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THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



that of 260 families only 11 had sur- 

 vived, while in Surat, a great and crowd- 

 ed city, he saw hardly a living soul, but 

 at each street corner found piles of dead 

 with none to bury them. 



Unlike the famines in other, countries, 

 where there is frequently a variety of 

 factors contributing to the failure of 

 crops, in India the shortage almost in- 

 variably results from an absence of rain. 

 The country is wholly dependent for 

 food upon its countless small farms, 

 which are worked on practically no capi- 

 tal. Local credit is in the main unorgan- 

 ized, and in times of stress millions of 

 laborers are thrown out of work. 



The success of India's crops from year 

 to year depends upon two monsoons — the 

 southwest, or the rains, and the north- 

 east, which brings the winter rains. For 

 a month or two before the rains (April 

 and May) the greater part of the penin- 

 sula fairly gasps in the heat. The soil is 

 baked and cultivation is impossible. With 

 June comes the monsoon, which contin- 

 ues until the latter part of September. 

 After the first showers the peasants plow 

 their fields and sow the autumn harvest 

 of millet and rice. The spring harvest, 

 which consists largely of wheat and bar- 

 ley, is sown in October and November. 

 Not only do droughts disarrange this 

 schedule, but prolonged rains, accompa- 

 nied by east winds, cause the wheat to 

 rust, while hot west winds cause the 

 swelling grain to shrivel on the stalk. 



The first of the Indian famines to at- 

 tract wide-spread interest in the western 

 world was the great catastrophe of 1769- 

 1770, during which it is estimated that 

 fully 10,000,000 souls, a full third of the 

 population of Bengal, perished. Like all 

 the famines, it resulted from a failure of 

 rain, supplemented by maladministration 

 on the part of the East India Company. 



The famines which occurred from 1780 

 to 1790 are worthy of note, because it 

 was during this period that the British 

 began to organize relief for the destitute. 

 Lord Cornwallis, by his administrative 

 ability as governor general in this trying 

 time, here managed to regain some of the 

 laurels which he had lost by his defeat 

 at the hands of the American colonists 

 during the Revolutionary ^*ar. 



In the twenty-two famines which oc- 

 curred in India between 1770 and 1900 

 more than 15,000,000 natives perished, 

 and some of the most terrible years — no- 

 tably the famine in southern India in 

 1876- 1878, when 5,200,000 starved in 

 British territory alone — have befallen the 

 empire just when the government be- 

 lieved it had almost mastered the prob- 

 lem of relief. 



CASTE COMPLICATES INDIAN FAMINE 

 REEIEF 



Great Britain has had many difficulties 

 to overcome in handling the Indian food 

 situation, not the least trying being the 

 ever-recurring problem of caste. 



Occupation is still preserved among 

 the Indian natives by inheritance and tra- 

 dition, so that the diversion of labor to 

 industrial pursuits has been an almost 

 impossible task. The supply of agricul- 

 tural labor constantly outruns the de- 

 mand, thus keeping the wage scale ex- 

 tremely low. Caste also prevents people 

 from leaving crowded districts and going 

 to sparsely inhabited regions, of which 

 there are many. 



In time of distress the restrictions 

 which caste throws about rescue and re- 

 lief work would be exasperating if they 

 were not so tragic. For example, in the 

 terrible Orissa famine thousands of San- 

 tals perished, in the midst of ample sup- 

 plies furnished by the government, before 

 it was discovered that there is a peculiar 

 tenet of their faith which forbids them 

 to touch food cooked by Brahmins. It 

 was also discovered that skilled weavers 

 would not go to the ordinary relief-work 

 camps for fear that the hard labor would 

 cause them to lose the delicacy of touch 

 which they value so highly. 



CHINESE FAMINE WHICH STARTED THE 

 BLACK DEATH 



China is another land which famine 

 seems to have marked for its own. Here 

 the difficulty is not so much a matter of 

 crop failures as the excess production of 

 the human crop from year to year. Ex- 

 istence is a perpetual struggle for food 

 in the Celestial Empire, and the smallest 

 deviation from a maximum yield de- 

 stroys the margin of safety between 

 "barely enough" and "starvation." 



