Conclusions

All told, scholars now agree, just as British administrators and Indian nationalists at the time recognized, that the late-nineteenth century famines in India were not purely food shortages, but rather were complex crises resulting from the impacts of drought and crop failure on market systems within the colonial Indian society and economy.⁴⁶

Orphaned children during the Madras famine 1876-1878, Tamil Nadu, South India

The famine in India: The village well

Recovery from famines’ consequences in India was achieved unevenly across society, and there were severe impacts on population growth, life expectancy, and political, social, and economic security. The study of these events reveals famine to be a catastrophic event marked not only by failure of rains; rather, it is a consequence of a complex matrix of environmental and cultural factors including changes in weather, disease vectors, infrastructure development, economic systems, social relations among colonizers and colonized people, and specific actions by individuals and governments.

The famine in India: Women grinding corn

⁴⁶ Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 112 and 19.

Famines in Late Nineteenth-Century India: Politics, Culture, and Environmental Justice

Between 1850 and 1899, India suffered 24 major famines, a number higher than in any other recorded 50-year period, resulting in millions of deaths. This exhibition—written by sociologist Naresh Chandra Sourabh and economic historian Timo Myllyntaus—describes the environmental and social factors that contributed to these cataclysmic events, situating their causes and costs within the complex natural and cultural contexts of nineteenth-century colonial India.

Naresh Chandra Sourabh and Timo Myllyntaus

About the author

Myllyntaus, Timo

University of Turku, Finland

Timo Myllyntaus is Professor of Finnish history at Turku University. He earned his first two degrees at Helsinki University and a Ph.D. in economic history at the London School of Economics. His research interests stretch from economic and social history to environmental history. His edited volumes include Thinking through the Environment: Green Approaches to Global History (2011) and Invisible Bicycle. New Insights in Bicycle History (co-edited with Tiina Männistö-Funk, forthcoming in 2016). He has also published around one hundred scientific articles and fifty popular articles. Myllyntaus has directed more than a dozen research projects, participated in activities of various scientific organizations including the European Society for Environmental History, and acted as a peer-reviewer for several journals.

Sourabh , Naresh Chandra

Institute of Social Research and Development, India

Naresh Chandra Sourabh is professor and founder Director at the Institute of Social Research and Development, Patna, India. He received his M.A. degree in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, in 1982 and his Ph.D. also in Sociology from the University of Helsinki in 2008. He is the author of the socio-ethnographic work The Culture of Women’s Housework. Previously, Dr. Sourabh lectured “Food in Indian History- Production, Consumption and Culture from the Colonial Times to the Present” at Turku University, where he was a fellow with the project Finnish Harvest Failures and Famines in the International Context, funded by the Academy of Finland.

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Famines in Late Nineteenth-Century India: Politics, Culture, and Environmental Justice

About the author

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