Introduction
This paper explores voluntary action in famine relief in late nineteenth-century India. From 1860 to 1901 India faced a series of devastating famines judged the worst in recorded history. It has been estimated that between 12 and 30 million people died in India in the last quarter of the century from starvation and famine-related diseases.Footnote 2 Throughout the nineteenth century British rulers of India developed emergency famine relief programmes as a way of strengthening the legitimacy of their rule.Footnote 3 However, government reluctance to accept full responsibility for saving lives, and fears of encouraging pauperism, resulted in the emergence of a parallel system of charitable relief. This combined indigenous traditions of relief with British models of organised philanthropy. Although in 1878 the Government of India introduced measures to control voluntary action in future famines, international relief funds in 1897 and 1900 raised record sums of money which were distributed by thousands of British and Indian volunteers. Building on the experience of famine relief in 1876–1878, there was also an expansion in the 1890s of independent voluntary relief, marked by fundraising, co-operation with other agencies and the personal service of volunteers. The paper commences with an overview of the evolution of the parallel systems of governmental and non-governmental famine relief in India from the end of the eighteenth century to the famine of 1876–1878 in South India. It then considers the nature and extent of fundraising, volunteering and administration of relief in the famines of 1896–1898 and 1899–1901. The paper concludes by showing the importance of organised voluntary famine relief in the late nineteenth century for the development of extensive social service in early twentieth-century India.
Literature and Sources on Indian Famines
While Indian famines have received scholarly attention since the late nineteenth century most of this work has focused on the role of government.Footnote 4 Although the historical neglect of voluntary activity and philanthropy has been reversed following a resurgence of academic interest since the 1980s, this is only beginning to be felt in studies of colonial India. Recently, historians such as Gwilym Beckerlegge and Carey Watt, building on the work of Christopher Bayly, have explored the evolution of Indian (particularly Hindu) philanthropic traditions into modern social service through the redefining of Indian ‘living traditions’ of seva (service), dana (charitable giving) and dharma (religious duty) in the last decades of the nineteenth century.Footnote 5 Bayly describes how seva was transformed into ‘an energising public doctrine’ of service through contact with Western models of voluntary association and Christian missionary charity.Footnote 6 This paper will show the importance of voluntary famine relief in the 1890s in this process. Famine relief helped lay foundations for the formation of a large number of social service groups – both British and Indian in origin – between the 1890s and the 1920s in India. The paper draws on a wide range of non-governmental sources to tell the important story of voluntary action in Indian famine relief. Common to all historical research on voluntary action is the problem that the viewpoints of the beneficiaries of charitable aid as well as those of many volunteers are missing from sources. As a recent book on recipients argues ‘too many studies in the past have taken an institutional stance, concentrating on the benefactors and officials who were responsible for implementing policies’.Footnote 7 Donors to famine funds were recorded in published subscription lists but the recipients of relief and ordinary volunteers were not. However, careful reading of surviving reports of relief agencies reveals the full extent of Indian participation in famine relief, provides impressions of the volunteers administering relief, and allows analysis of the many rumours circulating among recipients about the administration of charitable relief.Footnote 8
Famine Relief and Charity 1770–1874
Pre-British rulers of India had supported the people in times of scarcity by banning food exports from famine-affected regions, fixing grain prices and remitting revenue.Footnote 9 In addition, famine-affected people developed a range of mechanisms to cope with the onset of scarcity which included reducing food intake, selling assets, migration in search of work, food or alms, eating ‘famine foods’ such as roots, leaves and berries, and, in extreme cases, abandoning wives or children and committing infanticide.Footnote 10 In times of scarcity wealthier Indians, including landowners and merchants, assumed responsibility for providing direct relief to the less fortunate, in the form of work, doles of food or by selling subsidised grain.Footnote 11 In the early decades of British rule the East India Company continued with some of these relief methods but also encouraged alternative European-style charitable methods and sanctioned criticism of indigenous almsgiving.Footnote 12
Europeans travelling or living in India from the seventeenth century were aware of indigenous forms of almsgiving and poor relief: including building of roads, tanks and wells,Footnote 13 rest-houses (serais)Footnote 14, animal hospitals (pinjrapols),Footnote 15 and the distribution of food and alms to brahmins and the poor.Footnote 16 Writing in 1752–1753 the historian of India, Robert Orme, then a twenty-four year old employee of the East India Company in Calcutta, was impressed by the visible signs of almsgiving and benevolence but questioned the motives of donors.Footnote 17 Likewise, East India Company Chaplain William Tennant noted:
We ought not to confound what is extorted by the fears of superstition, or what is lavished by vanity, with the charitable benefactions dictated by a sound understanding and a benevolent heart.Footnote 18
Other European writers criticised indigenous methods of distribution of food and alms.Footnote 19 Under the influence of evangelicalism and utilitarianism, Europeans increasingly tended to view institutional charity as the only legitimate form of benevolence.Footnote 20 Baptist missionary William Ward warned his readers not to expect:
those benevolent institutions which owe their existence to the influence of Christianity. India contains no Hindoo hospitals for the sick and insane, no institutions for the relief of the poor and unfortunate, no charity schools, no benevolent societies of any kind.Footnote 21
European writers were also concerned to distinguish the ‘necessitous poor’ from religious ‘mendicants’ who were widely considered to be undeserving of assistance.Footnote 22 Such a distinction was not one recognised by indigenous donors but had its roots in contemporary fears that the unreformed poor law in England was encouraging pauperism. However, some eighteenth-century Indians in turn criticised the British for returning home with fortunes without thinking to continue indigenous traditions of sinking wells, digging reservoirs, building bridges or planting orchards.Footnote 23
