THE LIBRARY 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
THE GREAT FAMINE AND ITS 
 CAUSES 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2014 
 
 https://archive.org/details/greatfamineitscanash 
 
I 
 
THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 AND 
 
 ITS CAUSES 
 
 BY 
 
 VAUGHAN NASH 
 
 WITH EIGHT PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR 
 ^AND A MAP OF INDIA SHOWING 
 THE FAMINE AREA 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 
 
 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON 
 NEW YORK AND BOMBAY 
 1900 
 
 A II rights reserved 
 
PS . 
 HIS 
 NHS 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 The letters published in this volume appeared 
 originally in the Manchester Guardian. I 
 have made a few additions and alterations, 
 but none of any moment. No account of 
 so vast a catastrophe, written by any one 
 observer, can pretend to be more than a frag- 
 mentary record of impressions ; and though 
 I suppose I saw more of the superficial 
 extent of the famine during the eleven weeks 
 which I spent in India than any other 
 person, the great panorama of suffering that 
 unrolled itself day by day was, in relation to 
 the whole, the merest riband. May I add that 
 the most generous help was given to me by all 
 classes to whom I appealed, and that the 
 advice and assistance of the British and Native 
 members of the Civil Service — often given, 
 I fear, at great personal inconvenience — 
 
 QlTQROft 
 
vi PREFACE 
 
 lightened my task enormously. If my con- 
 clusions as to the economic situation are not 
 accepted by all whom it was my privilege to 
 meet, I must console myself by expressing 
 my deep obligations for the information and 
 material which enabled me to arrive at any 
 conclusions at all. The photographs in the 
 present volume scarcely touch the ghastlier 
 aspects of the famine. 
 
 V. N. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 i 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. In the Gateway of India i 
 
 II. In the Deccan n 
 
 III. The Penal Minimum 26 
 
 IV. Life on the Relief Works 36 
 
 V. A Road of Sorrow 46 
 
 VI. Cholera in Khandesh 53 
 
 VII. Some Village Budgets 62 
 
 VIII. In the Garden of India 68 
 
 IX. The Panch Mahals 77 
 
 X. Things that make for Famine .... 87 • 
 
 XI. The Famine in the Desert 97 
 
 XII. Marwar and Jaipur 108 
 
 XIII. The Punjaub 122 
 
 XIV. The Collection of Land Revenue ... 134 
 XV. In the Central Provinces 144 
 
 XVI. The Penal Wage again 166 
 
viii CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 XVII. Gujerat in May 175 
 
 XVIII. Famine Organisation in the Central 
 
 Provinces 186 
 
 XIX. How India is fed 198 
 
 XX. Some Preventive Measures 206 - 
 
 XXI. Debt and Expropriation 217 
 
 XXII. The Working of the Land Revenue 
 
 System 234 
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 Official Reports on the Famine 251 
 
 Indian Terms and their Equivalents 262 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 TO FACE PAGE 
 
 Dinner-time in the Uruli Famine Camp Frontispiece 
 
 Stone-breaking at Uruli 17 
 
 The Villagers of Valak 23 
 
 In the Poorhouse at Nandurbar 56 
 
 Materia Tank near Broach : on Starvation 
 Wages 75 
 
 In the Famine Camp at Godhra 83 
 
 Sir Pertab io 5 
 
 Tahvandi Rana : on Village Relief 131 
 
 Map At End 
 
I 
 
 IN THE GATEWAY OF INDIA 
 
 There is nothing in the outward appearance 
 of Bombay to suggest that all is not well with 
 the city or with India. When I came ashore 
 I found the people busy keeping holiday. 
 The natives were celebrating the festival of 
 the Holi, and the Europeans were away at the 
 races. On every hand there was movement, 
 animation, and dazzling colour. People went 
 about in the Fort, as the European quarter is 
 called, as unconcernedly as if it had been Pall 
 Mall. In the Bazaar the traders squatted on 
 their haunches, chewing their betel and rolling 
 their eyes in the seventh heaven of indolence. 
 The procession of bullock waggons creaked 
 along as usual. Work at the docks was active, 
 and along Frere Road the piled-up stacks 
 of grain showed that there was still corn in 
 
 B 
 
2 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 India. The policeman, in his blue tunic and 
 orange cap, lolled at ease, unperturbed by any 
 sense of the unusual. Natural enough, per- 
 haps, this general unconcern, though a trifle 
 disconcerting to the person whose notions of 
 plague are formed on Defoe, and who fancies 
 that famine on the scale and intensity of this 
 present famine must be an absorbing horror for 
 every soul within touch of it. Natural because 
 Bombay has been having its course of plague 
 for three or four years, because human nature 
 is quick to accustom itself to new conditions, 
 however horrible, so soon as the imagination 
 has ceased to feed upon them. Besides, in the 
 East, as we have all been told till we are tired 
 of it, the people are fatalistic. Whether they put 
 down the scourgings which have fallen upon 
 their backs to their gods or their Government 
 I do not know. There are those who hold 
 that the clash of Western civilisation with that 
 of the East has led to some mixing of deities, 
 and that the Government is held responsible 
 for evils to-day which were laid at the doors of 
 the gods in less complicated times. Let us 
 hope this is not so. 
 
 A closer inspection of the city, however, 
 
IN THE GATEWAY OF INDIA 3 
 
 gives you a sense of the shadows that are cast 
 by the Indian sun. The festival of the Holi 
 began in a week when people had been dying 
 at the rate of 400 a day from plague, small-pox, 
 measles, and the current maladies of the East. 
 This rate of mortality is expected to mark the 
 high-water line of the present year, for the hot 
 weather is now beginning, and until the rains 
 are come and gone the plague will be almost 
 forgotten. The outlook is, however, a very 
 serious one. Colonel Weir, the medical officer, 
 has given me the mortality statistics for the 
 first three months of the years 189 7- 1900, and 
 ' the figures show that this year has been far 
 worse than any other year of the plague, the 
 record for eleven weeks showing 26,539 deaths 
 from all causes during the March quarter, as 
 compared with 20,110, 24,348, 23,310 for the 
 three previous years. By the time the two last 
 weeks in March are added in, the death-roll 
 will be more than 10,000 in excess of 1897. 
 And this with a sanitary staff of 6000 officials 
 of one sort or another ! How many deaths are 
 actually due to plague the authorities no longer 
 pretend to say, though of late they have been 
 registering some 700 a week. Concessions 
 
4 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 have had to be made to the native prejudice 
 against the plague regulations, and the net 
 effect of it all would seem to be that plague 
 patients who do not belong to the poorest class 
 are permitted to suffer and die in peace from 
 a disease of some other name. Phthisis, so I 
 am told, is a popular complaint at the moment. 
 So long as this is the position in Bombay it is 
 obvious that every part of India is threatened 
 with a plague invasion, and elaborate preven- 
 tive measures have to be taken, the effect of 
 which upon the trade of the country and the 
 temper of the people can hardly be over- 
 estimated. It is not only the plague-smitten 
 areas but the threatened districts which are 
 suffering acutely from the pestilence, and the 
 cost of keeping up an army of medical in- 
 spectors and subordinate officials is a heavy 
 burden on the backs of the people. Truly the 
 glare from the burning ghat on the Queen's 
 Road is a sorry beacon light to be set in the 
 gateway of India. Day and night the bodies 
 are being taken to the ghat and built in with 
 huge billets of dry wood, which burn, when the 
 torch is put to them, with extraordinary fierce- 
 ness. One sees long rows of these braziers 
 
IN THE GATEWAY OF INDIA 5 
 
 blazing furiously ; the sparks fly from the 
 y crackling wood high into the air, and clouds of 
 pungent smoke pour out into the road. People 
 with a taste for dramatic contrasts may picture, 
 if they please, the procession of carriages troop- 
 ing out to the party at Government House 
 last Monday night and passing within a few 
 feet of the burning bodies and right through 
 the smoke of this unspeakable pest-heap of 
 corpses. 
 
 The famine has added its quota to the 
 troubles of Bombay. Many of the cotton mills 
 are standing idle because of the failure of the 
 crop ; and the high price of grain — for foodstuffs 
 of all sorts are twice as dear as when the famine 
 began — presses hardly on the people. Starving 
 wanderers, too, have come by thousands from 
 the far north of the presidency, from parts of 
 Gujerat and from Kathiawar, bringing with 
 them their little remnants of worldly goods, 
 consisting of a bundle or two of clothes for the 
 family and a few pots. The presence of groups 
 of these refugees wandering about the streets 
 by day, and camping out on the open spaces or 
 sleeping by the doorways and on the pavements, 
 is another of the strange incidents to which 
 
6 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 Bombay has accustomed itself. When, three 
 months ago, the ' wanderers first began to appear, 
 the police collected them and sent them back 
 in boatloads to their own parts. But the groups 
 of stolid men and tired women and clusters of 
 children appeared again — nobody knows how 
 they managed the journey of 250 miles, — and 
 the authorities at last grew tired of the work 
 and let the people stay. The police estimate 
 that 10,000 of these poor creatures are quartered 
 in Bombay at the present moment. I cannot 
 say that they show traces of famine. The 
 wealthier people of the Hindoo and Mussulman 
 communities have been liberal in doling out 
 handfuls of grain, and any morning you can see 
 the breakfast collected the day before being 
 prepared in the open ground which is at once 
 bed, table, and living room. The father is 
 drawing water with an old tin can out of a well 
 with a green shiny surface. The mother is the 
 centre of a group superintending the cooking 
 pan, which is balanced on a couple of stones, 
 under which a lot of smoke and a very little 
 fire are being produced ; and when all is ready 
 the mixture of rice and grain will be divided 
 amongst the company. Beyond the daily visits 
 
IN THE GATEWAY OF INDIA 7 
 
 to the houses of the rich and to the grain 
 stpres, where certain charitable merchants lend 
 a helping hand, there is little done in the way 
 of begging. I walked this morning through 
 a plot of land where some hundreds of people 
 were preparing for breakfast, and not one of 
 them asked for money. They do not belong 
 to the begging class, and most of them are 
 cultivators who have left their own farms 
 behind them in the north. Their cattle are 
 dead, their fields are hard as iron, and to have 
 stayed longer would have meant death. 
 
 The growing stress of the famine is every 
 week forcing the Government to extend its 
 system of relief. Already there are nearly five 
 million people camped out on famine works or 
 getting relief in poorhouses or in their own 
 villages ; and this is only the fringe of the 
 sufferers. Accustomed as India is to seasons 
 of scarcity, she has never had to face a crisis 
 like the present one. Nearly half of India 
 is hit. From Hissar, in the Punjaub, where 
 160,000 are on relief, down to the south of 
 the Bombay Deccan, the famine has the land 
 in its grip. In most of the intervening 
 territory, both British and native, the former 
 
8 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 and the latter rains held off last year, so that 
 the autumn and spring crops have utterly 
 failed. Bombay Presidency, if you except 
 the coast strip, is one great famine district, 
 and in some parts of it one out of three of the 
 population has come upon the Government. 
 In parts of Gujerat the people are dying by 
 scores every week. In Khandesh the suffering 
 is appalling, and from what I hear the extent 
 of the famine in some of the Native States is 
 only suspected by the Government. In a single 
 week an avalanche of 10,000 starving people 
 was loosed in Hyderabad and came down on 
 the relief works in this Presidency. One doctor 
 in the northern district reports having found 
 seven people dead in one poorhouse and twenty 
 in another ; and in some of the districts where 
 the people have clung to their homes to the 
 last it is a common thing to find dead bodies 
 along the road to the nearest relief camp. 
 Another piteous feature of the famine is the loss 
 of cattle. Millions of beasts have died already, 
 and when the ryot loses his bullock he is like 
 the fisherman who has lost his boat. The 
 Government has established a few cattle 
 camps in the hope of saving the best of the 
 
IN THE GATEWAY OF INDIA 9 
 
 animals, and is offering forage at low prices. 
 Some of the cattle will be saved by this means, 
 but for the mass of ryots in the worst districts 
 the want of water and of money to buy fodder 
 spells death for the beasts. If they cannot be 
 sold for a rupee or two they will be left to die 
 by starvation, for the sacred beast must not be 
 killed. Amongst the Mussulmans, however, the 
 case is different, and I have heard of a town in 
 Gujerat where a regular organised slaughtering 
 is being carried on, and of course the hides 
 fetch something. It is just as if the English or 
 Irish farmers were to kill their plough horses 
 for the sake of the hides. 
 
 Next week I shall be in the midst of the 
 famine districts in the south of the Presidency, 
 a witness of the hand-to-hand fight which the 
 Government is waging with the worst famine 
 that India has ever seen. By a strange irony, 
 this same Government is collecting the revenue 
 from the starving ryot. It seems incredible, 
 but I am only writing the truth when I say 
 that word has gone forth that the revenue must 
 at all costs be gathered in, and at this very 
 moment the entire collecting machinery is at 
 work on the business. Instead of picking the 
 
io THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 bones of the people at a time like this, would 
 it not be better for the Government of India 
 to tide things over with a loan, better for 
 the State to go into debt than to increase 
 the people's indebtedness — that ever-growing 
 burden which the ryot carries from the cradle 
 to the grave ? 
 
 Bombay, 21 March. 
 
II 
 
 IN THE DECCAN 
 
 The brown lands of the Deccan, none too rich 
 at the best of times, are fast being turned into 
 tracts of dismal sun-cracked desert — charred 
 earth whose friable edges are caught by the 
 wind and sent flying in clouds of pungent dust. 
 No water in the wells, no water in the rivers — 
 this is the report that comes in from the districts, 
 and you can easily test it for yourself. The 
 Khadkalla river, in the Poona district, which I 
 have struck on twice this week, has a few large 
 pools left standing in its bed, watched by the 
 beasts and ladled by the people ; the rest is 
 dusty boulders. I found donkeys and cattle 
 being driven along the sandy bed of the Sina 
 river as I crossed the bridge this morning, and 
 recrossing it later in the day I saw the women 
 spreading their clothes to dry in the river 
 
12 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 bottom. Town and cantonment are getting 
 their water by bullock transport. Even the 
 engines on the. line, like the cattle, are reduced 
 to picking up water where they can. We were 
 stopped yesterday for supplies at a nullah near 
 Visapur, which the railway people have been 
 tapping. The farmers in the villages are doing 
 their best to drive wells down to the water, 
 and Government has been lavish in making 
 advances to help them, but the successive 
 droughts seem to have left the earth bone 
 dry to a depth never known before, and little 
 comes of the ryots' efforts. The central horror 
 of this famine lies in the fact that the misery 
 and torment of a water famine have to be en- 
 dured together with a famine of food for people 
 and fodder for beasts. 
 
 In ordinary famines, or even in normal times 
 when the work on his farm grows slack, the 
 ryot will leave his home and go off to Bombay 
 in search of work, or he will take to bullock- 
 driving, or try to pick up a labourer's job on 
 the irrigated lands in the north. But this year 
 plague and famine have shut the door in his 
 face, and no work is to be had. The Mahratta 
 ryot is a hardy fellow ; but what can he do when 
 
IN THE DECCAN 
 
 13 
 
 the cattle have gone to the butcher, when the 
 last grains of the famine crop have been eaten, 
 when the money-lender will not lend another 
 pie, and the bucket comes empty up the well ? 
 In the first place, he will send his wife and 
 children to the relief works, and try if he can 
 struggle on alone ; and probably after a time 
 he will give that up as a hopeless job and go 
 to join his family at the famine camp. This, I 
 am told, is the first famine that has found the 
 farmers in any numbers on the relief works. 
 At some of the camps in the Poona district 
 there are 40 per cent, of Mahrattas, most of 
 them farmers or members of farmers' families, 
 working and sleeping in the same camp with 
 beggars and with mahars, who sweep the 
 villages and eat the flesh of famine-stricken 
 bullocks. A fair test this of the extremity of 
 the cultivator. 
 
 The exodus from the villages has been going 
 on ever since last year, and in spite of the 
 action of Government in moving the works to 
 greater distances, or where this is impracticable 
 in drafting the villagers to camps that are far 
 away from their homes, and notwithstanding 
 the more stringent deterrent features of relief 
 
14 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 routine, it still goes on. During the last few 
 days I have met scores of family parties on 
 tramp to the works, the mother carrying the 
 latest-born in a basket on her head and the 
 last but one in her arms or on her back, and 
 the father and elder children dividing the 
 burden of family goods, which generally con- 
 sist of a few pots, a bundle in a blanket, and 
 perhaps the handmill for grinding. A woman 
 came marching the other day into a camp in 
 Khandesh with two babies in the basket on her 
 head, one on each arm, and another couple 
 clutching at her sari. It is sad to see these 
 groups of refugees pacing the burning dust 
 with lips and throats too parched for speech, 
 their garments often in shreds and their eyes 
 hollow with hunger. The Indian in these parts 
 never seems to be sorry for himself or to look 
 for sympathy from others. He just goes on. 
 The bulk of the wayfarers whom I met in the 
 Poona district did not show signs of far- 
 
 o 
 
 advanced starvation. Now and again I noticed 
 emaciated beings with legs like sticks, who 
 stalked along, bundle on head, with a painful 
 hitching motion of the hips, but they were the 
 exception. The majority were distressed, 
 
7N f THE DECCAN 
 
 15 
 
 exhausted, and reduced, but not beyond the 
 point at which a few weeks' feeding, care, and 
 rest should set them up again. My impres- 
 sion is that the bulk of the people have not 
 waited for the last extremity of want, but 
 have set off for camp precisely when there 
 was no more food to be had at home. 
 
 But let me go back to my visits to the relief 
 works. I made a beginning in the Poona col- 
 lectorate, where the stress of famine is relatively 
 slight, only 65,000 out of a million of people 
 having so far come upon the works. In this 
 district most of the people are being put to 
 stone-breaking, and according to the figures 
 supplied to me, not more than seven or eight 
 thousand are employed on other tasks. My 
 first sight of a famine camp was at Uruli, a 
 village on the Sholapur road, sixteen miles 
 from Poona. Here I found some hundreds of 
 people grouped in gangs of thirty, squatting on 
 the ground, each man, woman, and child beside 
 a heap of broken and unbroken stones. They 
 seemed to me to make poor hands at the work, 
 the old women and the young children espe- 
 cially, though the children pounded away with 
 abundant misdirected energy. The youngsters 
 
1 6 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 under eight seemed to me the most thriving 
 set in the camp. I found them having their 
 breakfast of half a cake of millet — not at all 
 bad food, — which they were crumbling into 
 small fragments and mixing with oil and highly- 
 seasoned condiments — pepper, chili, saffron, and 
 salt, with a groundwork of carrot — calculated 
 to make the English infant dance with pain. 
 Each child had a pannikin of some sort ; every- 
 thing was arranged with order, and, except for 
 the frequent bad eyes, the occasional sores, 
 and the obvious languor with which some of 
 the children ate their breakfast, there was 
 nothing painful in the sight of the large break- 
 fast party. After breakfast the children trotted 
 off to look for shade under the few trees that 
 were dotted about. I believe they are to have 
 some sort of shelter before long, a piece of 
 extravagance which seems permissible with 
 the thermometer at 150 degrees in the sun at 
 midday, and matting and bamboos going cheap. 
 The babies of the camp who stay with their 
 mothers at the stone heap are not so fortunate, 
 and to English eyes there was something pain- 
 ful in seeing these infants tucked up somehow 
 in the mother's ragged sari or cradled amongst 
 
IN THE DECCAN 
 
 17 
 
 the stones, while the sun beat upon their heads 
 and the chips came flying from the women's 
 hammers. One child with half its head blue 
 with a frightful sore was ke ^ning up a dolorous 
 howling, the mother folding one arm about it 
 for comfort while she hammered with the other. 
 A little way off from the clink of this Nibelung 
 chorus, three cashiers were squatted on a 
 carpet tossing the wages for the week on to 
 another carpet placed in front of a group of 
 women whose names were being called from 
 the register. 
 
 The wages throughout the relief works are 
 paid in money, and they are based on a hypo- 
 thetical ration of so much grain, salt, vegetables, 
 condiments, and oil, a maximum and a mini- 
 mum ration being fixed, and the whole adjusted 
 to the price of grain in the bazaar. I shall 
 have more to say later on about the system of 
 work and payment, but it will be seen that the 
 scale works automatically in two important re- 
 spects. It safeguards the worker against a rise 
 in prices — the price of grain is, roughly, twice 
 as high now as before the famine, but if it were 
 four times as high the food equivalent would 
 still be paid — and it imposes, in theory at least, 
 
 c 
 
1 8 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 3. certain check upon any tendency to shirk the 
 allotted task. The system is not one of piece- 
 work, but of taskwork with a low minimum and 
 a maximum — the outturn of the gang giving the 
 measure of the individual's wages. 
 
 My visit to Uruli happened to fall on a 
 black day, for, a week before, a circular had 
 been issued decreeing that all gangs performing 
 less than half the maximum task — an imaginary 
 standard, by the way, which no single gang 
 had accomplished during the week in question 
 — should be paid 25 per cent, below the mini- 
 mum. So that instead of ten and a half annas, 
 the former weekly minimum, the men and 
 women in the defaulting gangs were getting 
 seven and a half and the working children four 
 and a half annas. This is why the group of 
 women at the pay carpet looked so dejected, 
 why the people kept throwing up their arms or 
 bending low in an attitude of petition as I 
 picked my way between the circles of stone- 
 breakers. " They think you have come to tell 
 them that the wages will not be reduced," a 
 native official explained. Whether the people 
 can subsist on this penal allowance without 
 ripening for cholera and other famine diseases 
 
IN THE DECCAN 
 
 19 
 
 is a grave question. The new scale, which has, 
 I believe, been very generally adopted in the 
 Presidency, is the result of the circular issued 
 by Mr. Holderness on behalf of the Govern- 
 ment of India. It has been introduced in the 
 full belief that there exists throughout the 
 famine districts a system of organised shirking, 
 against which the prescribed minimum was of 
 no avail, and which bids fair to destroy the 
 deterrent element of the relief machinery. 
 The cry, *' Ye are idle, ye are idle," comes from 
 almost every English official on famine duty. 
 To which the people reply, " Give us more 
 food, and we will do more work ; this is our 
 third year of famine within four years." It is 
 an ominous fact that whilst the minimum is 
 being cut down by a quarter — a minimum 
 which assumes that only fifteen ounces of solid 
 food a day will go into the stomachs of 
 people who must work nine hours between 
 the rising and the setting of an Indian sun 
 — cholera is on the march in Khandesh, and 
 God help India if cholera attacks the famine 
 camps ! 
 
 I must cut short what I have to say about 
 the other camps in the Poona district. But 
 
20 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 concerning the works at Khadkalla, where 
 some four thousand stone-breakers are em- 
 ployed, a word or two may be said which will 
 throw light on the charges of pauperisation 
 with which the Government of India are 
 backing their enforcement of the penal minimum. 
 Granting, for the sake of argument, that a large 
 percentage of the people are skulking, what 
 evidence have the Government for the assump- 
 tion that the villagers are leaving their homes 
 for the works without compunction, and that 
 the old feelings of pride and independence have 
 yielded to the attractions of free quarters and 
 light work ? Attractions ! Take the life in 
 camp. At three o'clock in the morning the 
 women get up and begin to grind the grain for 
 the midday meal. The refugees have spent 
 the night in the open air — in Poona district no 
 huts are provided for the rank and file, — and 
 the morning breeze, as I can testify, blows cold 
 from the Ghauts, cruelly cold for people whose 
 only covering is a threadbare kambli — a word 
 which by courtesy appears to be translated 
 blanket. Then, perhaps, fuel has to be gathered, 
 for it costs an anna a week to buy, or nearly a 
 seventh of the week's wages ; and when the 
 
IN THE DECCAN 
 
 21 
 
 bundle of sticks has been collected it is liable 
 to be seized by the officers of the Forest 
 Department. The officials at Khadkalla told 
 me that such seizures had happened several 
 times. When work begins, the attractions of 
 stone-breaking, however leisurely performed, 
 are not obvious. The people are unused to 
 the work, and the stones are hard and difficult 
 to crack. I took the hammer from a little girl 
 who was vainly trying to break a small lump 
 of stone, but after thirty blows, directed, as I 
 thought, with judgment, I gave it up and 
 handed it to the ganger. It took the ganger 
 another dozen strokes to split the stone into 
 two or three bits, and these bits had again to 
 be severally assailed before they would pass 
 through the two-inch ring. But if I am wrong 
 and the life really does attract the people, why 
 is it they have not come before ? The 
 famine has been going on and camps have 
 been open in the collectorate for several 
 months. Moreover, the famine code lays it 
 down that the village patels or headmen " shall 
 do their utmost to induce distressed villagers 
 to go to relief works," and judging by appear- 
 ances some of the new arrivals might well have 
 
22 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 yielded to the patel's urgency long since. If 
 the people are so demoralised as is alleged, 
 their delay in coming to camp is unaccountable. 
 
 Valak and Khamshet villages are close at 
 hand, and the day before my visit to the works 
 I went to inspect them, accompanied by an 
 ex-official who knows the district well. A fair 
 number of the villagers had gone on the works, 
 but most of them I found were still resisting 
 the temptation, preferring to struggle along on 
 wild fruits and whatever they could pick up. 
 Khamshet had come to the end of its beans, 
 and was fairly cleaned out, though not before 
 Government had secured 182 rupees as a first 
 instalment of the land tax — a demand which 
 made a biggish hole in the beans. Valak had 
 paid 125 rupees, and notices for the second 
 instalment had been served on both villages. 
 The people whom I met at this Sunday morn- 
 ing durbar on the spurs of the Ghauts were not 
 at all of the whining sort. They answered 
 questions in a straightforward way, through 
 their headman and accountant, and made few 
 complaints. They allowed me to go into their 
 houses — sheds with mud walls, thatched roofs, 
 and grass partitions — and see all that was to be 
 
IN THE DECCAN 
 
 23 
 
 seen — a heap of cow dung for fuel and manure, 
 two or three brass pots, a stone for rolling chili, 
 a handmill, a quilt of rags for sleeping on, and 
 the spare clothes of the family strung on a line. 
 There may have been food in hiding, but I saw 
 no traces of it in Khamshet, though in Valak 
 a woman was working her mill, and I believe 
 things were slightly better there. I asked 
 about the silver ornaments, but was told that 
 they were all pledged or sold last famine. 
 What about the money-lender ? Two-thirds of 
 the lands of each village were mortgaged, and 
 no more could be borrowed. In Valak the 
 money-lender — a beak-nosed, shifty-looking, 
 pink-turbaned gentleman introduced to me by 
 the interpreter as the village creditor — was 
 present on a visit. He had come to look for 
 money, not to lend it, and his grievance, which 
 he let me know before the village, was that he 
 could not recover any part of the two hundred 
 rupees he had lent to the villagers for grain 
 last year. But though the people did not 
 parade their wrongs, they let me know two 
 things before I left the villages. The men 
 wanted advances to enable them to prepare their 
 fields in time for the rains, and the women, who 
 
2 4 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 kept in the background till we were moving off, 
 would not let us go till the Englishman had 
 seen the blind folk and the ancient tottering 
 villagers and been asked to consider whether 
 perhaps a handful of the grain which the 
 Government allow for village relief might not 
 be spared for them. Of their own hardships on 
 the works and in the village they said nothing. 
 I shall not soon forget this meeting with the 
 villagers who pay us to govern India ; the 
 haggard, hunted faces of the women, turned to 
 hideousness by a life of misery ; the tottering 
 skeletons of old men ; the blind mother with 
 the blind child, and the other child that the 
 two kept fingering ; the bright eyes and hard- 
 set faces of the men, and the naked children 
 with distended stomachs and flies at the corners 
 of their eyes ; and the bunch of red idol sur- 
 veying us all through the open door of the 
 temple, under a roof of corrugated iron from 
 Wolverhampton. I asked the headman to tell 
 his people that I had come from England to see 
 them, and that the people of England were 
 sorry for their sufferings. On reflection I 
 admit it seems unreasonable that Khamshet 
 and Valak should not shut their doors and 
 
IN THE DECCAN 
 
 25 
 
 hasten to the works in a body ; but the fact is 
 that they are going in driblets, and reluctantly, 
 and when Sunday comes round the exiles 
 hurry back to the poor home, the burnt-up 
 field and the red idol as fast as their feet can 
 carry them. 
 
 Ahmednagar, 27 March. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE PENAL MINIMUM 
 
 I must pause for a moment to return to a 
 question which I have already touched upon — 
 a question which impresses me more and more 
 as one of extreme urgency, and which, in the 
 face of the outbreak of cholera, it is impossible 
 to leave over for more mature investigation — 
 I mean the penal minimum. But first one 
 word as to the Famine Code. The Famine 
 Code for the Bombay Presidency is an elabo- 
 rate document with an index of twenty-four 
 pages and minute directions concerning every 
 department of relief. It is rigid, definite, 
 and all-embracing — a complete system designed 
 to foresee and overcome every emergency. I 
 refer to the Code before coming to the ques- 
 tion of the penal minimum in order to dispel 
 certain illusions as to the safeguards which the 
 
THE PENAL MINIMUM 
 
 27 
 
 document sets up against harsh and ill-con- 
 sidered action. I suggest to the collector or the 
 engineer that the penal minimum is likely to 
 bear hardly on the weak and unfit, and they 
 refer me at once to the Code or to their instruc- 
 tions based upon the Code. They point out 
 that a careful system of grading is there laid 
 down, that new-comers go into a class where 
 the work is easy and are moved up into another 
 class where the work is harder, and that the 
 unfit are set to work by themselves on an 
 assured minimum or allowed to do nothing. 
 All this is excellent on paper, and might be 
 infallible in practice if the famine service did 
 not happen to be overworked and understaffed 
 to a degree which makes anything approaching 
 close or constant supervision impossible. The 
 service is short of administrators, short of 
 engineers, short of doctors, short of medical 
 assistants, short of material, short of tools for 
 the workers. Every one is pegging away at 
 top pressure in a superbly cool and cheerful 
 fashion that neither plague, nor famine, nor 
 cholera, nor a tropical temperature, nor all four 
 together, seem able to perturb ; and the native 
 officials, so far as I have been able to see, are 
 
28 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 working splendidly. But just as drill-books 
 are apt to be forgotten in a battle, so the most 
 beautiful of regulations may be overlooked in a 
 famine, especially when officers are lacking. If 
 I appear to be somewhat critical in what follows, 
 I am certainly not criticising the men who are 
 toiling night and day to keep the people alive. 
 My only fear is that their faith in a system is 
 leading them into deep waters. 
 
 Now, a very few hours on a single famine 
 camp — and I have studied several camps before 
 writing these lines — is enough to show that 
 between the principles and the practice of the 
 Code a wide margin may, and often does, exist. 
 To take a few instances, the Code assumes — 
 and I as a humble student of the Code assumed 
 too — that huts were provided in all cases at the 
 famine camps. In the Ahmednagar collectorate 
 they are so provided ; in the Poona collectorate 
 they are not. Then, as to fuel, the Code re- 
 commends that arrangements be made for pro- 
 viding the people gratis. I have not found as 
 yet one camp where this is done. At some 
 camps fuel is sold, at others the people are left 
 to collect it for themselves — at their peril. A 
 small thing, perhaps the reader will say ; but 
 
THE PENAL MINIMUM 
 
 29 
 
 no, it is not a small thing if you are living on ten- 
 pence a week with a purchasing power of five- 
 pence, and you find one morning that your wages 
 are to be cut down by at least 25 per cent. 
 Every penny, remember, represents a day's 
 food, and if a penny is to be spent on firewood, 
 the fact that the Code does not contemplate 
 such expenditure does not make good the loss 
 of a day's victuals. Again, the Code lays it 
 down that care should be taken to see that 
 every one has a blanket, but so far as I have 
 been able to observe, there is a grievous lack of 
 blankets in some of the camps, and too many of 
 the people in camp have worn their clothes to 
 shreds. 
 
 Even more important is the question of the 
 price of grain, on which the wages are computed. 
 At the present moment 16 lbs. to the rupee is a 
 general price, and every worker is supposed to 
 be able to go to the authorised dealer and buy 
 at that rate. But at a camp near Poona a sub- 
 ordinate official volunteered the information 
 that people there could only buy 14 lbs., and 
 that if they bought on credit they got 1 lb. or 
 \ lb. less. Here was a serious hitch ; and how 
 is one to know that similar hitches do not occur 
 
3° 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 elsewhere ? Another discrepancy between 
 Code and practice comes out in the payment of 
 wages. The Code recommends that payment 
 should be made at least as often as twice a week. 
 But the practice is to have a single weekly 
 payment. The results are most serious, as the 
 people are unable to trace the relation between 
 task and wages, and worse still, they get into 
 the grip of the bunya, who takes the wages and 
 gives them what he chooses. I pass by the 
 Code provision for the suspension and remission 
 of land revenue, as this is a matter on which I 
 fear I shall have to write at length. But I may 
 say here that whilst the Code provides in a 
 specific manner for the relief of taxation in a 
 period like the present, no attention is being 
 paid to its instructions, and the collection of 
 revenue is going steadily on. 
 
 These considerations have a direct bearing 
 upon the reduction of the minimum wage by 
 25 per cent. If one felt assured that the Code, 
 so to speak, enacted itself, and that the punish- 
 ment was only to be meted out to proved 
 skulkers — of whom, no doubt, there are plenty 
 on the works — it would be one thing, though I 
 submit a doubtful one. But I contend that there 
 
THE PENAL MINIMUM 
 
 3i 
 
 is no machinery for adequate discrimination, and 
 that, good as the intentions of the authorities 
 may be, it is inevitable that this penalty should 
 fall on the wrong heads, on the evil and the 
 good alike, and on women and children who 
 are in no condition to bear it. Remember, for 
 one thing, that the individual punished is one 
 of a gang of thirty, over which he has no more 
 control than the thirtieth part of a voice. But 
 now let us see what the penal minimum is, and 
 to do this we must go back to the normal mini- 
 mum, laid down some years ago by the Govern- 
 ment, and confirmed by the recent Famine 
 Commission, in the following terms : — 
 
 "In respect to the standard to be adopted we accept 
 without hesitation as sufficient, and not more than 
 sufficient, the full and minimum rations laid down by 
 the Government of India in the Provisional Code, 
 which were based upon the suggestions of the Famine 
 Commissioners, and were the result of much practical 
 Indian experience and expert inquiry. The only 
 alteration we propose is a very small addition to the 
 extra items of the minimum ration." 
 
