THE CHALISA 257 



people perished or sought other homes. Sirsa was 

 deserted, and a large tract of country passed at the 

 time from under regular sway and could not after- 

 wards be recovered by the Sikhs.' Captain Wall 

 writes (in his reply to the Famine Commission, 1880): 

 ' No one can fail to observe the enduring mark left on 

 the country and its tenures by the famine of 1783. In 

 Hissar that famine literally depopulated the country, 

 and the whole agricultural stock perished. At its 

 close hardly any of the original inhabitants remained. 

 Few villages now existing even pretend to a history 

 which goes back to a period before this famine, and 

 there is not one that does not date its present form of 

 tenure from the time when cultivation was resumed.' 

 This impression is confirmed by the President of the 

 Bengal and Orissa Famine Commission, 1866, Sir 

 George Campbell. ' Twenty years ago, when this 

 event was scarcely beyond the memory of the most 

 aged, the President lived in very intimate relations 

 with the people of the Upper Sutlej, and both the 

 popular accounts and clear historical traces seemed 

 to him distinctly to point to more complete and 

 permanent desolation than anything known in modern 

 times. A new era and a new population seem to 

 reckon from that date, the Native year or Sambat 1840.' 

 The only contemporary evidence regarding the 

 famine in the most afflicted districts which 1 have 

 come across is the following curt and grim notice in 

 the Calcutta Gazette, May 13, 1784: 'Wheat is now 

 selling at Battabah, 9 seers, at Lahore, 4 seers, and at 

 Jummoo, 3 seers.'* 



* Mr. H. G. Keene, who has made a particular study of this 

 period of the history of Hindustan, adds : ' Children were left to 

 wander and feed on the berries of the forest, and thus became an 

 easy prey to the wild animals, who, shaking off all fear of man, fed 

 upon human flesh in open day and in the most public places.' — Vide 

 p. 407, 'A Sketch of the History of Hindustan,' by H. G. Keene, 

 W. H. Alien and Co., London. 



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