Orissa Famine and India’s Struggle for Freedom

By Saswat Pattanayak

I shall briefly describe the possible role Orissa Famine might have played in cementing India’s struggle for independence.

Although famines had been a feature of Indian life from 12th century onwards, they used to be a result of seasonal changes – excess or lack of monsoon rains. And those famines used to impact only a single region at a time. 

However, from 1860s onwards, according to Dr. Judith E. Walsh, the famines in India were largely man-made, caused by food shortages overlooked by an apathetic British administration, and that process had started from Orissa. 

Orissa Famine had caused over 800,000 deaths and affected over 3 million people – of course, famine death statistic is reached only after subtracting the average number of deaths normally expected from the number of deaths that occur.

Unlike the famines in the past, the “Orissa Famine” had resulted in a continuous series of famines in the region and adjoining areas. In the last part of 19th century there were over 12 million famine deaths across regions following the pattern of neglect that started systematically with Orissa. 

Taking cognizance of this, a Liberal viceroy George Frederick Samuel Robinson, 1st marquess of (Lord) Ripon, passed the Famine Code which formally held the government responsible, by outlining interventions which needed to be followed to contain them. The Famine Code prescribed ways to detect shortages and to transport food grains/relief measures into the affected regions. Lord Ripon was acceptable to the Indians and he according to Encyclopedia Britannica, “weakened the British Empire and built up the Commonwealth.”

What Dr. Walsh hasn’t written about in her book on India’s history but is worth mentioning here, is that Lord Ripon was also instrumental in repealing the Vernacular Press Act of 1878. Because of that, the local-language newspapers gained equal freedoms with English ones. After all these years, now we know that the overall decrease in famines is directly proportional to increase in press freedom. 

Likewise, Lord Ripon had proposed Ilbert Bill which was aimed at allowing Indian magistrates to rule over British subjects – something that was unprecedented and deemed too controversial. In fact, this proposal from Ripon and the opposition to it by the British elites prompted for the first time a decisive politicization of Indian national freedom struggle. Such revolutionary manners that paved the way to freedom struggle and India’s independence subsequently, had their seeds sown by Lord Ripon while observing the Orissa Famine.

Further Recommended Readings: 

Works of Dr. Judith E. Walsh. Currently, she is professor in History and Philosophy at the State University of New York and she has a Ph.D. in modern South Asian History from Columbia University. 

Dr. Walsh has visited Odisha and in her book “A Brief History of India”, she has depicted Puri’s Jagannath Temple and a Ganesh idol from Bhubaneswar – both of which are photographed by her. Even as she describes Ganesh as western India’s Ganapati, she has chosen to use the photo from Odisha’s capital city. In the chapter about India’s freedom struggle, she describes Ganesh as a god who helps his worshippers overcome obstacles in life. 

Dr. Walsh addresses British rule quite extensively and in that context, she invokes Orissa as the first region that was most visibly neglected by the British. She also mentions Orissa in the context of Bengal’s permanent settlement vis-a-vis Zamindars in Orissa; she delves into Ashoka’s conversion to Buddhism after a “violent campaign against” modern-day Orissa, and how his rock edicts tell us “this battle took more than 100,000 lives and left the ruler questioning the purpose of such violence.” Dr. Walsh writes about Jain king Kharavela who ruled Kalinga in the mid-first century BCE.     

She writes about Subhas Chandra Bose as the son of a wealthy lawyer who had practiced in Cuttack, Orissa and how Bose had a “stormy educational career”. And fast forward, she mentions about the “Campaigns of Hate” in India during 1998-99 which prominently included the killing of an Australian missionary and his two young sons in Orissa by the Hindu extremist group, Bajrang Dal.