 I had better give the ration, the equivalent of 
 which is, as I have pointed out, paid in money : 
 15 ozs. common grain, 2 ozs. pulse, \ oz. salt, 
 J oz. ghi, or oil, J oz. condiments and vegetables, 
 
32 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 with 5 per cent, to be added for margin. Is 
 this an excessive allowance ? Its money equiva- 
 lent at present prices works out at \o\ annas 
 a week, without taking into account the margin 
 which has been knocked off the Bombay Code. 
 Is that in itself other than a penal minimum 
 ration — a ration which is bound to leave the 
 worker hungry and reduced ? The Govern- 
 ment has lately, in view of the high price of 
 grain, increased the allowance to prisoners from 
 an anna and a half to two annas and a half a 
 day, and one would think that a minimum of 
 some 70 per cent, below convict subsistence 
 was not too much to allow to people who have 
 been exhausted by years of acute privation. 
 Let me add that it was a reduced ration on a 
 rather more generous scale than the present 
 penal allowance that was held accountable for 
 the epidemics which swept off multitudes of 
 famine workers in previous famines. 
 
 Any one can calculate for himself how the 
 minimum given above will look with 25 per 
 cent, knocked off, but it is enough to say that 
 the penal wages come to annas a week for 
 grown people in the Poona collectorate and 8f 
 annas in works near Ahmednagar. I go back 
 
THE PENAL MINIMUM 
 
 33 
 
 for a moment to the camp at Uruli, which with 
 two adjacent camps began upon the penal 
 wage the week I visited them. I went through 
 the muster rolls with the aid of the officials, 
 and I found that out of the whole number 180 
 persons were earning a weekly wage of one 
 rupee and half an anna (between the maximum 
 and the minimum), 900 persons were earning 
 the minimum of \o\ annas, and 1100 were 
 getting the penal minimum of 7§ annas. 
 It should be explained that about a third of 
 the recipients of the minimum and the penal 
 minimum were children, and their wages in 
 the case of the lowest class came to only ^\ 
 annas for the week. Seeing also that more 
 than half the adults are women, I think it must 
 be admitted that the punishment is indis- 
 criminate as well as severe. Of course it may 
 happen that the black sheep will accomplish the 
 stipulated task under the goad of downright 
 starvation, but it is an experiment which one 
 rather dreads to see going on in a country 
 where the people are worn to the bone with 
 exhaustion, where plague and small-pox are rife, 
 and where cholera is beginning its march 
 through the famishing districts. Allowing for 
 
 D 
 
34 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 the item of fuel, and for the bunya's deductions 
 for giving credit, the sole subsistence of grown- 
 up persons is considerably less than i lb. of 
 grain per diem. And it was the i lb. ration 
 that played such havoc in previous famines. 
 If this matter should chance to be taken up 
 at home, it might be well to ascertain if the 
 Government consulted the medical authorities 
 before taking action, and what views those 
 authorities expressed. But, apart from the risks 
 of cholera and the defiance of the laws of life, 
 it is surely hard measure for the Government 
 which assumes the guardianship of the starving 
 native to punish him for the non-fulfilment of his 
 allotted task by putting him on less than half 
 the rations allowed for the subsistence of con- 
 victs. Is it impossible to devise a better means 
 than this for making famine labour productive ? 
 
 You may be told at home that the Com- 
 mission which I have quoted admitted that a 
 discretionary power might be left in the hands 
 of the Government of India — a power to be 
 used in the last resort for varying the minimum 
 and maximum rations to the extent of 25 per 
 cent. This is so ; but I submit that from the 
 Commission's own standpoint, and having 
 
THE PENAL MINIMUM 
 
 35 
 
 regard to their verdict that the authorised 
 minimum was not more than sufficient, the 
 reduction can only be regarded as the outcome 
 of a policy of panic or despair. To sum up, then : 
 taking into account the chapter of accidents to 
 which a vast extemporised machinery of relief 
 is liable, the deduction is far larger than it looks 
 on paper. The 5 per cent, margin assumed 
 by the Commission is struck off ; there is the 
 liability to overcharges, credit prices, and short 
 weight on the dealer's part and to peculation 
 by the lower officials, and there is the necessity 
 of getting fuel somehow if the food is to be 
 cooked. What is left to the famine worker — 
 or famine idler, if you please — when the feast 
 is spread, is a ration which, I repeat, can only 
 unfit him for work at the same time that it lays 
 him open to the attack of the famine diseases 
 that are lying in wait for him. If I am wrong, 
 all I can say is that the last Commission and 
 the one before that were wrong, and that the 
 distinguished men who appreciated and enforced 
 the lessons gained in previous famines at a 
 cost of life and suffering which horrified the 
 world were also wrong. 
 
 Nasik, 30 March. 
 
IV 
 
 LIFE ON THE RELIEF WORKS 
 
 In the collectorate of Ahmednagar I found 
 more than one in four of the population getting 
 Government relief, the greater part of the 
 people on relief being engaged in stone-break- 
 ing or earth work in the thirty famine camps 
 scattered about the district. About half the 
 famine labour in this district is employed on 
 stone-breaking and road-making, the other half 
 — a larger percentage than usual — going to the 
 far more suitable and profitable work of digging, 
 carrying, and embanking in connection with 
 schemes of irrigation and water supply. It 
 ought to go without saying that when India 
 asks for bread it is better that she should re- 
 ceive water than stones. The ten years' stock 
 of " metal," which, so far as I can see, will be 
 the chief monument of the famine, will be largely 
 
LIFE ON THE RELIEF WORKS 37 
 
 wasted, whereas the water schemes, supposing 
 only one out of ten to be carried through before 
 the next famine comes, will lessen the area of 
 want and sprinkle the rainless districts with a 
 few patches of green. Throughout the greater 
 part of the Deccan the only chance of extend- 
 ing the water storage arises when the forced 
 labour of famine is available ; and, this being 
 so, you would think that the task of setting a 
 famine to catch a famine would be the leading 
 idea of those who are responsible for the pro- 
 gramme of relief. But for one reason or 
 another stones are more in favour than water, 
 and I question whether these parts of India 
 will be the richer by many trickles of water 
 for all the labours and contrivings of these 
 terrible months. A dam will be raised a trifle 
 here or there ; scores of paper schemes will 
 get themselves outlined, so to speak, in earth ; 
 and then the people will go back to their 
 villages, and the works will have to wait for 
 the next patch till famine comes again. 
 Whether a certain number of "productive," 
 as opposed to the purely " protective," works 
 will be kept in hand when the famine is over 
 remains to be seen ; but if one may judge by 
 
38 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 past experience, the outlook is none too 
 hopeful. 
 
 Apart from this drawback there is no question 
 as to the superiority of earth work to stone- 
 breaking as an employment for the people in 
 camp. It is unskilled and comparatively light 
 work, whereas stone-breaking is an art ; and an 
 art without teachers takes time to pick up, 
 and is a cruel business at best when payment is 
 by results. It was a pleasant change to find 
 oneself away from the clink of hammers, watch- 
 ing the files of workers with their head-loads of 
 earth and the squads of diggers busy at work. 
 A couple of miles outside Ahmednagar they 
 are making a huge reservoir to supply the town 
 and cantonment, which at the present moment 
 are in straits for water — such straits that the 
 travellers in the dak bungalow are put on short 
 allowance of water, and are lucky if they can 
 get a bath. The huge dam, a mile in length, 
 was alive with people, the white dhotas of the 
 men and the saris of the women looking brilliant 
 against the sky. On closer inspection these 
 same saris turned out to be sadly tattered and 
 faded, but there is this to be said about the 
 dress of the Indian women, that whether you 
 
LIFE ON THE RELIEF WORKS 39 
 
 see it poised like a butterfly over a patch of 
 vivid green, or faded, as I saw it on the works, 
 to the shades of autumn leaves, it is beautiful 
 from first to last. The wearers of the sari had 
 been brought very low before they had taken 
 to the works, and though the number of 
 emaciated figures was not large, traces of priva- 
 tion long endured were plainly to be seen in 
 the files of women and children moving back- 
 wards and forwards between the bed of the 
 reservoir and the huge embankment. The 
 earth-carriers struggled slowly, and in the case 
 of the old women with evident pain, over the 
 burning sand and gravel, flocking so close on 
 one another's heels that the row of baskets 
 almost touched. A different procession this, 
 from what the visitor to this old town might 
 see in happier times, when the line of women, 
 pitcher on head, comes marching with stately 
 steps from the village well. The women are 
 still upright, for the burdens of the Indian 
 woman must be borne with head erect ; but 
 the lines of long-suffering endurance are cut 
 deeper, and the faces have been dulled into 
 stupor ; the large, glassy eyes stare straight 
 in front, and the listlessness of perpetual and 
 
40 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 hopeless misery is written in the carriage of 
 these poor people. 
 
 After all, one should be thankful that the 
 Government is keeping the people out of the 
 jaws of death ; but look at it as you will, it is 
 impossible to see the peasantry of a country 
 reduced to such a pass, to see wives and 
 mothers and little children toiling for a morsel 
 of bread under a flaming sun, as the Israelites 
 toiled in Egypt, without a sinking of the heart. 
 The camp may be in apple-pie order, as at 
 this Kapurwadi Tank, the smaller children 
 may be filling out under the regular food 
 from the kitchen, as indeed they were, and 
 there may be medicine enough to go round 
 amongst the three hundred patients in the 
 hospital. For all this let us be thankful. 
 But what sort of future, you ask yourself, do 
 the brown, deserted plains around you, or the 
 lands that lie away beyond the hills in Hydera- 
 bad, over which thousands of wanderers have 
 been flocking — what sort of future do they hold 
 in store for the refugees and for the two or 
 three hundred millions of others who are always 
 living on the edge of starvation ? 
 
 In the evening I went over to another big 
 
LIFE ON THE RELIEF WORKS 41 
 
 camp near Visapur, where a gigantic " bund " is 
 being piled across the path of the river, now 
 dry; and here" I found more files of slow-moving 
 figures, basket on head — ten thousand of them, 
 I believe, in all — more diggers, and more huts 
 of matting and bamboo. And here I got a 
 curious confirmation of the vanity of famine 
 works. I asked an official, " What is going to 
 happen to the farmers in the district you are 
 going to flood ? " He did not understand the 
 question, and I repeated it. " But it will take 
 two or three more famines to finish," he 
 answered, when he saw the drift of what, I 
 suppose, he thought a rather eccentric ques- 
 tion. At the Visapur Tank I noted the ex- 
 hausting effects of a long day's work in the 
 grilling sun. The people were literally drag- 
 ging themselves along, and were evidently 
 fagged out. The superintendent of the works 
 is allowing a longer interval in the middle of 
 the day, and he would like to guarantee a three 
 hours' rest when the sun is at its height, such as 
 the people are used to take when employed on 
 field work. The difficulty about this is that 
 the working day is so much cut into that there 
 is barely time for getting through the work. 
 
42 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 There is no complaint, I believe, on the score 
 of the people's laziness on these particular 
 works — indeed, I fancy that this charge is 
 mainly levelled against the stone-breakers — 
 but in the week before my visit 2023 people 
 had got the minimum, and 1720 the penal 
 minimum. At other works, too, I have found 
 the number of "penal minimums" going up 
 with the thermometer, and kind-hearted super- 
 intendents divided in their minds between the 
 manifest need for giving the people rest and 
 the equally obvious duty of allowing them the 
 chance of earning a little more than the penal 
 dole of seven annas and a half a week. I 
 ought to repeat, perhaps, that most of the 
 English officials with whom I have discussed 
 this urgent matter are convinced that the code 
 device for putting the weakly into a separate 
 class is sufficient to prevent the deserving from 
 suffering hardship. To which I can only reply 
 that, so far as I can see, the famine machinery 
 is essentially an engineering one : the civil 
 officer appointed for the grading of the workers 
 is subordinate to the supervisor of works, and 
 it would be absurd to pretend that he is 
 generally qualified to judge of the condition of 
 
LIFE ON THE RELIEF WORKS 43 
 
 the people ; the medical assistant, or com- 
 pounder, cannot properly look after his sick and 
 visit the "huts and haunts" — to quote the 
 Code — of anything from ten to twenty thousand 
 persons, even on the magnificent salary of forty 
 rupees a month. No, the thing has been cut 
 too fine. 
 
 The death-rate at Visapur Camp is high. 
 The week before my visit twenty-six children 
 had died of diarrhoea, fifteen of " emaciation " 
 — the word starvation is one that the Govern- 
 ment does not sanction — and one of dysentery. 
 The mothers of a batch of famine children 
 were in the hospital crouching over the shreds 
 of skin and bone which lay on the matting at 
 their feet or wrapped in the folds of their saris. 
 The hospital terrifies the women, and the 
 doctor has to hunt about the camp for his 
 patients and compel them to come. The 
 women want to get home to their villages 
 before their children die, but of course this is 
 impossible. They are too poor to pay for wood 
 to burn the bodies, which are carried outside 
 the camp and buried there. As I made my 
 way back after sunset to the station at Visapur 
 the camp fires were being lighted up, the family 
 
44 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 parties were mustering round the hut for the 
 evening meal, and the whir of the grindstone 
 and the chatter of the children released from 
 their day's confinement in the kitchen sounded 
 pleasantly. Turning back, as the darkness fell, 
 I saw the hills ablaze with fires. From Ah- 
 mednagar I came on by train to Nasik, a town 
 of temples, on the holy river Godavari. The 
 river, for the first time in the memory of man, 
 has ceased to flow. A dam has been thrown 
 across it above the town to collect what was 
 left of the waters for the needs of the Nasik 
 people, and enough is left for immediate 
 necessities and to allow of feeding the tanks 
 in the centre of the bazaar, where the wash- 
 ing and bathing of the town are carried on. 
 In the district of Nasik nearly 100,000 people 
 have come upon relief, but the irrigation system 
 established in parts of the collectorate has 
 helped to ease the situation, and it is worth 
 noting that the Palked and Ozartamat Canals, 
 which water an area of twenty square miles, 
 have been working effectively. These canals 
 are fed from the catchment area in the Ghauts, 
 an 1 almost untapped source of water, and 
 there is no doubt whatever that enough water 
 
LIFE ON THE RELIEF WORKS 45 
 
 could be caught in the hills and run down to 
 the Deccan to irrigate large areas of the rain- 
 less plains. Little, however, can be done so 
 long as irrigation is expected to show an in- 
 stantaneous return. 
 
 The day before I got to Nasik cholera had 
 made its appearance in the town, which is hard 
 upon a place that has only just shaken off an 
 attack of plague. At the collector's office of 
 the taluka, the mahars — village servants — were 
 assembled in scores with the revenue from the 
 villages, and the Brahmin clerks were busy 
 stacking piles of rupees. Yet in this same 
 district, where the pinch was not severely felt in 
 the earlier months of the famine, relief works 
 were to be started shortly. Such are the ironies 
 of the Indian famine. 
 
 On the Road to Khandesh, 31 March. 
 
 I 
 
V 
 
 A ROAD OF SORROW 
 
 The drive of thirty-four miles from Chalis- 
 gaon to Dhulia, one of the taluka towns of 
 Western Khandesh, gave evidence enough 
 and to spare of the state to which famine has 
 reduced the richest district in the Deccan. 
 Khandesh was thought to be proof against any 
 serious famine, for it has a fertile soil, and en- 
 joys, as a rule, a sufficient rainfall. When the 
 poorer provinces of the Deccan were suffering 
 from the famine of 1896-7, Khandesh had only 
 16,000 people on relief works, and the official 
 estimate for the present year, when things are 
 indefinitely worse, was 33,000. The forecast 
 was strangely wrong, for a quarter of a million 
 men, women, and children have found their 
 way to the famine camps, and there is another 
 
A ROAD OF SORROW 
 
 47 
 
 10,000 in the villages — the old, the blind, and 
 the village servants retained for village purposes 
 — who get their dole of grain from Government. 
 The happy district, which may be said to be 
 almost a stranger to famine, finds itself naked 
 and helpless, like its famine-seasoned sisters of 
 the Deccan, stripped at once of all reserves 
 of fodder, food, cash, and even credit. There 
 must be something wrong with India when one 
 finds a collapse like this. The road along 
 which I drove the other morning was a dismal 
 one to travel over — brown wilderness spreading 
 to right and left as far as the hills, and scarcely 
 a soul or a beast to be seen on the country-side. 
 Cattle were snuffing at the fallen leaves by the 
 roadside, on the chance of finding a few worth 
 munching here and there. Outside the station 
 we had passed five children — threads of 
 creatures — making a move in the direction of 
 the bunya's grain-heaps, to forage for breakfast, 
 I suppose. People in these parts tell me that it 
 is no uncommon thing to see the children follow- 
 ing a cart and picking like birds at any stray 
 grains of corn or rice that fall in the dust. I 
 myself have seen the babies on the works grub- 
 bing round the bunya's stalls, and getting their 
 
4 8 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 mouths all slobbered with earth in the process. 
 We met a train of bullock waggons coming 
 into town with loads of leaves, which are in 
 great request for fodder; so much so that 
 trees are being destroyed in thousands by the 
 ruthless stripping of branches. The avenue 
 we drove along had been badly handled, the 
 branches of many of the trees being torn and 
 ripped from the trunks as though a hurricane 
 had passed. 
 
 The beasts on the Dhulia road were to be 
 pitied ; they were bearing their sufferings as 
 submissively as their masters, allowing them- 
 selves to be pushed and pulled and almost 
 lifted along the road to market. Here was a 
 pair of bullocks, weak as water, yoked to a 
 waggon-load of hides, whilst further on a 
 woman strode along with a bundle of stiffened 
 skins upon her head. One bullock waggon 
 had a strange load — the wreck of a splendid 
 beast, with the glaze of death over its eyes. 
 Another bullock had fallen upon the road, and 
 lay there, too weak to get up again. As we 
 crawled along the burning road I thought of 
 Zola's description of the mad stampede of the 
 starving cavalry horses after Sedan, and the rage 
 
A ROAD OF SORROW 49 
 
 and clamour of the hungry soldiers shut up in 
 their island outside the town. Here the people 
 and the cattle are suffering and dying without 
 tears or moans. The silence is unbroken. It 
 is a tragedy that sickens and depresses all the 
 more because it is voiceless. I have seen 
 just two women and a boy shedding tears of 
 disappointment because the sahib did not 
 listen to their plea for food. I have seen the 
 people lifting their hands to heaven and throw- 
 ing themselves on the ground in the hope of 
 gaining the Englishman's ear ; but that is the 
 common Oriental fashion, and there is nothing 
 in it. As to the people on tramp to the works, 
 whom we passed about every mile or so, 
 nothing could be more prosaic or further re- 
 moved from the drama. Here in Khandesh 
 each family had actually got a deal box of its 
 own, which the father carried on his head, an 
 indubitable sign of the wealth and respectability 
 of the district. Perhaps, thought I, the gaunt 
 old fellow by the roadside, in the red turban 
 who, with his wife, was watching a woman's 
 figure collapsed at his feet, would rush out and 
 seize the horses' heads, and in the name of God 
 insist on food and help for his dying daughter. 
 
 E 
 
50 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 The red turban did lift as we went by, and 
 the arms shot up for a moment and then 
 fell again. " Is it nothing to you, all ye that 
 pass by?" he seemed to be asking. " Nothing," 
 said the dropped arms and hanging head. It 
 is idle to try to imagine the feelings of people 
 who are half comatose with famine ; but 
 the stupor and the silence are horrible, and 
 you wish that the unspoken horror of these 
 sapping months could be given some sort of 
 a voice. 
 
 Dhulia was hot when we got there at midday 
 — 114 degrees in the shade — hot and infested 
 with beggars, and short of water, and with nine 
 hundred criminals, tried and untried, in a gaol 
 that was built for two hundred, and with a 
 touch of cholera in the gaol and in the town. 
 Life in a taluka town is no joke, even for the 
 well-to-do in these days. At Dhulia the 
 traders were working to relieve the distress. 
 I saw their distribution of " breads " to the 
 crowd, including stalwart beggars and children 
 glistening with fat, as well as poor wretches in 
 the last extremity of emaciation, and children 
 spotted with small-pox pustules, to whose 
 presence in public, at first a trifle disturbing, 
 
A ROAD OF SORROW 
 
 5i 
 
 you soon get accustomed. Dhulia has its 
 share of Bhils in the neighbourhood. Many 
 of them were amongst the eaters of the 
 merchants' bread, and how many more were in 
 the gaol when I visited it on Sunday I should 
 not care to say. What surprises me, however, 
 is not the number of Bhils who go to gaol, but 
 the fact that so few of the population are 
 candidates for such a pleasant place. The 
 gaol is far cooler than the sites of famine camps, 
 which are always exceedingly hot and un- 
 sheltered ; and then the work is light and the 
 daily ration is double that of the famine mini- 
 mum, and a good deal more than double the 
 penal minimum. The day being Sunday, the 
 criminals of Dhulia, including a real live 
 money-lender, described to me as the terror 
 of Khandesh, were going to dine on 
 mutton. The ordinary week-day fare is as 
 follows : — 1 lb. 8 ozs. flour or jowar, 5 ozs. 
 pulse, 8 ozs. vegetables, and oil into the bargain. 
 India must be an honest country to resist 
 such a bill of fare. And now that the Govern- 
 ment has, as I hear, doubled the task of 
 work demanded of the stone-breakers — because, 
 apparently, at a camp where the stone was 
 
5^ 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 soft the people took to earning maximum 
 wages — it is little short of a moral miracle 
 that there should be no rush for the chaste 
 refinements and the simple but plenteous 
 larder of Dhulia gaol. 
 
 Dhulia, Khandesh, 3 April. 
 
VI 
 
 CHOLERA IN KHANDESH 
 
 From the bungalow where I write these lines 
 I look out westward over a plain of black-soil 
 country to the rampart of the Satpura hills, 
 blurred through the sand-cloud. Further off 
 to the south is the Ahkrani, marked by moun- 
 tains of the faintest blue, and between me and 
 the hills runs the river Tapti, one of the few 
 rivers that really do run in these dry days. 
 The plain is good growing ground for cotton 
 in an ordinary year, and Bhil labourers work 
 in the villages for the Mahratta and Gujer 
 farmers ; but away in the hills the Bhils who 
 do not toil or spin have their haunts and hunt- 
 ing-grounds, while those of them who have 
 taken seriously to cultivation plough their lands 
 and buy their cattle from Government by in- 
 stalments. If I turn my head I see within a 
 
54 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 mile of me the spurs of the Western Ghauts, 
 which form the frontier of another hunting- 
 ground of the hill Bhils — a country abounding 
 with tigers, panthers, and bears. The plain 
 between these ranges, up which the spirals of 
 dust go pirouetting, is not without attractions 
 in the way of dacoity, of which profession the 
 Bhils are masters. Yesterday evening I looked 
 in at the Courthouse and found the Mamlotdar 
 engaged with no fewer than twenty-nine gipsy- 
 looking fellows charged with a night descent 
 on a farmer's house and the removal of his 
 rice, rupees, and ornaments, all tenderly but 
 firmly done, as the way of these robbers is. 
 
 These are the people who have felt the 
 smart of famine most acutely. Their crops 
 have failed, their beasts have died ; there is little 
 left to steal ; the labourers have forsaken the 
 villages since the farmer's store of grain gave 
 out; and now that meat is getting scarcer — it 
 can still be bought for about a halfpenny a 
 pound, though the doctors complain that putrid 
 biltong is on sale in the bazaar — the position 
 is desperate. As a matter of fact, with all 
 their contrivings the hill Bhils have been starv- 
 ing for months past. The Ahkrani, I am told, 
 
CHOLERA IN KHANDESH 55 
 
 is clean swept for the time being, and the con- 
 dition of the people in the Satpuras is heart- 
 rending. No one can tell how many have died 
 of famine, but the death-rate of 87 villages in 
 Western Khandesh, amongst which the Bhils 
 have been wandering, is four times as great for 
 January and the first half of February as for 
 the corresponding period last year. Hundreds 
 and hundreds of deaths have taken place 
 from starvation, and till the poor-houses were 
 opened the other day at this town and near 
 Taloda, sixteen miles away, the bodies of the 
 starved Bhils were found every day upon the 
 roads. 
 
 The most urgent business of the moment is 
 the outbreak of cholera which is now attacking 
 one famine camp after another in West 
 Khandesh. The catastrophe is rendered the 
 more serious by the awful sufferings which the 
 people have endured since the outbreak of 
 the famine, and by the difficulty of concerting 
 relief measures for the hill Bhils, which has 
 been extreme. They are unused to regular 
 work and routine, and the notion of going 
 to a famine camp, especially if the camp be 
 off their beat, is a terror to them. Works 
 
5 6 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 were opened south of the Tapti at Tal- 
 wada Tank — where fifty men are now busy 
 digging graves for the cholera victims — but 
 nothing would induce the Bhils to cross the 
 river into this strange country. When at last 
 the Government started relief works near 
 Taloda a percentage of the hill folk went to 
 them, but then came cholera and panic, and 
 the poor wretches are dispersed again over the 
 country-side, wandering from village to village, 
 leaving their dead by the roadside and carrying 
 the cholera with them wherever they go. Down 
 in the little town of Nandurbar, with its eight 
 thousand people, there were twenty deaths from 
 cholera yesterday. Now, as a last resort, 
 the Government is opening poorhouses, where 
 food is given without a test. The one at 
 Nandurbar consists of a few huts of matting 
 and bamboo set up in the compound of a 
 cotton-ginning factory, with a larger hut for a 
 kitchen and a hospital of the same pattern for 
 cholera, dysentery, and other famine diseases. 
 By day the inmates of the poorhouse are 
 clustered in the shelter of the banyans, while 
 the newcomers who have wandered in from 
 the surrounding country lie about the gateway 
 
CHOLERA IN KHANDESH 57 
 
 of the compound, collapsed with hunger and 
 weariness. I found the people waiting for 
 their evening meal. The greater part of them 
 were starved to the bone. Skeleton mothers 
 were trying to keep the life in their babies — 
 anatomies rather than living creatures ; rows 
 of emaciated children sat in silence, some of 
 them clasping their heads in their hands, and 
 with eyes tight shut, others asleep in the dust. 
 There were old women shrivelled and sunken 
 beyond belief, turned almost to mummies by 
 the famine, blind men, and men whose eyes 
 and speech showed that they were starved into 
 imbecility, and here and there a figure, 
 common enough on the famine works, covered 
 with the pustules of small-pox. Altogether it 
 was as forlorn a company as St. Francis could 
 have wished to tend. And, worst of all, the 
 cholera was there. 
 
 I came up here from Dhulia with Dr. Farrar, 
 the famine medical officer for West Khandesh, 
 and he has told me the details of the outbreak 
 at Devala camp, not far from Taloda. He 
 had visited the camp and gone away, when he 
 was recalled by an urgent message that forty 
 deaths from cholera had taken place, and that 
 
5S 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 out of 4000 people on the works 3000 had 
 fled to the jungle. Dr. Farrar went over, and 
 found the rest of the people clamouring for 
 their wages and restless to be off. All over 
 the camp the people were lying dead or dying. 
 In a nullah a dozen were found dead and 
 another dozen dying, whilst a heap of bodies 
 had been already collected for burning. Dr. 
 Barve and the civil officer, Mr. Balaji Hari, 
 stuck to their posts throughout, and Dr. Farrar 
 helped them to get hold of men to undertake 
 the work of collecting and burning the bodies ; 
 it was also arranged that some one should be 
 engaged to look after the patients and the chil- 
 dren who had left the camp. The frightened 
 Bhils fled to their villages or to the towns in 
 the neighbourhood, and the bodies of many of 
 them had been found about the roads, and even 
 in the market square of Taloda. 
 
 With such a scattering as this, it was certain 
 that the cholera would spread, even if other 
 causes had not been at work. It has spread 
 to Serai, whither 2000 people have fled, and to 
 Talwada works, which are twelve miles from 
 here, amongst the spurs of the Western 
 Ghauts, clearing another 2000 off the works ; 
 
CHOLERA IN KHANDESH 59 
 
 and there are other camps, whose names I have 
 not by me, where the scourge has made its 
 appearance. As I left the Nandurbar poor- 
 house I passed a party of Brahmins burning 
 the body of Sitaram Bhargar, an official from 
 Talwada Tank, who was seized with cholera 
 early in the morning while engaged in his 
 duties at the relief works and sent to Nandurbar 
 in the hope of saving his life. Next day we 
 took the news of his death to his colleagues at 
 Talwada — a model camp, with excellent super- 
 vision, but which has been hard smitten within 
 the last few days. On the 29th of March, 2 
 children were seized with cholera ; on the 30th, 
 53 children and 1 woman; on the 31st, 55 
 children, 6 women, and 3 men ; on the 1st of 
 April, 37 children, 16 women, and 10 men ; and 
 on the 2nd, which is the latest day for which 
 I have a record, 39 children, 22 women, 
 and 17 men. I hardly have the heart to 
 describe what I saw in the cholera huts and on 
 the ground around them to which the stricken 
 creatures had crawled. In one hut a whole 
 family — father, mother, and two or three 
 children — lay collapsed together ; in another, a 
 brother and sister lay side by side, and the 
 
6o 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 father was dead ; in another, three children and 
 their mother were all down with it together. 
 No Englishmen could have done their duty- 
 more thoroughly than the chief native officials. 
 Vishnu Sadashir Khadilkar, the overseer, 
 Hurguvand Dhaneshwer, the doctor, and 
 Balvaht Trimball Niphadker, the civil officer, 
 had beaten back a desperate outbreak of small- 
 pox, which had attacked six hundred and 
 carried off a hundred people in the camp, when 
 the cholera appeared ; but, nothing daunted, 
 they took steps for allaying panic, evacuating 
 the huts, and guarding the water supply, and I 
 found the work going forward at the Tank as 
 though nothing unusual was happening. At 
 the shrine of a deserted village which stands 
 in the middle of the camp a Brahmin was pour- 
 ing water over a garland of leaves in honour of 
 Maruti, the god of faithful service, a piece of 
 ritual that seemed to me worth noting. But 
 it was impossible to give proper attention to 
 the people. At intervals the dispenser came 
 round with the medicines, and food was served 
 out, but the sick were left to suffer and die as 
 best they might. There is not what we at home 
 should call a nurse in all the famine camps in 
 
CHOLERA IN KHANDESH 61 
 
 India. The native women will do little or 
 nothing, and the doctor is only able to come out 
 twice a week from the town here to see how 
 things are going on. The same scenes will in all 
 probability be repeated in scores of famine 
 camps. And now arises the question, Is it 
 necessary that the people whom we have saved 
 from famine should be left to die like sheep of 
 disease ; that little children should moan them- 
 selves to their last sleep, as I have seen them 
 do, curled up on the earth alone, except for the 
 company of a group of men and women col- 
 lapsed with cholera, with no one by even to wipe 
 the flies from their mouths ? The Govern- 
 ment, whose resources have been strained to 
 breaking-point over the famine, will be help- 
 less against the cholera. Can England do 
 nothing to show these wretched people that we 
 care for them in their extremity ? 
 
 NAN DURBAR, KHANDESH, 6 April. 
 
VII 
 
 SOME VILLAGE BUDGETS 
 
 I wanted to know how the cultivators were 
 faring in the villages round Nandurbar, and 
 the following notes of a talk I had with a group 
 of farmers by the well at the village of Nagbode 
 will show that the battle with famine is a hard 
 affair, even for the men of substance. 
 
 Mathan, a man of thirty, owned five bullocks 
 last year. Three died from want of water, one 
 was killed by the Bhils, and one was left. The 
 survivor was trying to get on its feet at the 
 moment we began our conversation, and 
 Mathan went to help it up — by the tail. 
 Mathan farms 60 acres, but had no produce 
 this year. The land is mortgaged, and he is 
 living now as a labourer. With no water and 
 no bullocks, he can do nothing on his own land. 
 Last year, after paying 116 rupees for land 
 
SOME VILLAGE BUDGETS 63 
 
 revenue (on 84 acres), 100 rupees to a money- 
 lender, and some barley to two servants, he 
 had 70 rupees left for himself, his son, and two 
 daughters. His wife is dead. He has been 
 called upon to pay his revenue this year, but 
 has not done so. 
 
 Murar the Patel, a young man, farms 60 
 acres, but there has been no produce this year. 
 The farm is mortgaged to the extent of about 
 3000 rupees. He estimates last year's pro- 
 duce at 375 rupees, of which he paid 104 
 rupees to Government. He had to buy ^four 
 bullocks for 100 rupees, and pay 40 rupees 
 for servants, and was therefore unable to pay 
 anything to the money-lender. The other 
 expenses of cultivation amounted to nearly 60 
 rupees. He kept the rest for himself, his wife, 
 uncle, and two children. He has been served 
 with notice of assessment. He had six bullocks, 
 and has lost four. 
 
 Laxman has 84 acres ; his crops have failed ; 
 he has lost four out of eight bullocks ; three 
 are in a condition to work, and one is at the 
 point of death. He is indebted on his personal 
 security for 700 rupees. He had nothing left 
 for paying the money-lender last year after 
 
64 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 payment of the Government assessment — 150 
 rupees — expenses of cultivation, etc. 
 
 Nathu farms 39 acres. His crops failed, and 
 five bullocks out of six have died. After pay- 
 ing the Government 60 rupees last year, there 
 remained only 40 or 50, and he had to go out to 
 labour to keep his wife and five children. His 
 farm is mortgaged for 700 rupees, 
 
 Three of these men, with two others, Annaji 
 and Zuga, had taken the bit of garden round 
 the well, lent to them rent-free by an absentee 
 cultivator, and were doing their best with it, 
 but they did not see how they could hold on for 
 more than another month. They have no 
 grain at home, and some of the cooking-pots 
 have been sold. 
 
 A bullock cart came by, and some farmers 
 from Sarvala, a village eight miles off, seeing 
 us talking, pulled up to see what it was all 
 about. " Would they be willing to say how 
 things were going with them ? " I asked 
 through the interpreter. They made no 
 objection. 
 
 Gutal farmed 225 acres, and had no crops. 
 He had 100 beasts last year, bullocks, buf- 
 faloes, and two horses, and has lost 70. Last 
 
SOME VILLAGE BUDGETS 65 
 
 year's crops were worth from iooo to 1200 
 rupees. He paid 500 rupees to the Govern- 
 ment and 500 for labour, and borrowed money 
 for maintenance. 
 
