Latest / The Hidden History of Bengal: Kingdoms, Empires, and Revolution — Fexingo History / The Great Bengal Famine of 1770: East India Company's Man-Made Catastrophe
Transcript
- Lucas: So we've talked a lot about the battles and the politics — Plassey, Buxar, the rise of Company power. But there's a quieter, slower catastrophe that followed all of that, and in some ways it was even more decisive in shaping Bengal's future. Luna: The famine of 1770? Lucas: Exactly. The Great Bengal Famine. It's often called a 'natural' famine — drought, crop failure — but the more you look at it, the more it looks like something the East India Company engineered, at least in part. Between 1769 and 1773, roughly ten million people died — that's a third of Bengal's population. Luna: Ten million. That's staggering. And you're saying the Company caused it? Lucas: Not caused it like a switch, but created the conditions. The trigger was a failed monsoon in 1768 and 1769, yes. But famines had happened before in Bengal and they were usually localized, and people coped. What was different this time was that the Company, after gaining the diwani — the right to collect revenue — in 1765, had drastically increased land taxes. Zamindars, the local landlords, were pressed to extract every last rupee from the peasants, often using violence. Luna: So the peasants had no reserves left when the rains failed. Lucas: None. And worse, the Company had started forcing peasants to grow opium and indigo instead of rice, because those were more profitable for export to China and Europe. So when the drought hit, there was less staple grain in the ground to begin with. Meanwhile, the Company's own officials were hoarding rice and speculating on prices. Warren Hastings, who was Governor of Bengal at the time, later admitted that the Company's actions made the famine worse. Luna: Hastings admitted it? That's surprising. Lucas: He did, in a way. In his reports back to London, he wrote that 'the Company's servants have in many instances aggravated the distress.' But the Company didn't stop its revenue collection. In fact, in 1770, the worst year of the famine, the Company actually increased its tax demand by 10 percent. They collected almost the full amount too, because if zamindars couldn't pay, they were stripped of their lands. Luna: So they were taxing people who were starving to death. Lucas: Exactly. Contemporary accounts describe horrific scenes. One British official, John Shore, wrote about villages where 'the living were too few to bury the dead.' Another traveler, William Hodges, saw vultures picking at corpses along the banks of the Bhagirathi River. But the Company's response was to do almost nothing. They actually exported grain from Bengal to other parts of India during the famine. Luna: They exported grain while people were dying of hunger? Lucas: Yes. And it wasn't just indifference — it was policy. The Company's directors in London were focused on profit. They'd borrowed heavily to finance their wars, and they needed Bengal's revenue to pay dividends. So the extraction continued. There's a famous Bengali poem from that time that says: 'The English have come, and with them famine.' It's not poetic exaggeration; it's a political statement. Luna: What about the local response? Did anyone try to help? Lucas: Some zamindars did open their granaries, but they were also under pressure. The Mughal Emperor Shah Alam II, who was a puppet by then, issued a farman — a decree — ordering relief, but it had no effect. The only organized relief came from the Hindu and Muslim religious institutions, which set up free kitchens. But they were overwhelmed. The scale was just too vast. Luna: And the long-term effect on Bengal? Lucas: It transformed the economy. Millions of peasants died or fled, so vast tracts of land went fallow. The Company then auctioned off these lands to new zamindars, often speculators from Calcutta, who had no connection to the local population. This created a new class of absentee landlords, and the old Mughal-era system of reciprocal obligations between landlord and peasant was destroyed. That set the stage for the zamindari system that persisted until Independence. Luna: So in a way, the famine was the real conquest of Bengal — not Plassey or Buxar, but this slow, grinding destruction of the social fabric. Lucas: That's exactly right. And it's not just a historical footnote. The famine of 1770 became a template for later colonial famines in India, including the Great Famine of 1876–78 and the Bengal Famine of 1943. In each case, the combination of extractive taxation, export of grain, and official indifference produced mass death. It's a pattern. Luna: And it's a pattern that continues to echo in debates about colonialism's legacy. Lucas: Absolutely. You know, if you've been coming along with us through these conversations — about South Asia, about the layers of empire and resistance — you might appreciate that we keep this show ad-free. That only works because of listeners who support it directly, at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's a small way to keep these stories alive, without interruption. Luna: Yeah, every bit helps, and it's all listener-powered. Lucas: And speaking of stories that need telling — the 1770 famine also had a profound cultural impact. It's said to have influenced the development of the Bengali folk genre called 'kabigaan', where poets would improvise verses about current events. The famine became a recurring theme, a way for people to process the trauma. Luna: So art as a response to catastrophe. Lucas: Exactly. And that tradition of using poetry and song to comment on social injustice continued through the 19th century, right up to the works of Rabindranath Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam. The famine was a wound that didn't heal, but it also forged a new kind of political consciousness in Bengal. People began to see the British not just as rulers, but as fundamentally alien and exploitative. Luna: And that consciousness eventually fed into the independence movement. Lucas: It did. The famine of 1770 is a reminder that history isn't just battles and treaties — it's also what happens to ordinary people when systems fail. And in Bengal, that failure was not an accident. It was the logical outcome of a profit-driven empire.