Abstract
The article examines the upper Doab or what is now referred to as West U.P. from 1803 and onwards to interrogate the role of colonial property in developing a famine labour regime in the 1860s. The article shows how colonial notions of continuity and fixity in land undermine the relationship between variegated ecologies and the multiple economies (military labour, agro-pastoralism, cattle and grain trade) that depend on it. Moreover, the idiom of ‘relief’ is deployed to punitively organise the famine distressed into work sites and on large agrarian estates. This goes unnoticed in famine historiography as the literature affirmatively views ‘relief’ and ignores the relationship between proprietorial rights and the emergent famine labour regime from the 1860s and onwards.
In this article, focusing on colonial western Uttar Pradesh (or ‘North Western Provinces’) during 1803–70, it is argued that the occurrence of famines in India should be understood in the way the proprietorial regime built on land affected the ecology and patterns of livelihood. 1 Only this way can the working of the markets be understood and so also the resultant manipulations of grain prices that led to famine-like conditions. In the context of West UP, the colonial conquest of the region was followed by successive land settlements that caused shifts in cropping patterns, imposed juridical restrictions on mobility and built a new juridical regime. Only by understanding the conditions of subsistence and the impact of ecology under colonial rule, can we then meaningfully analyse the working of the markets and manipulation of prices that marked the famines. Much of the existing scholarship follows certain formulations of the archive in viewing the role of the market and the manipulation of prices as being solely responsible for famine-like conditions that often arose. 2 Such a historiographical approach absolves the constitutive role of the state by placing it at a remove from the way, say, the native usurers manipulated the grain market. In this literature, the intervention by the state is touched upon only in the context of ‘relief’ in the form of grain requisitioning for the starving poor. In contrast to such a framework, this article first shows the constitutive role of the state in the establishment of a proprietorial regime through specific land revenue regulations, and explores the impact of this regime on ecology and livelihood, locating in these factors the onset of famine or famine-like conditions and finally interprets colonial famine relief as a specifically punitive measure imposed on the famine distressed, as displayed in nineteenth century western Uttar Pradesh. 3
The first section of the article responds to famine historiography and the formulation of a colonial famine policy within the exigencies of pursuing a laissez faire pattern of trade. It calls for a reconsideration of such formulation and draws attention to the colonial proprietorial regime, especially its juridical role in enforcing fixed tenures and proprietary rights. It shows how the settlement policy was a causal factor in the disruption of existing forms of subsistence and land use, leading to a spate of litigation and disputes. These conditions were exacerbated with colonial irrigation technology introduced under a rationale of ‘improvement’. The second section shows the impact of such a regime on both, the ecology and those who subsisted on these lands. It resulted in an army of surplus famine-affected labour who would be forced to labour on public work sites. It shows how the urgency to push famine labour into such works was integral to the colonial policy of securing surplus from the land through the instruments of its proprietorial regime.
I
The death of millions as a result of colonial famines has been well documented by Mike Davis and Utsa Patnaik, among others. 4 The colonial archives also give us detailed statistics of deaths caused due to famine, in areas such as Bengal, North West Provinces (NWP) and the Deccan. It has allowed scholarship to engage critically with the occurrence of famines and the way it evoked a colonial response that led to the formation of a famine relief policy. Much of the dominant scholarship on famines is based on the assumption that the government’s interest in maintaining free trade and laisse faire meant that it did not intervene in the fluctuation of market prices. On the contrary, the fruition of the land settlements starting with the Cornwallis Code of 1793 was born out of a rationale of continuity and fixity that ran counter to the prevailing conditions of market and land use in India. Categories of rent, wages and profits were officially taken as ‘self-evident’ ‘to obscure the intervention of colonialism’. 5 This important dimension is overlooked in Ravi Ahuja’s work, which locates the role of the Company’s ambition of trade within a shadow of violence and conquest but sees this as part of a process that bears fruition in the ills that affect the grain market. 6 This argument ignores the inter-connectedness between shifts in existing land use and subsistence patterns that eventually determined shifts in the ‘unregulated grain markets’. As I argue, shifts in these markets merely exacerbated the fissures that were inherent in the colonial proprietorial regime, which, in fact, can be seen to have ultimately led to the famines of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Secondly, there is the historical argument that famines were caused by the fact that traditional forms of reciprocity, which were germane to the village economy broke down. As a result, peasants could no longer demand grain from the village money-lender or utilise the same agency in securing grain during lean years. 7 The money-lender it is said, leveraged laisse faire non-interference by colonial authorities to reap profits and also renege on earlier forms of social contract. The introduction of a famine relief policy is viewed as a response to the government’s inability to regulate the grain market or the usurious practices permitted in the name of laissez faire. As a result, although laissez faire is held partly responsible for market instability, much of it is alleged to be the result of manipulation of prices by the usurer.