 Dulladha owns 135 acres, and has lost 15 
 cattle out of his stock of 22. After paying 
 assessment — 350 rupees — last year, and the 
 expenses of the farm, he was able to pay his 
 way with the help of his family working on the 
 farm. His ancestral debt is 5000 rupees, and 
 up to last year he has paid interest on it in 
 money or in kind. 
 
 The third Sarvala man was in good circum- 
 stances, and his companions discreetly moved 
 away after explaining that his maternal uncle 
 had left him great riches, and such was my own 
 embarrassment that I forgot to take down his 
 name. The prosperous nephew owns 300 
 acres, but this year there was no produce, and 
 out of 1 20 beasts 20 remained, the others having 
 died for want of fodder. 
 
 The three had been served with notices. 
 I did not see the actual document, but the 
 following is a literal translation of the Mah- 
 ratti from a copy which I have since 
 obtained : — 
 
 F 
 
66 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 Notice. 
 
 A.B. Inhabitant of 
 
 Village 
 
 Taluka 
 
 District 
 
 You are informed that the land marginally noted 
 and the assessment marginally noted are in the 
 revenue records. The assessment for instal- 
 ment of year, being Rs. , was due on 
 , and you have not paid it yet. This notice 
 is therefore given to you that if the instalment of 
 Rs. , and the notice fee , total , is not 
 paid within ten days from the date of this notice, stricter 
 measures will be taken according to the law, and the 
 whole assessment for the current year will be recovered 
 at once, and you will be liable to pay as fee 
 on account of the non-payment of instalment. 
 
 Date, 
 
 Cold comfort this for people who are brought 
 as low as the peasants of France before the 
 Revolution, who have ruin and hunger as their 
 daily portion, while plague and cholera stand 
 over them ready to strike. To them appears 
 the Government of the British Empire in the 
 likeness of the broker's man. The Government 
 may explain that what it wants is to get the 
 money from those who can afford to pay, and 
 especially from the bunya. To which I would 
 reply that recovery from the bunya will in 
 
SOME VILLAGE BUDGETS 
 
 67 
 
 nine cases out of ten only increase the burdens 
 of the cultivator, that it is impossible to dis- 
 criminate between those who are able to pay 
 and those who are not, and that even if the 
 selection could be managed with a certain rough 
 justice, the sight of Government beginning to 
 distrain — I hear of " examples " being made as 
 I travel about the country — will break what 
 little is left unbroken in the hearts of the people, 
 and lead them to suppose that their own homes 
 and lands are going to follow. 1 
 
 1 The following is a translation of a Gujerati handbill issued by 
 a native revenue official for the information of the village 
 revenue collectors. The collector referred to is the collector 
 of Broach in Gujerat. The circular is part of a mass of evidence 
 bearing on the collection of land revenue during the famine, 
 placed before Lord Northcote by the Hon. Mr. Parekh : — 
 
 "Government through Mamlatdar of Anklesar. 
 
 "The Talati and Patel of Mouje are informed that the 
 Circular Order, No. 257, of April 14th, 1900, of the collector is 
 as follows : — ' I think that it is in the minds of the people, that 
 if Government assessment is not paid the lands will be forfeited, 
 but they will be given back without payment. This belief is 
 quite wrong, and it appears that it has produced a bad effect ; 
 therefore you are written to inform the people that if lands are 
 forfeited for non-payment of Government dues, they will not be 
 restored back ; but they will pass with right of possession to 
 persons who make the highest bids at the auction sales, and 
 therefore they will lose their lands. You will make them 
 understand this, and try to make revenue recoveries as early as 
 possible ; order to this effect has been received, therefore you 
 should cause a public proclamation to be made for information 
 of the people in this matter.' 
 
 "Dated April 15, 1900." 
 
VIII 
 
 IN THE GARDEN OF INDIA 
 
 I came on here from Nandurbar, passing through 
 Surat, where the famine is only slightly felt, and 
 spending a couple of days at Broach, which is 
 the richest district in Gujerat — Gujerat, as 
 everyone knows, being famous as the garden 
 of India. One terrible thing about the situation 
 here is the shock the famine has given to the 
 people. It is the first famine in Gujerat within 
 the memory of living man, and it has paralysed 
 the cultivators. They waited on their farms 
 till November and December in the hope of 
 rain, refusing to believe that Gujerat was des- 
 tined to go dry like the famine-seasoned tracts. 
 Before they gave up hope the beasts were dying 
 about the roads. The big bullocks that plough 
 and draw the water from the wells and haul the 
 heavy waggons were getting thinned off, and 
 the cows and buffaloes that are turned out in 
 
IN THE GARDEN OF INDIA 69 
 
 droves to fend for themselves could find no 
 grass to eat. It is estimated, indeed, that not 
 more than 10 per cent, of the brood cattle will 
 survive the famine. People who know the 
 district tell me that the fodder famine has hit 
 Gujerat harder than the famine of water or food. 
 The Government did its best to lessen the blow. 
 Cattle camps were opened, and fodder from the 
 Government forests was offered for sale below 
 cost price. Arrangements were made for draft- 
 ing 1 5,000 cattle to Thana forests, two hundred 
 miles south, but rinderpest and the strange food 
 and soil have played havoc with the poor beasts, 
 and not many are likely to return. A great 
 deal, too, was accomplished by private charity. 
 I have heard of one native gentleman who has 
 been keeping the life in 13,000 cattle without 
 charging the farmers a single anna for fodder, 
 and four of the five cattle camps at Ahmedabad 
 are being run by private individuals. Some- 
 body in the Government service suggested that 
 prickly pears would do for cattle food if the 
 thorns could be removed, but before this dis- 
 covery the cattle were eating the pears and 
 chancing the thorns. At the camp at Broach, 
 by the Nerbudda, I found a lot of bullocks 
 
7o 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 breakfasting in comfort off prickly pear, the 
 thorns having first been burned away and the 
 fruit slightly toasted in the process. 
 
 If people are dying by the thousand as they 
 are now in Gujerat, I suppose it is largely 
 because the cattle, the mainstay of the farm, 
 have famished before them. I hear that numbers 
 of people who have a beast or two left will not 
 leave the cattle even to save their own lives. 
 It is a common thing for beast and man to 
 starve and die together. The pass that things 
 have come to in the garden of India may be 
 gathered from a notice which has just been 
 issued by Mr. Lely, the Commissioner, the 
 substance of which I give : — 
 
 " Camp Surat, March 31, 1900. 
 " Numerous deaths occur among people who wander 
 about the country without food, and are attracted at 
 last towards some town or large village. Ignorant of 
 the relief provided by Government, or unwilling to go 
 to it, they linger on the roadside or in the fields until 
 they die of starvation. This is not only in itself a 
 regrettable loss of life, but it creates a public scandal 
 and discredits the arrangements made by the local 
 officers. The Commissioner thinks a rough ambulance 
 system should be established at every poorhouse and 
 kitchen (whether on a relief work or not), and at every 
 town or large village where there may be no poorhouse 
 
IN THE GARDEN OF INDIA 71 
 
 or relief work, but where famished vagrants are likely 
 to be found. At all these places as many stretchers 
 as may be needed should be kept. They can be made 
 very easily and cheaply of two stout bamboos and a 
 piece of canvas. They are kept already in many 
 places, but they should henceforth be part of the 
 regular equipment of every poorhouse and kitchen — 
 as much as the hutting, — and should be charged to 
 the general cost. The bearers should be provided as 
 follows:— In kitchens, on relief works, a sufficient 
 number should be told off to each stretcher from the 
 relief workers. In poorhouses a sufficient number 
 should be added to the staff to man the requisite 
 number of search parties, and charged to the general 
 establishment. In municipalities which contain no 
 poorhouses, and especially in those near which there 
 is a relief work kitchen, the duty of keeping up a 
 sufficient number of bearers fairly belongs to the 
 municipality, who should be asked with the least 
 possible delay to organise search parties and have 
 exhausted wayfarers carried to the nearest place 
 where they will be attended to. For every poorhouse 
 or kitchen in or near a municipality, certain areas all 
 round the town should be roughly indicated, and they 
 should be examined at fixed intervals by search 
 parties, consisting of bearers with one or two stretchers, 
 accompanied by some respectable person. Each area 
 should be searched every other day, or more. In 
 villages the Patel should have the fields surrounding 
 the village searched every day." 
 
 A glance into the hospital at a poorhouse, or 
 a relief work, is enough to fill in the rest of the 
 
72 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 picture. It is no good dwelling on such scenes, 
 but I confess that I had not realised the full 
 measure of the catastrophe in Gujerat, till I 
 saw the rows of famine-gnawed wanderers 
 dying in the hospitals at Broach and Ahme- 
 dabad. At the poorhouse here, which has 
 been fitted up in the old gaol, there were 
 thirty-six " cases " in the serious ward to-day ; 
 twelve had died since daybreak, and six had 
 been brought in dead out of the streets. There 
 was no chance, the doctor said, of saving the 
 rest. Old men and children, and men, as years 
 count, in the prime of life, lay on their strips 
 of matting, indifferent to everything. The 
 pain and struggle were over, and the only 
 thing now was to let them die in peace. Two 
 white-robed Sisters of Mercy happened to be 
 passing through the ward at the same time, 
 giving a look or gesture of sympathy to each 
 sufferer. It seemed to me that the sick and 
 dying in the hospitals, and the thousand or so 
 of the indistinguishable starving, who were 
 eating their rice in the gaol quadrangle, became 
 almost personal again as the Sisters passed 
 along. 
 
 My pen goes wearily as I settle myself to 
 
IN THE GARDEN OF INDIA 73 
 
 record the sad sights I have seen amongst the 
 famine refugees in this sweltering city, the 
 smell of which is like a monkey-house. The 
 ruin of all these hard-working, home-loving 
 creatures is too piteous. The city of mosques 
 and temples, with its East End of cotton 
 factories, is littered with these miserables. 
 Here you find a market established for the 
 sale of bundles of wood, with hundreds of 
 sellers, and scarce a buyer. Elsewhere the 
 people are squatting under the trees making 
 baskets ; further on are camps patched up 
 anyhow out of quilts, and blankets, and leaves ; 
 here half a dozen men and women are dragging 
 a waggon along, human traction having become 
 a regular calling since the famine carried off 
 the cattle. A long narrow waggon packed 
 with people, like a canoe on wheels, lumbers 
 down the street. It is the municipal ambulance 
 taking the exhausted wanderers to the poor- 
 house. As to the relief agencies, you lose 
 count of them after a few hours of inspection. 
 I have already spoken of the Government 
 poorhouse. There is also the voluntary poor- 
 house by the Sarapur Gate, and there are the 
 municipal relief works, the poorhouse for the 
 
74 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 people of the town — who will need relief still 
 more when the twenty-six cotton mills are all 
 shut down, — the collecting ground where new 
 arrivals are brought, fed with parched corn, 
 and drafted off next day to relief works, or 
 poorhouse, according to their condition ; and 
 there is the orphanage, with 900 famine 
 children, which the charity of the townsmen 
 has established. Ahmedabad is doing nobly 
 in the crisis, but what can charity do for people 
 who have been living on tamarind seeds, and 
 the roots of the beet grass ? The ordinary 
 death-roll of the place is 80 or 90 a week, but 
 since the refugees began to flock in, it has in- 
 creased to 500. 
 
 One word as to the relief works. For some 
 reason, which I have failed to fathom, the 
 people in this district are being treated with 
 exceptional leniency. There is no stone-break- 
 ing, most of the workers are paid the maximum 
 wage, and the penal minimum has not been 
 enforced. In Broach, on the other hand, the 
 famine people in the camps to the north of the 
 Nerbudda are faring badly. At a big tank 
 work that I visited, the numbers have been 
 reduced by more than half as a direct result of 
 
IN THE GARDEN OF INDIA 75 
 
 the Government's policy of penal tests. Nearly 
 thirty thousand souls were housed at this camp 
 when the word went forth from the head- 
 quarters that the wages must come down, and 
 the task of work be increased. The people at 
 the same time were given the option of moving 
 to a camp some five miles off, on the south of 
 the Nerbudda, where they would receive the 
 old rate of wages, the theory being that the 
 genuinely destitute would accept the offer, while 
 the others would go back to their villages and 
 live on their resources. Unhappily in the case 
 of these works, and of others to which the 
 order applied, the scheme has gone all wrong. 
 Only a small fraction could be induced to cross 
 the river. It was a strange land on the other 
 side, and the people were terrified with fan- 
 tastic rumours of what awaited them. Agents 
 were going to ship them to the Transvaal, 
 where they were to be put in the front of the 
 British firing line ; and so forth. At the time 
 I visited the tank the great majority of 
 the workers who remained were getting the 
 starvation wage of less than an anna a day. 
 As to the rest, some of them have indeed gone 
 home, but only to starve, and others are 
 
76 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 wandering about the country and being taken 
 to the poorhouses in the last stages of starva- 
 tion. It is a horrible story, and one can only 
 hope that the Government will come to realise 
 the true effects of its action while there is 
 still time to repair it. 
 
 Ahmedabad, 12 April. 
 
IX 
 
 THE PANCH MAHALS 
 
 The Panch Mahals — five districts — is a tract 
 of jungle country in the far eastern corner of 
 Gujerat, dotted about with bits of cultivated 
 land which the Bhils and Kolis have reclaimed 
 from the forest and waste. Here they have 
 built their huts, dug wells, and settled down as 
 people who have a stake in the country and a 
 liability in respect of land revenue. The Bhil 
 of these parts, so far as I can understand him, 
 is a pretty steady-going cultivator, and while 
 he walks about the country with his bow and 
 arrows, which he can use with effect when he 
 chooses, it is probably only his swagger, though 
 he says he does it for self-protection. What 
 wealth there is in the district lies in the timber 
 of the forests, which contain every sort of tree, 
 including a good deal of teak, and in the 
 minerals, which the Government suffers no one 
 
78 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 to touch. Even in this jungle the money- 
 lender swarms, and the cultivators grow their 
 crops for his grain heap, and subsist on such 
 bounty as he affords them, quite in the approved 
 fashion. A month in India has been enough 
 to teach me one thing — that the farmer lives 
 by the bunya's sufferance and toils for the 
 bunya's benefit ; that land system, law system, 
 revenue system are the parlour furniture of the 
 bunya spider ; and that British railways, canals, 
 officials, roads, police, and the general appa- 
 ratus of government, down even to the famine 
 organisation itself, make for the enrichment and 
 the greater power of this sinister person. It 
 was the bunya who openly proclaimed the 
 famine in these parts. Towards the end of last 
 year, foreseeing the scarcity, he began to stop 
 the grain allowance to his clients and to store 
 for all he was worth. I have a shrewd suspicion 
 that the bunya has practised the same wiles in 
 other parts of the famine areas, and, for that 
 matter, it is obvious that the man who holds 
 the produce can make the pinch of famine felt 
 pretty much when and how he chooses. Here 
 the bunya's policy was to hasten and aggravate 
 the famine, and he made so little secret about 
 
THE PANCH MAHALS 
 
 79 
 
 it that the Bhils came down one day with their 
 bows and arrows on one of the towns, killing 
 a few policemen and demanding food. Raids 
 against the bunya, however, are out of date ; 
 the Bhils got nothing from their trip, and now 
 the bunyas are selling their grain at famine 
 prices in exchange for the Government money 
 which circulates in the relief camps. 
 
 The shadow of death is on the land to-day. 
 From the windows of the train one sees dying 
 trees mangled by loppings and mutilations, 
 dying cattle, dead fields, and homes of which 
 nothing remains but the empty grain pot, big 
 enough to hold half a dozen of the forty thieves. 
 At the sidings the trucks are being loaded with 
 hides, and stacks of the stiffened skins are 
 heaped about the stations, while literally the 
 only traffic along the road consists of bullock 
 waggons heaped with hides. A month ago 
 whole train loads were being made up at 
 Godhra ; a grand cattle-slaying was going 
 forward just outside the town, and the tops 
 of the bushes for a distance round were red 
 with meat drying in the sun. The Bhils came 
 crowding to the killing, and waited till the last 
 beast which could be hurried up in time for the 
 
So 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 butcher had died the death — imagine what the 
 scene would mean to the other crowd of Hindoo 
 onlookers — and then dispersed nobody knows 
 whither. But at last the reserves of cattle 
 meat are used up, the trade in small bundles 
 of leaves, grass, and fuel becomes more difficult 
 every day, and though the mowhra flowers are 
 whitening the ground and bringing some relief 
 for the moment, the manna shower will save 
 but few of the starving people who wander 
 about the country or find their way to the 
 works and poorhouses to die. The famine 
 camps and the poorhouses will, without doubt, 
 save many lives, and they would have saved 
 many more but for an unaccountable delay in 
 concerting relief measures. Help has come too 
 late. Even where food is at hand many of the 
 people are too " perished " to be fed up, and 
 dysentery, diarrhoea, and fever are killing their 
 hundreds every day. These deaths will not 
 figure on the Government's reports under the 
 head of starvation ; but, not to enter upon a 
 futile controversy, it cannot be denied that the 
 deaths are famine deaths. So much is clear 
 when the sweepers at the Godhra Tank works 
 are picking up some twenty dead bodies about 
 
THE PANCH MAHALS 81 
 
 the camp every day, when the poorhouse has 
 a daily death-list of between thirty and forty, 
 and when the last return from the Jhalod 
 district shows a death-rate which, if continued 
 for a year, would carry off nearly half the 
 people of the Mahal. 
 
 Mr. Ward, of the American Methodist 
 Mission, who, at the invitation of Government, 
 has taken over the management of the Godhra 
 poorhouse, took me with him on his visit of 
 inspection on Good Friday. The mission has 
 been doing good work by supplying grain 
 below the bunya's prices, setting people to 
 work on a patch of irrigated land, and affording 
 a temporary shelter for wanderers. I saw two 
 sisters there who had come in the evening 
 before from a village twenty miles away. The 
 girls were far from being emaciated, but they 
 had eaten nothing for four days, and they were 
 sick with fever, from which the younger one 
 has since died. Running about the compound 
 was a plump little girl who had lost her father, 
 mother, and seven brothers and sisters in the 
 famine. A month ago Mr. Ward found her 
 sitting in the fields with the last of the brothers 
 dying in her lap, and there she had been sitting 
 
 G 
 
82 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 for two days. Our walk to the poorhouse was 
 rather a ghastly one. We passed the sweepers 
 preparing to burn the bodies of the poorhouse 
 people who had died in the night — eleven 
 corpses, desperately emaciated, and a sack of 
 babies — and came out of the nullah on to a 
 patch of bare ground, where a woman was 
 sitting. Her two babies were in front of her ; 
 her sari was drawn over her head, and she was 
 giving vent to a chant of grief, appalling in its 
 desolation. On this spot her husband had 
 died a month before, and the widow, thinking 
 herself alone, was giving herself up to her 
 sorrow. A little further on was a heap of 
 earth, the burial-place of some famine wanderer, 
 covered with thorns to keep the jackals off. 
 Then a stretch of the familiar matting which 
 gives shelter to some five millions of the 
 Queen's subjects came in sight, and we were at 
 the poorhouse. Here we found 200 people 
 collected together in the hospital sheds from 
 the neighbouring Tank works and the wards of 
 the poorhouse. Under Mr. Ward's direction 
 everything was being done for them that could 
 be done. There were native Christian women 
 acting as nurses, who seemed to be doing their 
 
THE PANCH MAHALS 
 
 33 
 
 work conscientiously; and the sweepers, who 
 are supposed to see to the cleaning of the 
 patients, were working under supervision. 
 Another thing that struck me was the way the 
 poorhouse inmates were divided into small 
 detachments, each with its day space and 
 sleeping quarters partitioned off with matting. 
 This is a great improvement on the common 
 plan of herding the people together, and not 
 the least of its advantages is the facility given 
 for finding out the sick, who are always averse 
 from going into hospital, and passing them on 
 at once for treatment. The condition of the 
 people was terrible, half of them at least being 
 the merest skeletons. 
 
 At the famine camp outside the town 12,000 
 people were busy deepening the dry bed of a 
 tank. The work has only been started since 
 the beginning of the month, and in view of the 
 people's condition the Government very wisely 
 began by putting them all on the maximum 
 wage. Last pay-day, however, the wages were 
 cut down to the minimum, with the result that 
 the people fancy they are being robbed. At 
 a similar work at Dohad, 40 miles east of 
 Godhra, which I visited yesterday, the whole 
 
s 4 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 camp took to the jungle when the reduction 
 was made. After a few days, however, they 
 began to return, and I found about 5000 out 
 of 7000 back again at work. I went round 
 the camp during the midday interval, under a 
 scorching sun, and I noticed that numbers of 
 people were grubbing for roots amongst the 
 clods, or working away with their pickaxes at 
 the same job. The children in the kitchen 
 seemed to me to be the worst starved and 
 most neglected-looking collection that I have 
 ever seen in any famine camp. They were 
 having their midday siesta, which no doubt 
 told against their appearance, for the famine 
 sleeper is a more collapsed-looking creature 
 than the semi-comatose famine victim awake. 
 But when the children roused up a little on the 
 approach of the women bringing them water 
 there was hardly a spark of animation amongst 
 them all. They looked weary, listless, and 
 drooping, and many of them had the lines of 
 old age and care on their sunken faces. 
 
 There are births in the famine camps as well 
 as deaths, and at Dohad the mothers of two 
 amazingly shrivelled and monkey-like babies 
 were the happiest-looking people in the camp. 
 
THE PANCH MAHALS 
 
 35 
 
 And this reminds me of a point as to which I 
 had meant to say a word before. I am afraid 
 it is true that famine often breaks up family 
 affection, and that under its stress children are 
 sold or abandoned or robbed of their food by 
 their parents. When the stomach presses 
 against the spine, the heart may sometimes get 
 displaced. But I have seen much of the other 
 and brighter side of the picture — instance after 
 instance of tenderness and self-sacrifice ; and, 
 to learn how suffering may be borne, I say 
 there can be no better school than India. 
 Never was people afflicted like this people ; 
 but words cannot describe their patience and 
 resignation, their child-like sweetness and 
 docility, their gratitude for a word or look of 
 comfort. When a man has seen all this, and 
 has seen, besides, half-savage parents with the 
 death-pangs at their heart comforting their 
 dying children, he understands why it is that 
 Englishmen and Englishwomen will work for 
 India till they drop. No ; the famine does not 
 always kill the affections. I am writing now 
 with the voice in my ears that I heard this 
 evening at the poorhouse hospital, where the 
 sweepers were pulling a dead child from its 
 
86 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 mother's arms. The floor was littered with 
 sixty dying people, and there was silence in 
 the shed — not even a moan or a sob from the 
 figures on the floor, — when the mother's 
 screams of anguish suddenly filled the place. 
 
 As we left the shed at sunset there came 
 filing into the compound a procession of the 
 most pitiful phantoms, some thirty of them, 
 starved beyond belief, their lips drawn back 
 over their teeth, their eyes burning with fever 
 in their deep-sunk sockets. Silently they 
 formed up in a row before the Sahibs, and the 
 priests in the little temple across the road 
 began drumming their god to sleep as they 
 stood. Then this famished and exhausted com- 
 pany, mothers and old men, and little boys and 
 elder sisters, sank together to the ground and 
 turned their poor ravaged faces to the Sahibs 
 in submission. " You see us," they seemed to 
 say. " Will the hand of the Sahib be stretched 
 out to save ? " 
 
 Godhra, Panch Mahals, Easter Stmday. 
 
X 
 
 THINGS THAT MAKE FOR FAMINE 
 
 Before leaving British territory for Rajputana, 1 
 it may be as well for me to note down my im- 
 pressions of certain famine phenomena, which 
 are none the less real and cogent because they 
 are unconnected with the failure of the monsoon. 
 Our institutions in India, by some perverse fate, 
 have, I am afraid, entered into a conspiracy 
 with the powers of famine, so that the instant 
 the monsoon fails, millions of the people are 
 hungry. And it is this category of famine con- 
 ditions as to which I want to say a word in pass- 
 ing, reserving fuller discussion for a later stage. 
 
 The first thing that must strike an observer 
 as he goes about the country, is the lack of 
 staying power shown by the cultivating classes. 
 He sees them living on the brink of ruin with- 
 out reserves of cash, or kind, or credit, and he 
 
 1 The foregoing letters were all written in Bombay Presidency. 
 
88 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 asks himself how it is that a generation of rail- 
 ways, and more than a generation of trading 
 with the West, find the people touching bottom, 
 with nothing, and less than nothing, to show 
 for all the exports and imports and internal 
 development. The new commerce, indeed, 
 has gone far to rob the country of its ancient 
 industries, and multitudes of people who used 
 to ply their trades in the villages have been 
 thrown back upon the land. The new finance 
 has robbed the people of a quarter of their 
 savings by depreciating the value of the silver 
 ornaments which fill the place of the Post- 
 office Savings Bank at home. What would 
 the depositor in Manchester say if one fine 
 morning he found that the Chancellor of the 
 Exchequer had been forced by considerations 
 of high finance to write his balance down by 
 25 per cent. ? The Indian cultivator is not a 
 luxurious person with many wants. As the 
 camel is to other beasts, so is the ryot in the 
 family of men. He can work, endure, and 
 keep silence on the barest pittance, and if his 
 savings enabled him to put his hand on three 
 halfpence a day in famine times, he would stay 
 at home instead of going to the works. But 
 
THINGS THAT MAKE FOR FAMINE 89 
 
 even so moderate a reserve as this is in count- 
 less cases beyond his command, and every 
 famine finds the numbers on the relief works 
 going up. From the Imperial point of view 
 this lack of staying power ought, one would 
 think, to be a matter of some concern. It 
 shows that for some reason or other the culti- 
 vator cannot in good seasons get enough food 
 out of the land to tide him over bad ones, 
 though we force him all the same to scrape 
 rupees enough from his furrows to pay us for 
 governing India. 
 
 In Bombay Presidency, where the word has 
 gone forth that every rupee of revenue which 
 can be collected shall be swept into the Trea- 
 sury, we have an example of the desperate 
 pass to which the country has come. Yet, 
 after all, this policy is only the logical outcome 
 of the British revenue system. Once you 
 grant that a fixed inflexible tribute is the right 
 thing, what objection is there to enforcing it 
 even in famine years ? Is not the bad year 
 taken into account when once in thirty years, 
 or possibly less, the assessment is revised ? 
 Ergo — so runs the official defence — the ryot 
 should be able in the bad year to disgorge from 
 
go 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 the surplus he enjoyed in the good one. The 
 only flaw in the argument is that the ryot has 
 not the wherewithal to pay, one reason being 
 that the bunya takes his surplus. It seems to 
 me unprofitable to spend time in debating 
 whether a tax is too high when you know that 
 people cannot pay it, and this is the state of 
 things year in and year out with the mass of 
 the Bombay ryots. The ryot, at any rate, 
 does not pay. The man who pays is the 
 bunya, who is getting the land into his hands 
 as his return. Nothing can be clearer than 
 that our revenue system, coupled with the right 
 we gave the ryot of mortgaging and alienating 
 his land, has become a mighty engine of ex- 
 propriation. The bunya is indispensable to 
 the Government — -any one will tell you that — 
 in his capacity of advancer of revenue. But 
 when the lord-high-raiser-of-the-wind to the 
 Government of India comes upon the scene 
 as landlord, with the man who once upon a 
 time was a ryot as his tenant or labourer, even 
 the high official perceives that he is a dubious 
 sort of benefactor. What seems to me to be 
 as plain as Indian daylight is, that when the 
 wheel comes full circle the resisting power of 
 
THINGS THAT MAKE FOR FAMINE 91 
 
 the cultivator has gone, and a famine can be 
 declared almost at any time. And the wheel 
 is coming round fast. 
 
 I am often told that the real source of the 
 ryot's indebtedness is to be found in his own 
 extravagance, and especially in his passion for 
 marrying off his daughters expensively, and 
 giving his father an elaborate funeral. Ex- 
 cessive sums, I believe, are spent in this way — 
 notably in Gujerat. It is the ryot's one extra- 
 vagance, but don't let us blame him for it too 
 hastily, or assume that if he buried his father in 
 an inexpensive way, the land question would 
 proceed to settle itself. Look a little way back 
 into history, and you find that these ceremonies 
 are part of the bunya's stock of baits. The 
 whole scale of pomp and cost was raised when 
 we gave the bunya the ryot's land to angle for. 
 It is one of the commonplaces of Indian public- 
 ists that this conversion of the right to culti- 
 vate land into the right of disposing of it was a 
 fatal error, and when the theory of improvidence 
 is brought forward to account for everything, it 
 may fairly be said that the ryots are no more 
 improvident than any other class would be, 
 which, by no effort of its own, found itself 
 
9 2 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 endowed with property by some process of 
 magic, and surrounded by crafty and obsequious 
 traders offering all sorts of benefits in exchange 
 for a signature to a piece of writing. 
 
 But this is, after all, beside the question. 
 " Under the native States," said a man who 
 knows India as few other men know it, " there 
 are laws of leather; in British territory laws 
 of iron." Very well ; we substituted for the 
 leather law of payment according to crops the 
 iron law of a fixed tribute, and the inevitable 
 result was, that the people had to borrow in bad 
 years. This inflexible tribute system is the 
 nether millstone, and the gathering burden of 
 indebtedness the upper millstone, with which 
 we are grinding India. Let me give an illus- 
 tration. There is a native State in Kathiawar, 
 not far from where I write, and into that State 
 in 1882 was introduced the principle of the 
 fixed assessment, and the people were permitted 
 to alienate their land. In 1897 an official of 
 the State, from whom I have the story, went 
 closely into the economic position of the dis- 
 trict with which he was familiar fifteen years 
 before, and which at that time was fairly inde- 
 pendent of the bunya, and he found that in the 
 
THINGS THAT MAKE FOR FAMINE 93 
 
 course of those fifteen years the ryots had run 
 up debts, the annual interest on which was 
 equal to the revenue of 300,000 rupees. There 
 is food for thought in this bit of economic his- 
 tory, which is indeed a microcosm of indebted 
 India. I am told that in Upper Burmah, 
 where the money-lender was unknown under 
 native rule, he has come in like a flood since 
 annexation. Wherever you find the iron 
 assessment and the individual property in land, 
 you find the cultivator going down. And 
 remember that behind the bunya and his bonds 
 are ranged all the batteries of our laws. "His 
 Lordship in Council entertains no doubt of the 
 fact," so ran a Vice-regal minute issued thirty 
 years ago, " that the labouring classes of the 
 native community suffer enormous injustice 
 from the want of protection by law from the 
 extortionate practices of money-lenders. He 
 believes that our civil courts have become 
 hateful to the mass of our Indian subjects, from 
 being made the instruments of the almost 
 incredible rapacity of usurious capitalists. 
 Nothing can be more calculated to give rise 
 to widespread discontent and disaffection to the 
 British Government than the practical working 
 
94 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 of the present law." The cultivator who lives 
 under British rule, whether direct or reflected 
 in the native State, is, in truth, in a fair way to 
 become a permanently famine-stricken man. 
 You may say that he enjoys the benefits of the 
 British Raj ; and so he does, but the economic 
 effect of this privilege has been to set up over 
 him another native prince in the person of the 
 money-lender, who takes his crop when he has 
 one, and in fact behaves himself very much as 
 the wicked old princes are reported to have 
 done, only that he is surrounded by the odour 
 of sanctity. No man, not even a ryot, can 
 serve two such masters and live ; and that, and 
 not the poverty of the land, or the population 
 question, is the reason why the ryot has lost 
 his staying power. The British Raj and the 
 Bunya Raj eat up his crops, and what one 
 leaves the other devours. 
 
 That is the truth about the ryot's position 
 to-day, and the one gleam of life above the 
 horizon is that the Government seems to be 
 getting alive to it. When the " Pioneer " is 
 angry with the English papers for their talk 
 about the recuperative powers of India, and the 
 Viceroy is pushing through a bill to prevent 
 
THINGS THAT MAKE FOR FAMINE 95 
 
 the alienation of the Punjaub lands, you feel at 
 least that the official world is not living in a 
 fool's paradise. This is not, perhaps, a great 
 achievement under present circumstances, but 
 it is something, and I should be inclined to 
 rate very high the widespread hope that Lord 
 Curzon's administration is exciting amongst all 
 classes. The question that crosses and comes 
 back to one's mind after a course of famine 
 travel, is, whether any great hope of recovery is 
 left. The man who held on all night to the 
 edge of the pit with the bottom a few inches 
 from his feet, might as well have let go, and 
 Tolstoi's reading of the parable is that the 
 lowest depths of poverty are tolerable compared 
 with the torments of the struggle to avoid them. 
 Why should the ryot hold on to this miserable 
 life ? I suppose, however, that the call of the 
 land will be too strong for him, and that we 
 shall find him again when the rains come, 
 toiling, as Sir George Wingate said, that 
 another may rest, and sowing that another may 
 reap. If in the meantime it is realised here, 
 and at home, that the land question, and the 
 debt question, and the revenue question, which 
 are all one, can wait no longer, and it is decided 
 
9 6 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 to apply remedies without thought of anything 
 but the relief of the ryot, and without being 
 frightened at the cost, we may begin to get at 
 the roots of the Indian famine. 
 
 Gujerat, 17 April. 
 
XI 
 
 THE FAMINE IN THE DESERT 
 
 The famine in Rajputana is like the famine 
 elsewhere in one respect — it is the worst within 
 the memory of man. The distress is worst 
 and widest-spread in the group of States to 
 the west of the Aravali Mountains, and border- 
 ing on the desert — States which appear to the 
 eye as a waste of whitish sand ; but in a greater 
 or less degree every one of the Native States 
 in the huge territory where the Rajput chiefs 
 hold sway is suffering from failure of water, 
 crops, and fodder. Ajmeer, the British State 
 planted in the midst of Rajputana as an out- 
 post of civilisation, is as badly off as any, and 
 at one time nearly half the population was on 
 the relief works. The report of Colonel 
 Brooke on the famine of 1869 — a document 
 which states that Marwar came forward with 
 contributions to the Lancashire famine — gives 
 
 H 
 
9 8 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 a terrible account of the sufferings of that time ; 
 and though it is pretty certain that the deaths 
 in this famine will be fewer than they were in 
 1869, when relief measures were of a per- 
 functory kind, the loss that must fall upon the 
 people will be far heavier. There is an ascetic 
 in Marwar, 108 years old, who remembers the 
 great famine of 181 2, and according to his 
 account there has never been anything to 
 approach the clean sweep that has been made 
 of the cattle in the last nine months. 
 
