Did British policy cause the famines of 1876–1900?

The short answer

• The Crown’s promise and its limits. In her proclamation of 1858 Victoria promised that Indians would be “freely and impartially admitted” to office. The conditions for entering the ICS made that promise difficult to realize. Candidates had to sit the examination in London; in 1876 the Secretary of State, Lord Salisbury, reduced the upper age limit to nineteen, beginning with the 1878 examination. Indian graduates could scarcely compete, and only a handful entered before the century ended. Lawyers and teachers who had taken the promise seriously organized to bring practice closer to it.
• The Ilbert Bill and the lesson of agitation. Viceroy Lord Ripon backed a bill in 1883 drafted by his law member, Courtenay Ilbert. It would have allowed senior Indian magistrates to try Europeans in rural courts. British planters, merchants and officials in Calcutta mounted an openly racial campaign against the measure. In the 1884 compromise, a European defendant could demand a jury at least half European. Educated Indians saw both the unequal result and the means by which it had been obtained: organized pressure had moved the government. Two years later they founded a body of their own, the Indian National Congress.
• Railways, print and English made an all-India public. A movement claiming to speak across India needed people to meet and ideas to travel. Railways brought delegates from Madras, Lahore and Calcutta to the same city, allowing Congress to meet in a different place each December. Telegraphs and cheap newspapers carried arguments between provinces. English, used in the universities founded in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras in 1857, supplied Bengalis, Marathas and Tamils with a shared political language. Institutions and communications created under the Raj became resources for its critics.
• Famine and the economic case against the Raj. Dadabhai Naoroji's income-per-head estimates, begun in the 1870s and collected in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901), offered a way to connect colonial government to poverty. Pensions, army costs and interest sent a “drain” to Britain, he argued, leaving India poorer and less able to withstand drought. Romesh Chunder Dutt's Economic History of India (1902–04) placed direct blame for famine on heavy land revenue. The famines gave their arguments urgency: the question was not only who held office, but whether people could sustain their livelihoods.

What it changed

Moderates and extremists. Gokhale and other moderates trusted reasoned petitions to British liberals and expected gradual reform. Tilak concluded that the Raj needed pressure. His newspaper Kesari attacked plague searches in Poona; articles in it brought him an eighteen-month sentence for sedition in 1897. He also used the Ganapati and Shivaji festivals to bring nationalism into the streets. Within twenty years Congress was divided over method, and at Surat in 1907 the split became open. The choice between petition and pressure would return throughout the movement.

Muslim politics takes its own road. Sayyid Ahmad Khan saw a danger in elections: Muslims were about a fifth of the population and, in English education, behind Hindus. He feared they would be outvoted and urged them in 1887–88 to stay outside Congress. His college at Aligarh trained the generation that founded the All-India Muslim League in 1906. An argument had begun over whether India's Muslims needed protection as a minority or constituted a nation in their own right, half a century before anyone spoke of Pakistan.

Curzon inherits a confident empire. The empire Lord Curzon inherited as Viceroy in 1899 seemed secure. Upper Burma had been absorbed, the Raj had survived two great famines, and Congress had been contained within annual petitions. Curzon treated this record as evidence that imperial rule would last. He staged the Delhi durbar, an imperial pageant, in 1903 and partitioned Bengal in 1905 with little regard for Indian opinion. That confidence begins the next chapter; its overreach and consequences follow in the chapter after it.

The drain becomes a nationalist creed. Naoroji and Dutt's critique suggested a way to act as well as a way to explain poverty. The Swadeshi campaign, begun in 1905, urged Indians to buy goods made in India and boycott British goods. Gandhi later drew on related arguments when he made homespun cloth a symbol of independence. The famines of 1876–1900 supplied evidence for this economic nationalism: its account of the drain began with the problem of hunger.