By denying the legitimacy of Indian traditions of relief, European writers opened space for the personal service and charitable aid of the British. Alternative models of charity organisation were promoted by Europeans resident in India. From the 1770s Europeans organised emergency relief funds for disasters such as famines, floods and fires, and founded institutional charities such as hospitals, schools and asylums in major towns.Footnote 24 The policy of the East India Company was to make grants to these funds with the aim of stimulating individual giving, although on at least one occasion – the Madras famine of 1782–1784 – Company officials sought to avoid paying the pledged donation.Footnote 25 Emergency relief measures sometimes turned into longer term welfare provision for the indigenous poor. In Madras a Native Poor Fund was formed with surplus money from the 1782–1784 relief fund and it continued to manage the Monegar Choultry, an alms-house started during the famine.Footnote 26 Indian participation in donating to, fundraising for, and administering funds was often quite substantial, at least in Calcutta and Madras, although this was often overlooked in contemporary reports.Footnote 27
It was in the 1837–1838 famine in North India that East India Company officials for the first time gave serious consideration to the principles on which they would administer relief.Footnote 28 Influenced by contemporary discussions on the poor law in England, provincial governments declared that they had a duty to provide employment for the able-bodied but judged that gratuitous relief should be the responsibility of the charitable public.Footnote 29 British-style ‘discriminate’ charity was championed and indigenous relief methods heavily criticised.Footnote 30 Voluntary relief committees were organised in the affected towns of Cawnpore (Kanpur), Agra and Farrukhabad and money was raised outside the famine areas through public meetings in towns including Calcutta, Berhampore and Bombay.Footnote 31 In contrast to indigenous practices of distributing grain and cooked food in open kitchens near the homes or businesses of the charitable, relief committees experimented with new ways of governing hunger. These privileged discipline and strict tests of need and drew heavily on the English poor laws for their theoretical underpinning. For example, committees distributed cooked food in residential poor-houses enclosed by walls.Footnote 32 However, such novel European methods did not go uncontested. The Agra Ukhbar criticised relief committees for confining their work to the towns while starving people were dying before they reached the poor-houses, and accused them of hoarding capital reserves.Footnote 33 The committees fought back in attempts to secure additional government funding, decrying indiscriminate indigenous alms-giving which was attracting hoards of beggars to the towns.Footnote 34 In contrast relief committees presented their work as adhering to the accepted rules of European organised philanthropy. The president of the Agra relief society, F.O. Wells, was at pains to ‘assure Government that the most scrupulous regard is had to the honest and frugal distribution of the funds’.Footnote 35
As the colonial state tightened its control on Indian possessions during the nineteenth century so were indigenous practices of relief further criticised and widely challenged. Provincial governments continued to offer famine relief in exchange for manual labour while those unable to work were left to the care of charity.Footnote 36 The overwhelming fear of the British rulers was that over-generous famine relief would pauperise the people and leave millions dependent on state support.Footnote 37 Thus while governments praised and relied on Indian benevolence in ‘ordinary times’, in periods of scarcity they sought to channel and control indigenous giving.Footnote 38 Provincial governments stimulated donations to relief funds by agreeing to match the sums raised and ensured government officials were represented on each voluntary committee.Footnote 39 The committees introduced checks to prevent relief for the undeserving poor, supplying food in central poor-houses to applicants issued with tickets after an enquiry into their circumstances.Footnote 40 From the 1860s some committees began to provide uncooked grain to the ‘respectable’ classes in their homes and to develop special relief programmes for artisans.Footnote 41 In 1861 the first international appeal for Indian famine relief was made through the Lord Mayor of London.Footnote 42 However during periods of scarcity in the 1860s the food and money distributed by private individuals was often greater than the relief given by committees, especially in wealthy cities such as Delhi, Lahore and Amritsar.Footnote 43 The British in India remained ambivalent and inconsistent in their attitudes to such indigenous methods of giving. Only rarely did the British – like the secretary of the Punjab relief fund in 1869 – acknowledge that the ‘liberality of natives can be but poorly tested by subscription lists’.Footnote 44 In turn Indians routinely cited famine relief as characteristic Indian charity. Reporting on indigenous relief in the famine of 1866, Kissory Chand Mittra recorded:
Their conduct has afforded the most triumphant refutation of the ungenerous charge so often laid at the door of the Hindus that there is no charity in their composition. It on the contrary conclusively proves that charity is a conspicuous trait of their national character.Footnote 45
Following a disastrous relief campaign in Orissa in 1866–1867 provincial governments gradually rejected the earlier principle of relying solely on charity for relief of the poor, old and sick.Footnote 46 In the Bengal famine of 1874, described by modern historians as the only successful relief effort in colonial India, the government significantly extended aid but the cost proved too high for the administration to applaud.Footnote 47
The 1877 Relief Fund
Accordingly in the 1877–1878 South Indian famine the government was concerned to keep expenditure as low as possible while at the same time not be seen to rely on charitable donations for preventing mortality. The viceroy Lord Lytton argued that having accepted this responsibility, the government should be left to pursue relief, safe from the ‘humanitarian humbugs’ that might jeopardise a cost-saving approach.Footnote 48 The Government of India pursued an uncompromising centralised relief programme, appointing Sir Richard Temple as special envoy for famine.Footnote 49 Lytton's hope of avoiding criticism of the stringent relief programme was not fulfilled, with a very public debate ensuing over the notorious ‘Temple ration’ experiment.Footnote 50 When in August 1877 the leading citizens of Madras – both Indian and European – appealed in Britain for donations to a famine relief fund, Lytton viewed this as an act of insubordination and acted swiftly to suppress the fund, sending a coded telegram to the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal.Footnote 51 This move provoked outcry when leaked to the Indian and British press. As the newspapers were quick to point out, Lytton's opposition to the fund placed all donors in the wrong, including the newly designated ‘Empress’ of India and a host of former Governor-Generals who had headed the subscription lists in Britain. A leader in The Times expressed great regret that ‘the Viceroy should have interposed to repress the impulses of private charity’ and denounced his policy of pursuing famine relief ‘solely with economy in mind’.Footnote 52