 Here in Marwar — " the place where man dies 
 for want of water " — the calamity is almost in- 
 supportable. The people had had a succession 
 of bad seasons, and last year brought no rainfall 
 whatsoever. The merest sprinkle of rain is 
 enough to turn the desert into a tract of grass 
 on which cattle and men can manage to sub- 
 sist, the seeds of the grass making an excellent 
 porridge. But not a drop fell ; not a blade of 
 grass nor a stalk of corn or millet pushed up 
 through the sand, and many of the wells dried 
 up. Then the bunya, according to his kind, 
 began cutting off the supplies of grain to his 
 tenants and bond slaves, and the people were 
 left hungry and helpless, with their cattle on 
 
THE FAMINE IN THE DESERT 99 
 
 their hands. It is the custom in Marwar, when 
 famine threatens, for the cultivators and herds- 
 men to leave their homes and go off with their 
 families, driving their beasts before them, to 
 some country where there is grazing to be had. 
 The Marwaris are great cattle-owners, and 
 their beasts are often enough the only property 
 they possess. For the farmers cultivate just 
 enough to feed the bunyas and themselves, and 
 they only get one crop in the year. At the 
 end of August the stream of emigration began. 
 Thousands upon thousands of Rajputs and Jats, 
 with the lower castes thronging after them, 
 poured out along the roads to Central India, 
 Gujerat, and the North-west. It is believed 
 that 200,000 people went to Mhalwar, in 
 Central India. Many others went to Indore. 
 Sixty thousand people crossed the waterless 
 desert into Scinde, and another multitude 
 flowed down into Gujerat. All the families 
 who had cattle drove them on before, unless 
 the bunya happened to have seized them for 
 the value of their bones and hides. This 
 exodus is one of the most heartrending chapters 
 of the Indian famine, for the people made their 
 journey only to find another famine at the 
 
IOO 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 journey's end, and they had to turn back again, 
 or wander about in search of food. Their 
 cattle died upon the road or starved in the 
 jungle, and the people died as well, in numbers 
 that will never be known, in the attempt to get 
 back again to their own country. Mothers 
 tramped back with a child or two, the only 
 survivors of the family. The grandfather 
 came back with a grandchild, the boy of twelve 
 without father or mother. I have seen and 
 talked with some of the wanderers who have 
 survived these awful marches, and I suppose 
 that nothing but the grand physique which 
 comes from the life and air of the desert could 
 have made them proof against such hardships. 
 They are a splendid race, these Jats and 
 Rajputs, even now, with the marks of all their 
 sorrows and privations upon them. Of the 
 cattle none have come back, and the State 
 Secretary tells me that 90 per cent, of the 
 whole stock of Marwar have perished — between 
 three and four million head. 
 
 About half the cultivating classes — some 
 500,000 souls — are supposed to have left Mar- 
 war in this way, and those who were left in the 
 villages found themselves caught in another 
 
THE FAMINE IN THE DESERT 101 
 
 movement which was confined to Marwar 
 territory. The bunyas are notoriously a 
 timorous people, and their nerves are known to 
 be more sensitive in a Native State than in 
 British territory, which is the bunya's paradise. 
 These worthies disliked the idea of being left 
 in the wilderness at a time when public opinion 
 was inflamed against them and the chances of 
 being looted were considerable. What they 
 did, therefore, was to remove themselves and 
 their stores from the villages where they trans- 
 acted business to convenient spots where they 
 felt strong enough in numbers and position 
 for any emergencies that might befall. And 
 the result was that the villagers had to follow. 
 The bunya, I am often told, is an indispensable 
 man, and in this case he certainly had all the 
 food supplies of the village in his waggons, 
 and there was nothing for it but to trek after 
 him. So it comes about that, whilst numbers 
 of villages are deserted — a fact for which the 
 want of water is also responsible in many cases 
 — others are swollen with a new population, of 
 which the bunya is the leading figure. A 
 town called Balotra, not far from here, which 
 was selected as a likely city of refuge, enjoys 
 
102 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 a larger grain market to-day than Jodhpur 
 itself. As to relief measures, two points are 
 pretty clear, and they apply to Rajputana 
 generally. Without the railways, large districts 
 must have been isolated from all possible food 
 supplies, and unless the famine relief had been 
 organised on a generous and effective scale the 
 railways would have been useless, except for 
 carrying away the train-loads of hides and 
 bones. As it is, they have been bringing grain 
 into the country from the North and North- 
 west, and the unfinished railway which is to 
 connect Karachi and Calcutta has been giving 
 a large amount of employment for famine 
 labour. Of course there are plenty of districts 
 far away from the rails, but they are not 
 beyond the reach of camel and railway service 
 combined. 
 
 The task of concerting relief measures has 
 been an anxious one for all concerned. The 
 Government of India is not only the governor 
 of British provinces, but the protector of the 
 people in the Native States, and it was bound 
 to see that precautions were taken against the 
 evil day. What was the policy of the native 
 princes going to be ? Some of them had no 
 
THE FAMINE IN THE DESERT 103 
 
 money in the treasury, others were known or 
 suspected to be indifferent as to what be- 
 came of their subjects, and not a Rajah had 
 before been called upon to steer his ship 
 through a tempest that threatened annihilation. 
 The Viceroy, at any rate, lost no time in 
 declaring his policy, and he decided early in 
 the day to give the native rulers a strong lead. 
 He offered loans on easy terms to the States 
 that wanted money ; he sent to Rajputana, as 
 Famine Commissioner, Major Dunlop-Smith, 
 who won his spurs in Hissar at the last famine 
 in the Punjaub, and he offered the services 
 of Staff Corps men, engineers, and doctors. 
 Nobody could have given more practical or 
 strenuous encouragement to the chiefs, and 
 Lord Curzon may to-day fairly congratulate 
 himself on the way in which his challenge was 
 accepted. With a few exceptions, the princes 
 both in Rajputana and other districts have set 
 manfully to the task of saving life, and so 
 far as I can judge, the famine organisation in 
 Rajputana has been as successful as could be 
 expected. There have been several cases 
 in which the native princes have shown a 
 signal public spirit and capacity for effective 
 
104 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 leadership. The young Maharajah of Bikanir 
 took his place at the head of the famine organi- 
 sation from the start. He set works going in 
 the desert, organised a system of grain supply, 
 and turned over to the famine service the 
 camel corps of the Imperial service which Lord 
 Dufferin invited the Native States to organise. 
 Again, the Maharajah of Marwar, the young 
 nephew of Sir Pertab Singh, found himself 
 with a dry treasury in the autumn, and no 
 prospect of revenue ; for in these States " no 
 crop no revenue" is still the rule. He 
 borrowed three million rupees from the 
 Government of India, and, with the help of his 
 own Ministers and a little knot of Englishmen 
 who for the last six months have been toiling 
 like galley slaves, a relief organisation has been 
 built up which would do no discredit to a 
 British district. I have seen something, and 
 heard more, of the good work that is being 
 done in Marwar ; and coming as I did from 
 British territory, expecting to find confusion 
 and inadequacy in the organisation, the results 
 have astonished me. Even in the face of a 
 cholera epidemic, happily of a mild kind, which 
 has attacked most of the famine camps and is 
 
THE FAMINE IN THE DESERT 105 
 
 raging in Jodhpur and in many of the villages, 
 the machinery is going without any sign of 
 a breakdown. To take the city first — the 
 wonderful sand-swept city of the desert, whose 
 stone houses from the height of the fortress 
 look as if they had been peppered down any- 
 how, and might be so many chips that the 
 centuries had knocked off from the rock- 
 mounted fort and left sticking in the sand : 
 here I have found poorhouses, orphanages, a 
 cattle camp — with an inscription from Shake- 
 speare over the door, — searching parties for 
 bringing in the starving from the country 
 round, and an institution for the relief of 
 purdah women. Sir Pertab Singh, the indomi- 
 table, who has buckled down to famine work 
 like the cheery old warrior that he is, took me to 
 see this last institution, in the fortunes of which 
 Lady Pertab has been much concerned. The 
 high-caste women were found, as they are in 
 so many places, starving quietly at home with 
 their children, their husbands having gone off 
 to look for work. They were taken to the 
 Home, which is out on the hills a couple of 
 miles away, and there I saw them grinding 
 their corn and cooking their cakes like anybody 
 
106 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 else. Even the purdah had fallen from their 
 faces, and some of the women did not trouble 
 to replace it — such is the force of famine. Sir 
 Pertab Singh, Prime Minister, is a reassuring 
 figure as he gallops about on his Arab pony ; 
 strong, straight, unconventional — a man whom 
 they say the people will obey unquestioningly, 
 even though his orders are, as they are to-day, 
 that last week's rainfall which has filtered into 
 the empty tank is on no account to be touched. 
 The poorhouse — or one of the poorhouses — is 
 established in the courtyard of an old palace of 
 the Maharajah's. A thousand people were 
 breakfasting when I went round the place — the 
 Bhils in one line, the weavers in another, and 
 the higher castes, preserving their selectness 
 while they tried to put some flesh on their 
 bones, in a third. The death-rate here was 
 low, and the people seemed in fair condition 
 and ready in many cases to be drafted off to 
 relief work. In the old British Residency there 
 is an orphanage, maintained by Rao Bahadur 
 Sookdeo Pershad, the State Secretary, of 
 which it can only be said that the children are 
 fat. This is not the case with the cattle in the 
 charitable refuge, where a lean and weary-eyed 
 
THE FAMINE IN THE DESERT 107 
 
 company were munching the stalks of a 
 highly unnutritious-looking grass. A bullock 
 laden with water went down in a heap in the 
 street in front of me to-day, and farther on I 
 passed a horse dying in the middle of the road. 
 The wild birds and beasts, too, are starving 
 in millions. Therefore the cattle should be 
 thankful for their stalks, for the inscription 
 about the quality of " charity " over the gate, 
 and for the ingenious collecting-box which the 
 Rao Bahadur has invented, and on the inside 
 of which a cow is painted with the words 
 " Thank you " in Persian, Hindustani, and 
 English, coming out of its mouth. 
 
 Jodhpur, Marwar, 21 April. 
 
XII 
 
 MARWAR AND JAIPUR 
 
 At Pali, in the Marwar desert, I found a large 
 tank in process of being deepened and a poor- 
 house established in the Durbar stables. The 
 camp where the famine labourers are housed 
 is excellently arranged, with long lines of mud 
 huts thatched with grass, each with its grind- 
 stone, primitive cooking appliances, and store 
 of thorns for fuel. The hut is supposed to 
 hold about a dozen, and where the patriarchal 
 family, usually a pretty extensive one, fails to 
 fill it up, the family "co-opts" some fellow- 
 villagers or adopts some of the orphans who 
 are always plentiful on famine works. As a 
 rule the head of the family makes the purchases 
 for the group. The wages are sufficient to 
 buy about a pound and a half of grain a day 
 for each grown-up person, and they are eked 
 out with bark and roots. At the best of times 
 
MARWAR AND JAIPUR 109 
 
 the wants of the Marwaris are not excessive. 
 A feature of the works is the daily payment of 
 wages, a system which has the advantage of 
 keeping the people out of the bunya's debt and 
 checking any disposition to peculation on the 
 part of subordinate officials. I was assured in 
 Bombay that daily payments were impossible, 
 owing to administrative difficulties, but here at 
 Pali the system was in full swing — I believe it 
 is adopted on all the works in the State, — and 
 I am inclined to put down the very fair condi- 
 tion of the people on the works to the facts 
 (1) that they know precisely what wages they 
 are entitled to ; (2) that they get their wages ; 
 and (3) that they enjoy the full purchasing 
 power of their daily pay, which the famine 
 workers on British territory, owing to their in- 
 debtedness to the bunya, often fail to do. At 
 Pali, too, they deal very gently with the aged 
 and infirm. At intervals along the top of the 
 embankment which will be washed one day by 
 the waters of the tank, sat lines of old people 
 hammering away at the clods of earth with bits 
 of wood about the size of a child's hoop-stick. 
 Two thousand of the ancients of Marwar, to- 
 gether with the lame and the blind, were 
 
no THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 beating out the clods on the morning of my 
 visit. The sun beat fiercely on their heads, 
 and the glare from the burning earth struck 
 back upon their faces ; but the torrid perch was 
 a bed of roses compared with the stone-heaps 
 where the patriarchs of the Deccan are con- 
 demned to labour. 
 
 I mentioned in my last letter that cholera 
 was raging in Jodhpur, and I have since heard 
 that outbreaks have occurred in most of the 
 famine camps. At Pali town — a place which 
 gave its native name to the plague — there is a 
 serious epidemic, but happily no fresh cases 
 have appeared in the camp or poorhouse for 
 some time back. At a tank work fifteen miles 
 to the east, where nearly 30,000 wanderers had 
 been collected, things have not gone so well, 
 as a panic set in, and more than half the people 
 scattered themselves over the desert, carrying 
 the pestilence with them. The same thing on 
 a smaller scale has happened at other camps, 
 and it is easy to understand why the towns and 
 villages, not in Marwar alone, but in other 
 Rajputana States, are being desolated by the 
 scourge. Cholera, indeed, is in the air. I 
 travelled from Jodhpur with one of the 
 
MARWAR AND JAIPUR ill 
 
 engineers of the railway. A telegram was put 
 into his hand saying that a man with cholera 
 had been taken out of the train that followed 
 ours, and a few stations farther on another 
 telegram was handed to him announcing the 
 man's death. My fellow-passenger to Jaipur 
 was a doctor knocked up by overwork, who 
 had been fighting the cholera in the northern 
 districts. An English officer on famine service 
 in the deserts since November came in on 
 his camel to Pali fit for nothing but a rest 
 at home. I open the newspaper, and find 
 that cholera has broken out at Godhra, and 
 that a hundred bodies are lying unburied at the 
 camp that I visited a fortnight ago. Brahma 
 Nund, famine officer to the Marwar Durbar, 
 who came with me in the train from Pali to 
 Marwar junction, was visiting a camp a short 
 time back when he saw a man fall. Then 
 another fell, and another. Next day a hundred 
 and ninety people were down with the cholera, 
 most of the officials had fled, the camp was in 
 panic, and the sweepers would not touch the 
 bodies. Brahma Nund collected fresh workers 
 around him, told the people that it was a holy 
 service, and no defilement to see to the sick and 
 
112 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 bury the dead, and in due time fairly beat the 
 cholera out of the camp. A line from the book 
 of Ramayan, he told me, was running in his 
 head during the struggle ; he wrote it for me 
 in my notebook, and here it is — " Disadvan- 
 tage, advantage, life, death, fame and infamy 
 rest in the hands of God." 
 
 I am afraid there can no longer be any doubt 
 that a calamity of the most appalling kind is 
 beginning to break over India, and that hun- 
 dreds of thousands of poor wretches who have 
 been reduced by want and by the hardships 
 and unnatural conditions of life in the famine 
 camps will go down before the blast. The 
 odds are too great against the handful of 
 Englishmen who are fighting on the other side. 
 Here in Rajputana there are twenty Staff Corps 
 men and a few engineers and doctors, and 
 besides them must be reckoned the Residents, 
 the story of whose efforts to save the people 
 would make a chapter in English history worth 
 the reading, if it could only be written. Look 
 at the map, and consider what chance this little 
 band of Englishmen, backed by an occasional 
 Brahma Nund, can have against the pestilence. 
 Nor is the rest of India so vastly better off in 
 
MARWAR AND JAIPUR 
 
 "3 
 
 point of establishment. A thousand, or even 
 five hundred, British officers, commissioned 
 and non-commissioned, and another five hun- 
 dred doctors might turn the scale. The exist- 
 ing service is not strong enough to grapple 
 with famine, let alone cholera. 
 
 I must go back now for a moment to describe 
 another part of the Marwar machinery of relief 
 — I mean the collecting dep6t. One of the 
 difficulties the State has had to face is the 
 recall of the multitude of Marwaris who have 
 strayed into other districts. Many have come 
 back by road, but immense numbers have been 
 fetched by train, and Marwar Junction, where 
 a collecting camp is established, is one of the 
 principal depots for the reception of these 
 wanderers, who are fed up for a few days and 
 then passed on to one of the famine camps. 
 The camp proper has had to be dismantled 
 because of the cholera, and I found four parties, 
 each about a thousand strong and arranged in 
 huge circles on an open stretch of sandy 
 ground, their fires beginning to blaze in pre- 
 paration for the evening meal. Here were 
 all sorts and conditions of men — potters, oil 
 extractors, camel breeders, beggars, thieves, 
 
 i 
 
ii4 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 drummers, cultivators. Most of those I talked 
 to were wanderers who had returned from 
 Central India, leaving their cattle dead behind 
 them, and often enough some member of the 
 family as well. A woman who sat with her 
 boy had left her husband and a girl of twelve 
 at Indore, and two of her children had died 
 since their return to their own land. There 
 have been many deaths at the collecting house. 
 The doctors tell me that the condition in which 
 thousands of wanderers have come back is 
 such as to make their final recovery impossible. 
 They may do their work at the famine tanks 
 and eat their rations like the rest, but their 
 bodies cannot be properly nourished, and if 
 they get back finally to their own villages it 
 will only be to die. 
 
 Here in Jaipur State the famine is less severe 
 than it is in Marwar, and in many districts 
 there has been a fair supply of fodder. More- 
 over, there are appreciable stretches of country 
 where irrigation works have enabled the people 
 to hold out longer than they would otherwise 
 have done. True, the water this year has been 
 scanty, and now at the end of April the canals 
 and tanks are giving out ; but there is no doubt 
 
MARWAR AND JAIPUR u$ 
 
 that the jealous care with which the scanty 
 rainfall has been husbanded and utilised, has 
 done much to add to the staying power of 
 Jaipur. The good work done in this direction 
 is due to the man who for thirty-three years 
 has given the whole of his energies to the 
 advancement of Jaipur. Under Colonel Jacob's 
 direction more than a hundred and fifty irriga- 
 tion works have been carried through, and this 
 in a country without rivers, and presenting as 
 hostile a face to schemes of watering as, I 
 suppose, any district in India. The usual 
 plan adopted has been to select the best spots 
 for catching and storing the floods which come 
 with the rains, and then, by means of canals, 
 to lead the water to as many village tanks, or 
 reservoirs, as possible. Besides replenishing 
 the tanks, the wells for a long way round have 
 the leakage from the tanks to draw upon, so 
 that the water is thoroughly well spread. Irri- 
 gation direct from canal to field — the common 
 fashion in India — is also used. The accounts 
 of the Public Works Department show what a 
 splendid investment irrigation has been for 
 Jaipur. On an outlay of five and a quarter 
 millions of rupees, there is an annual return of 
 
u6 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 more than 300,000 rupees, and although the 
 chief expenditure on capital account took place 
 in the eighties, the whole outlay since the 
 beginning, in 1868, will be recovered in another 
 three years. The benefit to the people them- 
 selves may be imagined by those who know 
 what the value of water means in India. I am 
 told that when Colonel Jacob goes about the 
 country, the people of the unirrigated districts 
 surround him as if he were the god of water, 
 and beseech him to give them canals. Another 
 incidental advantage of a progressive water 
 policy is, that when famine comes, there are 
 irrigation schemes in readiness for famine 
 labour. An example is to be found close to 
 the city, where a deep sandy nullah, along the 
 bottom of which runs a sluggish stream, is 
 being turned into a garden of broad terraces. 
 The water is dammed and then lifted on to the 
 terrace on each side the nullah ; and almost 
 within hail of the people who are digging and 
 carrying the loads of sand for the unfinished 
 terraces, there are limes and orange trees and 
 roses, guavas, barley, oats and grass, and all 
 sorts of vegetables. The genius of the nullah 
 is a famous organiser of transport, Dhanpat 
 
MARWAR AND JAIPUR 117 
 
 Rai, whose name will be familiar to officers 
 who have been on service on the frontier and 
 in the Soudan. Dhanpat is now in charge of 
 the Imperial Service Transport Corps of Jaipur 
 State, which he has turned to good use for 
 famine purposes, and he is cultivating the 
 nullah and organising the 7000 workers em- 
 ployed in it as a sort of amusement. The 
 little finger of this entirely competent person 
 is worth more than a famine code and leagues 
 of red tape to the Jaipur Durbar. His huts 
 are dug out and solidly thatched ; his gangs 
 of workers know exactly what is the daily task, 
 and do it; his orphans, clad in surprising 
 jackets of yellow, are governed by five orphan 
 corporals ; his ambulance waggons are well 
 horsed; and his depots for the collection of 
 sick and starving are run with military 
 precision. 
 
 I suppose it is natural that a small compact 
 State more or less subject to the influence of 
 public-spirited Englishmen within its borders, 
 should give evidence of more individuality and 
 flexibility in its conduct of a famine than a 
 British province, which goes by rule and tradi- 
 tion, and is subject to what is known in India 
 
n8 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 as the secretariat. There is, of course, a reverse 
 side to the picture, and I have heard of infamies 
 being perpetrated by famine officials in native 
 States which have made the fingers of British 
 officers who discovered them itch for their 
 sword-hilts. But without instituting hasty 
 comparisons between British and native 
 States, it is pleasant to record the touches 
 of human character and human kindness that 
 one meets with here. Nor are they rare. 
 The sick children in the poorhouse which 
 Colonel Pank, the medical officer, is super- 
 vising, were nursing with much solemnity the 
 lions and tigers and peacocks of painted wood 
 which the Colonel had given them. And the 
 poorhouse hospital itself was no range of low- 
 browed huts, destructive to the hat of the 
 Englishman who enters them, but a series of 
 lofty and well-ventilated sheds which, in their 
 kind, did no discredit to the Mayo Hospital, in 
 whose grounds they stand. The Maharajah 
 is rich and generous — he has just presented 
 Lord Curzon with a million rupees as an 
 endowment for a permanent famine fund, — the 
 Englishmen of Jaipur are public-spirited, and 
 there is no secretariat ; but, even so, the 
 
MARWAR AND JAIPUR 119 
 
 painted lion and the orphan corporal are 
 welcome. Then, again, if you ask how the 
 people are faring at the hands of the revenue 
 collector and the bunya, you are bound to 
 admit that there is something to be said for 
 the native State. In most of the Rajputana 
 States the fixed assessment has, for good or 
 evil, been introduced. But in Marwar, whose 
 ingenious system of land revenue I shall return 
 to later on, there is no talk about revenue in 
 years of extreme scarcity. Then the bunya, 
 though troublesome and dangerous enough, 
 has nothing like the power that he enjoys in 
 British territory. A bunya in Marwar was 
 caught selling light weight the other day, and 
 in the presence of a British officer he was 
 hoisted on the back of a camel and beaten with 
 a slipper through the famine camp. Here in 
 Jaipur the Durbar has been selling grain 
 against the bunyas since September, with the 
 best of results for the people, though at a 
 heavy loss to itself. Twenty-one Raj shops 
 are opened in different parts of the town, and 
 up to the 24th of April grain to the value 
 of a million and a half rupees was sold. 
 The police attempted to keep the women 
 
120 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 and children from getting near the shops, till 
 the Durbar found them out and whipped them. 
 Then the bunyas went into the market where 
 the Raj was buying and tried to corner it, and 
 their ringleaders were discovered and whipped 
 as well. The result of this combination of 
 protection and free whipping is that the people 
 of Jaipur are getting comparatively cheap 
 bread. Here is a story which shows what 
 manner of men the Jaipur cultivators are. It 
 was told me by an Englishman who has just 
 come back from a tour round the famine 
 districts. The Englishman was trying to per- 
 suade the villagers in a remote part of the 
 State to leave their homes, where they were 
 starving, and go to the relief works. They 
 replied, as they often do, that they would not 
 abandon the old people, and that they had no 
 money to buy food for the journey. The 
 Englishman offered to give them money, and 
 some of the people accepted it, and promised 
 to go. One man, however, who had taken 
 a rupee came back afterwards, and insisted on 
 returning it, as he had three goats, and one of 
 them, he explained, could be killed and eaten 
 at each stage of the journey. Later on another 
 
MARWAR AND JAIPUR 121 
 
 man came to the Englishman to return his 
 money, as he could not give an absolute 
 undertaking to leave his home until he heard 
 from his brother, who had a half share in the 
 house. Such honesty has a prehistoric flavour, 
 but it matches the character of the peasantry, 
 who prefer to stay at home and die quietly 
 when the last grains are gone, rather than 
 tear life up by the roots and go on the relief 
 works. 
 
 Jaipur, i May. 
 
XIII 
 
 THE PUNJAUB 
 
 " Now I have given the darkar [district] of 
 Hissar," so ran a proclamation of Akbar Shah 
 Badshah in 1568, "to the great, the fortunate, 
 the obedient, the pearl of the sea of my king- 
 dom, the star of my Government, the praised 
 of the inhabitants of the sea and land, the 
 apple of my kingdom's eye, my son Sultan 
 Muhamed Salim Bahadur (may God grant 
 him long life and greatness). My wisdom 
 wishes that the hopes, like the fields of those 
 thirsty people, may by the showers of liberality 
 and kindness be made green and flourishing, 
 and that the canal may in my time be renewed, 
 and that other waters may be conducted into 
 it, that thus it may endure for ages. For God 
 has said, from water all things were made. 
 Therefore I ordain that this jungle, in which 
 subsistence is obtained with thirst, be converted 
 
THE PUNJAUB 
 
 123 
 
 into a place of comfort, free from all evil." 
 The edict went on to say that the canal was 
 to be " excavated deeper and wider than 
 formerly," and that " on both sides of the canal 
 down to Hissar trees of every description, both 
 for shade and blossom, be planted, so as to 
 make it like the canal under the Tree in 
 Paradise." 
 
 The pear! of the sea must have done his 
 work faithfully, for the banks of his canal are 
 shaded with all manner of trees up to and 
 through Hissar, and there is water enough for 
 a good belt of fields on each side, the crops of 
 which were glistening in the sun as I rode 
 along the bank this morning. The Oriental 
 fervour of this strange old utterance seems 
 nothing more than natural after a thousand 
 miles of wilderness and the extermination of all 
 agriculture. To see groups of people in the 
 fields again, to see things growing, oxen stand- 
 ing in the shade, squares of land glistening 
 under the film of water from the canal, and, 
 climax of all, a big company of men and women 
 threshing the yellow wheat, is a wonderful 
 thing. But this "place of comfort, free from 
 all evil," is, after all, a narrow strip running 
 
124 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 through a great waste of wicked desert ; and 
 out in the desert, in which their fields have 
 disappeared, the people of Hissar, in numbers 
 that fluctuate from a hundred thousand to a 
 hundred and sixty thousand, according to the 
 work to be got elsewhere, are digging tanks 
 and living in famine camps. Numbers of 
 villages are absolutely deserted, and for more 
 than six months past the worst famine within 
 human memory has had its grip on Hissar. 
 
 The scarcity of food is worst in this southern 
 corner of the Punjaub, a corner about as large 
 as Yorkshire ; but the fodder famine through- 
 out the whole province has reached a point of 
 such intensity that the Lieutenant Governor 
 has just declared that, in spite of all the efforts 
 of the local government and the Government 
 of India, it is impossible to secure supplies for 
 keeping life even in the indispensable plough 
 cattle. Thanks to the supplies of fodder from 
 the Chenab and other canals, the calamity has 
 been put off for months, and it is very hard 
 that this great province should have to look on 
 now while its cattle are dying by hundreds of 
 thousands, as they died last year in Rajputana 
 and Gujerat. It becomes more and more 
 
THE PUNJAUB 
 
 125 
 
 difficult to see how the cultivators of the stricken 
 districts are to get back to work again, in the 
 face of this measureless destruction of their 
 cattle. Even the beasts on the great Govern- 
 ment cattle farm, which covers an area of 60 
 square miles, are in a half-starved state, and it is 
 lamentable to see them roaming about in their 
 vain search for food. The question is forced 
 upon one again whether some system of 
 Government fodder storage or the provision of 
 local ensilage depots ought not to be ener- 
 getically taken in hand when once the Govern- 
 ment has time to look round. It is rather 
 surprising to find so little attention being paid 
 to this matter. Again and again the peasantry 
 have been stripped bare of their capital, and 
 nothing has been done to provide against future 
 calamities. India has an enormous Forest 
 Department, and it ought surely to be able to 
 take steps for keeping, say, 10 per cent, of its 
 live stock from death by famine. 
 
 " But what about canals ? " the reader who 
 has studied irrigation will ask. " Is not the 
 Punjaub the classic ground for irrigation ? " 
 The answer is that the situation would be 
 simply desperate but for the magnificent 
 
126 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 system of artificial watering begun by the old 
 rulers of India, and continued, up to a point, 
 by us. Let me deal with the matter more in 
 detail. The total area of crops matured in the 
 Punjaub during the year ending September, 
 1899, was 20,y3&,6S7 acres, and of this area 
 §,967,391 acres, giving a yield of 43 per cent, 
 of the crops of the year, were cultivated by 
 irrigation. The chief forms of irrigation are — 
 (1) the canal which draws its water all the 
 year round from one of the snow-fed rivers of 
 the Himalayas, and spreads them over a great 
 tract of country by a system of minor canals 
 and ducts ; (2) the inundation canal, fed by 
 cuts in the river banks through which the 
 waters find an exit in times of flood ; and (3) 
 the irrigation wells. The immense importance 
 of the well in Indian agriculture will be seen 
 from these two facts — that during the past 
 ten years more than 16,000 new masonry wells 
 have been sunk in the Punjaub, to say nothing 
 of the simple pit or cutcha well, and that close 
 on four million out of the nine million of 
 irrigated acres were watered by the wells. The 
 inundation canals, owing to want of flood-water, 
 did badly, and a decrease of half a million acres 
 
THE PUNJAUB 
 
 127 
 
 of watered lands since the previous year must 
 be set down to their account. 
 
 As for the great and constant-flowing canals, 
 whose shaded banks are the pleasantest refuges 
 the plains can offer you in the hot weather, they 
 have done so magnificently well that the failure 
 to extend them faster is most unfortunate. Of 
 their financial success I say nothing at the 
 moment, except that they are by far the best 
 investment that the Government of India has 
 ever made. They have largely extended the 
 cultivation of new crops such as rice and sugar, 
 they have given India a permanent granary, 
 and they have opened up huge tracts of desert 
 country to cultivation, relieving the congested 
 districts in the process. This is an old story, 
 no doubt ; but the man who comes back from 
 a camel-ride through a once-cultivated desert 
 by way of Sultan Salim's water of Paradise 
 sees more in a canal than the " moral and 
 material progress " Blue-books disclose to him 
 at home. 
 
 Take the Chenab Canal, the latest big 
 scheme which the Government of India has 
 carried through, and consider its effect, direct 
 and indirect, upon the local famine districts — 
 
128 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 the rainless corner of Hissar and the half-dozen 
 other districts of the Punjaub less severely hit 
 by the food famine than Hissar, but still 
 pretty badly touched. Now the Chenab has 
 opened or is opening up four million acres of 
 pure desert, it has given any quantity of 
 employment to the distressed people during the 
 famine, it looked as if it was going to save the 
 cattle out of its supplies of fodder, and it will 
 certainly give to the Punjaub a new productive 
 colony of a quarter of a million or so of workers 
 and their families, all of them carefully selected 
 from the congested districts. That is an 
 achievement of which the proudest Govern- 
 ment can afford to be proud, and Colonel 
 Ottley, the master mind of the Chenab, who 
 has gone home to irrigate the minds of the 
 young men at Cooper's Hill, will be glad to 
 know that, in the opinion of a high official of 
 the Government, " the Chenab has largely 
 saved the situation in the Punjaub." 
 
 In face of all this, the excessive deliberation 
 with which the Government sets about realising 
 the rest of the approved canal schemes is 
 scarcely edifying. The Jhelum project was 
 fully authorised in 1888, but nobody seems 
 
THE PUNJAUB 
 
 129 
 
 quite to know when it will be ready to hold 
 water. Then, after the Jhelum, there is the 
 Sind-Sagar project for spreading Indus waters 
 over another enormous stretch of desert ; and 
 there are some enthusiasts who hold the belief 
 that about 1920 there may be a chance for the 
 Montgomery project — a scheme which might 
 have been half put through by this time if the 
 Government had allowed a company to carry 
 out the work. Some addition is being made 
 this year to the pittance which the Govern- 
 ment annually devotes to irrigation, but the 
 Punjaub presents an irresistible case for large 
 and adequate treatment. A forward policy 
 means, of course, more men and bigger estab- 
 lishments ; but so, for that matter, does a famine. 
 And for the rest, if the approved schemes are 
 all finished in a dozen years instead of fifty, there 
 will still be plenty of work for the engineering 
 staff, even supposing that India is by that time 
 surfeited with canals. 
 
 To come back to Hissar, I must confess that 
 opinions gathered here and in other parts of 
 the Punjaub are not very hopeful about any 
 extensive scheme of irrigation being possible 
 for this district, and in these matters one is 
 
 K 
 
i3o THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 necessarily in the hands of the experts. But 
 at the worst a large canal policy would give 
 permanent openings to many people in this 
 famine-haunted region, and abundance of work, 
 at least for a generation, to emigrants during 
 times of famine. The recent drop of numbers 
 on the relief works from 160,000 to 110,000 is 
 due, so I am told, to the people going off 
 harvesting in the irrigated regions. 
 
 It is satisfactory to know that every stroke 
 of famine labour is making in the direction 
 of more water storage. In company with 
 the Deputy Commissioner who is "running 
 the famine," I visited two of the tanks 
 which are being dug out for the future use 
 of groups of villages. A large number of 
 these tanks are being made, and it is work of 
 which the people well know the value. There 
 is no complaint whatever of skulking. The 
 day's work for the gang is marked out, and it 
 is generally done within the day. A leading 
 principle of Major Dunlop-Smith's administra- 
 tion of the last famine was that the people 
 should clearly understand what was expected 
 of them ; he found that the trouble taken in 
 explanations was well repaid, and that the 
 
THE PUNJAUB 131 
 
 results of famine labour compared very fairly 
 with ordinary labour ; and evidently the tradi- 
 tion sticks. The people on the works struck 
 me as in good condition, and there was 
 practically no sickness — the best test, I 
 suppose, of good all-round administration. 
 Hissar, however, has not been spared by the 
 cholera, which is raging at this moment 
 in many of the towns and villages. The 
 famine camps had their worst time' some 
 months ago, and there was a terrible outbreak 
 on some canal works, many miles away, to 
 which eleven thousand of the Hissar people 
 had been deported — so bad, indeed, that the 
 whole camp had to be broken up and the 
 people brought back. I went also to the village 
 of Tahvandi Rana, five miles away, a cluster 
 of mud hovels picturesquely heaped together 
 on a mound in the desert, and deserted by all 
 but the aged and infirm, who are receiving a 
 weekly dole. These poor creatures were 
 waiting for us outside the village, formed up 
 in a group under a big sandbank. There 
 were old men leaning on their staves, and 
 women shaking with palsy, the usual collection 
 of village decrepitude, and five blind. On the 
 
132 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 other side of the road were the fresh applicants 
 for relief, who told their cases. One of them 
 was an old man who had lost two of his sons. 
 He was keeping their wives and their three 
 children and his old mother of ninety. He had 
 no land, and his bullocks, from which he got a 
 living, were dead. He and five more were put 
 upon the list. Altogether in the village, which 
 is a large one, there are thirty-one people 
 on Government and twenty-nine on charitable 
 relief. 
 
