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The Kiplings and India: A Collection of Writings from British India, 1870-1900 Main Menu Works by the Kiplings Digital Editions of Works by the Kiplings By Author Social Movements in British India Representing Famine Materials related to the Famines of the 1870s on this site Timeline: The Kiplings and India A visual guide to dates and events involving the Kiplings and Indian culture 1870-1900 Glossary A Path containing Glossary entries Map: Place Names in 19th-Century British-India Google Map, Dublin Core Term: Spatial Works Cited General Bibliography Editorial Team Bios of Individuals Involved in this Project

Famine

Famines were an ongoing and serious fact of life in British India. Historians have noted more than a dozen major famines in the 19th century alone, including two famines in the 1870s, the 1873-4 famine in Bihar and the 1876-8 famine in the Madras and Bombay Presidencies.

The first of those two famine events was handled aggressively by the British administration in Bengal, meaning that the number of deaths from the famine was very small. Lockwood Kipling, who was then living in Bombay, wrote about the local response to the famine in one of the columns attached to the "Famine" tag below.

Some government officials complained that Richard Temple's initial reaction to the Bihar famine was too aggressive and required too much in the way of government expenditure. As a result, under the new Viceroy Lytton, the reaction to the second major Indian famine of the 1870s was much more limited. Richard Temple was sent to manage the famine response, but he appears to have made every effort to ignore the rampant evidence of starvation on a mass scale. Many of the deaths originally recorded in the Madras Presidency listed the cause of death as "cholera," but subsequently historians have pointed out the connection between drought, famine and cholera-related deaths. (One of the columns from the Allahabad Pioneer marked by the Famine Tag below vividly demonstrates the many ways in which Temple and the British administration was attempting to ignore the evidence right in front of their eyes.)

The Kiplings did not address famines very much in their writings. Lockwood Kipling only mentions the famine once in Beast and Man in India, and did not address the Madras Famine at all in his Pioneer columns from 1876-1878. Admittedly, Lockwood and Alice MacDonald Kipling were living in Punjab during the Madras Famine, and thus may not have seen evidence of it first-hand. For his part, Rudyard Kipling missed the 1870s famines -- he was then in England. And he did not witness famine first-hand in the formative period of the 1880s, when he traveled widely around northern India as a journalist.

That said, Rudyard Kipling does substantially address famine in one short story, "William the Conqueror." This story was published in a collection called The Day's Work, 1898, several years after he had left India.

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