Lord Lytton was eventually forced to sanction the existence of the relief fund and to donate Rs. 10,000 (£1,000) himself, a gesture he admitted privately he made with ‘an ill will’.Footnote 53 The fund, which eventually totalled £820,000, was raised through millions of small contributions from individuals, schools, churches and regiments throughout the British world.Footnote 54 However, until December 1877 Lytton continued to describe the fund as ‘a complete nuisance’ and to issue dire warnings that all the money would be wasted by an irresponsible committee.Footnote 55 Voluntary famine relief in 1876–1878 was important in the shift to organised social service in India because of the scale of the programme, which was administered by 150 committees involving three or four thousand Indian and European volunteers.Footnote 56 It was also noteworthy for the new relief measures pioneered by committees such as day nurseries for children, cattle saving funds and extension of relief for ‘respectable’ classes in their own homes.Footnote 57 The famine provided new opportunities for two recently formed associations in Western India – the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha and Bombay Theistic Association – to become involved with both the administration of relief and the investigation of conditions in famine-affected areas.Footnote 58 Lytton would not admit that voluntary aid might have helped save lives in 1877, although his views were countered by the organisers of the relief fund.Footnote 59 Despite the range of voluntary relief agencies, the Famine Commissioners’ report in 1880 endorsed the viceroy's view of charitable aid as solely supplementary to government relief and proclaimed the necessity of measures to control charity in future famines. The report confirmed the prevailing British view of Indian charity as indiscriminate and likely to pauperise recipients, taking evidence from civil servants such as Mr Gibbs of Bombay who considered indigenous charity a ‘grave evil’ that had demoralised the people.Footnote 60 The Commissioners judged that once a government relief programme was in place the ‘public distribution of alms to unknown applicants should be discouraged and if possible entirely stopped’.Footnote 61
Famine in the 1890s
By the late nineteenth century the British administration in India had created codified criteria that enabled officials to distinguish ‘famine’ from ‘scarcity’ and to begin the emergency operation aimed at containing large-scale mortality.Footnote 62 For famine-affected people, however, the boundaries dividing famine from ‘ordinary’ times were always blurred.Footnote 63 Numbers on government relief at the height of the 1897 famine were 4 million out of an affected population of 40 million and in 1900 this had risen to 6.5 million out of 25 million.Footnote 64 Despite the extension of aid, in numerous cases rations were reduced and relief work opened only belatedly.Footnote 65 The emergency relief measures were understood as exceptional breaks with the ordinary administration of British India, in no way constituting an acceptance of state responsibility for the poor, sick or disabled in ‘ordinary’ times.Footnote 66 Voluntary relief in the 1890s provided significant additional support to famine-affected populations although it was not able to prevent the high mortality of the years 1896–1901. In 1897 and 1900 charitable funds of all kinds spent over Rs. 20 million, equivalent to more than a quarter of the sum spent by the government on direct relief.Footnote 67
Fundraising: The International Relief Funds
After 1877 the Government of India assumed responsibility for defining the ‘legitimate’ objectives of charitable relief in famine times, for sanctioning international appeals and for overseeing the organisation of volunteers administering these funds. These new rules allowed the administration to delay the opening of an international appeal for four months from October 1896 to January 1897, when public feeling in Britain about the famine could no longer be ignored.Footnote 68 Once again the government found itself heavily criticised by the press – and this time also by the Indian National Congress – for seemingly refusing offers of British charity.Footnote 69 Nevertheless, the 1897 famine relief fund totalled £1.7 million, the ‘largest amount that had ever been collected anywhere’ according to the then Lord Mayor of London and double that collected in 1877.Footnote 70 Critics, however, compared this sum unfavourably with the £10 million spent in Britain on celebrating the Diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria.Footnote 71 In 1900, despite poor expectations because of the South African War, the total collection was still more than £1 million, of which £627,000 was raised in Britain.Footnote 72
Famine relief funds were causes with which the rich and famous of the day wished to have their names associated, via Times subscription lists and participation in fundraising events across the Empire. For example, best-selling author Arthur Conan Doyle read from his work in London at an event in aid of the 1897 fund.Footnote 73 In Calcutta amateur dramatic performances were organised to raise money.Footnote 74 Similar fundraising events had been common among the European community in India since the early nineteenth century and were a means to endow the sometimes frivolous social activities of Anglo India with a veneer of respectability.Footnote 75 The international appeals also prompted new forms of corporate philanthropy. In 1897 and 1900 several large firms sent gifts-in-kind including Mellin's Food, Meaby's biscuits and First Swiss Alpine Milk Exporting Co.Footnote 76
Donations for the international fund were collected by the Mansion House in London, by Lord Mayors or Lord Provosts in other cities, by Governor-Generals in British colonies and through various independent newspaper appeals before being forwarded to a central committee in Calcutta for allocation to provincial committees. The largest contributions came from Britain but money was donated all over the British world, particularly in Australia, New Zealand and Canada.Footnote 77 The international famine relief funds were mainly imperial funds. American contributions to famine relief, though significant, tended to be channelled through their own missionaries. In the 1890s over $1 million in cash and gifts-in-kind from the United States was sent for missionary famine relief in India.Footnote 78 The Indian diaspora contributed large sums to the funds raised in British colonies: M.K. Gandhi, for instance, organised collections in South Africa in 1897 and 1900.Footnote 79 This succession of funds seemed to cast the British in the perpetual role of benefactor and Indians as permanently holding the begging bowl.Footnote 80 Writing in 1897 to urge its readers to contribute to the fund The Daily Mail noted ‘If it falls to us to defend our Empire from the spectral armies of hunger. . .our weapon is good honest British money’.Footnote 81 In fact around a fifth of the total amount raised in both 1897 and 1900 was collected in India. Referring to this proportion in a speech in 1900 Lord Curzon suggested ‘Native India has not yet reached as high a standard of practical philanthropy or charity as might reasonably be expected’.Footnote 82 Such an attitude reflected the longstanding prejudice against indigenous relief and ignored the significant contributions of time and money Indians made to locally organised relief in the 1890s.
