The Indian Famine of 1770 is one of the greatest disasters in human history. Over ten million people, a third of the population of Bengal, died. A drought lasting 5 years, bad harvests, and cruel British rule all contributed. The British East India Company compounded the famine with heavy taxation, leading to millions of Bengalis unable to buy food and starving to death. The Bengal Famine had a ripple effect far beyond India. When accounts of the terrible famine reached the American colonies, they helped instigate the Boston Tea Party.
There was, in fact, more to the Boston Tea Party than just anger over tea taxes. News of the Bengal Famine fostered distrust and outrage towards the British Parliament and the East India Company. Boston’s reaction was particularly acute, escalating rebel anger and culminating in the Boston Tea Party of 1773.
The East India Company was a private British firm that ruled most of India from 1757 to 1858, when control was transferred to the British government. In 1764, after a military victory over the Mughals, the Company won control of Bengal (including present-day Bangladesh). This included the right to levy taxes on the Indian population. The East India Company attained the right to collect the peasant’s tribute (diwani) formally given to the Mughal Emperor. This tribute had been about 10-15% of the output of the peasant farmers.
The Company profited off land revenue taxes collected through local tax collectors.
These collectors were rewarded with handsome percentages and bonuses for meeting their goals. The Company raised that rate to 40 to 50%. In addition, they outlawed the storage of rice and other foods. India regularly experienced droughts, so storage of reserves was a standard practice amongst villages and families. The Company however wanted to their maximize profits, so they outlawed this “peasant hoarding.”
When drought began in 1769, it produced famine conditions, risking starvation amongst the Bengal population. What was the governing Company’s response? The East India Company, chaired by Sir George Colebrooke, was not satisfied with merely maintaining revenues from the Indian peasants with millions facing starvation. They wanted more.
It raised the taxes again to 60%, and resorted to violence to collect them. The Company imposed a yearly quota that tax collectors must reach—no matter what. This placed an impossible burden on the poor Bengali population. Now Bengali families no longer had money to pay for food when their crops failed with reserves outlawed. Famine-related starvation began.
Tax collectors, not wanting to loose their bonuses, employed violence on the population, curtesy of the occupying British Redcoats, to “compel” the Bengalis to pay. As a result, most families, after having been forced to pay the taxes at gunpoint, had dry farmland unable to grow food, and no money left to buy it. Starvation of men, women, children, elderly – it mattered not to the Company directors.
The most died of starvation in 1770 when the worst of the taxes reigned. Indians knew that the root cause was not the drought, but the cruel taxation of the British occupiers, and deep hated was planted. With each Indian death came less tax revenue for the Company sucked from the Bengali population. This economic shortfall would have an unexpected ripple effect in of all places – the American colonies.
In 1771, a number American newspapers ran excerpts of a “Letter from a Gentleman in India”
“On our arrival here, we found a river full of dead human carcasses floating downstream. The streets crowded with the dead and dying, without anyone attempting to give them relief. So horribly has the famine raged here, that those who were able to procure food were so accustomed to see their fellow creatures perish, that it did not even create a painful emotion. The numbers that have perished in Calcutta alone amounted to 10,000 to 12,000 a week.
Every morning the dead were just gathered together in a heap and thrown into the river. I have myself passed by and seen 20 or 30 lain down to die in the length of one street. It was no uncommon sight to see dogs running about with human limbs in their jaws. I have beheld the hapless infant tugging at the empty breast of its mother just expiring, without being capable of affording them the smallest aid. ”
The now financially-struggling Company influenced the British Parliament to pass the Tea Act in 1773, allowing direct shipment of its Indian tea to the American colonies. The company could now bring tea to America duty-free, with the taxes paid by the colonists. Its design was to grant the company an American monopoly on tea, and enable it to gain greater profits from the trade.