A recent approach that follows this rationale, thereby ignoring and eliding the constitutive role of the state, has been put forward by Tirthankar Roy. 8 He credits colonial famine relief policy for helping areas like the Deccan overcome the effects of mid-to-late nineteenth-century famines. He uses the example of well construction and the requisitioning of grain and transport by the railways to show how water and food were made accessible. Where these efforts were found wanting, especially if cultivators were denied access to well water, this was, according to Roy, due to the nature of caste-based exclusions. Roy’s argument of showing the complicit role of upper caste landlords or the conventional allegations against village usurers rescues the state from any guilt over the occurrence and effects of famines. As a result, through such an approach, the government is often shown as intervening to offer relief (by requisitioning grain) to those most affected by the famines.
In contrast to the above trend in famine historiography, the close relations between land ownership, markets and labour as a critique of the perception of an immaculate and decontextualised market can be found in Karl Marx’s argument of primitive accumulation as well as Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, notwithstanding the important differences between the two. 9 In understanding the role of the land settlements, there is a rich tradition going back to Ranajit Guha and Eric Stokes, who engage with rent and land settlements. 10 Yet, it will be seen how these works lead scholarship on political economy to take the village as a closed and internally interdependent unit rather than one that is actively being reconstituted under the colonial juridical regulations governing relations in the land.
Govind offers an approach to test the durability of the interdependent village by revisiting the moment of transition to colonial rule by locating the role of violence behind the language of economics. Drawing on long natural rights traditions from Locke and Hobbes, he shows how the juridical-political character of imperial rule is interpreted through a rationale based on political economy. 11 In India, the use of these categories of the economy meant that cultivators were in actual fact circumscribed under juridical regulations that gave them limited options to exercise consent to continue with cultivation or partake in multiple economies such as military labour, pastoral work or cattle and grain trade. It resulted in contestations that were brought before colonial courts replacing earlier forms of negotiation and consent that were crucial for the continuance of subsistence patterns corresponding to variegated ecologies. This can be seen in the processes that followed after the Company’s rule was established over the upper Doab following the Anglo-Maratha War of 1803.
Conquest of the Doab
The upper Doab extended from the foothills of the Shiwaliks and extending towards the north Indian plains included the regions Saharanpur, Muzaffarnagar and Meerut. Doab was defined as the area between the courses of rivers the Ganges and Jumna as they traversed the region southwards from the Shiwaliks.
The topology of the upper Doab was characterised by an inconsistent gradation where uplands (bangar) were interrupted by valley-like lowlands (khadir). Kolff refers to this as interdependence between bangur and khadir that supported local chieftains in meeting gross tax demands. 12 The former enabled a consistent yield of crops due to the suitable runoff of rivers and rainwater leaving the soil well manured and drained. Cultivation constituted a single-cropped pattern influenced by rabi and kharif seasons, with the dominant produce being sorghum, lentils, maize and pearl millets. A similar cropping patter was found in the khadir, although a larger proportion of lands supported pastoral grasses and so social groups that actively participated in the trade in cattle in north India.