Independent Relief Agencies
In 1896–1901 there was an extension of organised charitable relief independent of the semi-official committees which distributed the international funds. A wider range of voluntary and religious organisations were involved than any earlier famine, reflecting the rapid development of civil society in urban India in the last two decades of the century as well as the increased missionary presence in the sub-continent.Footnote 83 Indigenous charitable and associational traditions had been altered over a century of elite accommodation with colonial rule. In particular, many wealthy Indians had been receptive to the idea of adapting traditions of gift giving to include the sick and the poor.Footnote 84 However philanthropy was an arena in which the elite engaged in a contest for self-representation with the colonial state. Throughout the period some individuals continued to feed the hungry in the traditional manner. On one level government reports were seen to commend this ‘free and generous distribution of charity by the well-to-do’, yet in practice officials disapproved of much ‘indiscriminate’ indigenous relief.Footnote 85 One report noted with regret that many well-to-do Indians continued to prefer ‘the old fashioned method of relieving the beggars at their doors to giving donations to the fund’.Footnote 86
Yet in the famines of the 1890s much indigenous relief differed from the dana of wealthy individuals because it was marked by fundraising, co-operation with other agencies and the organisation of volunteers. Relief in the 1890s thus continued the shift from individual giving to organised social service that began in 1876–1878. In many towns or rural districts small voluntary committees were formed at the start of the famine to raise money locally to open kitchens, orphanages or relief works.Footnote 87 For example, 42 residents of the town of Burhanpur in the Central Provinces, including two Europeans, raised Rs. 12,000 to maintain a cheap grain shop and poor-house in 1900.Footnote 88 Some of these spontaneous groups later became local or district committees of the semi-official relief funds. In Broach, in the Bombay Presidency, Hindu, Parsi and European women formed a committee to raise money to relieve 8,500 women and children in 1900, independently of the relief fund.Footnote 89 The Arya Samaj first became involved in famine relief work in North India in 1897 and greatly extended this in 1899–1900 with a large-scale publicity and fundraising campaign.Footnote 90 In Western India associations such as the Prarthana Samaj, Poona Sarvajanik Sabha and Deccan Sabha were all involved in relief work in the 1890s.Footnote 91 In Bengal and Bihar the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj and Indian Association built on their earlier famine relief collaboration in 1884–1885, while famine relief formed the first expression of organised seva by the Ramakrishna Mission.Footnote 92
The largest independent relief was channelled through Christian mission societies which, even in the age of international famine funds, appealed to home committees and directly to the Christian public in Britain, America and continental Europe for money to fund their relief work. Missionary publicity was highly effective in raising global awareness of the effects of famine in India, particularly through publication of shocking photographs of starvation.Footnote 93 Missionaries often found the committee structure of the semi-official funds frustrating and slow: funds were generally not started until the height of a famine, by which point missionaries and other local volunteers might have been engaged in relief work for many months. Missionary complaints however were rarely appreciated by the Government of India. As the Secretary of State, Lord Hamilton, wrote to Lord Elgin in 1897:
I am getting thoroughly out of temper with the Missionaries and their misleading reports to their friends at home. They lose no opportunity of decrying the efforts of the Government, and insinuate that the funds of the Famine Relief are misused, squandered, and, in some cases, appropriated by those supervising them.Footnote 94
Special missionary funds were used to establish independent feeding stations in mission compounds, to employ famine labour and to finance a range of other relief programmes for both Christians and non-Christians. As noted above, Americans channelled relief through missionaries and developed traditions of sending food provisions in preference to cash donations. Celebrated incidents of 1897 and 1900 were the ships of American grain and beans sent to India by readers of the New York based Christian Herald.Footnote 95 In terms of the funds raised and extent of relief work undertaken, the missionary response to famine hunger in 1897 and 1900 was on an unprecedented scale. However, in justifying their relief work to headquarters, missionaries tended to invoke powerful personal images of feeding the hungry and caring for the bodies of the poor.Footnote 96
Volunteering
The extent of Indian participation in both official and voluntary relief administration was far greater than the image of India as a ‘land of famine’ suggested to many British donors at the time. The service and sacrifice of British civil servants on famine duty was eulogised in Rudyard Kipling's verse and stories and in speeches of successive viceroys—reinforcing pre-existing beliefs about British agency and Indian passivity.Footnote 97 However, in 1897 and 1900 thousands of Indian volunteers, largely from the professional middle classes, came forward to serve on hundreds of committees to administer funds raised by the international appeals. In comparison, in 1899–1900 just 637 officials, Indian and European, were on official famine duty.Footnote 98 The semi-official relief funds were organised hierarchically with 11 provincial committees co-ordinated by the central committee in Calcutta. Each provincial committee had between 17 and 36 district committees, which in turn had several local committees. The vice president of the 1897 central committee believed that the fund's strength consisted in enlisting this ‘vast amount of voluntary agency, which the government could not command’.Footnote 99 Reports of local committees attest to the sacrifices of many volunteers in administering famine relief, such as that of 70-year-old Mohamed Iqbal Hussain who died of malaria brought on by the hardships he endured as voluntary manager of the poor-house at Abu, Rajputana in 1900.Footnote 100 Such fleeting mentions in reports and footnotes may perhaps be seen as reluctant acknowledgements that many Indians shared with the British an ideal of service.
