Ram Prasad Sharma, After the Hunger: India in the 1880s (Bombay: Prakash, 2004)
… If the Great Rebellion was the last dying gasp of pre-colonial India, then post-colonial India was born in the Great Famine.
In the early 1870s, strange as it no doubt seemed even ten years later, famine relief was one of the chief arguments of the Raj’s
defenders. The British authorities had responded quickly and effectively to the 1869 Rajputana famine of and the Bihar famine of 1873-74. In Bihar, there were almost no fatalities, and while a million people died in Rajputana, most of these were in the princely states (of which only Udaipur made any significant relief effort) or in the districts that were overwhelmed by refugees from those states. Even many critics of British rule compared the Raj’s efforts favorably with those of the maharajahs, of whom many were uninterested in famine relief and others were constrained by limited resources.
All that changed with the Deccan crop failure of 1876.
Successful as the Bihar relief effort had been, it had its critics both in London and within the Government of India, many of whom accused the provincial government of excessive spending. The colonial administration provided two types of relief in times of famine: “relief works,” or public-works projects that provided able-bodied workers with a basic ration and a small wage, and “charitable relief” for those unable to work. By 1876, it had responded to the fiscal criticism by tightening the standards for both types of relief as well as reducing the rations provided at the relief-work camps – measures intended both to impose fiscal economies and to prevent “demoralization,” or dependency, within the Indian population.
This diminished relief program was utterly unable to deal with the Great Famine. The drought of 1876 and the resulting crop failures caused hunger throughout southern India, and by mid-1877, the famine had spread to the Central Provinces and the northwest. In all, some 60 million people were affected.
To say that the results were disastrous would be an understatement. Many skilled tradesmen and their families, who were not considered poor enough to meet the more stringent relief criteria, were turned away from the camps. Those who did find places in the relief works fared hardly better, because the ration provided – one pound of grain a day for men, and less for women and able-bodied children – was insufficient to sustain life for heavy laborers. And with the qualifications for charitable relief also tightened, many who were only marginally capable of physical labor were directed to the works.
As the famine progressed, and as hundreds of thousands and then millions perished, an outcry arose not only from Indian leaders but from many British officials and civilians. William Digby, a journalist then working in India, organized a charitable fund to supplement the governmental relief programs, and wrote fiery despatches to British newspapers castigating the colonial government. When the administration confidently proclaimed that the hunger was “under control,” he responded that “a famine can scarcely be said to be adequately controlled which leaves one fourth of the people dead.” [1]
Another who joined the outcry was Sarah Child, a Dorsetshire widow who studied nursing after her husband’s death and took up a post in India, which she had developed a fascination for as a young woman. She used her immunity as an Englishwoman to confront the Regent of Hyderabad in his palace, personally shaming him into tripling his relief effort, and she did the same to British district officers and commissioners throughout the southern provinces. She was arrested and jailed on numerous occasions, but was released each time after an outcry by her supporters, who included several members of Parliament. It is estimated that, through her campaign, more than two hundred thousand people were fed – but on the scale of the Great Famine, this was no more than a drop in the bucket.
Ultimately, after the Prime Minister himself joined the chorus of outrage – famously responding to a supporter of fiscal economy with the statement that “an Empire which cannot feed its subjects has no claim to be an Empire” – the relief program was increased. The ration at the relief works was increased to a pound and a half of grain and three ounces of dhal, more funds were budgeted for charitable relief, and the Government of India began importing rice from Burma, which it had hitherto refused to do. But this was too late to prevent the hunger from being the worst to afflict India since the Skull Famine of the previous century, with a death toll somewhere between five and eight million. [2]
In the aftermath of the famine, the British government empaneled a commission, which resulted in the adoption of provincial famine codes, stockpiling of food reserves and implementation of a standard famine-relief ration of rice, sugar and pulses. The response of the Indian elites was slower, but more profound. For them, the Raj’s response to the Great Famine masked what had been hidden in the 1869 and 1873-74 crop failures: that British famine relief efforts were a matter of grace that could be withdrawn at any time, and that the debate over the life and death of Indians had been carried on in their hearing but without their participation. The famine, even more than conquest – when, at least, they had stood in their ranks and fired, and chosen which side to support – had taught them the helplessness of colonialism. Their response would be both political and religious…
Mirza Ghulam Ahmad
… Abacarism had achieved its first foothold in India during the 1860s, brought there by Hadhrami traders who had heard of it in Mecca. It had been an Indian, in fact, who introduced Tippu Tip to Abacarist doctrines in Zanzibar. In the wake of the famine, it would be the large Indian merchant community of Zanzibar who would bring Tip’s prophetic Abacarist Ibadism back across the ocean, where its ecstatic ritual would mesh well with the apocalyptic social landscape and where its emphasis on equality and justice between ruler and ruled would answer to the people’s demands. By the early 1880s, this would give Ibadism its first significant presence in India.
