EIGHTEENTH CENTURY FAMINES 245 



3 or 4 seers of grain. The people died in numbers, as 

 did also the cattle. The people in the villages became 

 restless, like fish, for want of water, left their homes 

 and wandered from jungle to jungle, numbers also 

 going to Malwa and other places.' 



1757-66. — Minor famines reported from Kutch. 



1769-70. — The great Bengal famine, in which one- 

 third of the population is reported to have died. 



1774. — A minor famine in Kutch. 



1781-82. — A famine in the neighbourhood of Madras, 

 said to have been mainly due to the war with Haidar 

 Ali. Mill ('History of India,' vol. v., p. 256) says: 



4 The bodies of those who expired in the streets or in 

 the houses, without anyone to inter them, were daily 

 collected and piled in carts, to be buried in large 

 trenches out of the town, to the number, for several 

 weeks, of not less, it is said, than 1,200 or 1,500 a week.' 



1782. — A minor famine is reported from Kutch in 

 this year. 



1783. — The great Chalisa, which extended from the 

 eastern edge of the Benares province to Lahore and 

 Jammu. 



1790-92. — There was a series of bad harvests in the 

 Southern Maratha country from 1787-88 to 1795-96, 

 which culminated in 1790-92. According to tradition, 

 this was one of the severest famines ever known. It 

 extended over the whole of the (present) Bombay 

 Presidency (excepting Sindh), into Haidarabad, and 

 affected the northern districts of Madras. It was 

 known as the Doji Bara, or skull famine, because the 

 people died in such numbers that they could not be 

 buried. ' It is said that some of the higher classes, 

 being unable to obtain grain at any price and rejecting 

 animal food, poisoned themselves, while the poorer 

 classes found a scanty subsistence from roots, herbs, 

 dead animals, and even human corpses. There is a 

 tradition that a woman in Gokak was driven by hunger 

 to devour her own offspring, but that the indignation 



