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Ravenshaw University continues to rekindle the memory of the human tragedy of gargantuan proportions that took a toll on a million human lives in the Odisha Famine in 1865. British Parliament had discussed on Orissa Famine on August 7,1867. The proceedings shed interesting light on the happenings, on the magnitude of human sufferings and on the quality of the government’s response.
“In the second blue book”, Viscount Cranborne, observed “was a series of accounts from various witnesses as to the probability of famine. They might be divided into three classes. First, Native witnesses, who never doubted that famine would arise from the failure of the crop in October 1865. Next, the unofficial persons connected with the Government—irrigating companies, merchants, missionaries—who though more tardy than the first class at arriving at a conclusion, still spoke, all of them of the frightful famine. The third class was the officials, and they, with one or two honourable exceptions, seemed all to have been walking in a dream—to have been surrounded by some veil that hid from them what was visible to everybody else and to have walked on in superb unconsciousness, believing that …… as long as they did nothing absolutely wrong, and did not displease their immediate superiors, they had fulfilled all the duties of their station. At the head of this official organization stood the Lieutenant Governor of Bengal. He further observed,” When the Governor General went to Shimla he was still near his work, but it was difficult to convey an idea of the absurdity of the Lieutenant Governor of Bengal going from Orissa to Darjeeling. Lieutenant Governor of Bengal attempted to manage Orissa from the borders of Tibet.” English officials in India, with many very honourable exceptions, he said, did not regard the lives of the coloured inhabitants with the same feeling of intense sympathy that they would show to those of their own race, colour, and tongue.
Mr Smollett felt that the situation of Orissa was of itself a reason why the conduct of the officials was doubly culpable. It was a province contiguous to Calcutta, and the most distant part of it could be reached in a day and night by palanquin. He had himself seen two famines in India—the last of which occurred in 1852–3. At that time Sir Henry Pottinger proved himself equal to the emergency, and by the arrangements which he made, and the expenditure of between £150,000 to £200,000, the famine was stayed. But what was the case at Orissa? The famine commenced with the failure of the crops in 1865, and though that fact was thoroughly known to the officials and to the Supreme Government, the only alacrity shown was by the Board of Revenue, and that alacrity was of a mischievous kind, for they amused themselves by dispatching circular orders, stating, among other things, that the starving people must depend on private liberality, and that too at the time when starvation and death were rife. More heartless and disgraceful letters, he said, were never penned by any Board in the world.
Lord William Hay referred to the case of a woman whose bowels were actually being eaten by dogs while she was alive, but she was unable from extreme weakness to defend herself; to another incident of a lunatic eating the dead body of a fellow creature, and of another man who was not a lunatic doing the same thing, and also of the stench from dead bodies unburied at one station being so great that it extended for four miles. These things, he said, occurred at a time when the Lieutenant Governor saw no signs of famine.
The Commissioner, Mr Ravenshaw, who was new to the province and without experience there, attributed the stoppage of the sale of rice to a wicked combination among the dealers in the country. But that was not the opinion of Mr. Barlow, a sagacious officer, who had been long in Orissa. In November Mr. Barlow made the important recommendation that a shipload of grain should be imported. A petition from certain Zamindars was also received, stating that the rice crop did not amount to one-third of that of last year. But the Board of Revenue rejected the petition. At that point in time, people in a particular district were, for want of rice, living on roots. Petitions continued to pour in from the Zamindars, but the Commissioner opposed inquiries for fear the Government should have to remit a portion of their revenue. On November 14th he again stated that there was no famine; that the scarcity arose from a combination among the dealers, and that there was nothing to warrant apprehension. He continued to refuse inquiry, and on the 20th of November, he went away to Mayurbhanj on a tour lasting two months. The Commissioners who afterwards inquired into the matter said that the Commissioner's (Mr. Ravenshaw's) opinion was rash, and was founded upon defective information; that he was entirely new to the district, and that he was not in a position to form a competent opinion.