 I must turn now for one moment to the 
 unpleasant business of criticism, a task that is 
 lightened in the present instance by a frank 
 confession of error and promise of repentance. 
 In his report on the last famine Major Dunlop- 
 Smith pointed out that the grain stores existing 
 in the district gave evidence of unsuspected 
 staying powers on the part of the people ; but 
 he also took pains to point out that of the sum 
 of four hundred thousand and odd rupees 
 owing for land revenue and other Govern- 
 ment demands, it would be practically im- 
 possible to recover anything during the follow- 
 ing harvest, which happened to be a bumper 
 one. Other counsels, however, prevailed, and 
 
THE PUNJAUB 
 
 133 
 
 the arrears were incontinently collected, almost 
 before the people had time to look round. 
 The very next year the famine comes again, 
 and the people, who with a little nursing might 
 have pulled themselves together for a struggle, 
 are compelled to come on the works at once, 
 and in 50 per cent, greater numbers. There 
 could hardly be a more dramatic illustration of 
 the tendency of our revenue arrangements to 
 play into the hands of the famine demon. 
 But, as I say, the Punjaub Government have 
 publicly acknowledged their error and, I think 
 it may be said, abjured it. 
 
 Hissar, Punjaub. 
 
XIV 
 
 THE COLLECTION OF LAND 
 REVENUE 
 
 I have come on a flying visit to Simla, where 
 the head-quarters of the Government are estab- 
 lished for the hot weather. There is no famine 
 here, thank Heaven. On the ridges of the 
 Himalayas you strike once more the impreg- 
 nable rock of assured and adequate diet. 
 Simla, in spite of its deceptive-looking Oriental 
 bazaar, is not India, but Rotten Row, and Pall 
 Mall, and Whitehall, hung up in the mountains 
 of Sutherlandshire, and waited on by coloured 
 servants in liveries. That it should be possible 
 to rule India by telegraph from such a place is 
 a thing that fills one with abiding astonish- 
 ment. It is a triumph of political imagination. 
 The famine itself is being " run " from Simla at 
 this moment. The high officials have their 
 hands on the wires that link together the Indian 
 
THE COLLECTION OF LAND REVENUE 135 
 
 wilderness from Hissar to Hyderabad, and the 
 statistics of relief works and mortality, and the 
 omens concerning the eagerly expected mon- 
 soon, are conned and tabulated within sight of 
 the snows, and as likely as not with the hail- 
 stones beating a wild tattoo on the roofs of 
 corrugated iron, which ripple between the 
 government of India and the stars. By the 
 courtesy of those who are concerned in this 
 work of supervision, I am able to give some 
 general information as to the course of the 
 famine, and the steps that are to be taken so 
 soon as the rains break. 
 
 When I arrived in Bombay I concluded too 
 hastily that the extraordinary measures adopted 
 for the collection of land revenue were due to 
 the orders of the Government of India. As a 
 matter of fact the Presidency Government was, 
 and is, alone responsible. There is a further 
 word or two to be said in regard to this very 
 grave matter. The Bombay Government has 
 put it forth that the collection is only to be 
 pressed where the cultivator is able to pay, and 
 that the man who cannot pay is to have the 
 benefit of suspension. That is to say, he will 
 start farming again after the famine with arrears 
 
i 3 6 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 of taxation hanging over him, which may or 
 may not be finally remitted. Now what is the 
 plain English of this edict ? There is, in the 
 first place, no means of discriminating between 
 the man who can pay and the man who cannot. 
 I forget whether I have mentioned that Bombay 
 has no system of land record, but so it is, and 
 the actual ownership of the land is therefore 
 absolutely unknown to the officials. What 
 happens is, that the revenue notice is first of all 
 served upon the occupier, and if, after certain 
 kinds of pressure, he fails to pay, another notice 
 is served on the money-lender of the village, 
 who is pretty certain to be either the owner of 
 the land, or the creditor of the ryot. ct If the 
 ryot cannot pay, let the money-lender pay for 
 him," is the Bombay formula. The following 
 passage from a report of an ex-collector of 
 Poona as to the methods adopted during the 
 famine of 189 1-2, puts the matter in proper 
 official form : — " The revenue," says the col- 
 lector, "was paid up as soon as the milder 
 forms of pressure began to be exercised. 
 There could not, to my mind, be a clearer 
 indication of the fact that the cultivating classes 
 possess a reserve of resources not always 
 
THE COLLECTION OF LAND REVENUE 137 
 
 attributed to them. It may be that many not in 
 debt before had to apply to the village money- 
 lender, and that many already in debt had to 
 involve themselves in heavier liabilities. But 
 to raise money on loan necessitates the posses- 
 sion of some sort of credit, and practically the 
 whole revenue demand was eventually paid up 
 either from hoardings or from loans which the 
 credit of the borrowers was good enough for 
 them to obtain." The argument sounds rather 
 cynical, and if it had come from the mouth of a 
 seigneur in the days before the French Revo- 
 lution, I suppose the historians and moralists 
 would hardly have let it pass ; but I have no 
 doubt that the collector sincerely represented 
 the views of his Government, and those views 
 are no whit less firmly held to-day. Suppose, 
 however, for the sake of argument, that the 
 revenue officials knew their men, and had at 
 least a shrewd suspicion as to their resources, 
 would it be possible to carry out a policy of 
 selective pressure without risk of injustice ? I 
 have put this question to some of the highest 
 revenue authorities in India, and their answer 
 is that it would be impossible. The subordi- 
 nate native official collects the tax, and he will 
 
138 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 do what in him lies to please his superiors by 
 getting in all the money he can squeeze from 
 the cultivators. He will establish a reign of 
 terror in the villages, and with examples of 
 distraint before their eyes, the people will beg 
 or borrow or do anything to raise the rupees 
 for paying the tax, or for bribing the official to 
 give them time. 1 
 
 It should be understood that Bombay is the 
 only Government in India, British or native, that 
 is suffering from an attack of revenue-hunger at 
 the present time. The native States are sus- 
 pending and remitting over entire areas where 
 the pinch of famine is most severe, and in the 
 Punjaub and the Central Provinces suspensions 
 by district have already been arranged on a 
 large ''scale, and the cultivators know exactly 
 where they stand. In four districts in the 
 Central Provinces the entire revenue has been 
 suspended, and in the other districts it has been 
 lightened materially. There is no doubt, too, 
 that the British provinces will ask the Govern- 
 ment of India to sanction the conversion of sus- 
 pensions into remission when the time arrives, 
 
 1 This has since been verified by the disclosure of violent 
 and oppressive measures of recovery adopted in Bombay during 
 the worst rigours of the famine. 
 
THE COLLECTION OF LAND REVENUE 139 
 
 and that on a very large scale. As to Bombay 
 I have my misgivings. The Government 
 of the Presidency may be forced on occasion 
 into partial and grudging suspension, but into 
 remission never. The one good harvest that 
 stood between the famine of 1897 and 1899 
 had to pay the famine revenue and the revenue 
 for the current year, and when the money- 
 lenders had taken their share, the cultivator 
 had nothing left for a rainy or, rather, a rain- 
 less day. The results we know. No remis- 
 sions were made in the famine of 189 1-2, and 
 only trifling suspensions, and for the ten years 
 previous to the famine, which included seasons 
 of scarcity in the Deccan, the account stood 
 thus : — Collections, 98*40 per cent, of the de- 
 mand ; outstanding balances, 0*94 ; irrecover- 
 able balances written off, 0*43 ; remissions, 
 0*23. Is it to be wondered at that the money- 
 lender is entering into the ryot's lands, or that 
 famine comes more swiftly on famine's heels 
 than ever before ? 
 
 There is another aspect of this painful 
 business which can hardly have escaped the 
 Englishman who gives a moment's thought 
 to India. If there is something fatuous in 
 
i4o THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 taking a farmer's last rupee with one hand, and 
 offering him a job at stonebreaking with the 
 other, or in making large loans of Government 
 money for well-sinking and seed purchase 
 to people whose resources have been drained 
 dry by Government's revenue demands, can it 
 be said that the part allotted to the charitable 
 public is altogether satisfactory ? Most of the 
 funds subscribed in England and elsewhere 
 will go, as I understand, in gifts of money for 
 the purchase of cattle and seed-grain to farmers 
 who cannot offer Government a good security 
 for a loan. This may or may not be the best 
 shape that such help can take, but my point 
 is that there is a certain hardship in expecting 
 the public to provide an indemnity, as it were, 
 for Governments whose reckless collecting has 
 plunged the people into ruin. The Bombay 
 system of grabbing at every rupee that it can 
 seize is, I am afraid, made easier by the know- 
 ledge that charity will come to the rescue after 
 the famine is over. This, however, is by the way. 
 As to the need for help, it was never so urgent 
 as it is to-day. The time is drawing near for 
 the people to leave the works and get back to 
 their land and villages in readiness for the rain. 
 
THE COLLECTION OF LAND REVENUE 141 
 
 But how are they to maintain themselves and 
 their labourers without funds or credit, and how 
 are they going to plough without bullocks ? 
 Again, the people on the works are only the 
 fringe of the distressed millions. In ninety 
 native States, in Bombay, the Central Provinces, 
 the Punjaub and Berar, some 90 millions of 
 people are hit by the famine. What pro- 
 portion have lost their cattle, eaten up their 
 store of seed-grain, and worked through their 
 credit with the money-lender, no one can say, 
 but it is certain that a larger number of culti- 
 vators are simply broken to-day than ever were 
 broken before in the recorded history of India. 
 The single item of cattle lost is stupendous, 
 and though here and there the ryots may make 
 a push to prepare their lands by hand tillage — 
 and I believe that part of the British fund is to 
 be used in providing specimens of hand ploughs, 
 harrows, and seed-drills, — it is clear that culti- 
 vation cannot be generally taken up again till 
 the plough cattle are somehow replaced. Add 
 to all this that the rains will find the land 
 furrowed with sickness, and that cholera is 
 already raging over an enormous area of the 
 famine districts, and you have a rough idea 
 
142 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 of the task that lies before the Government of 
 India and the devoted band of Englishmen 
 who are fighting the furies down on the burning 
 plains. To meet these needs the Govern- 
 ment has decided to devote half a million by 
 way of loans for the purchase of cattle and 
 seed-grain ; and a further ,£380,000 from the 
 funds contributed by people in India, England, 
 the colonies, Germany, and America, is already 
 allotted for the same purpose, only this latter 
 sum will be distributed in the shape of gifts. 
 The charitable fund may possibly be increased 
 to half a million, 1 for the British colonies and 
 dependencies are telegraphing over large sums, 
 and in that case there will be a round million 
 to be distributed over an area of 700,000 square 
 miles, most of which has to be reclaimed from 
 a state of desert. It is enough to indicate the 
 need and the remedy to show how black the 
 prospect is, and how overwhelming is the case 
 for an English grant. To set the people on their 
 feet again will cost many millions, and if the 
 resources of India are unequal to the strain, the 
 alternatives are obvious — the people will be 
 
 1 According to the Viceroy's statement in October the fund 
 actually reached about a million. 
 
THE COLLECTION OF LAND REVENUE 143 
 
 sent to their villages to face yet another famine, 
 or the Government at home will have to come 
 to the rescue. The theory held in certain 
 quarters, that the money-lender will set things 
 going again, is likely to prove a broken reed. 
 In the first place, the usurers, in spite of their 
 profits from the grain trade, are hard hit in 
 their capacity of landowners and mortgagees ; 
 and, in the second place, the Government is 
 trying to force them from the land in the 
 Punjaub as a preliminary to stopping land 
 alienation throughout India. Under these cir- 
 cumstances it seems unlikely that the bunya 
 will come to the rescue. Of the wisdom and 
 statesmanship of leaving the people to recover 
 themselves by means of a further plunge into 
 debt, I say nothing. Altogether the situation 
 is one which England can hardly disregard. 
 
 Simla, May. 
 
XV 
 
 IN THE CENTRAL PROVINCES 
 
 It is a far cry from Simla to the Central 
 Provinces, whether you look at the thermometer 
 or the distance to be travelled. For most of 
 the way the railway skirts the western famine 
 frontier. First there is a long stretch of Pun- 
 jaub to be traversed, then you find yourself in 
 the North-west Provinces, which have escaped 
 the famine owing to a sufficient rainfall, touch- 
 ing at cities with Mutiny names, and passing 
 close to the borders of Rajputana. And finally 
 you cut across the barrier of the Central India 
 States, in all of which the famine is more or 
 less severe, and come out upon the region that 
 has been described as the boss of the Indian 
 shield, and which, topography apart, is the 
 very equator for heat. When I left the train 
 at Jubbulpur and stepped out into what ought 
 to have been the cool of the evening, I had 
 
IN THE CENTRAL PROVINCES 145 
 
 skirted the greater part of the famine region, 
 but the breadth of the Central Provinces still 
 lay to the south, and beyond that again the 
 enormous tract of Hyderabad and Berar. 
 
 The Central Provinces were constituted in 
 1 86 1 by the union of the outlying dependency 
 of the North-west Provinces (the Saugor- 
 Nerbudda territories) with the estreated do- 
 minions of the Rajah of Nagpur. " These 
 tracts," so a Government report informs you, 
 " include the mass of jungle-covered hills which 
 have given asylum to the aboriginal tribes in 
 their retreat before the advancing tide of Hindoo 
 immigration." Twenty-one thousand square 
 miles are under the Forest Department, and 
 in 1 89 1 there were 18,000 square miles of 
 large zamindari (landlord) estates, said to be in 
 great part waste, and another 20,000 square 
 miles lying uncultivated in private hands, most 
 of it hilly and rocky ground, which the authorities 
 say it would not pay to cultivate. Roughly, 
 then, the Central Provinces include some of 
 the richest land in India, with tracts of virgin 
 soil that have only been opened up within 
 the last thirty years — and also some of the 
 poorest. It is emphatically a half-developed 
 
 L 
 
146 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 territory, and for mixture of tribes I suppose 
 it cannot be surpassed. The land system 
 is described as forming the connecting link 
 between the proprietary communities of the 
 North-west Provinces and the landlord settle- 
 ment of Bengal. The revenue settlement is 
 not made with each individual cultivator as in 
 Bombay and Madras, nor with entire village 
 communities, as in the North-west and, no- 
 minally, in the Punjaub, but with landlords who 
 were drawn from the class of revenue farmers, 
 and in a moment — as it seems to some — of 
 aberration forcibly endowed by the Govern- 
 ment with the lands of the State. For the 
 rest the tenants have quite recently been safe- 
 guarded in respect to their occupancy rights 
 by a most stringent law. Their rents are fixed 
 by the Government when the periodical revenue 
 settlement is made with the landlords, concerning 
 which, however, and the effect of the system of 
 land assessment on the condition of the people, 
 I must postpone comment till I have had time 
 for pushing my inquiries further. As to the 
 extent and acuteness of the famine, it may be 
 gauged by the fact that out of a popula- 
 tion of ten and three-quarter millions in the 
 
IN THE CENTRAL PROVINCES 147 
 
 districts affected, close upon a million and three- 
 quarters are on Government relief, and it is 
 expected that the number will be increased 
 to two millions before the monsoon bursts. In 
 Raipur, the great rice-growing district, 600,000, 
 or 40 per cent, of the people, are on relief, and 
 in Bilaspur, the neighbouring division, which I 
 hope to visit, a quarter of a million. Happily 
 the people have been spared a fodder famine, 
 and there is food and to spare for all the beasts 
 in the Government forests ; but the rains were 
 wholly insufficient to grow rice, and in the 
 grain-growing districts the autumn and spring 
 crops were very small. The scarcity of water 
 is growing acute, and wells, tanks, and streams 
 are drying up on every hand ; but in the 
 eastern district, from which I write, the land 
 looks far less baked than in the rest of the 
 famine districts, and I believe that the 
 authorities hope for a sufficient supply for 
 drinking purposes throughout the provinces. 
 
 It is impossible to speak too highly in praise 
 of the relief work which has been carried on 
 ever since the autumn. In the famine of 1897 
 the Government was too late in the field, and 
 a heavy toll was paid before measures of relief 
 
148 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 could be organised; but the lesson has been well 
 learned, and directly the failure of the autumn 
 crops declared itself, a systematic campaign was 
 organised by the Chief Commissioner, and 
 pushed forward twenty-four hours ahead of 
 every movement of the enemy. The campaign 
 has no doubt been costly, and it has absorbed 
 an army of organisers, but on the other hand it 
 has kept the people from starvation, and when 
 the monsoon bursts the two millions of agricul- 
 turists will be in good heart and trim for getting 
 their farms in hand again. Till a week or so 
 back, when the cholera drew ahead, the death- 
 rate for the Central Provinces was normal, and 
 if that is not a test of triumphant organisation, 
 I do not know what is. The Government has 
 opened village relief works and kitchens at the 
 people's own doors ; it has gone to the Gonds 
 and Bhils, and other aboriginal tribes, and 
 offered them work at grass-cutting and road- 
 making in the forests, and wherever there was 
 a sign of genuine distress, relief works on a 
 larger scale have been opened. Not a district 
 has been neglected, and out of all the scores 
 of thousands who have come in across the 
 borders, not a starving wanderer from the 
 
IN THE CENTRAL PROVINCES 149 
 
 Native States has been sent empty away. 
 And with all this the rate of wages has been 
 sufficient to keep the people in good condition ; 
 fining below the minimum is rare, and the 
 penal minimum is, so far as I can gather, un- 
 known. What has been the moral effect of 
 this policy ? Have the people flocked from 
 their villages at the invitation of the Sirkar 
 when they might have stayed at home ? Are 
 they skulking at their ease on the works, where 
 the Government is feeding them ? These are 
 the questions which I have been putting to 
 officials of all grades in the service, and seeking 
 to answer for myself in the villages as well as 
 on the works. I cannot pretend to give a 
 conclusive reply, but I think that I can shed a 
 little light on some very vexed questions which 
 these recurrent famines are raising to a point 
 of Imperial importance. 
 
 First as to the labour problem. The policy 
 of the famine authorities has been to exact a 
 fair task from the people, and to do this it was 
 necessary to have competent supervision, and 
 enough of it, to see that the camps were not so 
 large as to endanger discipline, and to hit 
 upon a means of payment that would give the 
 
150 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 people a clear idea of the relation between 
 work and wages. They began by paying their 
 works superintendents double the salary paid 
 in the last famine, and enough officers, 
 engineers, and non-commissioned officers were 
 imported to keep watch and ward over the 
 whole gigantic system of relief that had of 
 necessity to be built up on a basis of native 
 officialdom. This, as I have said, was costly 
 in the first instance, but then the famine in 
 these parts has emphatically not been run 
 on the cheap. Further, it was decided that 
 not more than five thousand, or at the outside 
 six thousand, people were to be employed at 
 once on any one work — a provision that has 
 kept the famine camps from degenerating into 
 mobs. And, finally, the payment of wages 
 was to be made daily, and the daily task so 
 marked out as to be comprehensible to a child. 
 A system of moderate fining was introduced 
 for cases of contumacy, but it was provided 
 that no one should be fined twice in the same 
 week until the attention of a superior officer 
 had been called to the matter, so that inquiry 
 should be made as to whether the fault lay 
 with the workers, the supervision, or the 
 
IN THE CENTRAL PROVINCES 151 
 
 material. The result of all this patient and 
 laborious contriving is that the great majority 
 of the people are earning the maximum wages, 
 and are in good heart and good condition, and 
 that a vast addition in the shape of tanks, 
 roads, and railway work has been made to the 
 wealth of the provinces. So much for the 
 work. That the policy will prove itself really 
 costly in the long run I venture to doubt. 
 Whether the relief has sapped the people's 
 independence is a more difficult question to 
 bring to the test. The view of those who are 
 entitled to speak with the highest authority is 
 that of two evils it was better that a certain 
 number should be admitted to the works who 
 were not absolutely destitute than that any 
 risks should be run of reducing the really 
 needy to a state of starvation by barbed-wire 
 deterrents. They frankly admit that a certain 
 percentage of people who might have eked 
 out a living in their villages have come 
 upon relief; but in regard to this class it is 
 pointed out that when the famine is over their 
 savings will be available for making a fresh start, 
 and to this extent the drain on Government 
 and charitable aid will be reduced. No one 
 
r 5 2 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 can blind himself to the dangers that lurk in 
 the erection of a system of out-relief on this 
 colossal scale, but I cannot say that the officials 
 are despondent as to the results, whilst the 
 chief desire of the people themselves, who are 
 employed at a distance from their homes, is to 
 get back again as soon as may be. That is 
 so, at any rate, in the case of the farmers. 
 Till there is grain to feed them, it would 
 be foolish to expect the labourers to be in 
 any hurry to return. At the best of times 
 their existence is a hard and precarious 
 one. 
 
 In company with a member of the Civil 
 Service I have been visiting some of the 
 villages in the Hoshangabad division, and the 
 evidence I have gathered, coupled with 
 the testimony of the officers in charge of 
 village districts, goes to show that the bulk of 
 the people have elected to make a brave fight 
 against the famine, surrendering only when 
 there is no choice left to them. Riding out 
 through the fields, you are struck at once by 
 the amount of work that is going on in the 
 way of ploughing, harrowing, and weeding, 
 and in the villages there are plenty of signs 
 
IN THE CENTRAL PROVINCES 153 
 
 of life and animation. Out of half a million 
 people in the division only 60,000 are on 
 relief ; the rest are living on the remains of a 
 scanty harvest which they were able to reap 
 this spring. But it is a hard and anxious 
 business, a painful race against time and the 
 rains, and the people's faces tell the story of 
 what they have had to endure. They have 
 eaten their seed grain, and for months they 
 have been living on half or rather less than 
 half rations, for which in many cases they have 
 had to go into debt to the landlord. Their 
 credit with the money-lender is exhausted, 
 and the women's ornaments were sold or 
 pledged in the famine of 1897. Yet with 
 relief works within easy walking distance, whole 
 villages are fighting it out together. One of 
 them, a large village with 500 inhabitants, 
 settled by the Rajputs after the famine of 
 1 86 1, had sent only eleven of its people to the 
 works. The next village was in much the 
 same case, and at a third, a few miles farther 
 on, where the tank was being deepened by 
 famine labour, only a handful of people had 
 gone on the works. Yet in this village all 
 the tenants, except a couple of farmers, had 
 
154 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 mortgaged their occupancy rights to the 
 money-lender, reducing themselves in the 
 process to the position of bond-slaves. The 
 people are eking out their grain with such wild 
 fruits, roots, and berries as the plains afford. 
 If the fodder famine had spread to the Central 
 Provinces they would be in far worse case. As 
 it is, they are able to earn a few annas by 
 hauling timber and grass from the forests 
 and carting grain to the famine camps and 
 villages. How far are these people typical of 
 the rest who are facing the famine at home ? 
 According to three charge officers who have 
 been looking after a population of some 80,000 
 in the same district, they are a fair sample, 
 only, of course, the numbers who have gone 
 in the works vary according to the degree of 
 the failure of the crops, and, for the rest, some 
 villages which have been disheartened by a 
 long series of failures have gone almost en 
 masse. One of these officers tells me, too, 
 that in his district the people do not wait for 
 the disappearance of the last handful of grain, 
 but when no more than a month's allowance is 
 left they hide it away in readiness for the rains, 
 and the family, or some part of it, goes on 
 
IN THE CENTRAL PROVINCES 155 
 
 relief. Couple with this the fact that many 
 of those on the works are actually saving a 
 fraction of their wages against the time for 
 the return to the village, and one gets a partial 
 clue to the mystery of how the cultivators 
 manage to exist between the closing of the 
 works and the gathering in of the autumn 
 harvest. In Rajputana I found the famine 
 workers were putting aside a pinch from their 
 rations for the same purpose, and so strong is 
 the instinct to make provision for the blessed 
 days when the green shoots will be showing 
 above the soil, that I am assured the people 
 will put up with any privations so long as they 
 can insure themselves against the journey 
 home and the period of waiting for their 
 crops. The two big parties of Marwars 
 that I met trekking back with bullocks and 
 carts to their own land must have provided 
 for the journey by stinting themselves on the 
 famine camps. These Indian cultivators are 
 an amazing folk, patient, resourceful, and 
 thrifty beyond belief. And the authorities 
 have surely done better in making it possible 
 for them to get back home in good heart 
 and fair trim than if they had broken them 
 
i 5 6 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 in spirit and health by a course of penal 
 diet. 
 
 Last Sunday I rode out ten miles from 
 Harda towards the spurs of the Satpuras, whose 
 western shoulders I had seen from Khandesh. 
 The vast stretch of jungle-covered mountains, 
 which are the home of the Ghonds and Koor- 
 koos and other aboriginals, were hidden by 
 the grey haze in which the country was set to 
 boil on that particular day. Was it a sign, we 
 wondered, that the rains were coming ? For a 
 week or so before the monsoon bursts there 
 comes a sort of lull, with a thundery feeling in 
 the air, which the people call " the great 
 silence." The soothsayers declare that the 
 rains will come early this year, but at Simla 
 the meteorologists give them another three 
 weeks. Some of the villagers we passed in 
 the fields, or driving their bullock-waggons 
 along the ruts which pass for a road, thought 
 the rains were coming within a week or ten 
 days. Their soothsayers predict another two 
 years of bad fortune for India. The rains are 
 not to fail, certainly ; but the harvests will be 
 poor — so poor that only the commonest sort 
 of grains should be sown. 
 
IN THE CENTRAL PROVINCES 157 
 
 My guide was to hold a conference with the 
 famine officials about the storing of grain in the 
 hill villages before the rains make the roads 
 impassable, and close to the village where he 
 was to meet them a whole posse of natives were 
 eating their tiffin under a grove of mangoes. 
 Some of them had devised a dish which was 
 new to my companion, with all his knowledge 
 of the aboriginals. It was not the chiroda 
 plant, nor the young leaves of the pipal tree, nor 
 the achar fruit, nor the temru, nor any one of 
 the innumerable roots and berries of the jungle 
 which the Ghonds and Bhils devour, but the 
 big stones of the mango, which were being 
 roasted for the sake of the kernel, and an excel- 
 lent dish they are said to make. The tribes 
 have deserted their villages and flocked to the 
 works which the Government has set up in the 
 forests. People tell me that you see no more 
 signs of starvation in the hills than you do in 
 the plains, and I can testify that I have seen no 
 traces of famine in Jubbulpur, Hoshangabad, 
 Tamarni, or Harda, except an occasional 
 wanderer from the Native States across the 
 Nerbudda, and once or twice an emaciated 
 infant. To have solved this problem, and to 
 
THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 have got a quantity of good honest work from 
 the tribes in return, is a splendid achievement. 
 The Government, too, is resolved that no risks 
 shall be run when the monsoon bursts, and for 
 the space of five or six hours on that sweltering 
 Sunday, for the larger part of which, I fear, I 
 slept, my companion was hammering out the 
 details for the transport, storing, and distribution 
 of a three months' stock of grain for the hill 
 tribes, scattered over twenty square miles. And 
 within a fortnight the thing will be done, too. 
 
 Alas ! the cholera cannot be kept at bay, 
 even in this district, for, feed the people as you 
 may, there is no guaranteeing the purity of the 
 water. I had come in early in the morning to 
 the head-quarters of a district in the Western 
 Division, and I called at the office of the 
 engineer, who was looking after the district 
 works, which give employment to some fifty 
 thousand people. There was bad news. 
 " We've kept the cholera at arm's length so far," 
 said the engineer, " but it has broken out at a 
 camp down the line, and ten cases were reported 
 yesterday. The civil surgeon is going off by 
 the next train, and I hope we shall be able to 
 take it in time." We went down to the station, 
 
IN THE CENTRAL PROVINCES 159 
 
 the engineer armed with a big tin of perman- 
 ganate for the wells, and there we found the 
 civil surgeon waiting for his train, and likely to 
 wait for another couple of hours — for such are 
 the ways of the Indian lines, — with the certain 
 prospect of missing the mail at the junction, and 
 spending a dozen hours on a journey of less than 
 a hundred miles. " We're used to this sort 
 of thing," the civil surgeon explained ; " time 
 doesn't count in India." I took the night train 
 in pursuit, having spent the afternoon at a famine 
 camp on the Nerbudda, where some railway 
 work was in progress, and early next morning 
 I caught him up at the dak bungalow at 
 Tamarni. Here, too, was the district famine 
 superintendent, an officer of the Indian Staff 
 Corps, worn, but full of " go." He had got a 
 telegram at another famine camp two nights 
 before, had ridden off at once without waiting 
 for servants or stores, caught a goods train, 
 and spent the whole of the previous day in 
 separating the infected gangs from the others, 
 douching fifteen hundred people with perman- 
 ganate, seeing to the wells, and setting things 
 straight at thehospital sheds. Up to four in the 
 afternoon, when his stores came up, his rations 
 
160 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 had consisted of a tin of sardines. On the 
 whole it looked as if the measures adopted 
 would stamp the cholera out. The civil sur- 
 geon and I jolted out five miles in an ox-waggon 
 to the scene of action, the superintendent riding 
 on ahead. Close to the hospital we found him 
 driving bamboos into the ground, and getting 
 ready the framework of another shed, for the 
 hospital was overcrowded, and the coolies put 
 on to the work had fled. Inside the two 
 hospital sheds of wattle and mud, were a score 
 or so of patients, with their women folk about 
 them. Mothers were hanging over their 
 children, brushing away the flies and moistening 
 their lips, and in one corner of the shed stood 
 a woman whose husband lay sick unto death, 
 fanning him with her crimson sari. It was hot 
 inside — anything from 105 to no degrees — the 
 sun came streaming in through the cracks in 
 the roof of matting, and the people were incon- 
 veniently crowded. But for all that there was 
 an air of cheerfulness and confidence about the 
 sufferers and their nurses ; for most of the 
 patients were making a good fight of it, death 
 was in no hurry to empty the sheds, and, above 
 all, the people who had been struck down were 
 
IN THE CENTRAL PROVINCES 161 
 
 well fed and in good condition. Truly the 
 difference between cholera here and in Khan- 
 desh was immeasurable. A couple of miles 
 further on we came to the famine workers 
 taking their midday rest under the trees, 
 which are plentiful in these parts, and well 
 covered with fresh green leaves. Here it ap- 
 peared that the cholera was not yet beaten out. 
 Under a great mango tree was a group of men 
 and women enjoying their siesta, with a fringe 
 of children amusing themselves in the subdued 
 fashion that seems common to the youth of 
 India and Germany, and on the outside of the 
 group, nervously watched by a couple of order- 
 lies in scarlet scarves, lay a woman with sunken 
 eyes and pinched features, who looked as if she 
 had been ill for weeks. They got her on to a 
 dhulie, and her two boys, with tears running 
 down their cheeks, knelt on the ground and 
 rubbed her legs to ease the cramp. The 
 officer gave her a drink from his flask, and 
 then, when the bearers were ready, the two 
 boys pulled themselves together, hoisted the 
 cooking vessels, water-pots, and the rest of 
 the family belongings on their heads, and the 
 sorrowful procession moved off towards the 
 
THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 hospital. I wondered how the people would 
 take it ; but they made no sign, and a few 
 minutes afterwards a hundred smiling faces 
 were looking on whilst the civil surgeon made 
 the children scramble for pice and biscuits. 
 For the space of half an hour you could not 
 have wished to see a merrier party. Then 
 came a messenger with word of another case 
 under the mango trees a quarter of a mile off — 
 a girl this time, — already cold and pulseless, 
 but collected and undismayed. Later in the 
 day there was a third seizure, the thirteenth 
 since the night before; but from what I have 
 heard since, I believe that this was the high- 
 water mark of the epidemic, and that the 
 disease has now begun to abate. The worst 
 of it is, that it has crept into the villages around, 
 and begun to make its way to the neighbouring 
 camps. Every day that sees the pools in the 
 rivers sinking, and the well-water growing mud- 
 dier, and the mangoes ripening on the branches, 
 is a day on the side of the cholera. Worst of 
 all, when the monsoon breaks next month — for 
 every one assumes that there will be no failure 
 this year — the first swirl of the waters will 
 carry death in every direction ; and where the 
 
IN THE CENTRAL PROVINCES 163 
 
 famine administration has been run on hard and 
 grudging lines, and the people are weakened 
 and disheartened, the pestilence will have things 
 its own way. Down here in the Central Pro- 
 vinces the relief has been organised with such 
 grasp and thoroughness and the whole famine 
 service is drilled to such a point of efficiency, 
 that the prospect may be faced with something 
 like composure. In the Raipur district matters 
 are worse, the cholera having declared itself in 
 forty-five camps ; but the numbers attacked are 
 only a tithe of those in the Bombay Presidency, 
 and as the people have confidence in the 
 officials, and all the camps are of manageable 
 dimensions, there is no panic. 
 