Membership of a famine relief committee was both patriotic duty and a sign of status in colonial India, and active participation or generous giving was one way to earn the honours and titles of the imperial chivalric orders.Footnote 101 It was important that all communities and religious groups were represented to maximise fundraising potential. The central committees in 1897 and 1900 included over 300 names although in reality these never met and were simply a device to recognise large donors and to associate the great and the good with the funds. In both years executive committees in Calcutta did the work, meeting several times a month.Footnote 102 The actual investigation of need and distribution of relief was undertaken by the thousands of district and local committee members. The report of the 1897 fund gives a picture of typical district committees:
On these various committees most of the influential men of the neighbourhood found a seat: a large majority were non-officials, and, besides officials they included European planters, lawyers and doctors, native gentlemen and zamindars, pleaders, bankers, school masters and in short all who could assist in what was universally recognised as a work of real benevolence.Footnote 103
Committee membership thus provided a way for local, non-official elites to enter the public sphere as well as opportunities for urban professionals to make connections with villages in surrounding districts.Footnote 104 In 1897 and 1900 a concerted effort was made to raise the proportion of Indians, yet although Indian professional men outnumbered Europeans on committees, only rarely were they able to assume significant leadership positions.Footnote 105 B.K. Bose, a Government Advocate, did serve as secretary of the Central Provinces provincial committee in 1897 and 1900 and was rewarded for his service with membership of the 1898 Famine Commission.Footnote 106 In Bombay the Parsi philanthropist Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy – responsible for instigating a town relief fund in 1876 – was vice president of the provincial committee in 1900.Footnote 107
The careful composition of relief committees highlights underlying tensions not just between the European and Indian population, but among the Europeans resident in India. Most provincial and district committees also had at least one missionary member although their place on relief committees was ‘very delicate’ according to Sir John Edge, president of the North West Provinces provincial committee.Footnote 108 Tensions occurred where missionaries or Indian Christians were felt to have too much influence over the distribution of relief funds, reflecting fears about potential conversion of ‘rice Christians’. That such fears were legitimate may be seen in the large numbers who converted to Christianity following missionary-administered relief during famines – and other periods of social and economic dislocation – in the nineteenth century.Footnote 109 Missionaries in turn complained that they were not allowed a greater part in distributing what they saw as money donated by Christian people.Footnote 110 Reverend John Haythornthwaite suggested missionaries in the North West Provinces in 1897 had been ‘entirely ignored’ and described it as an ‘injustice’ that the committees were mostly composed of ‘wealthy natives’ and officials.Footnote 111 Although some missionaries claimed to enjoy serving alongside Hindus and Muslims, citing the ‘pleasant relationships’ that were formed, many suspected they were more likely to vote aid to co-religionists than to poor Christians.Footnote 112 There were however many examples of close co-operation between missions and local relief committees, such as that between the Baptist Zenana Mission and the Bhiwani town committee in Punjab in 1897.Footnote 113 Since the volunteers who served on the committees of the semi-official funds were mostly men, they often had to cooperate with women missionaries in selecting female cases for relief although only in exceptional circumstances were women accepted as full committee members.Footnote 114
The formation of mobile volunteer relief teams was another significant development of the voluntary famine relief in the 1890s. For example, Brahmo Samaj volunteers from Bengal ran a kitchen at Mortakka in the Central Provinces from May to July 1900, feeding up to 1,950 people a day.Footnote 115 Swami Akhandananda, a member of the Ramakrishna Mission, related in his memoirs how his famine relief work grew from small attempts to relieve the hunger and suffering of individuals he encountered on his wanderings in 1897 to a relief operation involving a survey of need in 50 villages, large-scale distribution of rice, co-operation with the semi-official relief fund, extensive fundraising and the mounting of a publicity campaign.Footnote 116 Eventually Ramakrishna relief centres were opened in Bengal at Mahula, Birole and Dakshineshwar and at Deoghar in Bihar.Footnote 117 This pattern of travelling in a team to undertake relief in other parts of India was a model adopted by volunteers in later Indian emergencies such as the Kangra earthquake of 1905.Footnote 118
Administering Relief
At the onset of hardship the first available relief was likely to be from voluntary agencies that started kitchens and offered employment before government works or poor-houses opened. Central to voluntary famine relief in the 1890s was careful selection of recipients, the principle that labour should be exacted in exchange for relief, and strict discipline and routine in poor-houses or kitchens. These were tests of need designed to exclude the so-called ‘professional beggar’ but were also government-sanctioned social control measures aimed at restricting the tendency of the poor to wander in search of food. The semi-official relief committees were restricted by government rules to providing food of a supplementary nature only. Since government rations were sometimes so small as to endanger life, relief committees supplemented doles with additional food such as gruel, rice or vegetables and gave milk, lime-juice and food supplements like Mellin's Food or Bovril to the most vulnerable.Footnote 119 However volunteers reported some prejudice against the use of food supplements; in one case children deserted a feeding centre after rumours spread that they were being poisoned by Mellin's food.Footnote 120 The intended recipients of relief were deeply suspicious of both government and voluntary-run poor-houses and often reluctant to attend. Rumours recorded in 1897 reveal the fears of the recipients, such as that circulating in Fatehabad, Punjab, that the poor-house was a lethal chamber for poisoning people.Footnote 121 Another volunteer, B.N. Singh, reported that when a children's feeding centre at Garwi in Bundelkhand was fenced and roofed to prevent children from running away to the public works the rumour spread that children would be transported to Mauritius where government wanted labourers.Footnote 122 Such reactions were perhaps not surprising in centres where volunteer administrators kept everything ‘arranged as regularly as a strict disciplinarian in a public school could wish’.Footnote 123 The distribution of clothes and blankets was another necessary and symbolic act of charity undertaken by voluntary agencies. Elaborate systems were developed to prevent the poor from claiming more than one set of new clothes: in some cases, new clothes were dyed red or marked, while the recipients’ old clothes would be burned in front of volunteers distributing the relief. Nevertheless, according to reports of volunteers, these gifts of clothing evoked gratitude among recipients and were treated with less suspicion than the food given in poor-houses.Footnote 124