Following the conquest of the Doab, the collector appointed for Muzaffarnagar and Saharanpur was asked about the possibility of bringing more land under the plough. 13 He reported back stating that the pastoral economy held monetary value for the beoparies (traders) and graziers and that such groups would only turn to settled cultivation if similar gains were to accrue from cultivation. 14 These groups, namely Bunjaras (graziers) and beoparies (traders), supplied cattle and grain to the north Indian armies and were important constituents of the north Indian cattle economy. A total of 12–15,000 bullocks along with grain passed from the upper Doab to parts of the North and Deccan. 15
The seat of colonial government in Fort William, Calcutta, was however concerned about the prospects of establishing a revenue settlement along the lines of the Permanent Settlement in Bengal. This required the government to locate practices of fixed and continuous cultivation, instead of what was being reported from the upper Doab region. As a result, it intervened in the crucial context of livelihoods embedded in the larger ecology to introduce shifts towards settled cultivation by engaging local chieftains, who controlled the movement of cattle and grain. However, even much after the conquest in 1803, these groups continued to be involved in internecine conflicts and raids on trade routes on which grain was carried outside the upper Doab. The Sikhs made incursions into the Doab to ransack estates even as chieftains such as the Jat, Gujar, Rajput and Saiyid confronted each other militarily. Following colonial annexation, Saiyids lost their claims to revenue over large spaces in Saharanpur to the Jats and Gujar mukaridars (revenue farmers) and were limited to the areas of Jansath and Khatauli to the south of Muzaffarnagar. The colonial government tacitly acknowledged such military raids and soon extended recognition to the chieftains with their proprietary titles. 16 As the dominant authority that reserved the right to exercise violence, it negotiated terms of revenue payment with the military chieftains in the upper Doab. 17 Two triennial settlements were made between 1803 and 1811 predominantly with Raja Ramdayal of Landhaura, the Jansath Saiyds, Marhal Nawabs, the Jats of Kuchnessar and the Rajputs, where the estimated revenue was set at one-sixth to one-eighth of the gross produce. 18
As per the new juridical regulations, defaulting estates would be confiscated and sold for non-payment of tax arrears. 19 The discretionary fixing of rent and revenue estimates when read alongside the right to confiscate reveals the juridical anchor provided for financial and property appropriation. 20 The upper Doab shows that by supplanting existing conditions of land use and subsistence, the official process to establish gross tax estimates did not conform to the real ratio of rent, wages and profit. On the contrary, it raised alarm amongst holders of proprietary titles, who, fearing confiscation began to usurp lands of rivals by way of manipulation of village papers and land titles. It was reported that village officials, either worked independently or alongside proprietorial claimants to switch land titles either to assume proprietorship themselves or act on the behest of larger proprietors. 21
The contests over proprietary titles also influenced the prevailing nature of cultivation. Under the colonial land settlements, juridical regulations insisted on two changes. One was that the cultivators would have to be entered in the pattah or record of rights to show proof of cultivation. This was a reintroduction of earlier Mughal categories like the Patta qabuliyat, even though their meaning was in effect altered by way of the Juridical Regulation 1 of 1807. 22 As per the regulation, the earlier patta, which offered a record of cultivators, was now reintroduced as a valid document to settle claims to property. Landowners were offered the discretion to prepare these papers in line with the juridical regulations. As a result, the former could now use the pattah to grant rights, oust the cultivators or charge them with perjury by producing pattahs that seconded their own claims over those of the cultivators. This marked a major shift in the way the pattah came to assume a juridical value, threatening to supplant the possibility of consent and negotiations that marked the earlier relations between hereditary cultivators and holders of proprietary rights. The change had a debilitating effect on the ability of social groups to collectively bargain for work in military labour or agriculture as the new juridical regulations recognised the cultivators in the pattah as simply individuals. Contesting counterclaims as sole litigants pitted them in an unequal position in comparison to the holder of proprietary titles, who was not only supported by the village officials like the patwari and qanungo but also by common caste hereditary cultivators.
The disruption caused by the pattah may be juxtaposed with the period prior to the assumption of the Company’s rule. The cultivating classes were then distinguished by their caste roles in military labour and the cattle and grain market. This meant that social groups, such as occupational caste groups, bargained for work both through rights to cultivate land as well as by working in multiple economies with holders of proprietary rights. The latter belonged to the land-owning castes (Saiyids, Jats, Gujjars and Rajputs). As stakeholders in both, the military labour market and the cattle and grain trade, these dominant castes relied on consent and negotiation in order to retain cultivators for work on land as well as to meet demand for labour in the other sectors. The government now dismissed these relations as aspects of a despotic regime and instead sought to enforce the legality of documents and fixed rights in settled cultivation as part of the revenue regulations.
