The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

by William Dalrymple

‘All through the stifling summer of 1770, the people went on dying,’ wrote Sir William Hunter. ‘The husbandmen sold their cattle, they sold their implements of agriculture; they devoured their seed grain; they sold their sons and daughters, till at length no buyers of children could be found. They ate the leaves of the trees and the grass of the field; and in June the Resident at the durbar affirmed that the living were feeding off the dead. Day and night a torrent of famished and disease-ridden wretches poured into the great cities … [so that soon] the streets were blocked up with promiscuous heaps of the dying and the dead.’7 By June 1770, the devastation was unfolding across the entire province. Five hundred a day were now dying of starvation in the streets of Murshidabad.8 Rice was scarce even in Calcutta, where 76,000 died on its streets between July and September. ‘The whole province looked like a charnel house,’ reported one officer. The total numbers are disputed, but in all perhaps 1.2 million – one in five Bengalis – starved to death that year in what became one of the greatest tragedies of the province’s history.9 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 s...