by Jon Wilson
But there wasn’t enough investment in the capital needed to allow cotton-growing to thrive. In the 1860s, factory owners and MPs in Britain lobbied for investment in India that would increase the supply of raw cotton. A railway line cutting directly from Bellary to Karwar was mooted but never built. Canals stretching from Bellary to India’s east coast were projected but, again, there was no funding. The possibility of shipping cotton to Britain encouraged Abraham and Sabapathy to invest their limited capital in opening cotton-processing factories but, relatively speaking, these were tiny enterprises. The Government of India failed to seize the moment, and refused to invest in the infrastructure needed to develop the country’s cotton supply. The Secretary of State for India found the demands of British mill-owners infuriating. They ‘talk more like fools than any set of men I have come across for a long time’, Charles Wood complained in February 1861.4
Towns connected with the growth and export of cotton boomed during the American Civil War, from Bellary to Bombay, but when supplies resumed from the southern states of the United States to Britain in 1865, India’s cotton boom turned into bust. Workers moved back to the countryside where there was less demand for the crop, and were forced to make a living growing poor grain crops like jowar. The population of Bombay itself shrank from 800,000 to 644,000 by the time the first census was compiled in 1871. The revival of Britain’s cotton industry in the years that immediately followed the American Civil War took place with little Indian competition and with Indian supplies. Ever greater quantities of cheap cloth and clothes were sold throughout India. India was an increasingly important market for British goods, taking 8.2 per cent of British exports in 1870–1922 and 16 per cent in 1913. But as late as the 1890s, cotton was only cultivated on 346,000 acres of the district of Bellary, 16 per cent of the total land under the plough.
When other parts of Britain’s empire prospered, India’s incorporation into global markets increased the country’s poverty. The expansion of markets in everyday necessities made it harder for Indian workers to make a living from agriculture as well as from manufacturing textiles. Once railways were built, the British imagined improvements in transport would increase living standards, by increasing the demand for crops and reducing the price of food needed for labourers to survive. In fact the effect was often reversed. Higher prices for food had always been charged in places where crops were lost to natural catastrophe, such as a drought or flooding. But poor transport links meant prices could stay low in neighbouring areas. As railway lines stretched into every part of India, merchants across larger distances were able to increase prices to match the price in the area of greatest dearth, and there was always a dearth somewhere.
Take Bellary again. The soil of Bellary was owned by small chieftains, the kind of men who, seventy-five years earlier, Thomas Munro had imagined would form a peaceful yeoman class to underpin British rule. Bellary was, after all, the capital of the Ceded Districts where Munro had finessed his system of land management. The fantasy was that British rule would encourage the growth of a class of independent peasant proprietors, who would labour and thrive without support from any indigenous hierarchy. In practice, though, Bellary’s 992 villages were divided between a few thousand magnates each of whom employed between ten and fifty men to work their grain and cotton fields. The big village houses were built on top of grain pits. Ploughing and sowing were traditionally paid for with grain given from the chief’s store. Even in difficult times, enough grain was kept to be distributed to keep poor labourers alive.
But the sharp increase in grain prices in the early 1870s encouraged local lords to sell their grain supplies on the open market. Local systems of entitlement began to unravel. Instead of working for a lord in exchange for subsistence in good times or bad, labourers were forced to eke out whatever livelihood they could. They were compelled to sell their muscle power by the hour to buy more expensive grain, or to scrabble on the dry Deccan soil to cultivate their own tiny plots of land. When crops were destroyed by drought, there was no work. The decline in traditional systems of subsistence occurred alongside the loss of weaving work, and together undermined a poor family’s chances of survival.