The pattah emerged as an important piece of paper that displaced oral consents and put the proprietorial owner at an advantage to ensure greater pliancy, especially since the threat of confiscation hung over each estate. The land settlements made no allowances for the varied patterns of cultivation that cohered with the ecology or patterns of rainfall. Instead, litigating tenants were viewed as recalcitrant, while fluctuating grain prices were shown as the handiwork of money-lending communities who also manipulated land records to usurp rights to property. 23 The allegation against such classes, made in some of the famine historiography, does not allow for the fact that the usurpation of land holdings was more a response to the available opportunities that were presented in the land market. 24 Auction purchasers first engaged holders of proprietary rights with loans and also secured revenue contracts from the colonial government. The inability to repay loans allowed the revenue farmers to buy out the estates that they were extorting revenue from. This can be seen, for instance, in the case of Shekh Kullen, an irregular cavalryman who served the Raja of Landhaura and rose to become a significant auction purchaser in Saharanpur and Muzaffarnagar. 25
Disruptions to land relations, both in the form of contests over proprietary and cultivating rights, increased as the land settlements bore fruition in 1830. By then, it had been almost three decades since the first triennial settlement was introduced. The settlement conference in Allahabad resolved to move a step closer towards developing village-level estimates on the basis of soil characteristics. In the upper Doab, Edward Thornton compiled district wise rental and revenue estimates by arriving at approximate yields on the basis of estimates of yields based on three soil classes—Rousolee (wet), Meesun (manured) and Bhoor (dry). By this method, a higher commutation rate was set for crops such as wheat and cane grown on Rousolee and Meesun. 26
The Thornton settlement aggravated contests that were brought before the local courts because claimants to cultivation continued to assert earlier forms of consent over the choice of crops. Accepting the terms of cultivation meant not just a shift in subsistence patterns but also a reassessment of rental liability based on crops that attracted a higher computation rate. This was followed rigorously in the Allahabad Conference (1832) meant to formalise the land settlement processes that had commenced in 1803 and ensure that the pattah would be the primary document of proof at the time of arbitration. This was despite numerous reservations being put forward by members of the Board of Revenue tasked with offering views on the fruition of land settlements under Regulation IX of 1833. In their dissenting notes, they underlined the disruptive role of the pattah for causing alterations to land use and subsistence and also causing an escalation of cases that were causing the Company a higher outlay of costs. 27
While these factors were put on record, the government implemented its ambitious canal irrigation projects between 1850 and 1854. The canals, like the revenue settlement, portended improvement in lands, reclaiming waste and promising higher yields. As a result, the increased area under irrigation was meant to result in profits that could be taxed in the revised settlements. Also, the heavy investment of finances in the construction of the canal was also seen as a reason to enhance not just revenue rates but also, separately, the canal water rates.
II
Land said to be irrigated had the potential for higher yields and attracted higher assessments following the order of soil characteristics listed by Thornton. The earliest effects of the canal were made visible in 1849 when the Lt. Governor took a boat ride along the Jumna River and noticed massive swamps, flooding and breaches in embankments. 28 Within five years, the Ganges Canal was commissioned and began to influence the khadir regions along the canal tract in a manner that dwarfed the role of the Jumna Canal.