At the end of January Mr. Barlow, Collector, Puri again wrote that the only way to benefit the people was to make it a condition to import rice. The executive engineer of the works also wrote that the people's lives depended upon an early supply of rice. In spite of these applications, the Government of Bengal decided that it could not have anything to do with the importation of rice. Mr. Ravenshaw after visiting the district about this time and finding the state of the country, sent a most important telegram to Calcutta on the 31st of January, in which he asked that rice might be sent. The answer to that telegram was sent by the authorities of Calcutta on the 1st of February. They declined to import rice saying if the market were favourable to its importation, rice would be sure to find its way there. Mr. Ravenshaw, not possessing sufficient official boldness for the occasion, let the matter drop. In the middle of February, Sir Cecil Beadon, accompanied by several officials, visited Orissa, “when it might have been hoped that his eyesight would have convinced him of the necessity that existed for some steps to be taken to prevent the population dying of hunger. Extraordinary to relate, however, nothing he saw appeared to have the slightest effect upon him, and he states that he neither saw nor heard anything about the famine in the course of his tour, which lasted a week.”
Mr. Henry Seymour mentioned that while the suffering in Madras was great, the conduct of the officials was very meritorious, and if similar conduct had been pursued in Bengal, the loss of life would not have been so great. But though no punishment was awarded to Sir Cecil Beadon and others, they must suffer in their own minds on account of the dreadful calamity they had been the cause of producing, while men like Mr Barlow and Mr Forbes would receive in their own consciousness the reward of their own good actions.
England and India had both received a lesson, said Mr Stansfeld, which they would not soon forget. Deeply regretting the past, he trusted that our future rule would give indications of renewed vigour and energy of administration, and of an added and renovated sense of the beneficent effects of foresight and initiative power which could alone justify the despotic, though paternal, rule of a superior race.
Sir Stafford Northcote was of the view that the catastrophe must always remain a monument of their failure, a humiliation to the people of England, to its government, and to those of Indian officials of whom the Englishmen had been perhaps a little too proud. At the same time, he hoped that they might derive from it lessons which might be of real value to them and that out of this deplorable evil good of no insignificant kind might ultimately arise.
Mr Smollett mentioned the reply of Viscount Cranborne—then the head of India Office-- to Sir John Lawrence who as the head of the Government was in possession of £47,000,000 a year of revenue, that the resources of the country ought to be devoted to the saving of life and the relief of destitution. That was a very proper and praiseworthy reply he felt. The misfortune was it came too late. This indicates that up to the 20th of October, the rulers of India never thought it worthwhile to devote the resources at their command to the relief of suffering humanity. They had not thought it their duty. Mr Smollett candidly stated that in his judgment, in the main the Governor General of India was responsible for this great calamity, and Sir Cecil Beadon was also responsible.
This brief account conveys how the imperialists had little respect for human lives in the colony. There was no trace of a superior race that Mr Stansfeld asserted the Englishmen were. The men who handled the great Odisha Famine with few exceptions were petty-minded, incompetent, grossly deficient humans. Ravenshaw was the Face of that inhuman edifice and it is just untenable that Odia race would almost deify that gentleman. If Ravenshaw was not there in Odisha when the Famine arrived, Collectors like Barlow would have done what their counterpart did in Madras and surely saved thousands of lives.
Those educated persons who now see great merit in perpetuating Ravenshaw’s memory portray him as the saviour of the Odia language. Their view, now in circulation, is that though Odisha had been under British rule since 1803, little on education was done for more than six decades and it was the then Commissioner, Mr Ravenshaw, who saved the state and the Odia language by establishing educational institutions.
The situation in the entire country till 1858 as a whole was not very different either. It is worth noting that Queen’s Proclamation of 1858 adopted a policy of strict neutrality in religious matters and conveyed an assurance to the people of India that the Government had neither the right nor desire to impose Christianity upon India. As a consequence, in the next 24 years – between 1858 and 1882 -- policy of the concerned Department of Government was marked by rapid multiplication of Government educational institutions and an indifferent attitude towards Schools by Missionaries. In 1857 there was not a single College in India managed by Indians. However, Indians had made munificent contributions to the establishment of colleges. Notable instances were Elphinstone Institutions, Bombay and Colleges at Agra and Delhi.
The number of Arts Colleges in India in 1855 was just 15 with 3246 pupils. It increased to 38 with 4252 pupils in 1882. Similarly, professional Schools/Colleges increased from 13 to 96; Secondary Schools, from 169 to 1363 with 44,005 students and primary schools increased from 1202 to 13882 with 6,81,835 students. (Source: History of Education in India During the British Period by Syed Nurullah and JP Naik—Macmillan & Co Ltd, 1943). Orissa too benefited from this pan-India policy and had the College at Cuttack and some schools in different places. The credit for this cannot be ascribed to any particular official, far less to someone who was widely known to be deficient in courage.
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