 There is a serious flaw in the general 
 famine organisation on which I must say a 
 word before closing this letter. Here in the 
 Central Provinces, any quantity of Government 
 fodder, cut and uncut, is going begging, whilst 
 away in the Punjaub and Rajputana and 
 Gujerat, the last of the beasts are dying of 
 hunger. The fact is that there is no fodder 
 famine if you take India as a whole, any more 
 than there is a grain famine. But whereas the 
 Government is paying the people to get rice 
 
■64 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 from Bengal and Burmah and grain from the 
 North-west Provinces and the Punjaub, and 
 the grain dealers and the railways are finding 
 it worth their while to bring the food to the 
 place where it is wanted, no such organisation, 
 with the exception of a handful of cattle camps, 
 exists for keeping the cattle alive. The fault 
 lies partly with the Government, who began 
 by demanding an absurdly high price for the 
 fodder, partly with the railway companies, 
 which either will not, or cannot, supply the 
 rolling stock, and in any case find the transport 
 of r grain more profitable than that of pressed 
 fodder. Between the two the mischief has 
 been done. A spurt has lately been given to 
 the Bombay demand by a big reduction of 
 price, but the railway companies refuse to 
 provide anything like enough trucks ; and I 
 suppose that is why the Lieutenant Governor 
 of the Punjaub has given up all hope of 
 bringing fodder into his province as a bad job. 
 And yet the Forest Officer at Hoshangabad tells 
 me that he is advertising his fodder in seven 
 newspapers, and that the slackness of demand 
 is such that the grass-cutting operations, carried 
 on by famine labour, are being stopped. The 
 
IN THE CENTRAL PROVINCES 165 
 
 Forest Department has a pretty long queue of 
 sins waiting at its door for the day of reckoning, 
 and so have the Indian railway companies, and 
 the two of them may now apportion the re- 
 sponsibility as best they may for the catastrophe 
 which has robbed India of her cattle. So far 
 as the Government of India and the provincial 
 governments are concerned, their position is 
 one of confessed helplessness. Surely it would 
 have been better to spend a little money and 
 energy in saving the cattle, even at the risk 
 of annoying the railway companies, than to fall 
 back on loans for buying fresh cattle, if indeed 
 they are anywhere to be got. 
 
 Harda, Central Provinces, 22 May. 
 
XVI 
 
 THE PENAL WAGE AGAIN 
 
 Passing through Bombay on my way to Gujerat, 
 where I am anxious to see how the fight with 
 the cholera is going, I find a long pronounce- 
 ment in the papers from the Government of 
 the Presidency in answer to my remarks on 
 their famine administration. I am sorry that 
 it makes no mention of their revenue proceed- 
 ings. The document deals chiefly with the 
 penal minimum, and I fancy it is addressed 
 to Simla rather than to the public. If I add 
 that it is in the nature of an apology for a line 
 of action to be dropped, rather than a defence 
 of a policy to be persisted in, I may appear to 
 be in conflict with the wording of the document, 
 which seems to threaten the continuance of 
 a line of administration which I have already 
 said is tantamount to introducing starvation 
 into the famine relief works. My information, 
 
THE PENAL WAGE AGAIN 167 
 
 however, warrants me in saying that this un- 
 happy policy has already been checked. In 
 Gujerat no more will be heard of the penal 
 minimum, and I believe that measures are 
 being quietly taken to suppress its abuse 
 throughout the Presidency. In this work the 
 Government of India is, I have reason to 
 believe, taking a sympathetic interest. This 
 being so, there seems no occasion to enter at 
 any length into a controversy which has been 
 already decided in principle, but, if only in 
 courtesy to a Government which has given me 
 every possible facility in my inquiries, and from 
 many of whose officials I have received great 
 personal kindness, I must try to meet the chief 
 points of their reply. 
 
 And first let me say, as there seems to be 
 some doubt on the matter, that there has been 
 no difficulty on my part, nor, I hope, on that of 
 my readers, in following the line of reasoning 
 of which the penal minimum is the outcome. 
 But in case there has been any misunderstand- 
 ing on this score, I give the words of Mr. 
 Monteath, the Chief Secretary of the Govern- 
 ment, contained in the memorandum. After 
 describing the condition of affairs at a camp in 
 
THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 Khandesh, where 37,000 people, supposed to 
 be employed at stone-breaking, were living 
 contentedly on the code minimum, and doing 
 next to no work — at which camp he observes 
 that the penal minimum was first introduced, 
 — he continues : — 
 
 " It has never been considered a matter of primary 
 importance to make famine labour productive. But 
 it is essential, not only in the interests of the general 
 community who have to supply the funds, but for the 
 prevention of widespread demoralisation, that there 
 should be a test of the need of relief, and the only 
 effective test that has ever been suggested with regard 
 to the able-bodied is the exaction of a reasonable 
 amount of labour in return for the payment made. 
 It is clear in the circumstances above mentioned, that 
 the attempt to apply the test was frustrated either 
 because the people dealt with had other resources, or 
 because the Code minimum, which they could get 
 without any substantial work, was found to be suffi- 
 cient to maintain them without discomfort. In either 
 case the relief works were converted into charity 
 camps, and in the former case charity was given at 
 the public expense to persons who were not in need 
 of it." 
 
 This is a side of the problem which must, 
 of course, be kept in mind from the first by 
 any famine administration, and I do not wish 
 to underestimate its difficulty. What I suggest, 
 
THE PENAL WAGE AGAIN 169 
 
 however, once again is that there are other and, 
 I think, better means of getting work out of 
 people than a system of fines, the bearing of 
 which, as likely as not, the culprits entirely 
 fail to comprehend. I found, for instance, 
 in the Punjaub and the Central Provinces, 
 and in some of the Native States, that the 
 people were working cheerfully and steadily 
 and doing a fair day's work for a wage which, 
 if fair under the circumstances, was nothing to 
 boast of ; that fining was hardly ever resorted 
 to, and fining down to the penal minimum un- 
 known. And on inquiries I invariably found that 
 this result was due to two causes — rigorous 
 supervision over subordinate officials and patient 
 explanation and demonstration to the workers 
 of the task required of them. The people, 
 one must remember, are unused to working 
 at stone-breaking and earth-carrying, or to 
 carrying on organised labour in great bodies, 
 and they want to be cheered and encouraged 
 and not worked like machines. And the scratch 
 collection of clerks and schoolmasters, postmen, 
 policemen, and Heaven knows whom, who 
 are appointed to hold sway over them are just 
 as unused to the business of control, and they 
 
THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 want to be trained and encouraged. Set the 
 two together, with an inadequate supply of 
 effective officers at the top, and you will find 
 every one down on the minimum. I did not 
 see the camp at which 37,000 people were 
 " supposed to be engaged in metal-breaking," 
 but I heard of and saw other camps in the 
 district where the organisation was, let us say, 
 not in the same category with that of the Pun- 
 jaub and the Central Provinces. This may 
 have been inevitable. If so, I contend that 
 the people should have had the benefit of 
 the doubt, and that defects of organisation 
 ought not to have been visited on their heads. 
 One danger of the penal minimum is that 
 administrators may adopt it in the hope that 
 it will supply them with a cheap and auto- 
 matic substitute for a well-considered organi- 
 sation. 
 
 I observe that the memorandum says nothing 
 of the efficacy of the penal wage either as a 
 test of need or an incentive to hard work, 
 but a long resolution of the Governor in 
 Council, headed " Effect of the penal wage 
 on relief workers," contains the following re- 
 marks : — 
 
THE PENAL WAGE AGAIN 171 
 
 " These reports [referring presumably to the reports 
 of district officers] do not afford sufficient grounds for 
 a definite conclusion as to the effect of the reduction 
 of the minimum wage in excluding from the works 
 persons not really in need of relief, the ascertainment 
 of which was the main object Government had in 
 view. It can scarcely be doubted that the measure 
 has had some result in this direction, but in Sholapur 
 only have the local officers formed a decided opinion 
 on the point, and the figures as given in a tabular 
 statement do not seem to support it. If the estimate 
 of the district medical officer in Khandesh — which, 
 however, is not accepted by the collector — is at all 
 approximate to the truth, there is an enormous 
 number of people on the works in that district who 
 prefer the penal wage without substantial work to a 
 higher wage on condition of honest work." 
 
 This is really not conclusive, nor are matters 
 mended by the omission to note the effect of 
 the penal minimum on the work done. A 
 Bombay newspaper assumes that it has had 
 the effect of keeping a million people off the 
 works, and the Government may of course 
 pronounce an opinion later on. But for the 
 moment the efficacy of the " test " remains a 
 mere hypothesis. The Governor in Council, 
 however, is explicit on one important point. 
 
172 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 I mean the physical condition of the people in 
 receipt of the minimum. "All the officers," 
 he says, " who have reported regarding works 
 on which the penal wage has been given are 
 agreed that there has been no deterioration 
 in physical condition, although a different 
 opinion seems to have been expressed by some 
 subordinate officers." I do not know if this 
 is to be taken in the sense that medical officers 
 have reported on all the works in question. 
 In view of what I myself have seen, of the 
 reports which have been shown me, of the 
 official opinions openly expressed, and, above 
 all, of the enormous death-rate at the camps 
 where the penal minimum has become the 
 prevailing standard, I can hardly suppose it to 
 be so. In any case, it is curious if the penal 
 minimum to-day is working out so differently 
 from the i-lb. ration in the great famine of 
 1877. I described that ration in one of my 
 letters as rather more generous than the one 
 under discussion, and I am confirmed in this 
 view by what I have learned since. The truth 
 is that the system of weekly payments adopted 
 in violation of the Code places the people so 
 completely under the thumb of the grain trader 
 
THE PENAL WAGE AGAIN 173 
 
 that the money equivalent of 18 ounces a 
 day is no warrant that 18 ounces can be 
 purchased. Mr. Monteath will, I think, find 
 on inquiry that the penal minimum works out 
 in practice more severely by a good deal than 
 it does on paper — more severely, I submit, 
 than the i-lb. ration adopted by Madras and 
 Bombay in 1877 at the suggestion of Sir 
 R. Temple. The memorandum states that 
 " the authority for the statement that a reduced 
 ration on a rather more generous scale was 
 held accountable for the epidemics which 
 swept off multitudes of famine workers in 
 previous famines is not known." I am sur- 
 prised at this announcement, because Bombay 
 was closely concerned in this very controversy 
 only 23 years ago, and Mr. Monteath will 
 find that the officials defended the ration 
 against all assaults precisely as it is alleged 
 that they are doing now. But the Sanitary 
 Commissioner and many other authorities 
 denounced the wage from the first as utterly 
 inadequate ; and if Mr. Monteath will turn to 
 Mr. Digby's book on the Indian famine, which 
 gives a long account of the painful controversy, 
 he will find that the enormous mortality is 
 
174 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 attributed in great part to the i-lb. ration. It 
 is true that the sickness which followed the 
 famine is dealt with by way of forecast, but 
 I could quote columns from Mr. Digby's 
 chapters in proof of the contention that the 
 ration was the cause of sickness and death in 
 the famine camps throughout the stricken area. 
 
 I think I have dealt with the more important 
 points in Mr. Monteath's reply; but, as I say, 
 the penal minimum is, I believe, practically 
 dead, and a painful chapter in the history of 
 the famine, the full meaning of which will 
 never be known, is closed. 
 
 Bombay, 24 May. 
 
XVII 
 
 GUJERAT IN MAY 
 
 When I was here a few weeks ago things 
 seemed to be about as bad as bad could be ; 
 but all that was hideous and heartrending in 
 the condition of the people has been intensified 
 in the weeks that have passed. Cholera has 
 come, the last of the few remaining cattle are 
 dying, and under this burning sky, which shows 
 no signs of the expected rains, the hearts of 
 the people are failing them for fear. They 
 have fought against death a long and unavail- 
 ing fight, enduring sufferings that no Western 
 race could bear; now they sit with bowed 
 heads awaiting death. They have no hope to 
 buoy them up, poor wretches. The skies are 
 as brass ; but supposing the rains were to fall 
 to-morrow, how are the fields to be ploughed 
 and sown without bullocks or seed, and where is 
 
i 7 6 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 the food to come from to keep life in cultivator 
 and labourer, and how are the children to 
 live when the strength of the mothers is spent 
 and the cow that used to give the " baba" milk 
 is dead ? 
 
 An impression seems to exist at home that 
 directly the monsoon breaks a transformation 
 scene is to take place, Government and philan- 
 thropy between them supplying all that is 
 wanted to set the life of the fields in motion 
 once more. I wish I could see any traces of 
 such a thing here. In Broach — the richest and 
 most heavily assessed district in Bombay Presi- 
 dency — there is no evidence whatever of the 
 approach of this happy change, and two inci- 
 dents that have come under my notice point 
 quite the other way. A practical effort was 
 lately made by the Commissioner to keep the 
 remnant of the plough cattle from death. A 
 large grant was secured from the Famine Fund 
 for supplying fodder at a low price — two rupees 
 per iooo lbs. — and arrangements were made for 
 bringing up quantities from the Central Pro- 
 vinces, where, as I wrote last week, tens of 
 thousands of tons are waiting for customers. 
 Here was good tidings. The people came to 
 
GUJERAT IN MAY 
 
 177 
 
 the town in crowds when the first consignment 
 arrived, and their gratitude for this Heaven- 
 sent respite for their dying beasts was touching 
 to see. " Tell the Englishmen," said a ryot, 
 " that all our cattle would have died if it hadn't 
 been for them." But, alas, for the sequel ! The 
 railway companies, after the first few hundred 
 tons were carried, turned their attention else- 
 where. Remonstrances, petitions were in vain. 
 The Government of India were appealed to, 
 but they declared that they could do nothing. 
 The railway remained deaf and obdurate. 
 And so it has come about that the last hope 
 of saving the beasts has had to be abandoned. 
 " Give us fodder, give us fodder," was the 
 burden of the despairing chorus that I heard in 
 the villages yesterday. " We can manage for 
 ourselves. We live on half our usual food, and 
 it is poor, coarse stuff — rice from Burmah and 
 jowar, instead of cadgeree and ghi ; but help us 
 to keep our cattle alive. We work where we 
 can find work, and we are hungry. But if our 
 cattle have no food, what use are our carts, and 
 how shall we plough our fields ? " It seemed 
 cold comfort to tell these men that England 
 will help — for what good will the help be later 
 
 N 
 
178 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 on when the beasts are all dead ? — but it was 
 the best that I could offer them. 
 
 The second incident is of the same order, 
 but this time it is the Government grant for 
 buying cattle that has missed fire. A large 
 order — large in actual numbers, but small in 
 relation to the need — was given for bullocks to 
 the cattle owners in Bhopal State, where cattle 
 happened to be plentiful. The cattle were to 
 be delivered at thirty rupees a head, and the 
 authorities waited anxiously for their arrival. 
 They are still waiting, and if in the course of 
 weeks the cattle should arrive they will pro- 
 bably be too late. In any case, if there is no 
 fodder in Broach they may just as well stay in 
 Bhopal. I asked an Englishman, who has had 
 business relations with Gujerat for nearly forty 
 years, whether this deadlock was, in his opinion, 
 avoidable. His verdict is that with energy 
 and organisation the pressure could be over- 
 come. But these are qualities that appear 
 to be lacking in Indian railway management. 
 
 The physical condition of the people is 
 steadily deteriorating, and the death-rate has 
 gone up again in the past month. The 
 Gujeratis are accustomed, as a rule, to plenty 
 
GUJERAT IN MAY 
 
 179 
 
 of food — as plenty is understood in India — and 
 they are unused to working during the heat of 
 the day. The coarse and scanty rations, and 
 the hard work of the famine camps, have fairly 
 knocked them to pieces. It is, perhaps, a 
 question whether the most generous treatment 
 permitted by the famine code would have kept 
 the Gujeratis in anything approaching to fair 
 condition. Here, in Broach, where for some 
 weeks the harshest treatment that I have seen 
 in India was meted out, the state of the people 
 beggars description. The " deterrent " element, 
 on which the Bombay Government lay such 
 stress, has had full play with a vengeance, but 
 when the history of the famine comes to be 
 summed up, I doubt if the result will be paraded 
 as a success. The net effect of it on the works 
 has been semi-starvation, sickness, and an 
 appalling death-rate, and in the villages, starva- 
 tion on a wholesale scale amongst the people 
 who were " deterred," by the harshness of the 
 tests, from going, upon the works. There is a 
 point at which relief becomes a greater evil 
 than misery and privation, and to the mind of 
 the Gujerati this point was reached when the 
 wages on the works were cut down to the 
 
180 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 skeleton standard. It is too late to repair 
 the damage, now that the test has shown the 
 people to be really and truly famine-stricken, 
 and the buried hoards of grain and ornaments 
 to be figments of the Secretariat's imagination. 
 The rules have, indeed, been relaxed, but the 
 people have lost confidence, and multitudes 
 have been reduced to that awful state in which 
 the body wastes and shrivels, no matter how 
 much food is put into the stomach. The finest 
 wheat and the best champagne would be use- 
 less now. And on top of all this a raging 
 visitation of cholera is sweeping the country. 
 Of this final catastrophe I can do no more than 
 give you a colourless sketch. The kites and 
 jackals are gorging themselves, and the air is 
 thick with the stench of the dead, who are 
 dying faster than they can be burned or buried. 
 Every one of the works in the districts of 
 Ahmedabad, Broach, Kaira, and Panch Mahals 
 has been attacked. In Kathiawar it has been 
 almost as bad. The cholera is of the most 
 virulent kind, and the first instinct of the people 
 has been to fly from the camps, in the hope of 
 reaching their homes alive. It has been a 
 race between cholera and starvation, a grand 
 
GUJERAT IN MAY 181 
 
 hunt of death with scores of thousands of the 
 refugees at the famine camps for quarry. The 
 panic is estimated to have driven about half 
 the people from the works in the Ahmedabad 
 district, and I suppose that something like a 
 hundred thousand souls have joined in the 
 flight in Gujerat alone. The number of the 
 dead is unknown, but it must be reckoned by 
 scores of thousands. In some instances the 
 native officials ran off when the cholera came, 
 leaving the sick to die without medicine or help. 
 At Godhra a handful of Englishmen, including 
 the collector and the medical officer, had to 
 collect and burn nearly a thousand bodies 
 with their own hands. Dr. Klopsch, of the 
 American Christian Herald, who is over 
 here distributing the fund which his readers 
 have contributed, was at Dohad, forty miles 
 further west, just after the breaking up of the 
 works, and he tells me that he could not free 
 himself from the stench of the dead for a couple 
 of days. He was in Russia during the recent 
 famine, and, in his opinion, the stress of suffer- 
 ing in Gujerat, leaving the cholera out of 
 account, is worse than anything he saw there. 
 Happily the panic has left some camps 
 
lS2 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 untouched. But the flight has been general 
 enough to scatter the cholera broadcast through 
 towns and villages, and to throw the relief 
 machinery out of gear. Baroda has fared 
 better, but in Rajputana the havoc has been 
 something frightful, the recorded deaths from 
 cholera amounting in places to nearly 5 per 
 cent, of the population, and 10 per cent, in 
 some of the Bhil districts. The works in 
 Tonk, Udaipur, Sirohi, Marwar, and Ajmere 
 were nearly dislocated, Udaipur faring worst. 
 Colonel Adams, Administrative Medical Officer 
 in Rajputana, is amongst the victims. 
 
 Now that the deluge has come the Govern- 
 ment is taking measures. Additional officers, 
 recruited from all parts of India, are being 
 poured into Gujerat, and the Commissioner, 
 Mr. Lely, who is looked up to by the people 
 as their father and protector, has been granted 
 something like a free hand. The new policy 
 is to start works close to the villages, so that 
 the refugees on their arrival shall find help 
 within reach, and every nerve is being strained 
 to get the organisation set on foot while there 
 is a chance of saving life. It is too late to look 
 for the equipment of anything approaching an 
 
GUJERAT IN MAY 
 
 183 
 
 adequate medical and ambulance service. The 
 people have died, and are still dying, like 
 sheep, and a regiment of doctors and nurses 
 would be too small to render much assistance. 
 It is sickening and horrible to the last degree, 
 but there is the fact. Indian fellow-subjects of 
 ours, members of some of the grandest races 
 in the world, are doomed to die as the beasts 
 that perish, and the British Empire, for all its 
 might and glory, is unequal to the task of 
 sending them succour in their extremity. I 
 sounded a warning note when I wrote to 
 you early in April from Khandesh, where the 
 cholera, which was beginning then, is still 
 raging. It seemed to me at that time that a 
 general visitation would find the authorities 
 wholly unready. That cholera would come 
 was regarded as a thing inevitable, and it was 
 obvious that the Government was directly 
 responsible for the collection of masses of 
 people who, in their reduced condition, offered 
 an easy prey to any epidemic, and especially 
 to an epidemic arising from bad water. No 
 effort or sacrifice should have been too great 
 to give the people the necessary protection. 
 I pointed out, however, that the medical service 
 
THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 was deficient even for the normal work of the 
 famine camps and poorhouses. The " hospital 
 assistants " and " compounders" were often, as 
 I was later on to discover, unequal to their 
 work, and sometimes scandalously incompetent. 
 And besides all this, there was the ominous 
 fact that a large percentage of the people were 
 being granted an allowance which was neither 
 more nor less than a refined form of starvation. 
 The very worst that could happen has happened, 
 and I cannot think that this ghastly chapter is 
 one that the British people can look upon 
 without misgivings mixed with their grief. 
 They were told that the resources of India 
 were equal to the strain, and they must know 
 by now that this was not the case. A little 
 more frankness, a little more forethought and 
 contriving, a little more energy in preparing 
 for the enemy, and the worst horrors of this 
 frightful business might have been averted. 
 There are plenty of doctors in England, and 
 if there was no time to get them out, an 
 ambulance corps might have been got together 
 from the regiments in India for cholera service. 
 Half a dozen cheery, competent soldiers in every 
 camp would have made all the difference 
 
GUJERAT IN MAY 
 
 i8 5 
 
 between order and panic. Soldiers were told 
 off for famine duty in the Central Provinces, 
 and I heard excellent reports of their work. 
 But nothing was prepared for beforehand. 
 The Government of Bombay sat with folded 
 hands, hoping for the best, but knowing that 
 the worst must come. They were too late in 
 opening the relief works in many parts of 
 Gujerat and Khandesh, too late in realising 
 that their " deterrent " policy was merely sub- 
 sidising death. 
 
 Broach, Gujerat, 26 May. 
 
XVIII 
 
 FAMINE ORGANISATION IN THE 
 CENTRAL PROVINCES 
 
 I sent you a rough sketch from Harda of the 
 lines on which relief work in the Central 
 Provinces is being carried out. My inquiry 
 was interrupted by my hurried visit to Gujerat, 
 and I hardly did justice to what is really a 
 masterpiece of relief organisation. Bilaspur, 
 where I have been renewing my studies, is in 
 the far east of the Central Provinces, just to 
 the westward of the meeting-place of the east 
 and west monsoons. The district is hard hit, and 
 more than a quarter of a million of the people 
 are on relief. For the benefit of the reader, who 
 may chance to be wearied by accounts of mere 
 machinery, let me say a word before I begin. 
 I can imagine people at home saying to them- 
 selves that the famine must be pretty well over 
 by now, and declining to trouble themselves 
 
ORGANISATION IN CENTRAL PROVINCES 187 
 
 further about the details of an organisation 
 whose purpose has been served. My own 
 view is that the famine is far from being over, 
 and that there will be a call for further help 
 for a long time to come, no matter how well 
 the monsoon turns out. The famine affects 
 an area equal to seven-ninths of the whole of 
 British India, and a population more than twice 
 that of the United Kingdom ; the destruction 
 of cattle is without precedent, and millions, who 
 have held back from claiming relief, are destitute 
 and without means of making a fresh start. 
 Quantities of land will therefore be thrown out 
 of cultivation, and employment in the fields, 
 and in the industries that depend on agri- 
 culture, will be seriously contracted. The 
 famine machinery, then, if my estimate is 
 correct, is by no means ready to be packed up 
 and put away. 
 
 And there is a graver question behind — I 
 mean the doom of recurrent famines that seems 
 to have been pronounced against India. I say 
 "seems," but the sentence is ringing in the 
 ears of all who have ears to hear. Even the 
 Pioneer, which stands for what is optimistic 
 in the official mind, declares that famines must 
 
iSS 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 be regarded as a recurrent evil, and that, as 
 such, provision must be made to meet them. 
 Remember that these famines, with only a 
 year between them, have set their teeth in the 
 land, that the people, who were incredibly 
 poor in 1896, are poorer now than the beasts 
 in the jungle, and it will be seen that, even 
 with the kindliest of monsoons, a quick recovery 
 is not to be hoped for. In many districts it 
 will take a generation to get over the shock 
 and loss of this year of horror, and we can 
 hardly hope that the monsoons, which have 
 been bewitched of late, will fall back into their 
 old regular ways for the whole period of this 
 perilous convalescence. If the famine camp, 
 in one shape or another, is to become a stand- 
 ing institution, as I fear it must be for a time, 
 we shall have to scrutinise it well, and see to 
 it that the alternative life for ryot and labourer 
 and village craftsman is made supportable, at the 
 same time that we exorcise the famine demon 
 from the body of our laws and administration. 
 
 One of the wisest things about the Central 
 Provinces administration, as I have already 
 hinted, is the stress that has been laid on village 
 works. In this division alone something like 
 
ORGANISATION IN CENTRAL PROVINCES 189 
 
 a thousand village tanks have been dug, 
 deepened, or repaired, a job that has given 
 employment to nearly half the able-bodied 
 people on relief. See what this means. The 
 people have been left at peace in their own 
 homes, free to keep an eye on their fields and 
 cattle, and to look after the old folks and the 
 children, and ready to rush to the land directly 
 the rains begin ; and they have been employed 
 at a kind of work which they all appreciate, 
 because they know its inestimable value. I 
 can testify to the good heart and trim of the 
 people on these village works, both in the north 
 and east of the Central Provinces, and it is 
 wonderful to see the swiftness and intelligence 
 with which they map out the work and the 
 ease with which the whole thing is organised 
 and kept going. The village headman, or the 
 accountant, is generally in charge, and there is 
 an occasional visit from the " circle " officer. It 
 is the nearest possible approach to a system 
 of automatic relief work, and it has been an 
 unqualified success. 
 
 I have been knocking about in parts remote 
 from the railway, riding through jungle and 
 over rice and grain fields — that were — taking 
 
i go THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 stock, so far as I could, of the state of things 
 in the villages, and meeting the people at camp 
 in the evenings ; and, notwithstanding that the 
 famine is over everything, I have seen no traces 
 of starvation. The worst sights that meet the 
 eye are the evidences of the famine of 1897 — 
 houses deserted and falling to pieces, and lands 
 which the jungle has annexed since the cultiva- 
 tors died or fled away in despair. Whole 
 districts in these Provinces were desolated by 
 that famine, and when you strike its trail you 
 are reminded that the task of relief and succour 
 is not alone humanitarian, but is dictated and en- 
 forced by cogent considerations of self-interest. 
 For the jungle pays no revenue, and a course 
 of famines unalleviated would send us packing 
 out of India. This by the way. The pleasant 
 thing to reflect upon is that the big brown 
 bunds of the village reservoirs will be standing 
 after the famine has passed away, the reserve 
 of water will be greater than ever before, and, 
 seeing that the new tanks are to be utilised for 
 flooding the neighbouring fields, the area of 
 irrigation will be greatly increased — in Bilaspur 
 doubled. If the larger schemes for catching 
 the water at the foot of the hills and linking 
 
ORGANISATION IN CENTRAL PROVINCES 191 
 
 village tanks with the main reservoirs by means 
 of a canal, had been ready in time, even more 
 would have been done. 
 
 Another feature of Central Provinces ad- 
 ministration is the village " kitchen " — a simple 
 affair of a pot and a couple of stones under a 
 tree, with a store of dal and rice and a Brahmin 
 or some other high-caste person for cook. In 
 two thousand kitchens the pot boils every day, 
 and another five hundred are to be in readiness 
 by the rains. The kitchen makes it possible 
 to give gratuitous relief with a less grudging 
 hand than when the dole is paid in rice, and 
 for children and the aged and feeble it is the 
 greatest of boons. And with the system of 
 village works and kitchens, and the provision 
 of famine-camps on a larger scale where the 
 need exists, it has been possible to dispense 
 almost entirely with that most unsatisfactory of 
 relief agencies — the famine poorhouse. The 
 heads of distribution throughout the Central 
 Provinces may be of interest : — 
 
 Adults. Children. 
 
 Public Works Department ... 571,948 ... 95,475 
 
 Relief works : — 
 
 Village works 466,332 — 
 
 Forest works 16,179 
 
 Weaver relief 26,870 — 
 
IC)2 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 Gratuitous relief : — 
 
 Dependents 
 
 Kitchens 
 
 Otherwise relieved ... 
 Poorhouses 
 
 Total 
 
 Adults. Children. 
 
 11,105 ... 114,006 
 
 78,109 ... 297,685 
 
 90,374 ... 16,056 
 
 432 ... 161 
 
 ... 1,261,349 ... 523,383 
 
 By the time these figures are in print, I dare 
 say the total on relief will be a couple of 
 millions, or a sixth of the entire population ; 
 but everything is ready, and there will be no 
 flurry or dislocation, and certainly no attempt, 
 by means of increased tasks or reduced wages, 
 to keep the people away. The complete 
 success of the work of relief among the 
 aboriginal tribes must be set down, as so 
 much else must be, to the instructions given 
 last August by the then Chief Commissioner, 
 Mr. Denzil Ibbetson, to whose foresight, 
 promptitude, and grasp the setting-up and 
 smooth starting of all this gigantic organisation 
 are mainly due. If other Governments had 
 approached this particular task with the same 
 knowledge and in the same spirit which dic- 
 tated the instructions that I here append, 
 tens of thousands of lives would have been 
 saved : — 
 
ORGANISATION IN CENTRAL PROVINCES 193 
 
 11 Our ordinary methods of relief," wrote Mr. Ibbet- 
 son, " fail to reach them, as they will not come to large 
 relief works ; they are shy and distrustful, and will, 
 if allowed to do so, starve, or very nearly starve, 
 before they apply for relief. It is necessary, therefore, 
 to relax the usual conditions in their case, and to 
 adopt a special system. It is not enough to render 
 relief available ; care must be taken that it is actually 
 given to all who really need it." 
 
 And this has been done. As to the larger 
 works which are being run by the Public 
 Works Department there is not much to be 
 added to my previous letter, but on two points 
 I should like to say a word with a general 
 application. "It cannot be too clearly under- 
 stood," wrote Mr. Ibbetson in one of the 
 August circulars, "that the exaction of a task 
 depends, in a great measure, on the orderly and 
 methodical arrangement of the relief workers." 
 This has been the keynote of the labour policy 
 throughout the Central Provinces, and the 
 organisation has been so thoroughly done that 
 a system of gang-work has been introduced, in 
 which payment up to a certain point is made 
 by results, and there is no minimum. The 
 people are left to form their own gangs, so that 
 members of the same family, and people from 
 
 o 
 
194 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 the same village, work side by side ; and, for 
 the rest, this system of qualified piece work is 
 strictly confined to the able-bodied. Now the 
 withdrawal of the protection of the minimum 
 wage is obviously a very risky step, and I do 
 not mention the experiment to recommend it. 
 But the fact that the wages earned are, as a 
 rule, on the maximum scale, and that, to the 
 best of my knowledge, they never, taking the 
 week together, fall to anything like the level of 
 the Bombay penal minimum, is a striking tes- 
 timony to the value of order and method. As 
 to the character of the work, the percentage of 
 strictly useless undertakings — heaps of broken 
 stone that will never be used and roads that 
 will never be travelled on — is, I should say, 
 relatively small, but there is plenty of room for 
 improvement. Let me add, however, that Mr. 
 Monteath's contention that "it has never been 
 considered a matter of primary importance to 
 make famine labour productive," would hardly 
 command respect here ; nor is this the only 
 part of India where I have heard officials sigh 
 over the gigantic waste of famine labour. End- 
 less good work — productive, paying, serviceable 
 work — wants doing in every district, and can 
 
ORGANISATION IN CENTRAL PROVINCES 195 
 
 never get itself done in normal times for lack 
 of funds. It sounds a paradox, but it is true 
 all the same, that only wheni poverty reaches 
 famine-pitch can India hope to set to work to 
 improve her own house. Under these circum- 
 stances the technical view of famine works as 
 a mere test of destitution, such a test as the 
 stoneyard offers to the able-bodied pauper at 
 home, is both costly and misplaced. The 
 problem is emphatically one of poverty, not of 
 pauperism, and, in my judgment, the less 
 Indian officials draw on the obsolete formulas 
 of the English Poor Law the better. The 
 people of India are the poorest in the world, 
 but they are above all things self-respecting, 
 and the fact that they have no Poor Law, and 
 that the State does nothing for the destitute 
 except in famine time, ought not to be for- 
 gotten. If you want to demoralise the people, 
 then by all means set them building vain altars 
 — of broken stones or useless earth — to a fetish 
 of pauperism which has no earthly relation to 
 the facts of Indian life. 
 
 I must reserve what I have to say about 
 the land system and revenue procedure — 
 matters that are interlocked with the desperate 
 
196 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 condition of the people. But lest it should be 
 assumed that because the relief system is 
 working well the worst of the trouble is over, 
 I am sending you an extract from a letter 
 which comes to me from a native gentleman 
 of influence, who is held in the highest respect 
 by Indians and Englishmen : — 
 
 "There is absolutely no money left with the 
 majority of the cultivators to buy seed, buy or hire 
 bullocks to plough their fields, and to pay for the 
 other expenses of cultivation, and to feed themselves 
 and their families between the sowing and the earliest 
 harvest. The Government is distributing 25 lakhs 
 (£166,000) as takavi — loans for agricultural purposes 
 — and the Charity Fund, 18 lakhs. But even this 
 sum, which would under ordinary circumstances have 
 been a very substantial help to the cultivators, is, I 
 am afraid, likely to fall very short of the actual 
 requirements of the people. The reports which I 
 have received, as secretary to the Central Provinces 
 branch of the Famine Charitable Relief Fund, disclose 
 a most serious state of things. Sums which the 
 districts have put down as representing the minimum 
 needs are considerably in excess of what we have 
 been able to give them. For the cultivators are, in 
 most tracts, simply bankrupts, without cattle, without 
 money, and without credit. How they will get on 
 this time, Heaven alone knows. The very success 
 of the measures adopted to keep the people alive 
 has had the effect of blinding people to a perception 
 
ORGANISATION IN CENTRAL PROVINCES 197 
 
 of the real condition of our people. No other 
 province in the whole Empire has suffered half as 
 much." 
 
 No words of mine can add force to this 
 appeal. 
 
 Bilaspur, Central Provinces. 
 
