so much un-British rule had been perpetrated.
Acknowledgement
I thank David Arnold, David Washbrook and Shruti Kapila for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.
