The famine did not touch the entire province, and in eastern Bihar the situation was slightly better; but in the worst affected districts, fully one-third of all the peasants died, and two-thirds of the old Mughal aristocracy were ruined. Half of all the rural artisans perished. The Hughli was full of swollen bodies, floating slowly downstream to the sea, its banks littered with corpses where ‘dogs, jackals, vultures and every bird and beast of prey grew fat and unwieldy on the flesh of man’.