XIX 
 
 HOW INDIA IS FED 
 
 In spite of the famine, there is grain enough 
 and to spare in India. India has, in fact, 
 contrived to feea herself through the whole 
 famine period, that is to say since August or 
 September, without any appreciable import of 
 foodstuffs ; and though the exports of wheat 
 and rice have sunk enormously, they have by 
 no means ceased. This circumstance helps one 
 to realise the extent of the food surplus in a 
 normal year, and at the same time to appreciate 
 the crudity of the doctrine that over-population 
 is at the bottom of India's misery. The great 
 province of Bengal, the province of Burmah, and 
 the greater part of the North-west Provinces 
 had good or fair harvests last autumn and 
 winter, and they have created the supply on 
 which the other provinces have drawn. The 
 Bengal winter rice crop occupies 31 J million 
 
HOW INDIA IS FED 
 
 199 
 
 acres, the total cultivated area of all crops in 
 Bengal being 57 million acres. The winter 
 rice crop is, therefore, the most important crop 
 in Bengal. In December and January last the 
 yield of this crop was about 18 million tons 
 of cleaned rice — a full average yield. The 
 bulk of it is required to feed Bengal ; but with 
 an average yield there is a considerable surplus. 
 Suppose this surplus to be a million tons, this 
 means food for six million persons for six 
 months — or, say, enough to feed the whole of 
 the people who came upon relief in the famine 
 districts. The actual surplus, I am told, is 
 possibly more. In the famine year of 1896-7, 
 the Bengal rice crop failed over consider- 
 able areas, and yielded only 7J or 8 million 
 tons. There was therefore a serious shortness 
 in the supply required by the most densely 
 peopled province of India. In both 1896-7 
 and 1 899-1 900 Burmah has had great rice 
 crops, and in each year a large surplus has 
 been available for export to India or Europe. 
 The surplus this year has been put as high 
 as two million tons. Most of this goes, as 
 usual, to Europe, but a good deal has found 
 its way to Bombay. In 1896-7 the grain 
 
200 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 markets were very short, and the Government 
 was anxious as to the sufficiency of food 
 supplies. This year there has been no anxiety. 
 The thickly populated rice-eating districts 
 were known to be safe, and only the thinly 
 populated western and central tracts were 
 affected. 
 
 The reversal of ordinary trade conditions 
 comes out in the reports of rail-borne traffic 
 issued by the famine provinces. Thus in the 
 quarter ending December the Central Provinces 
 imports exceeded the exports by 649,000 
 maunds, and in place of 203,889 maunds of 
 grain and pulse imported in the corresponding 
 period of 1898, 2,271,644 maunds were imported. 
 Instead of exporting half a million maunds of 
 rice, as it did in 1898, the Provinces imported 
 over a million and three-quarters, two-thirds 
 of which came from Bengal, and the rest from 
 Burmah. " The main feature of the quarter's 
 trade," writes Mr. R. H. Craddock, Chief 
 Secretary to the Government, " is that instead 
 of parting with grain to buy commodities the 
 people have been parting with commodities 
 to buy grain." The export of goods classified 
 as " all other articles of merchandise " rose 
 
HOW INDIA IS FED 
 
 201 
 
 from 283,343 to 564,442 maunds. The nature 
 of these goods is, unfortunately, unknown. 
 Turning to the North-west Provinces and 
 Oudh, the drain created by the famine is 
 shown by an increased export of more than 
 four million maunds of wheat and other grains. 
 Rajputana and Central India were the largest 
 customers ; the Punjaub, Bombay, and the 
 Central Provinces also imported freely. 
 
 How is it that, with a surplus in excess of all 
 requirements, the people of India have had to 
 pay as much as twice the normal price for grain ? 
 It is difficult to get the data for answering the 
 question, for the grain-trade of India is numbered 
 amongst the mysteries of this land of mystery. 
 A high authority, in answer to the question 
 whether the market is rigged, replies : " I do 
 not think myself that prices are artificially 
 made or kept up by a ring of grain-dealers, 
 and I think that they are natural prices. One 
 reason for the sudden rise is that the aori- 
 culturists throughout India, when drought 
 occurs in any part, become nervous and hang on 
 to their grain, and have to be tempted by high 
 prices. Another is that in the famine-tracts 
 grain has to be brought from long distances, 
 
202 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 and carriage adds much to the price. There is 
 such competition and keenness in the grain- 
 trade in India as to prevent the possibility of 
 an organised corner." These opinions, whilst 
 entitled to great respect, do not claim to be 
 more than opinions. What follows is indu- 
 bitable fact. " Inasmuch as our normal Indian 
 prices are lower than those of Europe or 
 America, no equalising import is possible until 
 a higher level is reached. Consequently, when 
 we have a short harvest, and our producers 
 become anxious to hold up, prices rise rapidly 
 until the importing point is reached. There 
 they stick, or do not pass it. For instance, 
 iooo tons of wheat were imported from 
 Australia the other day, and similar small 
 imports from time to time occur whenever a 
 sufficient margin temporarily is reached. But 
 no large import is possible, for prices in India 
 would soon fall below the importing point." 
 It would seem, then, as if in times of scarcity 
 the " natural price " is fixed by the price of 
 imports, and that, whether by design or the un- 
 conscious concentration of ten thousand schem- 
 ing minds on the same point, the price of grain 
 can be brought up to import level and there 
 
HOW INDIA IS FED 
 
 203 
 
 maintained. Certain it is that from the first 
 suspicion of famine up to the present time a 
 fine animation has characterised the market 
 behind the scenes. Great plots, I am told, 
 were laid in Calcutta in the early autumn, and 
 it is matter of common complaint to this day 
 that the ordinary person cannot get his telegram 
 through for many hours because the wires 
 are blocked with the bunya's grain-messages. 
 Still, there is nothing in this that may not be 
 accounted for without going in search of con- 
 spiracies. That prices are too high, and that 
 somebody is making a lot of money, is suffi- 
 ciently clear. And the Oriental is a clever 
 trader — very, very clever. My informant, how- 
 ever, continues : " It is a mistake to think that 
 the grain-dealers control the grain. I believe 
 the bulk of the stocks of grain in the country 
 at any point of time is in the hands of culti- 
 vators. The dealers buy to sell again, and 
 they have to get their supplies out of the 
 cultivator, and they have to offer him prices 
 that will tempt him. Over and over again 
 have cultivators and their landlords lost their 
 market by refusing to sell in a bad year 
 because they thought prices would go higher 
 
204 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 still." If this is so, then the ryot with a crop is 
 exploiting the ryot without one, and the trader 
 is really an agent rather than a principal. In 
 other quarters, let me add, the view prevails 
 that what with debts and land alienation, the 
 ryot's power to hold is, generally speaking, by 
 no means what my informant credits him with. 
 The following extracts from a Bombay official 
 paper show clearly enough that merchants are 
 quite capable on occasion of doing their little 
 share in the way of controlling the grain : — 
 
 "Ahmedabad District. 
 
 "There is a widespread belief among the people 
 that the district contains sufficient grain to last for a 
 couple of years, but the supply is held back by 
 merchants, in the hope of high prices from March to 
 May. There is no doubt that there are certain stocks 
 in the district. 
 
 "Kaira District. 
 
 "As in Ahmedabad, people believe that large 
 stocks of local produce have been held back in order 
 to secure better prices in future. 
 
 "Broach District. 
 
 " Last year's harvests were good, and it is reported 
 that the city of Broach contains large stocks of last 
 year's food-grains, and that dealers are unwilling to 
 
HOW INDIA IS FED 
 
 205 
 
 part with their stocks, in the hope of getting better 
 prices. 
 
 "Surat District. 
 
 "Last year's harvests were very fair, and the 
 district is believed to have large stocks of grain in 
 merchants' godowns in the city of Surat. Though 
 merchants are holding back their stocks in hopes of 
 better prices and have slackened imports, prices show 
 a tendency to fall." 
 
 It may be my fault, but I have met no one 
 in India who really knew the inner workings 
 of the trade — or who, knowing them, would 
 confide in me. 
 
XX 
 
 SOME PREVENTIVE MEASURES 
 
 The causes of famine — apart from the failure 
 of rain — and the possible remedies and pallia- 
 tives, have been much discussed within recent 
 years. There are the economic relations which 
 affect the staying power of the people and their 
 capacity for production — matters one cannot 
 touch without raising the whole question of 
 Western institutions as planted out in the 
 East ; and there are such factors as irrigation, 
 the encouragement of industries, the improve- 
 ment of agricultural methods, and the like. In 
 this chapter I propose to sum up my impressions 
 as to the latter. If I can add little that is new 
 to a well-worn subject, I may be allowed to 
 say that the views here expressed have been 
 formed after hearing the opinions of some of 
 the most capable, alert, and experienced men 
 in India. 
 
SOME PREVENTIVE MEASURES 207 
 
 Take first the question of agriculture. The 
 famine, let me say, is in no way due to defects 
 of the ryot qua agriculturist. He is short of 
 capital and hampered by debt. But every 
 competent judge admits his wonderful know- 
 ledge of the land and the crops, his laborious 
 industry during the seasons of hard field-work, 
 and his eagerness to improve his holding. 
 Agricultural enthusiasts from the West, who 
 come to scoff at his primitive customs, remain 
 to admire and learn as they watch him at his 
 work. At first sight it looks like tempting 
 Providence to scratch the surface of the land 
 with a light plough, and wonderful schemes 
 have been launched before now for bringing 
 all the latest improvements from Ipswich and 
 Grantham to show the poor Indian what his 
 land is capable of. But the machinery rusts 
 while the ryot goes his way. The truth is 
 that the sun and the wind do his deep plough- 
 ing for him. In the course of a spell of hot 
 weather the land is seamed with cracks, which 
 the wind fills with surface dust, and the result 
 is that the earth gets broken up and aerated 
 to a sufficient depth. And the ryot, without 
 knowing the reasons, has learned many a 
 
208 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 lesson of the same kind. Out of a poor soil 
 the Indian cultivator wins an amazing return 
 for his work. 
 
 The ryot, though he clings to what he knows 
 will answer, is willing to take up with new 
 ideas if you can convince him of their value. 
 While the Departments of Agriculture under 
 the provincial Governments have seen the 
 wreck of numerous fantastic schemes for in- 
 troducing exotic methods and varieties, they 
 have also seen well-considered suggestions for 
 manuring, sugar cultivation, cattle breeding, 
 and the like eagerly taken up and applied 
 broadcast. The ryot can, in fact, be helped 
 in much the same way as the Irish peasant 
 is helped by the Board of Agriculture and its 
 companion co-operative agencies. But those 
 who teach must first learn to understand the 
 ryot, and that is a lesson which must take 
 time. It is better, say the wise men, to go 
 slowly and make sure of the situation than to 
 try to rush the ryot. Let me give an illustra- 
 tion, with an Irish parallel. It is said that in 
 parts of Bombay Presidency the quality of 
 cotton is going off owing to bad cultivation, and 
 the complaints of manufacturers against the ryot 
 
SOME PREVENTIVE MEASURES , 209 
 
 grow more bitter every year. But it happens 
 not to be the ryots' fault at all. The mischief 
 arises in the ginning factories — so, at least, I 
 am told on excellent authority — where slovenly 
 and dirty methods are the order of the day, 
 these factories being in the hands of middle- 
 men. In Ireland we have the same state of 
 things in regard to flax-growing, only rather 
 worse ; for the middleman, with his scutching 
 mills, has managed so to disgust the manu- 
 facturer and discourage the cultivator that 
 flax-growing has almost died out of the country. 
 I am not prepared to say that the co-operative 
 plan which, I am told, is about to be tried in 
 the scutching mills of Ulster can be, as it 
 were, planked down out of hand in Khandesh. 
 But I do suggest that this line of association, 
 coupled with a strong and friendly lead on the 
 part of the local Government, may well prove 
 fruitful. Dairying is another industry that 
 lends itself to this kind of treatment. Agri- 
 culture is the Indian industry; and a more 
 hopeful line of attack may well be found in 
 the encouragement of trades connected with 
 agriculture and the natural resources of the 
 country than in the attempt to force a crop of 
 
 p 
 
2IO 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 exotic industries or to prop up those that are 
 dying. In this direction India is undeveloped 
 and only half explored. With her magnificent 
 teak forests and other precious trees, a field 
 exists for all sorts of wood industries. Silk 
 fibres, again, could be produced on a great 
 scale. 
 
 Industry in India falls between two stools. 
 The indigenous trades lose their market, as 
 natives are tempted by cheap Western com- 
 modities, and, on the other hand, capital and 
 enterprise, for purposes of development, are 
 not attracted as they might be. Experi- 
 enced Indian gentlemen have estimated that 
 something like 2 5 per cent, of the population 
 have been displaced from their work by 
 European competition, and either thrown upon 
 the land or forced to emigrate. And that is 
 no trifling matter in a country where famines 
 have to be reckoned with. The tendency is 
 inevitable. But the Government, instead of 
 giving facilities for new industries and for 
 opening up the undeveloped wealth of the 
 country, adopts the dog-in-the-manger policy, 
 and contrives to frighten away the capital 
 which India so greatly needs. It is one thing 
 
SOME PREVENTIVE MEASURES mi 
 
 to keep a jealous watch on concession-hunters ; 
 it is another to make terms of concession so 
 harsh that minerals and forests may be practi- 
 cally un worked. 
 
 It is not surprising, then, to find the growth 
 of a school of native opinion in favour of 
 protection. I found this feeling strong in 
 some of the cities. " We don't want European 
 capital," my informants said, " or European 
 direction. Give us a measure of protection to 
 keep us from being swamped while our own 
 industries are developing, and we shall be able 
 to give as good an account of ourselves as 
 the Japanese." For this demand the attitude 
 of the Government is, I think, largely respon- 
 sible, and, but for the failure of the sugar 
 experiment, that erratic step would probably 
 have whetted the appetite for this sort of diet. 
 As it is, the sugar adventure has done nothing 
 to help the cultivator ; it has opened the door 
 to competition from China and elsewhere, and 
 the net result, so far as I can ascertain, is to 
 benefit the Indian sugar refineries, and to make 
 the well-to-do consumer pay an enormous price 
 for his sugar. A strong policy of development 
 would, I think, incidentally turn a good deal of 
 
212 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 restless energy now going begging into practical 
 channels. 
 
 Turning to irrigation, I fear it must be 
 admitted that it cannot of itself save India 
 from famine ; but it can do much to limit the 
 famine area and give security to agriculture. 
 Where you can tap the great snow-fed rivers 
 the system of canal irrigation can bring the 
 cultivators water, even if the rainfall fails ; and 
 the hotter the season the better, for the faster 
 the snow will melt. But over the greater 
 part of the affected area river-fed irrigation 
 is, generally speaking, impossible ; and even 
 if rivers were within reach, the contour of 
 the country is often too broken and uneven 
 to allow of canal distribution. This, however, 
 is not the last word on the question of canals. 
 It is admitted that an immense amount is 
 to be done by making reservoirs into which 
 a large surface of hill country would drain, 
 and leading off the water by canals over the 
 low-lying lands. Something has been done 
 in this direction, though only a small fraction 
 of what might be done. But the famine is 
 stirring up the Government to take stock of 
 possibilities. Amateur opinions are worthless 
 
SOME PREVENTIVE MEASURES 213 
 
 on a subject where everything depends on 
 local conditions. But it may be said with 
 confidence that the Irrigation Department, 
 whose mighty programme in the Punjaub 
 and the North-west is drawing — with too much 
 deliberation — to completion, should forthwith 
 put in hand a thorough survey of unirrigated 
 India. With such a survey to work upon, the 
 labour now largely wasted in famine times could 
 be used to reclaim the land from future famine. 
 As to the tank, or artificial lake, of the village, 
 it cannot by itself play any very great part, 
 though it may water the fields below it, and 
 give water to man and beast. It is a charming 
 institution — the Indian village green. The 
 temple stands on its brink, with a flight of steps 
 leading down to the water, and the social life of 
 the village goes on around its margin. One of 
 the highest of religious obligations is its con- 
 struction and care. But in years like this the 
 tank is dry. With an evaporation of a third of 
 an inch a day, equal to nine feet in the course 
 of a year, the ordinary tank will barely serve 
 for a normal year. 
 
 Irrigation by means of wells is, however, 
 capable of enormous extension, and with 
 
214 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 enough of such wells vast tracts of famine- 
 stricken country could, except in the event of 
 successive failures of rains, be made to blossom 
 like a garden. The cost will vary according 
 to the nature of the soil and subsoil, the 
 expense of a masonry irrigation well ranging 
 from about ^65 in Gujerat to £7 in the 
 Deccan. The unbricked well can be sunk for 
 a pound or two ; but in the course of time, if 
 neglected, it falls in. The multiplication of wells 
 is simply a question of money. The ryots are 
 quite alive to their advantage, and the sinking 
 of a well is one of the first objects of a man 
 who can offer security to the money-lender or 
 the Government. But the Government wants 
 its money back too soon, and the subordinate 
 official who hears the application must be 
 bribed, while the money-lender's interest is a 
 matter for consideration. So that where a 
 hundred wells ought to be sucking up the 
 wealth of hidden water, perhaps one only is 
 sunk. To get an idea of well economy, take a 
 simple calculation in irrigation figures. The 
 leathern bag which a pair of bullocks raise, 
 say, once every minute, holds 250 lbs. of water, 
 and in a day the bag will bring up enough 
 
SOME PREVENTIVE MEASURES 215 
 
 water to irrigate half an acre. This process 
 has to be repeated once in eight days. The 
 limit of irrigation capacity per well is there- 
 fore, in the case of ordinary crops, about four 
 acres ; in the case of sugar-cane it is about 
 two acres. I am assured, on the best authority, 
 that in the low-lying lands of the famine-swept 
 Deccan well irrigation could be made almost 
 universal. I need only add that astonishing 
 results are obtained by cultivation of this kind. 
 In Gujerat this year the irrigation wells have 
 turned out three crops, and their green oases 
 are the one sign of life in the desert. Let me 
 conclude with the opinion of an expert who 
 knows, perhaps, more of agricultural conditions 
 in Bombay Presidency than any other living 
 man : " I look specially for advancement in 
 the extension of well irrigation. I would dig 
 wells as a special safeguard against famine, 
 whether in respect of food for man or fodder 
 for cattle. I consider well irrigation in this 
 Presidency everywhere a certain indication of 
 affluence or easy circumstances. The work- 
 ing cattle never suffer from fodder-famine. 
 The man who owns well-irrigated land, unless 
 he is a market gardener pure and simple, has 
 
2l6 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 more fodder to dispose of than his cattle 
 can consume. In ordinary years he perhaps 
 produces food crops to a greater extent than 
 fodder crops, but when the rains fail, every 
 square yard that can be irrigated grows gene- 
 rally those grain crops which produce also the 
 largest outturn of fodder." In the last famine 
 in the Deccan my informant tells me that he 
 saw thousands of patches of well irrigation 
 which produced over 2000 lbs. of grain per 
 acre and over five tons per acre of dry fodder. 
 
XXI 
 
 DEBT AND EXPROPRIATION 
 
 ■ THE expropriation of the hereditary agriculturist in 
 many parts of the province, through the machinery of 
 unrestricted sale and mortgage, has been regarded for 
 years past as a serious political danger. It is recog- 
 nised that the danger is accompanied with bad 
 economic results, that it is increasing, and that if not 
 arrested, it will grow to formidable dimensions. It 
 is also recognised that the idea of a free transferable 
 interest in land, which is at the root of the trouble, is 
 of comparatively modern origin, and is contrary both 
 to the existing practice in most Native States, and to 
 the traditions and sentiments — if no longer to the 
 practice — of the people of the Punjaub." — The Govern- 
 ment of India's explanation of the objects and reasons of 
 a Bill to amend the lazv relating to agricultural land 
 in the Punjaub. 
 
 This passage deserves to be quoted in the 
 years to come as the great recantation of 
 the principle which has gone far to shiver the 
 
218 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 economic system of India into fragments. I 
 shall say a word on the Punjaub Land Aliena- 
 tion Bill directly. But first of all let us get the 
 ground clear. And as we are touching now on 
 controversial matter — for I am about to suggest 
 that the English system is itself one of the 
 chief causes that make for famine, — it will be 
 well to approach this question with evidence 
 and opinions no less authoritative than that 
 which stands at the head of this article. The 
 immediate and most formidable issue, in the 
 estimation of the Government of India, is the 
 alienation of the ryot's land, which is passing 
 in great masses to the money-lender, leaving 
 the ryot derelict on his own soil. In Bombay, 
 I believe, the transference is on a far larger 
 scale than in the Punjaub. But in Bombay 
 there is no political question — the people are 
 submissive, and far away from the frontier, — 
 and, moreover, as a recent Commission has 
 justly observed, " it is impossible for the 
 Government to know what the land question 
 really is," for the simple reason that in Bombay 
 there is no record of proprietors or of land 
 transfers. In the Central Provinces, where Sir 
 Richard Temple's landlords have been but a 
 
DEBT AND EXPROPRIATION 219 
 
 few years in possession, the tenants are already 
 busy alienating their occupancy rights, while 
 the simple village head-men, endowed by 
 Government with the dignity of proprietor- 
 ship, are being ousted by the money-lender. 
 This universal burden of indebtedness, cul- 
 minating in the loss of the land, is a recent 
 development, a result of the shock which has 
 heaved up and scattered the old mosaic of 
 Eastern custom. Western ideas of property, 
 individual freedom, land speculation, contract, 
 coupled with Western notions of a fixed 
 and punctual revenue system, have worked 
 the disruption. The facts are not denied. 
 The undoing of the ryot is deplored by 
 the best among the men who govern India, 
 and openly and frankly admitted by the 
 wisest. 
 
 The links in the chain which bind the ryot 
 are indeed riveted by the money-lender, but 
 it is we who have put them into the money- 
 lender's hands. Take first the question of 
 revenue. The substitution of a fixed cash 
 payment for a fluctuating payment in kind was 
 one of these links. To get coin the ryot had 
 to go to the coin merchant. And the rigid 
 
220 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 revenue system which had crystallised around 
 the cultivator only increased his dependence 
 as time went on. Then, again, the money- 
 lender has had the whole weight of our civil 
 courts at his back ; and, finally, the enlarge- 
 ment of credit, which the early British rulers 
 of India gave the ryot when they allowed him 
 to regard his land as marketable, has been 
 nothing but a rope for the people to hang 
 themselves with. 
 
 That the ryot has gone into debt, and is every 
 year going deeper in order to pay his land tax, 
 there can be no doubt. Let me give some 
 evidence from a Presidency which is very 
 proud of the moderation of its revenue demands 
 — I mean Bombay. " There can be no 
 question," says the report of the Commission 
 of 1892 into the working of the Deccan Agri- 
 culturists Relief Act, " that the rigidity of the 
 present system is one of the main causes which 
 lead the ryots of the Deccan into fresh debt." 
 Sir T. Hope, himself a Bombay revenue 
 officer, in the speech with which he introduced 
 the Relief Bill, said that "to our revenue 
 system must in candour be ascribed some share 
 in the indebtedness of the ryot." This view 
 
DEBT AND EXPROPRIATION 221 
 
 is formally repudiated as a working counsel in 
 times of famine like the present, but the thing 
 itself goes on. I was perfectly satisfied during 
 my visit to Bombay, that the authorities re- 
 garded the money-lender as their mainstay 
 for the payment of revenue. The Commission 
 I have just quoted, which included Mr. Denzil 
 Ibbetson and Mr. Lely, the Commissioner for 
 the Northern Division of Bombay, collected 
 what seems to be conclusive evidence on this 
 point in the villages of the Deccan, and I will 
 give the testimony of some of the villagers 
 in the Poona district. The first money- 
 lender examined said that his clients always 
 had to borrow to pay the first instalment 
 of revenue, the second instalment depending 
 on the crops. The ryots at Dapuri are quoted 
 as follows : — 
 
 "The man who owes nothing paid last year's 
 revenue by selling cattle ; the rest, most of them, 
 paid first instalment by selling standing crops to 
 the money-lenders at a low fixed rate, to be delivered 
 after harvest ; when crops are good, they always pay 
 first instalment so, when bad [and five years out of 
 eleven are bad in the Deccan] they borrow on landed 
 security, or sell cattle or implements." 
 
222 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 The following table summarises the answers 
 from other villages : — 
 
 Village. How the Revenue is Paid. 
 
 Waiwand ... Ryots are obliged to borrow to pay revenue. 
 Pimpalgaon ... Borrow a little even in good years. 
 Deulgaon ... Borrow in some cases. 
 Kanagaon ... Crops seldom ripen in time for assessment, 
 
 so ryots have to borrow. 
 Nandgaon ... If rain- bad, borrow on security of standing 
 jo war. 
 
 Dhond Borrow on security of standing crops. 
 
 Girim Most borrow on account, or, if no credit, 
 
 sell standing crops. 
 
 Sonwari ... Have to borrow to pay revenue if cannot 
 pay out of savings, or by sale of cattle. 
 
 Wadhana ... Pay first instalment by borrowing on stand- 
 ing crops. If no crops, mortgage land, 
 or sell. 
 
 Morgaon ... Same. 
 
 Deulgaon (2) ... Same. 
 
 Ambi Same. 
 
 Tardoli Pay first instalment by borrowing on stand- 
 
 ing crops, or, if no crops, borrow on 
 interest. 
 
 Kusigaon ... Same. 
 
 Naroli Same. 
 
 From the Punjaub we get the same testi- 
 mony ; and here again the fact comes out that 
 even a light assessment may, from its want of 
 elasticity, force the ryot into debt. Mr. Wilson, 
 the Financial Commissioner, writes : — 
 
 " My recent experience in Gargaon and Jhagjjar of 
 
DEBT AND EXPROPRIATION 223 
 
 the ruinous effects of a light fixed assessment, even 
 on a thrifty peasantry, in bad years, has convinced 
 me strongly of the unsuitability of a fixed assess- 
 ment to such a tract, and to such a people, whom 
 it would be certain sooner or later to force into debt 
 and mortgage." 
 
 A recent official inquiry in four Punjaub 
 districts, the results of which I am enabled to 
 lay before you, brings out the precise propor- 
 tion that debts due to land revenue bear to 
 the total indebtedness of the peasant. Three 
 typical villages are taken in each district, and 
 for each group an analysis is made of the 
 causes of debt, of which I give the principal 
 heads : — 
 
 
 Villages 
 
 Villages 
 
 Villages 
 
 Villages 
 
 
 in Dis- 
 
 in Dis- 
 
 in Dis- 
 
 in Dis- 
 
 
 trict 1. 
 
 trict 2. 
 
 trict 3. 
 
 trict 4. 
 
 
 Rs. 
 
 Rs. 
 
 Rs. 
 
 Rs. 
 
 Agricultural 
 
 67,809 
 
 92,269 
 
 29,998 
 
 70,747 
 
 Land revenue 
 
 14,207 
 
 27,36o 
 
 H,387 
 
 20,569 
 
 Social expenses 
 
 10,847 
 
 13,476 
 
 10,520 
 
 16,802 
 
 Law 
 
 5,702 
 
 5,706 
 
 3,647 
 
 9,478 
 
 Various unspecified 
 
 42,078 
 
 36,523 
 
 32,591 
 
 67,635 
 
 Interest (when shown) ... 
 
 44,184 
 
 89,219 
 
 33,188 
 
 49,518 
 
 The proportion of debts for land revenue to 
 the whole is about n per cent. But land 
 
224 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 revenue, being a fixed burden which must twice 
 a year be met, crops or no crops, rain or 
 drought, has more than a quantitative im- 
 portance. The high official who conducted the 
 inquiry in question describes the part this item 
 plays in the peasant's road to ruin : — 
 
 " Ordinarily the small cultivator gets into debt by 
 borrowing grain for food after a short harvest, and 
 failing to repay his debt in the ensuing rabi (spring 
 crop). He begins to take grain in small quantities 
 in, say, November or December, and lives wholly 
 or partially on grain advances until his spring crop 
 is cut. If the yield is insufficient he becomes in- 
 volved. The creditor takes part of the crop from 
 the threshing floor, and accommodates the debtor by 
 paying his revenue. In that case the peasant, in 
 five cases out of six, is doomed. Till the catastrophe 
 [of expropriation] comes, he is more or less a serf, 
 making over much of each harvest to the creditor, 
 and bound to put up with any debit balance put down 
 against him in the account." 
 
 Here we see how famine may come without 
 any failure of the monsoon. Now turn to the 
 other side of the account, with the picture of 
 these twelve villages still before us. How 
 fares it with the villagers ? Out of 742 pro- 
 prietary families, 444 are practically ruined, 
 112 are seriously involved, but with economy 
 
DEBT AND EXPROPRIATION 225 
 
 may still extricate themselves, and 186 are 
 described as prosperous, most of them being 
 thrifty owners, with fair-sized holdings. The 
 bond is paid as follows : — 
 
 
 Villages 
 
 trict 1. 
 Rs. 
 
 Villages 
 
 trict 2. 
 Rs. 
 
 Villages 
 
 trict 3. 
 Rs. 
 
 Villages 
 
 trict 4. 
 Rs. 
 
 Wheat, fodder, trees, and 
 
 
 
 
 
 other produce 
 
 56,522 
 
 116,896 
 
 19,370 
 
 22,732 
 
 Cattle sold 
 
 IO,l6l 
 
 11,998 
 
 3,515 
 
 10,836 
 
 Land mortgaged and 
 
 
 
 
 
 sold 
 
 71,723 
 
 6 ,044 
 
 56,696 
 
 104,634 
 
 Cash 
 
 15,518 
 
 18,644 
 
 25,909 
 
 63,006 
 
 Balance still due 
 
 26,543 
 
 34,698 
 
 13,055 
 
 26,933 
 
 On both sides of the' account the balance is 
 made up of comparatively unimportant items. 
 The grand total debit for the 12 villages is 
 Rs.815,078, or ^54,000. 
 
 The bond is paid, and the hereditary culti- 
 vator becomes a serf, liable to eviction at any 
 moment, and looking for food and clothing to 
 the grace of the financier landlord for whom 
 he labours. " The ryot toils that another may 
 rest, and sows that another may reap." Nor 
 is this all. The very fabric of Indian society 
 and civilisation is left a bleeding mass as the 
 
 Q 
 
226 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 people are torn from their land ; and with the 
 entry of the alien money-lender as landlord, 
 the village community ceases for all practical 
 purposes to exist. On this point the testimony 
 of British officials is conclusive, and, if space 
 permitted, the opinions of Mr. Denzil Ibbetson, 
 of the Viceroy's Council, and of Mr. Douie, 
 Chief Secretary to the Punjaub Government, 
 might be quoted. The part which British law 
 and the civil courts have played in all this 
 wasting tragedy may be written in a word. 
 We have made the money-lender, once the 
 village servant, into the village master ; we have 
 turned him from a useful agent into a blood- 
 sucker ; and we have stood as Shylock's friend 
 whenever he came into court to enforce his 
 bond. The extent to which the money-lender 
 has obtained possession of the land cannot be 
 precisely gauged, as there are no complete 
 returns. But in the following statistics, which 
 here appear for the first time, the dimensions 
 of the evil are perhaps sufficiently shown. Of 
 the four districts in the Punjaub to which 
 allusion has been made, the first, with an area 
 of 1 20 square miles, containing a population 
 of 108,000 people, has had 20 per cent, of 
 
DEBT AND EXPROPRIATION 227 
 
 its lands alienated to the money-lender; the 
 second, with 349 square miles, and practically 
 the same population, 28 per cent. ; the third, 
 with 233 square miles, and a population of 
 50,000, 1 7 per cent. ; the fourth, with 349 square 
 miles, and 30,000 people, n per cent. This 
 was in 1895. For the northern district of 
 Bombay I am enabled to give the alienation 
 statistics for large groups of typical villages, 
 obtained through a similar inquiry. The dis- 
 tricts, be it noted, embrace the worst parts of 
 the whole famine area : — 
 
 District. 
 
 Prantij 
 Modasa 
 Sanand 
 Viramgam . 
 Dhandhurka 
 
 Ahmedabad. 
 
 Number 
 of selected 
 villages. 
 
 14 
 
 29 
 
 15 
 
 20 
 
 Percentage of land 
 alienated to non- 
 agriculturists. 
 32-8 
 177 
 17-2 
 247 
 35 '4 
 
 The other districts bring down the average for Ahme- 
 dabad to 19-8. 
 
 Matar 
 Thasra 
 Nariad 
 Borsad 
 
 Kaira. 
 
 9 
 ro 
 
 13 
 9 
 
 The other districts bring down the average to 10. 
 
228 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 Panch Mahals. 
 
 Number Percentage of land 
 
 District. of selected alienated to non- 
 
 villages, agriculturists. 
 
 Godhra 5 21 
 
 Dohad 4 18 
 
 Jhalod 3 7 
 
 Khalol 7 22 
 
 Halol 5 16 
 
 Broach. 
 
 Amod 9 32 
 
 Broach 9 22 
 
 Wagra 15 33 
 
 Ankleshwar ... ... 9 28 
 
 Hansar 7 45 
 
 Jambusar 9 4 
 
 SURAT. 
 
 The average alienated is 16 per cent. 
 
 Thana. 
 
 Dahann 4 71 
 
 Bassein 4 68 
 
 Salsette 4 ... ... 13 
 
 Kalyan 4 46 
 
 Shahapur 3 50 
 
 Murbad 3 58 
 
 Bhwindi 4 38 
 
 Mahim 4 74 
 
 Wada 4 27 
 
 In Bengal, the North-west Provinces, and 
 the Central Provinces, where we set up a 
 system of landlords, the tenants have at least 
 the protection of special legislation for securing 
 them in their holdings, and for regulating their 
 
DEBT AND EXPROPRIATION 229 
 
 rents. The cultivator of Bombay and the 
 Punjaub who has come under the money- 
 lender's thumb is denied this protection. He 
 has no security and no rights. 
 
 To say that the tendencies I have been de- 
 scribing must in the nature of things make for 
 famine, is perhaps to labour the obvious. They 
 make for famine at every step in the road from 
 independence to serfdom. We are muzzling 
 the mouth of the ox which treads out the corn. 
 The ryot's produce is the money-lender's, and 
 he can no longer put by for famine if he would, 
 nor can he be expected to work with the will 
 and energy of a free man. The fat years are 
 for the bunya, the lean kine for the ryot. Even 
 the unencumbered cultivator no longer stores 
 his grain now that the railway is ready to whisk 
 it off. 
 
