Naturalizing Famine

Abstract This chapter examines the East India Company’s response in Madras to the famines of 1790–2, part of the larger Doji bara famine which was more substantially documented and understood by historians only in the nineteenth century. Unlike the Bengal 1770 famine, this famine received little attention or discussion in Britain, but internal Company correspondence reveals areas of the famine to have been carefully documented; statistical data on crop losses and excess mortality was commissioned by the presidency and, as I show here, the results of efforts to quantify the famine were hotly contested within the hierarchy of the presidency. Contrasted with Bengal in the 1770s, Madras showed a shift away from attributing famine primarily to artificial scarcity caused by market manipulation or by the greed of local elites and zamindars. This famine, unlike those that preceded it, was explained by appeal to cyclical monsoon failures and stubbornness amongst local populations to adapt to such weather patterns, either by introducing different crops or improving irrigation. The chapter concludes by considering what efforts to introduce grain storage schemes in Bengal and Madras in the 1790s can tell us about the naturalization of famine. Exploring the failure of these schemes, I argue that Company leadership relied upon ideas of natural scarcity and famine in order to justify abandoning the ambitious famine relief measures of the era.