In an 1872 report on the condition of the district, a British revenue official described Bellary’s population of 912,000 as ‘a quiet and well-disposed set of men’. Its author, the Madras officer John Kelsall, imagined cultivators had done well from increases in the price of grain and cotton brought by the extension of the railway lines. But Kelsall’s sight was limited. He misread the energy and money concentrated in the small garrison town of Bellary itself for the condition of the district as a whole. After the rebellion of 1857–8, British officers had strengthened the cantonment, built a new arsenal and a new hospital for Europeans. In the early 1870s a new courthouse and tax office were added, together with a grand railway station at a cost of 100,000 rupees a few years later. Beyond the district capital, Kelsall noted local government offices were in a ruined state. He did not notice the collapse in living conditions for most of Bellary’s inhabitants beyond.5
Bellary’s population did not passively submit to its worsening situation. Many resisted, most of them unsuccessfully. The sale of grain by local landlords sparked riots. Labourers protested against their landlords’ decision to abandon their obligations, and with it the collapse of the principle of reciprocity supposed to bind rural society together. As one sub-collector put it in September 1876, ‘the poor ryots [peasants] consider that, as they have helped enrich the sowcar [landlord], the latter should not fail them in their time of need.’ Crime and disorder also soared. In 1876 and 1877 respectively there were 159 and 273 large robberies in the previously peaceful district of Bellary. In the whole of Madras presidency, these years saw the highest crime rates for the entire period of British rule.6
In years gone by, riot and crime would have forced great magnates to concede. But in the 1870s, rural leaders were less vulnerable to protests than they had been before because they had new support from British forces of violence. In the aftermath of the 1857–8 revolt, the imperial army was on anxious standby for opposition capable of undermining British power. Bellary was home to the largest garrison in British-ruled territory in south India, with between 800 and 1000 soldiers through the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s. When hardship grew in the early 1870s, more armed police were drafted in, 300 in total to the three worst famine affected districts of Bellary, Kurnool and Kadapah. As violence even failed to register their protest against the collapse of the system which secured their survival, peasants had little chance when the weather turned bad. In 1874, crops were destroyed by heavy rains. The next two seasons saw a serious drought, causing the price of staple foodstuffs to increase even further, to four times their 1873 level. Death in Bellary came for hundreds of thousands, and through the whole of southern India millions more.7
Twenty thousand famine victims walked into Bellary town in the summer of 1876. British officers encouraged them to leave by offering work. By October, the Collector and district engineer had opened 330 relief works in Bellary district alone. To start with, workers were given a variety of tasks, clearing prickly pear, digging out water storage tanks as well as collecting stones for roads. The aim was to move people away from areas of European settlement: only three work camps were opened in the district town, when this had by far the largest congregation of the poor. At the end of 1876, just over half of the population of Bellary district’s 912,000 people were receiving some kind of relief, 324,506 of them in return for work in labour schemes: one third of the district’s men, women and children was a paid labourer for the British state.8
The local government’s haphazard relief efforts saved some lives. But by the beginning of 1877, senior government officers in Bombay and Calcutta were anxious that the proliferation of local relief projects threatened to plunge India into chaos and push the regime into debt. Sir Richard Temple was sent to restore order and financial probity. Temple was concerned that local relief works up
rooted millions from their villages without concentrating them in any other place, allowing them to wander the countryside in mobs that threatened violence and endangered British power. Temple’s answer was to limit and contain, to restrict the poor to a small number of camps where they could be better surveyed. Village works were closed. The able-bodied starving were told they needed to walk to larger public works projects, ‘on which large bodies of men could be concentrated, supplied with food, and properly organized and controlled’, as the officer in charge of famine works in Bombay presidency put it. Labourers were strung out in a single controllable line of workers instead of being scattered throughout the countryside. A. K. Connell, an Irish critic of the bureaucracy in India, wrote in 1883 that the policy turned the imperial government into a great ‘taskmaster’ directing ‘a gigantic population of slaves’, but Temple and Strachey saw it as a way to turn Indians into diligent labourers and build public works. Also at the same time the rations given to famine victims were reduced. In the interests of ‘financial economy’, Temple initiated an ‘experiment’, to see whether famine victims could survive on the cash equivalent of one pound of rice a day, plus a small sum in money. The figure had been calculated as the amount needed to allow prisoners in Madras’s jails barely to subsist. It did not take into account the fact that famine victims used up calories working to get their food.9
In the two years of the famine, the average number working on relief projects throughout southern India was 877,000, with those ill or too frail to work fed in unhealthy relief camps. With cholera and dysentery rife, the chief surgeon of Madras presidency calculated that there were 918 deaths for every 1000 people in relief camps in his province. Despite large-scale relief efforts, the great south Indian famine of 1876–8 caused the death of over five million Indians, 2 per cent of the subcontinent’s population. It spread from Madras and Bombay to parts of Awadh and Punjab, but the epicentre was the central south, the region Temple visited in 1877.10 In Madras presidency, two million, or 10 per cent of the population, died. In the districts of Bellary and Kurnool one-fifth were killed, and the population over the next decade was a quarter below what it would have been had these deaths not occurred.11
Senior British officers argued that death on this scale was an act of God. India, particularly the dry Deccan, was simply prone to famine, or so officials like Sir Richard Temple believed. Massive mortality was inevitable unless Indians worked harder and saved their money to tide them over in bad times. The task of British rule was to give the starving work in exchange for food, trying to teach men and women whose bodies and minds had been weakened by years of destitution the virtue of labour and thrift. Most Indians, by contrast, blamed the British. It was the duty of political leaders to stop massive starvation, and the British regime failed badly.