Discipline and order were necessary because all voluntary agencies faced official inspection of their management and methods in the 1890s.Footnote 125 In line with the Famine Commission's recommendations of 1880, officials were prepared to close down indiscriminate charity or to impose tests of need. In 1900 district officers made efforts to bring private charity under control in some Bombay Presidency towns, where the distribution of cooked food and grain was attracting unwelcome ‘crowds of robust vagabonds, emaciated wanderers and diseased beggars’.Footnote 126 In Seoni in the Central Provinces in 1900 the poor at first refused the aid offered in a charitable kitchen managed on European lines. However they were forced to resort to it when the other charitable gentlemen of the town ‘were induced to stop all their daily or weekly doles of grain’.Footnote 127 It was rare that Indian-led initiatives received official approbation for following the rules of organised charity. However, Swami Trigunatita's relief work in 84 villages in Bengal from August to November 1897 earned praise from the Collector for his ‘methodical’ work and personal enquiries to find ‘deserving’ recipients.Footnote 128
In line with the accepted rules of organised philanthropy most voluntary relief agencies required that work was exacted in exchange for food by able-bodied recipients. Some Christian missions became involved in very extensive works programmes which both provided work for the famine-affected and offered opportunities for extending mission property.Footnote 129 In 1897 the London Mission Society mission at Cuddapah, one of the worst affected districts of the Madras Presidency, had an ambitious programme: building or repairing 68 churches and school houses, 39 teachers’ houses, 11 village latrines, digging 14 new wells and repairing 40 old wells.Footnote 130 Voluntary relief was especially important in the not infrequent cases where government relief was delayed or inadequate due to poor preparation or misdiagnosed need, or when it closed down prematurely.Footnote 131 The Rev Whiteside of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in Western India criticised government for opening too few public works and to create more opportunities he employed 300 labourers daily in 1897 out of CMS funds.Footnote 132 The use of famine labour on mission stations was justified by appeals to widely held tenets expressed in biblical terms: ‘if any shall not work, neither shall he eat’.Footnote 133 Moreover missionaries presented their work as preferable alternatives to government relief work where harsh treatment, exhausting labour, low wages and inadequate tools prevailed.Footnote 134 There is little evidence however that mission stations offered significantly better pay or conditions for famine labourers, and seems clear that many missionaries seized the unprecedented opportunities for improving and extending the mission stations and Christian villages in 1896–1901.
Since 1837–1838 Christian missionaries had opened orphanages and industrial training schools for children abandoned or orphaned during times of scarcity.Footnote 135 In 1896–1898 and 1899–1901 children were cared for in government poor-houses or in temporary orphanages run by relief committees, local charity or Christian missions. At the end of the famine children might be claimed by relatives or sent to live in permanent orphanages managed by a wide range of voluntary agencies. Christian convert Pandita Ramabai took famine victims into her recently established school for widows and by 1900 she was housing 2000 women and children on a 100 acre site 30 miles outside Poona. ‘Mukti’ was to become world famous as a centre of Christian social service and was widely praised by both visiting officials and missionaries.Footnote 136 Despite the fears of the Hindu community, not all mission societies pursued a policy of opening orphanages because of the long-term commitment and cost such work entailed. Miss Branch, a missionary who had started an orphanage for famine children at Morwara in Jabalpur in May 1898, was aware of the vulnerability of her venture, exclaiming in a letter ‘how grateful I am to our society that it let me keep our girls!’Footnote 137 Government-sanctioned Christian adoption of Hindu or Muslim children had proved controversial in earlier famines, but it was not until 1897 that Indian agencies organised a significant campaign against such practices. The Arya Samaj Hindu Orphan Relief Association ran five orphanages in 1897 and greatly extended its work in the 1899–1900 famine, rescuing in total about 1,700 children.Footnote 138 The Arya Samaj appealed to the wider Hindu community for money and support, and also successfully enlisted the support of Sikh organisations, such as the Singh Sabha.Footnote 139 Numerous other voluntary orphanages were started in the 1890s by ‘philanthropic Hindu gentlemen’, groups of Indian Christian women and the Ramakrishna Mission.Footnote 140
There was a large class of people affected by famine in India that, it was believed, could only be reached by private charity. Voluntary aid was targeted at those just above the class of landless peasants or day labourers: ‘respectable’ classes who would not in ordinary times require charity and were not viewed as fit objects for government aid, which required recipients to be destitute. The group included artisans, teachers, weavers, army pensioners, peasant landowners or tenant farmers and women living in purdah. Yet these classes experienced severe hardship during famines.Footnote 141 Voluntary agencies developed ways of helping those affected by famine to hold on to property such as clothes, tools, and livestock and thereby reduce subsequent vulnerability.Footnote 142 A discourse of respectability that differentiated those in need along class and caste grounds influenced distribution of aid at the local level and reflected the prejudices of committee members. Members of the respectable classes, particularly purdah women, received doles of food or money secretly delivered to them at home by volunteers, sometimes – but not always – in exchange for work.Footnote 143 In one district in the North West Provinces in 1897 the committee drew up confidential lists of ‘highly respectable persons’ who received ‘a more liberal allowance’ than the ordinary labouring classes.Footnote 144 Such investigation of need through case work was central to the organised social service undertaken by committees in the 1890s.
