Last Halloween, I told you a story of how Halloween became a commercial success. This Halloween, I instead take you back in time to the real-life stories of which tales of horror are made. At a time in Victorian England when Halloween was just becoming fashionable, propelled by a fascination of fear borne out of the comfort of warm homes, actual horror stories were being lived elsewhere.
The true gothic horror of the 19th century couldn’t be found in Mary Shely’s novels, or literature’s favourite haunted attics. It was in colonial India where the Empire’s greed devoured its own subjects.
Take the Madras famine of 1877, one of many examples of this unrelenting greed. Its catastrophes were not caused by monsoon failures, at least not in totality, but rather by an empire that wore its mask of ‘civilisation’ well. Masquerading behind their railways, notions of ‘democracy’, modernity and London’s fashionable elite strolling down the Thames.
The famine was precipitated by a severe climate event; consecutive monsoon failuresstruck Southern India — the winter rains of 1875 and summer monsoon of 1876 both faltered, leading to withering drought across the Deccan Plateau. Scientists now recognise that this drought was part of a global climate anomaly. The Indian Ocean Dipole and warm Atlantic conditions amplified an already historically intense El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) event, causing simultaneous droughts across much of the tropics. Unfortunately, as the planet keeps warming, we will soon not be able to call such events anomalies. They will likely become our day-to-day. A series of distant disasters, one by one, viewed through the technological boxes in our hands until they’re at our doorstep.
But climate alone cannot starve a subcontinent. What made famine inevitable was how colonialism had left cultivators defenceless long before the skies failed.
It was British economic policy that had left cultivators extremely vulnerable to this storm of events. The imposed land revenue taxes were heavy, often amounting to half or more of gross produce, and they were rigidly collected even in drought years. Under the ryotwari system prevalent in Madras Deccan districts, peasants paid the tax directly to the colonial state, or risked losing their land titles.
As a result, when grain harvests collapsed, basic staples quickly became out of reach for the poor as food prices skyrocketed. The second year of the drought in 1877 only compounded the crisis further. Farmers who had already sold their cattle, tools, and even land to survive the first failed harvest now had nothing left to produce or purchase food. Many had been forced into heavy debt to moneylenders, and by the late summer of that year, millions of people — especially landless labourers and lower caste peasants — were starving and perishing across Southern and Western India.
The British government’s response was to ignore all of this.
The Viceroy at the time, Lord Robert Lytton, and his administration had a strong belief in free market principles and fiscal conservatism. Early warnings of crop failure were met with official complacency, as colonial officials under classical liberal doctrine argued that exporting grain would eventually attract imports and stabilise prices. In practice, however, that never happened. Even as drought spread, grain continued to be exported from India under Lytton’s laissez-faire policies, which they believed would be sufficient to feed the starving through market forces alone.
In fact, at the peak of mass starvation during 1877, British India exported a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat to England (over 320,000 tons) even as India’s people could not afford bread. Those newly built railroads and telegraphs that could have helped distribute food were instead used to collect and ship grain out of famine districts, often to feed English markets at higher prices.
Lord Lytton’s government refused to halt exports or cap prices as grain first doubled, then tripled in price, out of a belief that it would distort the market. Allowing merchants and traders to profit by hoarding supplies and selling at exploitative prices in famine-stricken areas.
With all the pressure to not overspend on relief, born out of this Social Darwinist idea that poverty is caused by a moral deficit of laziness and Lytton’s preparations for a costly war in Afghanistan, when relief was finally provided, it was too little and too late. The relief measures initiated when the extent of the famine could no longer be ignored were deeply influenced by the same Victorian economic ideology and racialised notions of productivity. At times, officials were even known to claim that the famine was just nature’s method of controlling Indian overbreeding. (An opinion later also claimed by Winston Churchill? Idk something similar) Sir Richard Temple, as Famine Commissioner, implemented relief on the principle that aid should be minimal, punitive, and guarded against “excess”.
In early 1877, he set the notorious “Temple wage” for famine labourers: able-bodied Indians seeking food had to work on arduous public works for a daily ration considerably lower than what even his own medical advisors considered necessary for heavy labour — on the theory that too generous relief would encourage idleness. Women and working children received slightly less.
The rationale, as Temple openly stated, was that “any excessive payment might create dependency” or “demoralisation” among the famine-afflicted population. In other words, hunger was to be used as a tool to enforce work and discipline.
Not all British officials supported the government’s official stance. Some, like Dr W. R Cornish, the sanitary commissioner, warned that workers’ health was collapsing on Temple’s gravely insufficient starvation diet. But Temple, backed by Viceroy Lytton, overruled such concerns: “everything must be subordinated to the financial consideration of disbursing the smallest sum of money,”.
And so in the empire’s ledger, even Lady Mercy found that she had to pay for herself. Auditors could sit back and count pennies, while the dead… were counted in millions.
Despite all of this, Lytton went ahead with lavish preparations for Queen Victoria’s proclamation as Empress of India. And for a full week, 68,000 imperial dignitaries in Delhi feasted on imported delicacies, celebrating the Empire’s glory, while millions in Madras starved in what has been called “the worst environmental disaster to ever befall humanity”
The human toll of the Madras famine was ghastly. In the affected regions, excess mortality between 1876 and 1878 is estimated at between 5.5 and 9.5 million lives. A modern demographic study puts the best estimate at around 8.2 million deaths. This staggering figure – millions dead in just two years – makes it one of the worst famines in Indian history. Entire districts were depopulated. In Mysore, for example, the state’s population dropped by 874,000, roughly one-quarter, compared to the 1871 census. Countless villages simply ceased to exist as communities.