When he travelled to the famine-affected areas in 1883, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt noted that precisely the people he expected to support British rule were hostile to British power. On 26 November, Blunt visited the mill-owner Daniel Abraham. The same evening he was invited to a dinner party hosted by C. Sabapathy Iyer and his wife, newly converted Christians who drank wine but wore Indian jewellery and entertained their guest with a Telegu dance. These people had racial and religious affinities with the British, yet they were angry at the government’s response to economic crisis and then famine. They spoke of the chaos of relief, of a million and a half rupees wasted because there was no communication with the people the government were trying to save, of people given money with nowhere to buy grain and railway lines shipping food that stood in depots without distribution. Charity, collected by the British Mansion House Fund or by private individuals in India, tended to be well spent, as Bellary’s local political hierarchy were in charge of it. But, Abraham, Iyer and others argued, government money was wasted. One officer had a travelling allowance of 3,000 rupees for twenty-two days (£30,000 in 2016 prices), but did nothing because he could not speak the language. Blunt’s new friends said famine was caused by high taxation and ‘the extinction of the larger landowners, who used to keep grain in store for bad years’.
The greatest problem was the British government’s failure to listen to the people they ruled. C. Sabapathy Iyer told Blunt that he had visited England, toured the country estates of liberal aristocrats, spent time with the British radical statesmen John Bright and Charles Dilke and ‘been feted everywhere’. But in Bellary ‘the collector’s wife is too proud to call upon his wife’. ‘There was no real sympathy anywhere,’ Iyer complained. Blunt spent time with the district’s Collector and its police chief, but thought the most intelligent Englishman was Mr Hanna, the railway superintendent. Even he knew nothing about Indian opinion ‘as the English live in a world of their own’. ‘[G]ood had been done in the past’, but ‘evil was being done now’, the men and women who Blunt met complained.12
Friendly intercourse
Just short of two years after Wilfrid Blunt’s visit, a good friend of C. Sabapathy Iyer set out on a journey from Bellary. Then forty-eight, Sabapathy Mudeliar was Bellary’s most prominent man. From a family of merchants and military contractors, he had begun his career in Bellary’s British revenue office in the years after the great rebellion. He worked there for fifteen years before setting up his own firm, first acting as cotton-buying agent for a London merchant, then building a succession of cotton presses and weaving factories near Bellary. Mudeliar’s business enterprise was a part of the process of economic change that pushed the district into famine, as his factories drew work away from women scattered through the countryside, even though, during the crisis itself, he was a major philanthropist, feeding 4,000 men and women throughout the famine.
Mudeliar was a central figure in the civic as well as commercial life of Bellary and beyond. Often the convenor of public meetings in his home town, he was an active member of the Madras Native Association. The 1870s and 1880s was the age of petitions and memorials, and of the town and regional associations that produced them. In the Madras presidency alone, a hundred local associations were formed in the decade after the great famine. Throughout India, these organizations differed in style according to the political culture of each place. The British Indian Association of Awadh was dominated by conservative landholders, the Pune Sarvajanik Sabha by mathematics teachers, the People’s Association of Allahabad by bankers and traders. These new organizations were led by urban notables who were willing to take part in the government of their own communities where there was an opportunity to do so. Mudeliar, for example, was elected as first Indian chairman of the Bellary municipal corporation in the months before he left for Pune. His career had been bound up with the military, bureaucratic and commercial life of empire, and he was certainly no opponent of British rule itself. But he was a fervent critic of the aloof and absolutist way British power was exercised. In 1885 he travelled to challenge and critique British power, taking part in one of India’s first ‘national’ gatherings. He had been invited to the first meeting of the Indian National Union at Pune. While he was travelling the venue was moved to Bombay, and the name changed to the Indian National Congress.13
The seventy-two delegates who attended the first meeting of the Indian National Congress were men from a similar kind of background to Mudeliar. They were not aristocrats or landholders. They were the creators and leaders of self-consciously modern institutions which had been founded during the previous generation. These men were lawyers and newspaper proprietors, schoolmasters and merchants, active members of the hundreds of local political societies which had grown up in the cities and district towns of India since the great rebellion like the Madras Association and more informal series of gatherings in Bellary. The founders of the Indian National Congress came from a diverse and scattered political class that had decided engagement with imperial institutions, including imperial markets, was the best way to further the development of their own societies. But in 1885 these men came together in a mood of disappointment with the intention to criticize.
Famine and India’s poverty more broadly were the driving forces of discussions in the early Congress. The very location of the first meeting was shaped by the aftermath of mass starvation. The plan was originally for the first conference to be held at Pune, the city with India’s most vibrant culture of critical political discussion. Pune had been the site of riots in 1875, of Sathe’s revolt in 1878 and the growing ‘loyal’ critique articulated by M. G. Ranade’s Pune Sarvajanik Sabha. Announcements were sent out in March 1885. The meeting was supposed to begin on Christmas Day, and to last for six days. The Sabha was to act as host for delegates from every part of India. The old Peshwa’s palace had been bought by the organization and would act as the venue. By the middle of December, delegates had already started to gather. But years of famine followed by years of dearth had depleted Pune’s residents, and December 1885 saw a serious cholera outbreak. The organizers were worried that the weakened bodies of incoming delegates, tired after long travel, would make them susceptible to the disease. The meeting was therefore moved at the last minute to the Goculdas Tejpal Sanskrit College in Bombay, and reduced to three days.