Cheap grain shops were another way to support the respectable classes and many were opened by various committees, missions and charitable individuals in the 1890s.Footnote 145 Such a model of relief recalled older traditions but was administered under the rules of organised philanthropy: grain was only sold to those whose cases had been investigated and had been issued with tickets. Although pioneered in earlier famines, these schemes operated on a far larger scale in 1897 and 1900. One government officer reported 40 grain shops managed by voluntary agencies in his district in 1897.Footnote 146 Other special programmes were designed to give relief to artisans in their own trades. For instance, in Sholapur the local committee ran a relief scheme which employed 8,000 weavers in the city.Footnote 147 In one case in 1900 American missionaries sought to deal with two problems at once: meeting the shortage of trained teachers for their primary schools and tackling famine unemployment by opening a teacher training school where candidates were fed with corn.Footnote 148
The semi-official relief committees allocated the largest proportion of their funds to the forth ‘legitimate’ object defined by government: ‘restoring to their original position those who have lost their all in the famine, and in giving them a fresh start in life’.Footnote 149 In 1897 and 1900 around three quarters of the money raised by the international appeals was spent in this way.Footnote 150 Schemes which provided seed, tools and livestock to peasant farmers provided significant support, according to the 1898 Famine Commission, which estimated 1.5 million cultivators had been helped by the 1897 fund.Footnote 151 Charitable grants in fact exceeded government taccavi (agricultural loans) by Rs. 1,900,000.Footnote 152 Volunteers’ reports attest to the unwillingness of members of these so-called respectable classes – both Hindu and Muslim – to be seen accepting charity and requesting help only in the last instance.Footnote 153 The reluctance of the respectable classes to accept charity was deemed natural, and recalled the abhorrence of unemployed artisans in Britain to receiving charity through Mansion House Committees. H.E.M. James, the vice president of the 1897 famine fund, suggested:
it is these small ryots, men with patches of ancestral land, or even tenants on the same property from time immemorial, whom it is such real charity to raise up again.Footnote 154
Depicting recipients as ‘deserving’ of charity was integral to the success of the voluntary relief programme in India, as it was to charitable ventures elsewhere in the nineteenth century.
Legacies of Voluntary Famine Relief
Voluntary famine relief was recognised by the Indian National Congress and the 1898 Famine Commission as being more effective than government aid in supporting the ‘respectable’ classes and in helping peasant farmers to start again after famines.Footnote 155 However commentators in both India and Britain, including some of those most intimately involved in famine relief, came to recognise that charitable contributions could not compensate for the starvation level at which the Indian peasantry lived.Footnote 156 Joseph Rowntree concluded it was much easier to raise funds for famine-stricken people in India than it was to originate and carry through an inquiry into the causes of famines.Footnote 157 The failure of the British Government to commission an enquiry into rural poverty in India, to make a parliamentary grant for famine relief or to contribute to the charitable funds was debated in parliament in 1897 and in 1900. As J.M. Maclean, MP for Cardiff and a former editor of the Bombay Gazette, asked in 1900:
Why has Lord Curzon had to scour the world in the hope of getting charity from all the nations of the earth instead of coming to Her Majesty's Government at home, from whom he might have got fifty times as much as all the foreign countries were subscribing in charity for the benefit of India?Footnote 158
By 1900 the subject of famine had become central to the wider critique of colonial rule, repeatedly invoked in the speeches and writings of Indian nationalists and their British supporters.Footnote 159
Public debates about India's vulnerability to famine, the high levels of rural poverty and the nature of colonial rule had practical outcomes in the reorientation of existing associations towards social service and the formation of new service organisations in India.Footnote 160 The famines of the 1890s provided valuable experience of emergency relief which was put to use in subsequent earthquakes, famines and floods. Writing in 1915, Arya Samaj leader Lala Lajpat Rai acknowledged that famine relief in the 1890s had ‘opened fresh and untried ground for training Hindu youths in methods of social service’.Footnote 161 Following experiments in organised famine relief, the social service of the Arya Samaj and Ramakrishna Mission developed in scope and scale in the early twentieth century.Footnote 162 G.K. Gokhale's idea for a society of young men dedicated to serving India was first articulated in the famine-year of 1897 although his Servants of India Society was not started until 1905. G.K. Devadhur's experience of famine relief in the United Provinces in 1907–1908 prompted him to develop an idea for a parallel society to the Servants of India for women.Footnote 163 Indian voluntary welfare provision was a reaction to the perceived failings of the colonial state, which had been highlighted most clearly during the famine years. Strengthening resistance to famine was also central to the many programmes for village uplift put forward in the first decades of the century.Footnote 164 Arising directly out of the famines was a need for long-term support and vocational training of rescued children, but the social service organisations took up a broader range of activities including: education (particularly night schools, industrial training and women's education); health (public health campaigns, first aid at melas; medical care in epidemics); and relief work (earthquakes, floods, subsequent famines). A number of new organisations were formed to develop this work including the Depressed Classes Mission (1906), Sons of India (1908), Seva Sadan (1908) and numerous college-based social service leagues.Footnote 165 These associations emphasised efficiency and organisation, building on experience of modern methods of social service received during the famine years, especially fundraising, case work and house-to-house visiting.Footnote 166 Reflecting earlier tensions, in the twentieth century there was a growing element of competition between these new social service agencies and Christian missions who were increasingly turning to social welfare work.Footnote 167