People died not only of starvation but also of the epidemics that followed. As famine weakened bodies, diseases swept through the land. In late 1877 and 1878, malaria and cholera in particular savagely ripped through refugee camps and villages of survivors. One report noted that in the second half of 1878, malaria alone killed many more who were already emaciated, finishing what hunger began
Beyond the numbers, contemporary accounts speak to the social disintegration and horror that people experienced. Temple’s relief camps had quickly become sites of mass death rather than refuge. Exhausted, emaciated labourers often died by the roadsides, while conditions in some work camps grew so horrific that entire families chose to abandon the camps and take their chances elsewhere, or even deliberately commit petty crimes to be sent to jail, where at least they might be fed a jail diet better than Temple’s ration. Reports tell of workers dropping dead on the road and “skeletons” dragging themselves to relief works for a few final days of drudgery. Travellers in South India in 1877 described roads “lined with corpses,” villages silent and empty, and gaunt survivors wandering in search of relief.
Female mortality in particular is thought to have been very high as women, especially those pregnant or nursing, suffered acutely as household food allocation favoured men when scarce. Female infanticide rose in disturbingly high numbers — families unable to feed infants sometimes killed newborn girls, believing that boys had a better chance of eventual recovery of the family line. Destitute parents would sell girls into servitude, hoping the child would at least be fed by the buyer. In some areas, there was a surplus of men because of how many women and girls had died, fraying the social fabric so much that marriage patterns shifted.
Acts of desperation abounded at the height of the famine; people ate leaves, roots, and even clay to stave off hunger. In some instances, “a few [people], starved and senseless, resorted to cannibalism.”
Some have argued that the responsibility of India’s famines lay far more with the climate, or the fall in value of India’s cotton, than with British economic policy. This claim has very little substantiated evidence to support it. Government policy pushed struggling peasants into debt and starvation, turning a crisis into a disastrous catastrophe. (Not sure, but i think initial estimates showed that Britain extracted 45 trillion dollars in resources during this period and now today its 65 trillion.) The Madras famine was not an isolated instance; it was one of 25 estimated major famines that took place during the 89 years of the British Raj. In the two thousand years preceding colonial rule, only seventeen are recorded — an increase of nearly fifteen fold. This escalation was no accident of the Crown era alone; the pattern had already taken hold under the East India Company. Even before the British Crown took direct control in 1858, the East India Company’s administration had already overseen repeated famines — by even the most conservative counts, over two-thirds of the seventeen often cited as ‘pre-Raj” occurred under its rule.
These recurrent famines often had eerily similar contributing factors, leading to the assumption that either the lesson was never learned or they simply never cared.
Earlier, under East India Company rule, the Great Bengal Famine of 1770 had killed an estimated 10 million people (about one-third of Bengal’s population). Company policies then – such as relentless land revenue collection even amid crop failure, hoarding by company agents, and a ban on rice imports – were strikingly comparable to the later Madras Famine. Similarly, the Orissa famine of 1866 saw over a million deaths after colonial authorities failed to respond in time (telegraph reports of starvation were ignored for weeks). The famine that hit northwestern India in 1860–61 took 2 million lives, and another in 1868–70 killed an estimated 1.5 million.
Despite the codes that were established after this famine, another massive one engulfed India in 1896, taking the lives of roughly 5 million people with the same familiar issues. Another, three years later, took a million more.
The last major famine of the colonial era was the Bengal Famine of 1943, occurring during World War 2. An estimated 1.5 to 3 million people died from hunger and disease. A crisis once again catastrophised by British administrative decisions. Since Independence, South Asia, despite many challenges, has not experienced a single famine on the scale of the British era.
The material scale of this extraction defies full comprehension. Economic historians estimate that between the start of Company rule and the end of the Raj, Britain drained between US $45 trillion and US $ 65 trillion (in today’s value) from the Indian subcontinent through taxes, trade surpluses, and resource transfers — a sum that, even at its lower bound, surpasses the United Kingdom’s modern annual GDP, 3.644 trillion, many times over.
The end of the formal empire did not reverse this extraction; it restructured it. By independence the subcontinent had been left export-dependent, deforested, and fiscally drained. That legacy of depletion, now defines which nations are the least able to withstand the climate shocks the industrial world’s emissions have created.
As the climate keeps warming, extreme anomalies like those that caused the droughts across South Asia have and will keep increasing in severity and frequency. Every moment that we prioritise more superficial wants is, time that we don’t have, wasted. Already, the poorest and most vulnerable across the world are paying for our collective greed. In 2022, almost one-third of Pakistan was submerged after record monsoon floods, displacing over thirty million people and killing more than a thousand. Across East Africa, prolonged drought has pushed millions towards famine, while island nations start to drown under rising seas.
In the end, the Madras Famine of 1876-1878 stands as a harrowing exemplar of how there are no monsters to fight, and if there really is a true evil then it is a manmade horror. As history now repeats itself, or rather echoes, perhaps the lesson learnt is the dangers of placing profit over human life.