Latest / The Hidden History of Bengal: Kingdoms, Empires, and Revolution — Fexingo History / The Famine That Changed Everything: Bengal 1770
Transcript
- Lucas: So we've talked a lot about Bengal's political history — the Nawabs, the Company, the battles. But today I want to look at something that fundamentally reshaped the land and its people: the Great Bengal Famine of 1770. It's estimated that ten million people died — about a third of the population. And the debate over who was responsible has never really been settled. Luna: Ten million in one famine? That's staggering. Lucas: It is. And context matters — famines weren't new. Bengal had them before, but nothing on this scale. What made this one different was the perfect storm of ecological disaster and British economic policy. Lucas: To understand that storm, we need to rewind to 1765, when the Company acquired the diwani — the right to collect revenue — from the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II after the Battle of Buxar. Suddenly, the East India Company was not just a trading outfit with an army; it was the de facto tax collector for Bengal, Bihar, and Odisha. Luna: And they had no idea how to run a revenue system. Lucas: Right. The old Mughal system was intricate — it involved local zamindars, hereditary landholders who knew the land and the peasants. But the Company saw inefficiency and corruption. They wanted to maximize revenue to pay for their military campaigns and to ship silver back to London. Lucas: So they doubled the land tax. In some areas, it tripled. And they collected it with ruthless efficiency. When a peasant couldn't pay, they were tortured, their cattle seized, their huts burned. The idea was to create a land market where those who couldn't pay lost their rights — but in practice, it squeezed the life out of the countryside. Luna: And then the rains failed. Lucas: Two consecutive monsoons — 1768 and 1769 — were weak. The rice crop withered. But the Company continued to demand the same revenue. They actually increased it in 1770, right as the famine was taking hold. The collector of Birbhum wrote to his superiors that 'the whole province is a desert' — but the money still had to come. Lucas: Warren Hastings, who became governor of Bengal in 1772, later defended the Company's actions. He argued that the famine was a natural calamity, and that the Company had actually remitted some taxes. But critics — then and now — point out that the Company was still exporting grain to Europe during the famine. They were trading rice while people starved. Luna: So it wasn't just negligence — it was active profiteering. Lucas: Exactly. Bengal's rice was a valuable export, and the Company's private traders — their own employees — were shipping it to Madras and Bombay, where prices were higher. The famine didn't stop that trade. In fact, the Company's records show that in 1770, the year of peak mortality, Bengal exported more grain than in 1768. Lucas: And then there was the question of land. After the famine, the Company actually expanded cultivation by forcing peasants back onto abandoned fields — but the population had collapsed. So they imported labor from other parts of India. And they began to shift agriculture away from food grains toward cash crops like opium and indigo, which were more profitable for export. Luna: So the famine permanently changed Bengal's economy. Lucas: Profoundly. Before the famine, Bengal was one of the most prosperous regions in Asia — a center of textile manufacturing, shipbuilding, and agriculture. Afterward, it became a colonial backwater, dependent on imports for basic goods. The deindustrialization that we often associate with nineteenth-century India really accelerated in the 1770s. Lucas: Take the textile industry. Before the Company's takeover, Bengali weavers produced muslin and silk that were famous from Rome to China. But the Company imposed monopolies on cloth and forced weavers to sell at below-market prices. The famine finished off many weaving communities. By 1800, Bengal's textile exports had collapsed. Luna: And all of this is happening under Company rule, not the Crown. Lucas: Right — the British government didn't directly control Bengal until 1858. So the famine happened under a private corporation, accountable to its shareholders. And its response was characteristic: Hastings did investigate, but the directors in London were more concerned with dividends than relief. When news of the famine reached London, there was public outrage, but it didn't change policy. Lucas: One fascinating side story: the famine helped trigger the Sannyasi Rebellion, which we covered briefly in episode 37. Those wandering holy men — sannyasis — had been pushed off their lands by the tax increases. They formed armed bands and attacked Company warehouses. Hastings eventually suppressed them, but it was a sign of deeper unrest. Luna: So the famine was a catalyst for resistance. Lucas: Absolutely. And it also shaped British attitudes toward India. The famine was seen in London as proof that Indians were incompetent, that the Company needed to be more interventionist. But on the ground, the lesson was different: that the Company's revenue system was broken. That realization would lead to reforms under Hastings and later Cornwallis, but by then, the damage was done. Lucas: How many died? The official Company estimate was ten million, but modern historians like Rajat Datta argue that number might be inflated — or it might be conservative. The census data is terrible. But we know that entire districts lost half their population. In Murshidabad, once the capital of the Nawabs, villages were empty for decades. Luna: And yet this famine is not as famous as the Irish Potato Famine or the Bengal Famine of 1943. Lucas: Exactly — and that's partly because it happened early in the colonial period, before systematic record-keeping. But also because the famine was quickly overshadowed by the American Revolution and the wars in Europe. The Company's shareholders did not want to dwell on it. And in Bengal itself, the memory was passed down orally, not in official histories. Lucas: There's a famous poem from the period — 'The Plague of the Land' — by a Bengali poet named Bhabanicharan Bandyopadhyay. It describes the famine in vivid, terrifying detail: piles of corpses, mothers abandoning children, dogs eating human flesh. That poem was banned by the Company for years. Luna: They suppressed even the memory of it. Lucas: In a sense, yes. But the famine left a deep scar on Bengal's collective consciousness. It shattered the old social order — zamindars lost their lands, peasants became landless laborers, and the economy shifted from subsistence to extraction. And it taught a brutal lesson about what it meant to be ruled by a corporation whose first loyalty was to its bottom line. Lucas: So when we think about the rise of British power in India, we often focus on battles and treaties. But the real transformation happened on the ground — in the fields, the weaving sheds, the tax offices. And the famine of 1770 was the turning point that made Bengal a colonial hinterland. Luna: It's hard to think of a more profound change. And it's a story that deserves to be told more often. Lucas: Absolutely. There's a lot more we could say — about the debates over how many died, the role of private trade, the impact on later famines — but that might be a topic for another episode. For now, I think it's worth sitting with this: ten million lives lost, and the world barely remembers.