Book review: Bidyut Mohanty,A Haunting Tragedy: Gender,Caste and Class in the 1866 Famine of Orissa

Divided into 11 chapters, Bidyut Mohanty’s work, entitled A Haunting Tragedy: Gender, Caste and Class in the 1866 Famine of Orissa, is not only a thorough analysis of the Odisha famines but is also written in a free-flowing and easy style for a non-specialist general reader. It would certainly help us in comprehending the contemporaneous issues pertaining to food security in Odisha. We are, of course, aware of the starvation deaths in Kalahandi in the 1990s, the Nagada deaths of tribal children due to malnutrition in the Jajpur district in 2016 and the dadan seasonal migration that takes place annually of the ‘low’ caste and class peoples from western Odisha to the brick kilns of south India. The women of lower castes and classes, with low entitlement to food and nutrition, have been frequent victims in such situations. This could also be felt more terribly during the COVID-19 pandemic and the resultant lockdown, shut down, nationwide train cancellations, closure of schools and so on.

Bidyut Mohanty transcends the regional boundaries of Odisha and analyses the Bengal famine of 1943 and the Bangladesh famine of 1974 to highlight the universal nature of suffering in such historical episodes. The victims everywhere come from similar disadvantaged and deprived social groups, and the consequences are almost the same. As a teacher-educator concerned with school education, I know the extent of adverse impact the school closure and online mode of teaching had on children, particularly on the girl students, during the pandemic. It illustrated the persistence of gender discrimination in education. Everywhere, the first-generation schoolgoers from the ‘lower’ caste and lower-class social groups have been its worst victims.

Though the term ‘1866 Famine’ is there in the book’s title, the volume is actually a detailed analysis of all the famines of Odisha that took place between 1866 and 1921. It includes the famines of 1898–1899, 1907–1908 and 1918. Food scarcities and famines had occurred in the distant and near past, but their frequency and intensity increased during British rule, and it happened when England was being transformed as the ‘Workshop of the World’, during the peak period of industrial progress in England. With the major occupational shift of people from agriculture to manufacturing, the increasing number of people were concentrated in industrial centres and the colonial dependence for export of foodgrains also grew. On the other hand, the weavers and salt workers of Odisha, after losing their employment, also became dependent on agriculture, a sector where productivity was almost stagnant. There is a plethora of evidence to suggest that colonialism meant a loss of income and livelihood for a vast chunk of indigenous people, despite the contrary presuppositions of colonial administrators and some scholarly discourses that British rule improved agricultural prosperity and the general level of incomes of peasant households. There was no Odia press, no democracy, and no welfare state to take care of the impoverished multitude of people. On top of that, the top-order bureaucracy had been greatly enchanted with the idea of laissez-faire or free trade. Mohanty points out that T. E. Ravenshaw, the Commissioner of the Odisha Division and the actual decision-maker during the famine of 1866, was a great champion of free trade and was reluctant to interfere in the rice transport which aggravated the famine situation.

Fakir Mohan Senapati, the celebrated author of Odisha, was an eye-witness to the famine of 1866. He was 23 years old then and had been living in Balasore, a major hotspot of the famine. Fifty years later, while writing his autobiography, he gave one whole chapter to describe the details of the famine. He partly blamed Ravenshaw for his administrative mismanagement during the famine, but the blame was more on the lower-level clerks and subordinate native officials for misleading the ‘naïve’, ‘simple’ and ‘noble-hearted’ Commissioner, who, as Fakir Mohan claimed, ushered the ‘golden age’ of Odisha history. Fakir Mohan was not alone; the Odisha-educated middle class of the time also rewarded the Commissioner by naming the only college of the state as the Ravenshaw College in 1879.

Blaming the lower-level officials for the crisis is an easy way of absolving the high-ranking officials, the actual decision-makers, of their responsibility. The scene has not changed even today in the 21st century, though the famine of 1866 is more than 150 years old and nearly 80 years have elapsed since colonial rule ended in India.

The 1866 famine is known in Odisha as ‘Na’Anka Durbhikshya’, the famine that occurred during the ninth year of reign of the Puri king Dibyasingha Deb, who is idealised as the living incarnation of Lord Jagannath in the local tradition. However, neither the princely family nor the Jagannath temple—or the innumerable maths, religious shrines, of the pilgrim city of Puri—came forward for opening chhatras or food relief centres. With ample religious sanctity, if they had started chhatras, the people reaching there for food out of compulsion might not have been drubbed as chhatrakhias, a new social category, considered to be even lower than even the ‘low’ castes during the post-famine period. In such a situation, probably the chhatrakhias’ shame and guilt might not have been an issue. As the author notes, there was hardly any such initiative, though Puri as a pilgrim city could absorb famine victims in various employments, unlike Cuttack and so on.

The author has analysed how a structured caste system worked even among the already outcaste chhatrakhias. The dalits among them remained lower to other non-dalit chhatrakhias, as noticed in the Census of 1881. The famines and the resultant epidemics affected everyone, but the effects were far harsher and more severe on certain categories. This has provoked the author to look at the issue in terms of gender, caste and class. The reports of the census commissioners have shown that deaths among women were less than that among men. Mohanty concludes that this was untrue and analyses how the deaths of women were un-reported and under-reported. The argument that women could easily adapt to food scarcity and were less prone to infectious diseases is not tenable, argues the author.

Christian missionary activities intensified in the 19th century, which coincided with the end of monopoly trade and the beginning of free trade in the colony. Further, it is a fact that the ‘low’ castes and tribals have been mostly attracted to Christianity. Similarly, Alekh Dharma, a reformist religion, which rejected idol worship, Brahmanic supremacy and the caste system, originated in 19th Odisha. Like Christianity, Alekh Dharma also attracted mostly the ‘low’ castes and tribals. Bhima Bhoi, the acclaimed Odia poet was from the Kondh tribal community, and his Mahima bhajans or prayers were the medium for the spread of the Mahima cult everywhere in Odisha. He lived during the famine of 1866. However, while the missionaries were suspected and persecuted for alluring certain social groups to Christianity, the attraction of such social groups to the Mahima dharma has seldom been probed by investigators and persecutors. It is not only a specific famine but also the issue of prolonged food scarcity and the perennial caste ignominy, which has pushed the people out of their Hindu faith. A Mahima sanyasi looking for alms for survival had neither the shame nor the guilt, unlike a chhatrakhia.

The famine of 1866 had led to the death of more than one million people due to starvation and epidemics. It also led to large-scale migration from villages to towns, to Calcutta and to the Assam tea gardens. While the people of Calcutta did not entertain the migrants, for fear of spreading epidemics and perhaps for fear of losing their colonial pride, the migrants, with little bargaining power, were welcomed in the tea gardens for their cheap labour. The growth of the plantation industry due to such cheap labour supplemented the Industrial Revolution in England during the period. However, whether the identity of the tea garden labourers was some respite to the migrant labour from the ignominious caste hierarchy back home, since they could create a new social hierarchy, like the chhatrakhias, is an issue to ponder.

Bidyut Mohanty examines the dadan seasonal migration issue and the sirdar or labour contractor system still prevalent in western Odisha. The women, low-caste and low-class people are the worst victims there. This relates with the past famine history with the present time. To me, this is the strength of this marvellous publication. It has set ways for others to follow, as there are many such hidden histories from across the nation still waiting to be written. Hopefully, such efforts of public intellectualism will be a much-needed antidote to the present state of despairing sloganeering in the name of nationalism.