 But is the money-lender, after all, the man 
 of destiny, who as capitalist and organiser may 
 yet direct the energies of the ryot to a higher 
 plane, and, after the friction of the transition 
 is over, open a new chapter of prosperity ? 
 Judged by present facts, the answer is no, 
 and yet again no. The financier landlord's 
 one idea is to sit tight and screw the last 
 
230 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 anna out of the land. He is a narrow-minded, 
 grasping, short-sighted person, and nothing will 
 induce him to encourage his tenant, or to im- 
 prove his land by putting capital into it. In 
 fact, he is the merest exploiter, and as a farmer 
 or landowner, this creature that we have fattened 
 in our courts is the purest cheat. It follows 
 therefore that the land, as well as the people, 
 is progressively impoverished under the new 
 order of things. Let me give chapter and 
 verse from the official side. The Bombay 
 Government, in 1877, pronounced the verdict 
 that 
 
 " the money-lender who obtains the ownership of the 
 land is usually a stranger ; a hard and unsympathetic 
 landlord, grasping all he can secure for himself, and 
 expending no capital whatever upon the land." 
 
 The Deccan Commission of 1892 speaks 
 with bitterness of " the transfer of the land in 
 an agricultural country to a body of rack- 
 renting aliens, who do nothing for the improve- 
 ment of the land." We have the opinion of 
 the Government of India that such a transfer 
 is bad economically, and the Chief Secretary 
 to the Government of the Central Provinces 
 writes as follows, of the money-lender's capacity 
 
DEBT AND EXPROPRIATION 231 
 
 for land ownership, in his Settlement Report 
 on the Nagpur district : — 
 
 "Great or small, they are absolutely unfitted by 
 their natural instincts to be landlords. Shrewdest of 
 traders, most business-like in the matter of bargains, 
 they are unable to take a broad view of the duties of 
 landlord, or to see that rack-renting will not pay in 
 the long run." 
 
 In fact, the money-lender is just the same as 
 he was a quarter of a century ago, when the 
 Deccan Riots Commission pronounced the 
 class to be "probably the least fitted in 
 the world to use the powers of an irresponsible 
 landlord. ... As a landlord, he follows the 
 instincts of the usurer, making the hardest 
 terms possible with his tenant, who is also his 
 debtor, and often little better than his slave." 
 
 Altogether it must be admitted that, with 
 the best of intentions, we have boggled badly. 
 In the name of liberty we have made the 
 individual a bond slave ; and we have destroyed 
 the corporate life — that seemingly imperishable 
 thing which the bloody tumults of Mogul and 
 Mahratta left untouched, and which neither 
 famine nor pestilence disturbed. Nor does it 
 mend matters that our intentions were excellent. 
 
232 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 The pity of it is that, though the fatal mistake 
 was years ago discovered, the governors of 
 India, instead of facing it, have allowed the 
 cultivator and the village to waste to death, 
 drawing what comfort they can from the thought 
 that some day, somehow, the occidental pro- 
 cess is certain to bring its compensations. The 
 significance of the Punjaub Alienation Bill lies 
 in the fact that it seems to mark the determi- 
 nation of the Government to go to the root of 
 the matter, to imply that the whole question of 
 the repatriation of the cultivator is to be raised. 
 The Deccan Agriculturists Relief Act, I may 
 say in passing, turned out a palliative, not a 
 cure, because, while it sought to safeguard the 
 peasant against the worst oppression of the 
 money-lender, it did not attempt to stop 
 the right to alienate the land. If India is to 
 recover herself, it seems to me that the policy 
 of the immediate future must be directed to 
 repairing, so far as they can be repaired, the 
 mistakes of the past. To gather up the threads 
 of a remedial policy, they are : (i) The restric- 
 tion of land alienation, which is the salient 
 feature of the Punjaub Bill. Under this pro- 
 posal the creditor is permitted no more than 
 
DEBT AND EXPROPRIATION 233 
 
 a maximum of fifteen years' enjoyment of the 
 mortgaged property, after which it lapses to the 
 debtor. (2) An elastic system of land revenue, 
 fluctuating with seasons and crops, collected at 
 a convenient time, and based on an estimate of 
 what the ryot may reasonably be asked to bear. 
 (3) The introduction of usury laws as indulgent 
 to the debtor as, say, the bill for the protection 
 of English debtors which is now passing 
 through Parliament. (4) The creation of a 
 system of Government credit adequate in point 
 of personnel and finances to assist the agricul- 
 tural classes in the organisation of a reformed 
 credit system. (5) The extension to the money- 
 lenders' victims of some such Tenancy Act as 
 protects the cultivator of the North-west Pro- 
 vinces ; with, ultimately, a scheme, on the lines 
 employed by Lord Cromer in the case of the 
 fellaheen, to enable the ryots to buy back their 
 land from the money-lender. 
 
XXII 
 
 THE WORKING OF THE LAND 
 REVENUE SYSTEM 
 
 At first it rather puzzled me to find that 
 British officials agreed in treating the land tax 
 as in the nature of rent. Could it be said that 
 rent, as we understand it in the West, existed 
 at all in India ? And was the tribute which 
 the officers were gathering in during a year of 
 famine, even allowing for the doctrine of 
 averages, recognisable as rent ? In due course 
 I found that a controversy on the subject had 
 for many years been drifting along in the 
 leisurely Oriental fashion which marks the 
 intellectual exercises of Britain in India ; and 
 Lord Salisbury himself, as Indian Secretary, 
 had joined in the dispute in 1875, declaring 
 himself emphatically, but vainly, against the 
 theory of rent. In order to start fair it will 
 be necessary to look into the question for a 
 
THE LAND REVENUE SYSTEM 235 
 
 moment, and a little consideration will show- 
 that the difference between the two views is 
 no academic refinement, but a matter of 
 vital moment to the people of India. Lord 
 Salisbury puts the point trenchantly in his 
 Minute : — 
 
 " To the modern Indian statesman the refined dis- 
 tinctions of the economical school are a solid, living 
 reality, from which he can as little separate his 
 thoughts as from his mother tongue. To us it may 
 seem indifferent whether we call a payment revenue 
 or rent, so we get the money ; but it is not indifferent 
 by what name we call it in his hearing. If we say 
 that it is rent, he will hold the Government in strict- 
 ness entitled to all that remains after wages and 
 profits have been paid, and he will do what he can to 
 hasten the advent of the day when the State shall no 
 longer be kept by any weak compromises from the 
 enjoyment of its undoubted rights. If we persuade 
 him that it is revenue, he will note the vast dispropor- 
 tion of its incidence compared to that of other taxes, 
 and his efforts will tend to remedy the inequality, and 
 to lay upon other classes and interests a more equi- 
 table share of the fiscal burden. I prefer the latter 
 tendency to the former. So far as it is possible to 
 change the Indian fiscal system, it is desirable that 
 the cultivator should pay a small proportion of the 
 whole national charge. It is not in itself a thrifty 
 policy to draw the mass of revenue from the rural 
 districts, where capital is scarce, sparing the towns 
 where it is often redundant, and runs to waste in 
 
236 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 luxury. The injury is exaggerated in the case of 
 India, where so much of the revenue is exported 
 without a direct equivalent. As India must be bled, 
 the lancet should be directed to the parts where the 
 blood is congested, or at least sufficient, not to those 
 which are already feeble from the want of it." 
 
 It must be added that the rent tendency so 
 colours and pervades the whole revenue system, 
 that fiscal procedure, as we understand it, 
 appears in India completely inverted. Under 
 a system of taxation the demand would be 
 determined by the requirements of Govern- 
 ment, the burden being distributed, according 
 to certain fiscal principles, among the various 
 classes of the State. But in India nothing 
 of this sort happens. Government, acting 
 through the local officer, simply draws into 
 its treasury all it can get, or, as Sir Louis 
 Mallet puts it, all it dares to take, and, like 
 the old Irish landlord, lives and spends accord- 
 ingly. This manner of proceeding, as Lord 
 Salisbury points out, not only fails to secure 
 any equality of burden, or to impose any 
 conscious check upon the Government, but it 
 stamps the whole revenue system as arbitrary, 
 oppressive, and empirical. Look into the 
 matter, and you will find no equality as between 
 
THE LAND REVENUE SYSTEM 237 
 
 province and province, district and district, or, 
 taking India as a whole, between cultivator and 
 cultivator. Each settlement officer is, to a 
 large extent, his own master, and I doubt if 
 there are a dozen officials who could give an 
 intelligible account of the principles that purport 
 to regulate the actions of the various provincial 
 governments in the matter. 
 
 But is the conception of rent — economic rent 
 — anything else than a fiction imported from 
 the West ? You have in India a debt-bound, 
 poverty-stricken, custom-ridden peasantry, and 
 on the other hand you have, not a number of 
 landlords bidding for tenants, but a single land 
 suzerain and land disposer — the Government. 
 A system of land nationalisation may not be 
 inconsistent with free play for rent ; but in 
 India the land nationalised would seem to be 
 almost absolutely exempted from the play of 
 economic forces. The occupiers on the one side 
 are lacking in mobility, capital, and enterprise ; 
 and on the other side monopoly is made 
 absolute by the want of any power of appeal 
 or representation on the part of the people, 
 while the factors of agitation and combination, 
 which in a free country are part of the economic 
 
238 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 process, are written down in India, and ruth- 
 lessly punished, as conspiracy and sedition. 
 The rent demand is bound, therefore, to be 
 arbitrary in its nature, and the rent formula, 
 as applied to revenue, becomes nothing else 
 than a claim to extract all the tribute that can 
 be got. After a good deal of inquiry in various 
 parts of India, I believe this to be an accurate 
 statement of the process. 
 
 In those tracts, however, where we have set 
 up landlords on the English system, it is true 
 that a more plausible-looking vein of rent has 
 been tapped ; but the experiment has had some 
 curious results. I found two strongly marked 
 and absolutely divergent tendencies in operation. 
 In one quarter of the landlord districts the 
 Government had been following up its con- 
 cessionaires, the landlords, with Irish Land 
 Acts for the protection of the tenants, who, it 
 appears, were in danger of being extinguished 
 by rackrenting and eviction ; and in another 
 quarter — the Central Provinces — the tenants 
 were having their rents raised by Government 
 itself — again by the agency of a special Tenants 
 Act, — the efforts of the landlords in that direc- 
 tion having failed to come up to expectations. 
 
THE LAND REVENUE SYSTEM 239 
 
 In neither case was the Government doing 
 what the economist, arguing from official 
 premisses, would expect to find it doing, viz. 
 standing quietly at the neck of the bottle 
 and intercepting half the flow. The outpour 
 was too fast in the one case, and too slow in 
 the other. Shall we be wrong in concluding 
 that here again " rent " is nothing but a pay- 
 ment determined by Government ? Certainly 
 that is what the farmers and the landlords of 
 the Central Provinces would tell you. Who 
 ever before heard of a landlord who had his 
 rents raised by Government, in spite of his 
 protests, and often to his bodily danger — for 
 some of these cultivators are lively people, and 
 not disposed to stand any nonsense from the 
 proprietors who have been foisted on them ? 
 In fairness to the able officials of this region, 
 it should be stated that, from the standpoint 
 of taxation, the Central Provinces are by no 
 means doing their share. The episode only 
 shows to what strange passes landlordism and 
 the rent theory may bring an able and public- 
 spirited service. 
 
 The so-called rent, then, is not the resultant 
 of the free play of economic laws, but is 
 
240 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 itself determined, and that in an arbitrary- 
 fashion, by the fiscal authority. Let us now 
 look at the revenue machinery in operation, 
 bearing in mind that the taxpaying unit 
 of India is, in the main, the five-acre man 
 — the peasant who, supposing he spent on 
 farm and family every anna he could win, 
 would still be poor. The officer appointed 
 to value the land and fix the assessment 
 has made his shot — I use the expression ad- 
 visedly — at the average crop, and has deter- 
 mined the demand which is to hold for the 
 next twenty or thirty years ; and in theory it 
 is understood that the cultivator is to enjoy not 
 less than half the profits of his farm, besides 
 the privilege of subsisting on its produce. It 
 is further understood that the good years will 
 enable him to pay for the bad ones ; this, indeed, 
 is the very essence of the business. In prac- 
 tice, however, both suppositions are almost 
 certain to break down, and, as a matter of fact, 
 do break down, because the ryots cannot 
 possibly lead their lives, and conduct their 
 house-keeping, by actuarial laws, and a single 
 drought upsets the whole basket of theories. 
 What would the English farmer think, asks a 
 
THE LAND REVENUE SYSTEM 241 
 
 former Secretary of the Revenue Department, 
 of running a farm which sometimes produced 
 twenty bushels an acre, and sometimes nothing ? 
 This is the portion of the five-acre man, and 
 no doctrine of averages relieves him from 
 recourse to the money-lender for paying his 
 revenue, and replacing his seed-corn and cattle 
 after the drought. The fact is, that no ingenuity 
 in computing the revenue demand can adjust a 
 fixed burden to a wildly fluctuating income, or 
 enable the peasant to pay his revenue in bad 
 years. The remissions and suspensions, such 
 as they are, are themselves an admission that 
 the estimate is too much of a fair-weather fore- 
 cast, and, let me add, they mislead the public 
 into an idea that a well-considered machinery 
 of relief is working in the peasants' favour. 
 No one who has seen revenue collected in India 
 during a year of famine can be trusted to write 
 quite calmly on the subject. After the famine 
 of 1876, English officials were fortified by the 
 theory of averages to clear whole villages, and 
 to turn great tracts of the Deccan into forest 
 reserves ; and famine, in some parts at any 
 rate, is continually bringing the same bitter 
 experience. Is it any wonder that the Indian 
 
 R 
 
242 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 peasant is unconverted to the doctrine under 
 which such things are done ? " They told me 
 that the river was passable at such and such a 
 ford," said an old ryot to an official, " and on 
 their word I tried to cross it, but fell into a 
 deep hole and was nearly drowned. They told 
 me, when I struggled back to shore, that the 
 average depth was quite safe. But that would 
 not have kept me from drowning." 
 
 At the end of the assessment period the 
 authorities make another shot ; and now mark 
 what happens. They find that since their last 
 valuation prices have advanced, new railways 
 have been made, cultivation has been intensified 
 — or might be intensified, under a little pressure ; 
 and after the due application of tests of all 
 kinds, geological, botanical, hydrographical, 
 meteorological, arboricultural, etc., it is dis- 
 covered that land and farmer can bear an extra 
 30 per cent, or so on the old assessment. A 
 district in Bombay had, just before I visited it, 
 been reassessed at an enhanced rate of 30 per 
 cent., the officer having concluded that not 
 enough allowance had been made for rainfall. 
 Unfortunately in this case the rainfall stopped 
 directly his report was sent in. It is this 
 
THE LAND REVENUE SYSTEM 243 
 
 progressive pressure which makes so many re- 
 formers in India ask for a permanent settlement. 
 Even so impassive an observer as Lord Salisbury- 
 remarks : "I think we may fairly discourage 
 any scientific refinements in the work of assess- 
 ment, which are a natural exercise of the 
 intellect in highly cultivated officers, but which 
 worry the ryot, distribute the burden of the 
 State with needless inequality, and impose a 
 costly machinery upon the State." I spare the 
 reader an exhibit of the statistics of revenue 
 enhancement, which he can find for himself in the 
 reports of the settlement officers. It is enough 
 to note that the latest Blue-book on the condi- 
 tion of India mentions the following increases 
 made by the last assessments : — 
 
 District. Increase. 
 
 Meerut 37 per cent., yielding ,£11,000, 
 
 Bahraich 57 per cent., yielding ^9800. 
 
 Dera Ghazi Khan ... ^7500. 
 
 Seoni 53 per cent. 
 
 Betul 47 per cent. 
 
 Bhandara 1 
 
 Nimar \ 47 to 56 per cent. 
 
 Balaghat j 
 
 Trichinopoli 30 per cent., yielding ,£29,000. 
 
 Bombay Presidency (total 
 revision settlement) ... 30 per cent., yielding ^293,500. 
 
 Right or wrong, this demand will be levied on 
 
244 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 a whole generation of farmers. Prices may 
 have been miscalculated, the weather forecast 
 may turn out false, the estimate of the family's 
 needs may fall short of the truth — for the officer 
 has to play the part of Providence in fixing the 
 standard of living for thirty years to come ; in 
 a word, the whole bundle of probabilities may 
 altogether fail to square with the facts. I 
 would ask if any Government can safely under- 
 take a responsibility so portentous as this 
 casting of the ryot's horoscope in a country of 
 violent and incalculable weather vicissitudes. 
 
 It would be unjust to underrate the diligence 
 and conscientiousness which the settlement 
 officers bring to bear on their duties. It is the 
 system I am criticising, not the men. No 
 labour is spared in applying the standard 
 evenly between cultivator and cultivator in the 
 district under review, and the work of a single 
 assessment absorbs several years of a civilian's 
 career. The very intellectual exercises at 
 which Lord Salisbury scoffs, are often dictated 
 by a high sense of the responsible nature of the 
 task. But what a task it is ! Consider the 
 liability to error offered by the single factor 
 of prices. A 25 per cent, increase, we will 
 
THE LAND REVENUE SYSTEM 245 
 
 suppose, has been fixed, on the strength of a 
 50 per cent, rise in prices ; and it sounds fair 
 enough. But how much of the enhancement 
 does the ryot enjoy ? The officer can only 
 guess what proportion of the produce the 
 farmer and his family, his servants and his 
 cattle, consume, and how much goes to the 
 money-lender. The ryot may never see the 
 price of his crop, or the crop itself may consist 
 of some low-priced produce, out of the proceeds 
 of which the dearer foodstuffs must be bought 
 for consumption. In any case the five-acre 
 man's own share of any rise is a very small one. 
 It is clear that a bad guess may vitiate the 
 whole assessment, and compel the farmer to 
 reduce his standard of living, to starve his 
 farm, or to plunge into deeper debt, in order 
 to pay his revenue. 
 
 Thus we are left confronting the question 
 whether any argument from policy or ex- 
 pediency can be held to justify a fiscal 
 method, under which Government first fixes 
 the standard of living and cultivation, and then 
 proceeds to drain off all the winnings of the 
 people which rise above the mark that has 
 been fixed, — a process of bleeding, as Lord 
 
246 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 Salisbury calls it, which leaves the ryot with- 
 out staying power when famine comes. It 
 remains to be seen if famine will compel the 
 attention of the Government of India to this 
 question. 
 
 At the least, we may hope that attention 
 will be given to that famine-making agent — 
 the fixed demand levied in good and bad 
 years alike. And here the Government has 
 not far to look for a precedent, and perhaps a 
 model. In the system of fluctuating assess- 
 ments practised in large portions of the 
 Punjaub, we have something more than a 
 suggestion of the lines of an elastic method — 
 a method which adapts the burdens to the 
 crops of every harvest, and which taxes no 
 more of the ryot's land than is actually fruitful. 
 The plan is adopted only in districts which 
 rely for their water upon the varying overflow 
 from the rivers. But if flood-revenue — which 
 is what it comes to — be practicable and success- 
 ful, some system of rain-revenue is surely within 
 the bounds of achievement. And I think I 
 may give here, without breach of confidence, 
 the opinion of one of the highest officials in 
 the Punjaub Government, that for that province 
 
THE LAND REVENUE SYSTEM 247 
 
 this is the burning question of the future. 
 The machinery is provided by the minute 
 system of crop records already in operation 
 throughout the Punjaub, and the additional 
 supervision that would have to be exercised 
 would not be excessive. In the State of 
 Jodhpur I found in successful operation a very 
 similar system, based on rainfall and crops — a 
 system which in effect has re-established, but 
 on a cash basis, the old method of fluctuating 
 payments in kind. There is no need to enlarge 
 on the difference between an automatic plan of 
 this kind, and the present grudging and arbi- 
 trary machinery of suspension and remission, 
 qualified as it is by individual caprice and the 
 political exigencies of the moment. No doubt 
 a fluctuating revenue will in bad years land the 
 Indian Finance Member in a deficit, for the 
 burden of untoward seasons will, so far as 
 revenue is concerned, be transferred from the 
 people to the Government. But if borrowing 
 is to be done, it had better be done by 
 Government than by the ryot. 
 
 As for the scale of taxation — the propor- 
 tion of the cultivator's taxable capacity which 
 the State may claim to draw — does not 
 
248 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 the solution depend on a radical change of 
 attitude ? If the foregoing analysis is correct, 
 we have invoked an illusory economic authority 
 for imposing an oppressive tax — illusory because 
 ' the tenant is unprotected, and the Government 
 is unchecked by economic forces and public 
 opinion. That is a position which, if India 
 is to recover her ground, must be frankly 
 abandoned, and its place must be taken by 
 a theory of taxation which will bear the light. 
 What follows ? In the first place, if the 
 taxation be frankly substituted for the rent 
 theory, Government will fall into the position 
 indicated by Lord Salisbury. There will be 
 a new apportionment of burdens, in which 
 I imagine that the wealthy financial and 
 commercial interests, at present scarcely 
 touched, will be made to pay their share, and 
 the claim for a revision of Imperial charges 
 will issue in such a form as to be irresistible. 
 Then the question will be, not how much can be 
 squeezed from the cultivator, as at present, but 
 how far he can be spared. For Government 
 will realise, as it has never done under the 
 obsession of the rent doctrine, that its first 
 duty is to hold the balance fair between the 
 
THE LAND REVENUE SYSTEM 249 
 
 different classes of Indian society, and that 
 its first interest, its first and last interest in a 
 country where famines are recurrent, is to 
 secure the cultivator in his position, and to 
 secure, so far as it can, the prosperity of 
 agriculture, on which the life of India depends. 
 Change the point of view, and what is taken 
 with an easy heart as rent, will be seen to be 
 a grinding tax on the subsistence of millions 
 of poor and politically helpless people. In the 
 acceptance of this standpoint, and all that it 
 involves of the readjustment of relations 
 between Government and people, between 
 tenants and landlords, between India and 
 the British Treasury, the first step to the 
 solution of the Indian problem would seem 
 to lie. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 OFFICIAL REPORTS ON THE 
 FAMINE 
 
 A five-hundred-page report of the famine in 
 British districts has been presented to Parlia- 
 ment. It gives a mass of detail as to famine 
 administration, and shows at once the unprece- 
 dented severity of the famine, and the exhaust- 
 ing drain on the resources, both personal and 
 financial, of the Government. It is unfortu- 
 nate, however, that Parliament will look in vain 
 for information on some of the most material 
 facts. The papers consist for the most part of 
 correspondence and returns that have passed 
 between the local Governments and the 
 Government of India ; and they only bring the 
 story of the famine up to the end of the winter. 
 This may have been inevitable, but it is a pity 
 that the mortality statistics carry us no further 
 than February, and the absence of any mention 
 
252 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 of the work of the medical service, which for 
 some reason or other seems to be regarded as 
 a trifling affair, is also to be regretted. Again, 
 with regard to fodder, there are reports of large 
 schemes for cutting and transport ; but the 
 breaking down of the transport department 
 seems to have escaped attention. These are 
 some of the points which appear on a first 
 glance at the pages of the Blue-book. And 
 for the rest, , the form in which the material 
 is dealt with, makes it difficult to get anything 
 like a connected view of what has been 
 happening. 
 
 The "General Idea" pervading the Blue- 
 book is twofold — first, that the famine is the 
 most severe that has ever taxed the resources 
 of Government ; next, that the conditions of 
 relief should be made more stringent than ever 
 before. How far the one proposition follows 
 from the other, the reader is left to gather for 
 himself from the Government circular of 27th 
 December : — 
 
 " The Government perceive with some anxiety that 
 the numbers on relief in British India and Native 
 States are rapidly increasing, and that they already 
 exceed 2j millions of persons, although relief opera- 
 tions are in most provinces still in a preliminary 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 253 
 
 stage. If the present rate of progression is long 
 maintained, the crowds on relief will far exceed the 
 record of any previous famine, and will strain not 
 only the finances, but also the administrative re- 
 sources of the Government. These considerations 
 impel the Governor General in Council to invite the 
 local Governments to seriously consider, with him, 
 whether the principles or practice of famine relief 
 have in any particular, or particulars, been imper- 
 ceptibly relaxed, and whether the extreme readiness 
 which the people have evinced to throw themselves 
 upon the charity of the State, and to avail themselves 
 of every form of relief, does not require a correspond- 
 ing strictness on the part of those charged with the 
 duty of administering it." 
 
 Here we have what seems to be a suggestion of 
 general pauperisation, unsubstantiated, it may 
 be added, by any evidence of a conclusive 
 character. In fact, the very next words almost 
 supply the refutation of such a charge : — 
 
 " The fact is not overlooked that the circumstances 
 of the present drought are in some ways unpre- 
 cedented. Since famine began to be administered on 
 a methodical system, there has been no instance of a 
 province being twice smitten by extreme drought in 
 so short a space of time as three years, nor is there 
 any previous instance of such widespread mortality 
 of cattle as has this year occurred, carrying with it 
 the ruin of classes superior to those from which the 
 relief workers are ordinarily drawn. And there has 
 
254 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 rarely been a drought which unmistakably declared 
 itself so early in the year, or necessitated so early a 
 resort to relief." 
 
 However, the conclusion of the matter was, 
 that the conditions of relief were to be stiffened ; 
 large works were to be preferred to small, 
 because of the " discipline and incommodities " 
 which they offered, and gratuitous relief was to 
 be cut down to the lowest possible limits. The 
 Blue-book shows how far the gospel of de- 
 terrents was carried. Before the issue of this 
 circular the Bombay Government, in some dis- 
 tricts, tried a system of piecework without any 
 minimum, with the result that " large numbers 
 of people, who presumably did not begin work 
 till their strength was low, earned less and less, 
 until they got a pittance of two annas (2d.), or 
 less, in a week, that many accordingly left the 
 works, and others were deterred from coming 
 to them." This is from the report of Mr. Mon- 
 teath, the secretary to the Bombay Government ; 
 and to clinch the matter he adds that " for some 
 time a large measure of gratuitous relief will 
 be needed to restore to strength people who 
 have fallen into a state of emaciation." In 
 other words, the so-called relief was for many 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 255 
 
 simply a method of starvation. Matters were 
 only a degree better where a penal minimum 
 was fixed. This, course was decided on, so 
 we learn from Mr. Monteath, because there 
 was "reason to believe that the want of 
 sufficient establishment has made it impossible 
 to apply proper tests in Khandesh and Sholapur, 
 and probably also in Broach." The people, 
 in fact, did not work because the work was 
 not laid out for them, and supervision and often 
 tools were wanting. And, as I wrote from 
 Bombay, the penal minimum was adopted in 
 the hope that it would supply a cheap and 
 automatic substitute for a well-considered 
 organisation. The code minimum in the places 
 mentioned, and in other districts, was accord- 
 ingly cut down 25 per cent., and the result was 
 — What ? The Blue-book does not say. And 
 yet it would surely be fair to Parliament, con- 
 fronted as it is with a terrible breakdown in 
 the machinery for preserving life, to vouchsafe 
 some information as to the effect of the ex- 
 periment. I can only repeat that, to the best 
 of my belief, this so-called penalty for the con- 
 tumacious tended, through want of organisation, 
 to become the general standard of relief — a 
 
256 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 standard described by the Government of India 
 as " not a safe subsistence standard, in ordinary- 
 circumstances, for the masses." On the other 
 hand, the Central Provinces seem to have 
 turned a deaf ear to the suggestions of the 
 Government circular. They continued their 
 small works, and secured a sufficient organisa- 
 tion to keep them running, and enable the people 
 to earn a subsistence wage. True, the summer 
 has found them with two million people on relief 
 out of an affected population of ten millions. 
 But against this may be set the fact — which is 
 surely the true test of the measures adopted — 
 that starvation is practically non-existent, that 
 the death-rate, but for the cholera, is normal, 
 and that when the cholera came they were able 
 to grapple with it. In Bombay the monthly 
 death-rates of the worst districts given had by 
 February increased from the normal of 2*48 
 in Kaira to 7*90, from r86 in Panch Mahals to 
 12*58, from 2*15 in Khandeshto 5*95, and from 
 1 *8 1 in Ahmednagar to 4*09. These terrible 
 figures cannot be put down to any one 
 defect. They simply represent the con- 
 sequences of want of preparation, lack of 
 organisation, and deterrents of the barbed-wire 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 257 
 
 order. When the cholera came, we know what 
 happened. 
 
 The fearful strain on the personnel of the 
 famine administration is shown by the follow- 
 ing announcement, made in the Legislative 
 Council on the 19th of January: "The 
 Government of India have done all that lay 
 in their power to provide engineer officers and 
 subordinates for the provinces most requiring 
 them, and have also lent the services of a 
 large number of Staff Corps officers as relief 
 superintendents. It is no longer possible for 
 them to give any further assistance in these 
 directions ; and the Governor-General in 
 Council is reluctantly obliged to advise the 
 local Governments that they must do the best 
 they can with their present establishments, 
 supplementing them, so far as is practicable, 
 by temporary local engagements." This state- 
 ment did not put a stop to demands for help, 
 and on the 3rd of February the suggestion 
 was made that resort should be had to "un- 
 official European agency, obtained through the 
 medium of indigo concerns" in Bengal. More 
 hopeful, perhaps, was the announcement that 
 non-commissioned officers and privates of the 
 
 s 
 
258 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 British army were available for famine service 
 — a source of help which was largely drawn 
 upon by the Government of the Central 
 Provinces, with, as I was assured, excellent 
 results. The greatest credit is due to those 
 districts which managed to make up a fair 
 complement of officers, often out of very un- 
 promising material. But when we hear of the 
 deficiency of Government resources, it is as 
 well to remember that in point of qualified men, 
 they were long since exhausted. The lack of 
 men can only increase the misgivings with 
 which a study of the repeated efforts of the 
 Government of India to stiffen the methods 
 of relief will fill the reader. There is some 
 painful reading in the answers of the Govern- 
 ment of the Punjaub, and of the authorities 
 responsible for administration in Berar and in 
 Ajmere-Merwara, and the devices for shorten- 
 ing rations and increasing the task which 
 appear to have been universally applied, though 
 nowhere with such stringency as in Bombay, 
 alternate with disclosures of the people's ex- 
 tremity, and the unprecedented scale and stress 
 of the famine. The effect of this on the mind 
 is anything but pleasant. " Yes, your need is 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 259 
 
 great," the authorities say in effect ; " never, 
 indeed, was it greater ; but there are really 
 so many of you, that we shall be bound to 
 deal with you on the assumption that you 
 are tricking us, and we must therefore see 
 what is the very barest minimum on which 
 you will try the experiment of keeping body 
 and soul together." Would it not have been 
 better at the outset to admit that the financial 
 strain made adequate help impossible, and 
 frankly to appeal for a grant from the Imperial 
 exchequer? There is neither candour nor 
 kindness in trying to fight a famine on the 
 cheap, under the pretence that the people of 
 India are paupers at heart, and must be treated 
 to a regime of Bumbledom. The matter is not 
 one of retrospective interest merely, for the 
 numbers on relief are going up every week, 1 
 and it is only too certain that, what with the 
 lack of cattle, and the failure of adequate help 
 to replace the people on their farms, there will 
 be another famine next year. 
 
 The Blue-book gives us a rough estimate of 
 the suspensions of land revenue entailed by the 
 
 1 They reached their maximum of upwards of 6,300,000 
 during the second week in August. 
 
26o 
 
 THE GREAT FAMINE 
 
 famine, but nothing is said about remissions. 
 It is worth noting that in the northern division 
 of Bombay, where the people are literally at 
 the last gasp, the original estimates of suspen- 
 sions have been cut down by a million and 
 a quarter rupees, on the ground that such 
 estimates were excessive. The Commissioner 
 asked for powers to suspend about half of the 
 land tax ; he is only permitted to suspend a 
 third. In the central division, where famine is 
 general and severe, but not so overwhelming, 
 the estimate has been increased by nearly a 
 million. This procedure seems to call for 
 explanation. His Excellency in Council is of 
 opinion that " it is not expedient that people 
 who have resources should be relieved of the 
 punctual payment of their dues." Nobody 
 disputes that ; but, on the other hand, there is 
 no machinery for sorting out the resourceless 
 from the rest, and, this being so, the collection 
 of any revenue at all in the worst districts is an 
 intolerable hardship on the people. Some 
 alleviation, no doubt, has been introduced by 
 the lavish distribution of Government advances 
 for well-sinking, and the like. But while the 
 Government of India grants the money, the 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 local Government, I am assured on testimony 
 which I cannot doubt, does not hesitate on 
 occasion to dip its hand into the fund, scooping 
 out the cultivator's revenue before it lets him 
 have the money. For purposes of comparison, 
 I give the suspensions for Bombay, four 
 districts of the Central Provinces — the only 
 ones given, — and the worst-hit districts of the 
 Punjaub : — 
 
 Land revenue demand. Suspensions. 
 
 
 Rs. 
 
 Rs. 
 
 Bombay 
 
 39,224,330 .. 
 
 . 7,146,000 
 
 Central Provinces (first instal- 
 
 
 
 ment) 
 
 3,845,000 .. 
 
 .. 2,528,000 
 
 Punjaub — 
 
 
 
 Hissar 
 
 600,881 .. 
 
 • 520,438 
 
 Rohtale 
 
 528,174 .. 
 
 • 330,725 
 
 Gurgaon 
 
 614,570 .. 
 
 278,088 
 
 Gujrat 
 
 361,566 
 
 258,000 
 
 The Secretary for India may be able to ex- 
 plain the disparity between the first set of 
 suspensions and the second and third. It 
 wants explaining. 
 
INDIAN TERMS AND THEIR 
 EQUIVALENTS 
 
 Bunya 
 
 ... Trader and money-lender. 
 
 Mamlotdar ... 
 
 ... Native district magistrate. 
 
 Taluka 
 
 . . . Official district. 
 
 Joivar 
 
 ... A kind of millet. 
 
 Zemitidar 
 
 ... Landowner. 
 
 Maund 
 
 ... 8 2 flbs. 
 
 Rupee 
 
 ... i^. 4<£ 
 
 Lakh 
 
 ... 100,000. 
 
 Anna 
 
 ... A penny. 
 
 Pice 
 
 . . . One-fourth of an anna. 
 
 Pie 
 
 ... One-twelfth of an anna. 
 
 THE END 
 
 PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES. 
 
Note. — This map provides a rough indication of the famine area based on the official relief statistics. In view 
 of the universal fodder famine in the Punjaub, the wkolt Province has been shaded. The actual food famine 
 was confined, in the main, to parts of the unirrigated districts. The places visited will be found on the map. 
 
Messrs. LONGMANS, GREEN, & CO.'S 
 
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