A series of angry pamphlets, entitled “The Alarm,” were circulated in Boston in 1773. They told of the Bengal Famine and called for refusing to accept the tea brought by the Company. “Rusticus” writes,
“Are we to be given up to the East India Company to step forth in Aid of the Prime Minister, to execute his Plan, of enslaving America? Their Conduct in Asia for some Years past, has given simple Proof, how little they regard the Rights, Liberties or Lives of Men for the Sake of Gain. And these not being sufficient to glut their Avarice, they have, by the most unparalleled Barbarities and Extortions, reduced whole Provinces to Ruin.
Fifteen hundred Thousand perished by Famine in one Year, not because the Earth denied its Fruits; but because this Company engulfed their Necessaries of Life, and set taxes so high that the poor could not purchase them. Thus having drained the Sources of the immense Wealth from India they now cast their Eyes on America.”
“Rusticus” put the issue before his fellow Americans: the East India Company had just starved to death millions in Indian people for the sake of profit and greed. They controlled the British government with repeated bribes, and now they have their sights set on America. This injustice led to the Boston Tea Party in December 1773.
The Sons of Liberty, led by Samuel Adams, rallied meetings against the British Parliament.
In December 1773, several Company ships carrying tea arrived in Boston harbor. The colonists refused to pay taxes or allow the tea to be unloaded. The British Governor ordered the tea tariff to be paid regardless. That night, over 100 colonists emptied 45 tons of Company tea into Boston Harbor. The first Continental Congress was convened the next year in 1774. The American Revolution began at Lexington and Concord in 1775, and the Declaration of Independence a year later in Philadelphia.
As for the Indian Bengal Famine, below is an excerpt of a letter with a rather gruesome account from someone present at the time, published in the New-York Literary Magazine.
“Great dearth has desolated the provinces of this beautiful country. Hardly any rain has fallen during four years. In consequence the crops have failed, and the poor starved. From my enquiries, I find half of the inhabitants of the Duab have perished. Every ditch, road, brook, pond, and street were strewed with dead bodies of men, women, and children. Where the wretch expires, there he lies, till his flesh is stripped off by the dogs. No one tends to the dead; for their friends are starved wretches as well.
The Hindoos do not bury their dead, but burn them. We have been often obliged to shift our camp on account of the stench, arising from the putrefaction of so many bodies. Men and women, with their children in their hands, flocked to camp, offering themselves for sale for a quart of corn. Mothers sold their children for the fourth part of a rupee. I could have purchased a thousand children at this price.
These poor wretches were reduced to this hard alternative. You, in England are astonished, no doubt, to hear of dogs devouring dead bodies. Wise nature has so ordered, that this hot country abounds with these dogs, called parriars. They go up and down the streets seeking dead carcasses, which they devour, whether of horses, sheep, or men. I have seen hundreds of bodies with two or three dogs tugging the limbs to pieces.”
Company accounts reported that nearly 10 million died in the 5 year famine, 1/3 of the population.
The exact number is unknown since counting in rural and remote areas was ignored. What is known from accounts of British administrators is that the social upheavals were widespread. A Kali religious revival followed, reaffirming a religious identity suppressed by the Company. The terrifying Goddess Kali became a symbol of Indian, anti-British resistance well into the 19th and 20th centuries. Kali had become the Goddess of Indian protest against the cruel British rule.
Famines are preventable if there is a serious societal effort to confront them, lead by a democratic government with an independent press. Not surprisingly, while India continued to have droughts and famines under its oppressive British colonial rule, widespread famines stopped after it achieved independence 180 years later, in 1947.
What caused the 1770 famine? The continued raising of taxes by the Company, together with the drought and indifference of the British occupiers, resulted in the deaths of ten million Bengalis. Some historians call it a genocide, though not one cause by guns or gases. The Great Bengal Famine reminds us that unequitable treatment and unchecked greed can have destructive societal power when used to deny basic freedoms and access to justice … and incite others to rebellion and revolution.
Well Paul, another uplifting story. The British greed would show no mercy whenever profit was involved. Truly horrible and a total disrespect for life. The arrogance displayed by the British East India Company was displayed elsewhere like Ireland and China. So surprising that the story reached the American colonies and that it caused the reaction it did.