At the same time, another prophetic reformer, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, was himself combining Abacarism with Belloist and Mouride notions of communal solidarity. Like Tippu Tip, Ahmad claimed that he was a lesser, non-law-bearing prophet, announcing in 1882 that he had been divinely appointed as a reformer. In addition to several heterodox beliefs regarding cyclical history and the continuation of divine revelation, Ahmad borrowed Belloist pacifism, rejecting bloodshed and emphasizing the struggle for individual and communal perfection. From the Mourides, he adopted the principles of self-sufficiency and mutual support as a means of achieving social justice. [3]
These prophetic movements, combined with more conventional Abacarist thinking (if the word “conventional” can be applied at all to Abacarism), soon began to manifest themselves politically: doctrines with such strong components of social justice, democratic consultation and consensus-building could not be confined solely to the metaphysical sphere. The political Islam of the 1880s was opposed to both the excesses of British colonialism and the autocracy of the princely rulers, which it held equally responsible for ignoring the people’s needs and exacerbating the famine. In the words of Hyderabadi poet and reformer Muqtedar Khan, the district officers and the maharajahs were two sides of the same coin, and an unjust Indian ruler was no less to be opposed than an unjust British one.
It was in Hyderabad, in fact, that the reformers would score their first victory. The capital city, which had an Islamic majority (unlike the kingdom as a whole) was the largest Muslim concentration in southern India, and had a large Hadhrami merchant community in which Abacarism had taken root even before the famine. In 1882, Muqtedar Khan and other like-minded individuals formed the Hyderabad Constitutional Union, demanding an elected legislature, a bill of rights and reforms in the civil service and education. Popular unrest struck the capital in 1884, and the Nizam’s army, in which reformist officers were strong, forced the resignation of the regent and the appointment of a new regency council. This council, in turn, appointed a commission to draft a constitution, on which the reformists were represented, and created a 60-member legislative assembly divided equally between Muslims and Hindus.
The assembly was far from everything the reformists wanted – only half its members were elected, voting qualifications were restricted, and its powers were little more than advisory – but it was the first step toward democratization that had been taken in any of the princely states. [4] It was also, most likely, all that could be done without provoking the intervention of British colonial authorities, which viewed popular movements in the princely states with alarm. Nevertheless, it was a foundation that could be built upon, and an example that reformers in other states could cite.
Further north, the nascent Ahmadi movement, which had gained strength among merchants, organized around opposition to trade and industrial restrictions, which in its eyes denied India the wealth to support itself. In addition to preaching against restraints on development, the Ahmadi communities functioned as capital pools, with their members combining resources to expand their businesses and enter the industries that were available to them. These industries included the news media; in 1886, Ali Ansari, a member of this community, founded the
Reform Daily, which would become one of Bombay’s leading advocates for liberal policies …
Allan Octavian Hume
… The Muslims found common cause with their Hindu and Parsi compatriots, who were also galvanized into action by the famine. The elite discontent found a home in the Reform Association, a club which had been founded to promote Indian recruitment to the senior civil service (which was theoretically open to all races, but which at the time could count its Indian members on the fingers of two hands). By the late 1870s, the association had become a political club, advocating not only civil service reform but elected provincial governments and the elimination of all legal distinctions between British and Indian.
