Place · famine-hit region · India
Deccan famine, 1876–78
The 1876–78 famine affected large parts of the Madras Presidency, Mysore, Hyderabad and the Deccan. The repository treats famine as a spatial system of drought, grain markets, relief policy, mortality and migration rather than a single-point disaster.
- Date
- 1876–1878
- Function
- Trade & production
- Patron dynasty
- British Raj / princely states
- Condition
- past event / memory landscape
- Confidence
- Established / referenced — established event; mortality estimates vary
- Location
- 15.300, 77.500
Connections (1)
- Colonial catastrophe governanceVictorian Gothic & Art Deco, Mumbai
The 1876–78 famine killed somewhere between five and ten million people in the Madras Presidency, Mysore, Hyderabad and the Deccan, while grain continued to be exported and the Viceroy held a Durbar at Delhi. The relief policy — a wage below subsistence, on the ground that generosity would demoralise — was argued over in exactly the Bombay institutions, newspapers and legislative councils that the Gothic seafront housed, and it is where Naoroji's drain theory came from.
Sources
Indian Famine Commission records; modern famine scholarship including studies of the South Indian Famine of 1876–78.
Open Deccan famine, 1876–78 in the repository →