Indentured labour Famine, though no stranger to India, increased in frequency and deadliness with the advent of British colonial rule. Between and , there were only four famines. But in the last quarter of the century there were famines. It is estimated that over five million died.
By , Romesh Chunder Dutt, a former ICS officer and a staunch nationalist, enumerated mass famines since the 1860s, putting the total death toll at million. out from the British market by high protective duties. This policy ruined the Indian weavers and traders. Large numbers of weavers were thrown out of employment and forced to seek livelihood in agriculture, which increased the pressure on the already overcrowded land.
Charles Travelyan to a Select Committee of the House of Commons in made the following observation: “The peculiar kind of silky cotton formerly grown in Bengal, from which the fine Dacca muslins used to be made, is hardly ever seen. The population of the town of Dacca has fallen from , to , or , and the jungle and malaria are fasten croaching upon the town. … Dacca, which was the Manchester of India has fallen off from a very flourishing town to a very poor and small one; the distress there has been very great indeed.” Abbe Dubois, a French Catholic missionary, before his return to Europe in wrote: “misery and desolation prevailed everywhere and that thousands of weavers were dying of hunger in the different districts of the Presidency [Madras].” “The misery hardly finds parallel in the history of commerce…. The bones of cotton weavers are beaching the Gangetic plains of India,” said the Governor General William Bentinck.
Contrasting Muslim rule with British governance William Bentinck himself acknowledged the benevolent nature of the former. ‘In many respects’, Bentinck wrote, ‘the Muhammedans surpassed our rule; they settled in the countries which they conquered; they intermarried with the natives; they admitted them to all privileges, the interests and sympathies of the conquerors and conquered became identical. Abbe Dubois XI History - Lesson - -