Rice prices rose sixfold as Bengal starved under split rule
The Great Bengal famine of 1769 to 1770 hit Bengal and Bihar, touching some thirty million people, about a third of the region's population. It struck while the East India Company collected the taxes but the Nawab still ran the government, and estimates of the dead range from one million to ten million.
Bengal had been a Mughal province governed by a nawab since the sixteenth century. By the late 1760s power was divided: the Mughal emperor had granted the Company the diwani, the right to gather revenue, while the nizamat, civil administration, stayed with Nawab Najmuddin Ali Khan, who held office from 1765 to 1772. Short of trained officials, the Company contracted tax collection out to others, and the confusion may have deepened the disaster.
The immediate causes were failed crops in autumn 1768 and summer 1769, together with smallpox. Other pressures piled on. Grain dealers stopped advancing grain to peasants yet kept exporting it elsewhere, the Company bought up large amounts of rice for its troops, and its employees and their Indian agents cornered local grain markets. Rice doubled in price by the end of 1769 and then tripled again in 1770. In Bihar, armies marching through drought-hit villages made matters worse. The Company offered little direct relief and did not cut taxes, though its room to do so may have been narrow.
By summer 1770 death was everywhere. The monsoon that followed brought good rain but also disease, which killed many already weakened people. Abandoned, overgrown villages became a familiar sight and piracy rose for years on the Hooghly delta. The toll was uneven: north Bengal and Bihar suffered worst, including Tirhut, Champaran and Bettiah, central Bengal less, and the east only lightly, while parts of the southeast actually produced surpluses. Older estimates put deaths at seven to ten million and the loss of farmed land at a third, but some scholars argue these are inflated by the absence of reliable records and suggest at least one million.
Spinners and weavers died in large numbers because the famine ruined mulberry and cotton and they had no food stored. The crisis hastened the end of divided rule, leaving the Company as sole administrator soon afterwards. In Bengali it is remembered as the Famine of '76, after the local calendar year 1176, and a century later it inspired Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's novel Anandamath.
Source: Great Bengal famine of 1770
