188 



Effects of the Famine of 183S. 



[No. SO, 



this increase, no doubt, a very large proportion consists of un- 

 fortunates, who emigrated during the famine and fever- 

 years, and who have since returned to their homes. Among 

 a people so little migratory as the population of a rural dis- 

 trict, there is still a deficit of no less than one hundred and 

 sixty seven thousand souls, and we are led to the inevitable 

 conclusion that at least one hundred and fifty thousand per- 

 ished through starvation and disease !* 



* This is not an ordinary statistical fact — this is no record of so many 

 millions of yards of cloth exported and so much sugar imported, no detail of so 

 many people clothed and so many palates indulged. Here we read of a body 

 of human beings much larger in number than the whole armies of India, not 

 marching with the prospect of glory, promotion and prize money, but leaving 

 their homes, wandering into strange lands with no excitement but the crav- 

 ings of hunger and the agonies of thirst. Of these miserable pilgrims, a 

 mass equal to all the Bengal and Madras Armies put together ; a number 

 "whose corpses laid side by side would closely line both sides of a road 20 

 miles in length ; three times as many as all the British soldiers killed in the Pe- 

 ninsula war ; men, women, and children ten times more than the victims of 

 Cabul, died not among shouts and cheering by the quick blow of bullet or 

 bayonet, not in the course of a few nights, frozen to the sleep that ends in 

 death, but by lingering illness and gnawing pangs prolonged for days and 

 weeks. 



It is distressing but it may be useful to dwell upon the horrors of these 

 calamitous seasons. We are apt not sufficiently to consider in reading of 

 150,000 people killed by famine, how much individual wretchedness is in- 

 dicated by those six digits. We shrink from the six hundred tales of broken 

 up village communities, the uncultivated lands, the uncelebrated feast, the 

 fierce contest at the well, the thronged burning ground, the unburied dead. 

 We like not to contemplate the spectacle presented in thou sands and tens of 

 thousands of families, the herdsman with his uncomplaining cattle dying' 

 around him, stripping the coarse thatch from his roof in the vain hope of sus- 

 taining the lives which for years have been the grateful objects of his care, 

 the sheep burnt to death with the withered grass, the hungry children and 

 their starving parents, the famished mother unable to moisten the parched throat 



of her dying infant, or the hard struggle between the strong ties of kindred 



and the stronger instinct of self-preservation. 



Let it be remembered that the famine of 1833 was by no means confined to 

 the Guntoor District. Many must have a lively recollection of its disastrous 

 effects in other parts of the Presidency, as well as of the multitudes that camo 

 in search of food to Madras itself, where some measure of relief was afforded 

 them. 



