Ghosts in the dust of Gujarat
India is still trying to dig itself free from the legacy of the British Raj
Special report: natural disasters
Mike Davis Sunday February 11, 2001 The Observer
In India, as in El Salvador, Turkey and Armenia previously, grief turns to anger as survivors confront the 'unnatural' dimensions of earthquake disaster. Thousands have perished less as a result of plate tectonics than of poorly, even criminally constructed homes, schools and factories. Hundreds of people who might have been saved have died in the rubble for want of rescue equipment. The core issue is not seismicity but vulnerability to extreme but inevitable natural events. The facile explanations are 'poverty' and 'underdevelopment', yet there is another, more ghostly, culprit: the enduring disaster of the Raj.
A hundred years ago, the residents of Ahmedabad were also burning their dead on huge, makeshift funeral pyres. The death toll in 1901, however, was a full order of magnitude greater than today's. Drought, famine and cholera in tandem scythed down one in six of Gandhi's fellow Gujaratis. Among outcast or tribal people, the mortality was closer to 30 per cent.
As in the latest tragedy, the proximate cause was environmental: an epic monsoon failure, probably arising from the global El Niño event of 1899-1900 that turned Gujarat's 'once green as a park' countryside (according to an American missionary) into 'a blasted waste of barren stumps and burned fields'. A correspondent of the Times of India was unnerved by the vast dome of blue, cloudless sky over a slowly dying landscape: 'I do do not think I ever hated blue before, but I do now.'
The drought, which afflicted most of north-central India, was counterbalanced by bumper harvests in Bengal and Burma. As the official famine report would later emphasise: 'Owing to the excellent system of communications which now brings every portion of the [Bombay] presidency into close connection with the great market, the supplies of food were at all times sufficient.'
Traditional Indian polities like the Moguls and the Marathas had zealously policed the grain trade in the public interest, distributing free food, fixing prices and embargoing exports. As one horrified British writer discovered, these 'oriental despots' sometimes punished traders who short-changed peasants during famines by amputating equivalent weights of merchant flesh.
The British worshipped a savage god known as the 'Invisible Hand' that forbade state interference in the grain trade. Like previous viceroys (Lytton in 1877 and Elgin in 1897), Lord Curzon allowed food surpluses to be exported to England or hoarded by speculators in heavily guarded depots. Curzon, whose appetite for viceregal pomp and circumstance was legendary, lectured starving villagers that 'any government which imperilled the financial position of India in the interests of prodigal philanthropy would be open to serious criticism; but any government which by indiscriminate alms-giving weakened the fibre and demoralised the self-reliance of the population, would be guilty of a public crime'.
Vaughan Nash of the Manchester Guardian and Louis Klopsch of the New York Christian Herald were appalled by Curzon's 'penal minimum' ration (15 ounces of rice for a day's hard labour) as well as the shocking conditions tolerated in the squalid relief camps, where tens of thousands perished from cholera.
'Millions of flies,' wrote Klopsch, 'were permitted undisturbed to pester the unhappy victims. One young woman who had lost every one dear to her, and had turned stark mad, sat at the door vacantly staring at the awful scenes around her.'
Despite Kiplingesque myths of heroic benevolence, official attitudes were nonchalant. British officials rated Indian ethnicities like cattle, and vented contempt against them even when they were dying in their multitudes. Asked to explain why mortality in Gujarat was so high, a district officer told the famine commission: 'The Gujarati is a soft man... accustomed to earn his good food easily. In the hot weather, he seldom worked at all and at no time did he form the habit of continuous labour. Very many even among the poorest had never taken a tool in hand in their lives. They lived by watching cattle and crops, by sitting in the fields to weed, by picking cotton, grain and fruit, and by... pilfering.'
Gujaratis are famously industrious and probably enjoyed a higher average level of nutrition and well-being than their English contemporaries before the arrival of the East India Company.
In 1901, before the famine had run its course, the Lancet suggested that a conservative estimate of 'excess mortality' in India from starvation and hunger-related disease during the previous decade was 19 million.
As the great Indian political economist Romesh Chunder Dutt pointed out in one of his Open Letters to Lord Curzon , British Progress was India's Ruin. The railroads, ports and canals which enthused Karl Marx in the 1850s were for resource extraction, not indigenous development. The taxes that financed the railroads and the Indian army pauperised the peasantry.
Even in the macabre denouement of the Gujarat famine, the Government announced that 'the revenue must at all costs be gathered in', an act which Vaughan Nash denounced as 'picking the bones of the people'. When patidar farmers, ruined by the drought, combined to refuse a 24 per cent increase in their taxes, the collectors simply confiscated their land.
On the expenditure side, a colonial budget largely financed by taxes on farm and land returned less than 2 per cent to agriculture and education. While a progressive and independent Asian nation like Siam was annually investing two shillings per capita on education and public health, the Raj expended barely one penny per person as 'human capital'.
Not surprisingly, there was no increase in India's per capita income during the whole period of British overlordship from 1757 to 1947. Celebrated cash-crop booms went hand in hand with declining agrarian productivity and food security. Moreover, two decades of demographic growth (in the 1870s and 1890s) were entirely wiped out in avoidable famines, while throughout that 'glorious imperial half century' from 1871 to 1921 immortalised by Kipling, the life expectancy of ordinary Indians fell by a staggering 20 per cent.
This is the catastrophic past from which Indians are still trying to dig themselves free.
• Mike Davis's latest book, Late Victorian Holocausts , is reviewed on page 16 of the Review section