Carey Watt has argued that modern forms of social service took firm roots in colonial India because they conflated so well with Hindu living traditions of seva, dana and dharma.Footnote 168 Volunteers involved in famine relief played a part in transforming these living traditions to modern ones in which volunteering and financial support of social service agencies were conceived of as patriotic duties.Footnote 169 Reports of the voluntary relief funds noted that mass participation in famine relief had broadened the concept of ‘duty’ among middle and upper-class Indians.Footnote 170 Numerous nationalist leaders championed famine relief – and other forms of social service – as a ‘nation-building’ activity.Footnote 171 Moreover some Indians who became involved in voluntary relief, such as the adherents of Swami Vivekananda's idea of practical Vedanta, were deliberately seeking to broaden the older concepts of seva and dharma to include organised emergency relief work.Footnote 172 The influential Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore saw social service as a way to bridge the gulf that had grown up between the educated, urban elite of India and the villages.Footnote 173 The President of the Mahila Parishad (Ladies’ Conference) held in Madras in 1908 likewise sought to broaden Indian understandings of charity:
There is a prevailing notion that charity should chiefly be made to Brahmans and temples, and this is a mistake. You all know how famine is raging almost every year in some part or other of our country. . . .yet more funds are wanted – charity done for the relief of the poor, for the maintenance of hospitals, poor houses, etc., is praiseworthy.Footnote 174
Voluntary famine relief was also seized upon by educationists wishing to instil an ethic of personal service and self-sacrifice in pupils. During the famines teachers encouraged students to become involved in a wide range of fundraising activities, including collecting money, putting on entertainments or sales of work and in making clothes and toys for famine orphans.Footnote 175 As one of the first forms of secular service encouraged by schools and colleges, famine relief was a forerunner to the numerous social service leagues and brotherhoods formed by students in the early twentieth century.Footnote 176
For European missionaries and Indian Christians famine relief activities were welcomed both for the opportunities for conversion they offered as well as a way to win the respect and interest of educated Indians through a demonstration of ‘practical Christianity’.Footnote 177 Dr Welldon, Bishop of Calcutta, summed up this ideal: ‘What an opportunity for Christian devotion, and how nobly it has been seized!’Footnote 178 Over the following decade missionaries made much of Curzon's praise of their ‘noble efforts’ in his address to the Legislative Council in 1900.Footnote 179 By 1908 S.K. Datta, Christian lecturer at Forman Christian College, judged that famine relief alongside a rise of nationalist feeling had stirred the Indian Church to new life, suggesting ‘more service and giving has been called forth than ever before in its history’.Footnote 180 The large numbers of orphans left in the care of missions provided an opportunity for missionaries to diversify into new forms of educational provision, such as industrial or agricultural training schools. Missionaries saw rescued children and widows as the nucleus of new congregations and welcomed them as a ‘permanent heritage of famine relief work’ although they were worried about the costs of long-term support.Footnote 181 Indeed the number and quality of these orphanages put India ‘in the front rank’ of all foreign mission fields in this area of work.Footnote 182 Industrial work developed by missionaries as a method of support for poor Christians in famine times remained important to Christian communities into the twentieth century.Footnote 183 Missionaries recognised it as ‘one of the blessings of the famine’ that such new industries had been started.Footnote 184 During the famine relief work many missionaries came into contact for the first time with groups of leprosy sufferers, or outcasts for whom conditions did not improve even with the lessening of scarcity, again leading to new areas of work.Footnote 185 The subject of famine relief and the ongoing care of famine-affected communities also featured heavily at the Ecumenical Missionary Conference held in New York in 1900.Footnote 186 From the late nineteenth century Christian missions in India were extending and developing the welfare side of their work and famine relief played a part in this transition in mission practice from active proselytisation to an ethic of practical witness through service, a ‘new missionary order’ apparent at the World Missionary Conference held in Edinburgh in 1910.Footnote 187
Conclusion
Although many voluntary agencies involved in famine relief continued to justify their activities by appealing to religious traditions and imagery – Christian, Hindu and Muslim – the nature and scale of famine relief in the 1890s is evidence of a shift to organised social service. Several thousand volunteers were enlisted and deployed by a range of voluntary associations to administer aid which made a significant financial contribution to the overall relief effort.Footnote 188 The roots of this shift to organised social service may be traced to the expansion of voluntary relief in the South Indian famine of 1876–1878. Activities such as feeding the hungry, understood as charitable within all religious traditions, were transformed into social service activities that required organisation, fundraising and co-operation with other groups.Footnote 189 Service could either be channelled through the semi-official famine relief committees or through local indigenous groups and branches of national bodies. Indian leadership and participation was central to the spread of voluntary agency in the 1890s. Participation in relief, even on Western-style committees, was a way for Indians to show continuity with older gifting traditions, where a gift of food to the poor and hungry was especially meaningful and meritorious.Footnote 190
Throughout the period of British rule in India, administrators, missionaries and others set up a dichotomy between a British model of organised and scientific philanthropy inspired by Protestant Christianity and indiscriminate indigenous almsgiving motivated by superstition and ostentation. Such a contrast was disingenuous because the so-called organised philanthropy was in fact a relatively recent innovation which remained far from being universally accepted in Britain in the nineteenth century. Although in non-famine times the Government of India relied on this indigenous charity to support the old and sick and to eliminate calls for the extension of state welfare, in periods of emergency famine administration all forms of voluntary relief were subject to control and interference by the colonial state. Indiscriminate relief which attracted the wandering poor could be shut down by officials and strong efforts were made to channel indigenous giving through the semi-official funds. The Indian social service agencies formed after 1897 may be seen as evidence of what David Arnold calls a ‘resilient tradition of Indian philanthropy. . .that despite criticism of its inefficiency and want of discrimination survived and rearticulated itself during the colonial period’.Footnote 191 The high mortality of the years 1896–1901 confirmed that the relief offered by the Government of India and by voluntary agencies was wholly insufficient and failed to tackle root causes. The devastation wrought by famines focused attention on rural poverty and gave new urgency to the ‘uplift’ of the poor and depressed classes. Famine was used both to denounce the nature of British rule in India and to inspire a new generation to channel their patriotism into practical social service. Voluntary action in famine relief in the 1890s was therefore important for the development of a vibrant social service culture in India after 1900.