During the years after the famine, the Reform Association’s leaders, urged on by sympathetic members of the colonial administration, began talking about developing a comprehensive political program and a national strategy for its implementation. It took several years to iron out disagreements between leading personalities and create a draft proposal that as many organizations as possible could agree with – and several leading figures did break with the movement along the way – but in 1883, the All-India Reform Congress met in Bombay. It was essentially a shadow constitutional convention, with all the constituent groups of Indian society were represented, including the British – the ornithologist Allan Octavian Hume was among the founders, and both Digby and Child were delegates – as well as an unprecedented show of unity between Hindu and Muslim.
The Congress’ political program, announced on January 11, 1884, did not challenge British rule as such. It called for full legal equality, representation of Indians at all levels of the civil service, democratically elected governments in the provinces and municipalities, devolution of fiscal and development policy to the provincial level, and universal education administered by the provinces. They were willing to concede a special position to the British in India, and to recognize Victoria as empress, as long as the rights of Indians were respected.
The British government, which had been chastened by the famines, did respond with a few concessions. It had already established an Indian Civil Service training course in Bombay, opening the senior service to educated Indians who could not afford to spend a two-year probationary period in Britain, and in 1885, the Local Self-Government (India) Act provided for a staged implementation of elected village and city governments in several provinces. [5] These measures weren’t enough to satisfy the Reform Association, however, and at the same time were too much for many colonial officials, facing widespread opposition within the administration.
With the post-famine reforms largely stalled, the Association faced the problem of implementation. As there were no representative institutions in British India, the most effective platform for change was the civil service, and the Reform Congress resolved to create scholarships to educate promising young Indians and prepare them for the senior service examinations. It also resolved that the Indians resident in Britain should, where possible, become involved with British political parties and even seek office, in order to get access to the bodies where decisions about India’s future would be made.
Dadabhai Naoroji
One of those who took up this call was Dadabhai Naoroji, a former prime minister of the princely state of Baroda and member of the Bombay governor’s council. In 1885, he moved to London and became active in the Liberal Party, contesting the 1886 general election in the Holborn constituency. His candidacy that year was unsuccessful, but it would pave the way for his 1892 win in Finsbury Central, making him the first Indian member of the House of Commons. [6] But even before that, the presence of a strong voice for India in British political circles would have its effect…
______
[1] Everything up to this point happened in OTL, plus or minus a few details.
[2] As compared to 6-10 million in OTL. The lower figure is due partly to the fact that the relief-works ration was increased to the full amount recommended by the Madras sanitation commissioner (as opposed to increasing it halfway, which was done in OTL) and partly to the fat that the British government, which in this timeline is incrementally more sympathetic to its colonial subjects’ concerns, intervened sooner.
[3] In OTL, the Ahmadi movement was founded in 1889. Here, in an environment where revolutionary reformism is a stronger background presence, Ahmad went public with his inspiration a few years earlier. In addition, unlike OTL, this timeline’s Ahmadis will be anti-colonial.
[4] In OTL, Travancore was the first princely state to create a legislature, doing so in 1888. The Travancore legislative council was initially appointed, with the enabling regulation being amended in 1904 to provide for elected members.
[5] In OTL, local self-government was introduced in the Madras Presidency during the early 1890s. Madras seems to have been more willing than most provinces of the nineteenth-century Raj to allow Indian political participation; there were Indians on the governor’s council from the 1860s, and had an
Indian high court judge as early as 1877. This timeline’s act applies across a wider portion of India, and is scheduled to be implemented in stages between 1890 and 1905 (with the more “backward” provinces getting their local councils last).
[6] This happened in OTL, believe it or not.
I assume that Pan-Slavists would argue that Ethiopia should take a back seat to helping the Slavic Brethren in Europe if one goal would conflict with the other (in assigning ressources, chosing political alliances, etc.), but it still would leave the positive attitude to Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Christians unchanged.