As the canal water entered the Khadir region, it disrupted the earlier balances between upland and lowland. Khadir lands known for pastoral grasses came under the influence of canal irrigation as reports of cattle plagues, malaria, bowel issues and fevers began to appear in the areas served by the canals. It drove cultivators who alternated between pastoral work and cultivation to turn increasingly to upland estates with greater water supply. Many would be denied access to their earlier rights to cultivate due to the absence of pattah or refusal by proprietors to engage them. Proprietors whose estates were affected by canals found themselves unable to meet the additional charges, facing confiscation thereby or forced sale. Many were unable to navigate the incessant litigation, among the cultivators and proprietors themselves over meeting the revenue rates set by the settlement. 29
The tensions thus generated found expression in violence that occurred upon the outbreak of the Mutiny in 1857. The period saw proprietorial groups side with the rebels in Delhi and launch attacks on colonial symbols of revenue extractions. Local Gujjar headmen, for example, participated in the mutiny primarily targeting the revenue offices in Shamli. The treasury in Shamli was taken, and the tahsil office was decimated in the attack. 30
In 1860–61, the Bengal Chamber of Commerce deputed Col. Baird Smith to review the cessation of the settlement process caused by the Rebellion of 1857 and to offer suggestions to improve revenue management in the aftermath of the famine of 1860. 31 His appointment came a year after the ill-fated Rent Act X of 1859 was enacted to grant sub-proprietary rights to tenurial claimants who were able to show proof of occupancy for twelve uninterrupted years. 32 The Act came into effect due to professed colonial interest in protecting what was repeatedly referred to as village-based proprietors or as ‘ancient village communities’. It was common knowledge amongst the architects of the successive land settlements in the region that the land market and earlier rent regulations had allowed auction purchasers to pose as cultivating claimants and so entitled to permanent occupancy, or to make outright claims on proprietary titles on rival estates. If successful, they adopted the juridical appellation of headman (mukudum) over the whole estate or as privileged occupancy ryot on parts of it. The government’s complicit role in engendering a merciless land market that disrupted what it claimed to protect, that is, village communities, was masked by levelling allegations against litigating money lenders and non-proprietorial caste cultivators. In numerous letters, it was reported that the coherence of the village community (caste cultivators and their kinship alliances with proprietors) was faced with the onslaught of litigation that resulted even among members of kin-based groups trying to evict one another. 33
The legal enactments that were to follow in the form of the Rent Act X of 1859 were sought to be justified as measures to repair and revive the broken ‘ancient village communities’ caused by incessant litigation. 34 Contrary to the arguments put forward in support of the Act’s claim to grant sub-proprietary rights, the discretion offered to the proprietorial body was an attempt to offer further concessions to title owners in navigating the adverse effects of the land market. The Act guaranteed further discretion to title owners to determine cultivating rights and have a greater say in the determination of the pattah (land assignment) and village-level appointments. The provisions of the Act in expediting resumptions of cultivable rights as well as forced sales and transfer. This was because the discretion over the management of village papers could be used by an assertive title owner to alter terms of cultivation within their estate, and also claim title ownership or tenurial rights over lands in others’ hands. Despite this, the government claimed that these changes were being made to protect the ‘village community’. 35 From 1860 onwards, the myth of the village community was used even more increasingly to justify amendments to Rent Acts, even though the consequences would be more disruptive for the functioning of the so-called ‘village community’.
Col. Baird Smith viewed the Rent Act favourably, stating that the Act offered overall security of tenure and transparency. He claimed that even if estates continued to be broken down or tenants lost their rights to occupation, it should be seen as the emergence of ‘a vast mass of readily convertible and easily transferable agricultural property’, resulting in lesser interference and more reasonable revenue assessments. 36 The Act in Smith’s view offered the potential to expedite the transferability of land since rights ‘could be more easily distinguishable, transferable within an umbrella of tranquillity’. 37 Smith’s account on property and the ease of land transferability conforms to the rationale of economism and laisses faire that justified the enactment of Act X of 1859.
Smith alleged that those who formed the vast army of famine-distressed labour were a result of poor government and mismanagement on the part of loss-making estates. Such labour could be redeployed in agriculture as labour and artisans.
38
For example,
Our famines are famines of work rather than food. When work can be had and paid for, food is always forthcoming, but people whose power to labour is annihilated at their homes, can only seek to re-establish it elsewhere as the working population, both as agricultural labour and as artisans.
39
Smith’s Famine Report was the precursor of the famine relief policy, which proposed intervention in the form of ‘relief’ measures to ameliorate the conditions of the famine distressed. According to Dr Cutcleffe, Civil Surgeon at the Meerut Relief Hospital, ‘there were one and all starving and the majority were skeletons from atrophy’. 40 The related diseases were caused because persons affected by the famine relied on wild fruits and vegetables to support themselves. The deficiency of digestible material and the lack of proper nutriment led to an outbreak of bowel-related problems.
The surgeon reported a large toll of deaths, which had an impact on the mental health of persons admitted to the hospital. Persons admitted were reportedly children without their parents, husbands without their wives and wives without their husbands. 41 The hospital in Roorkee, lying to the east of Saharanpur, saw upwards of 200 persons dying each day. Up to 7,000 persons died monthly in Meerut between April and May of 1860. 42 By this calculation, upwards of a lakh expired in the upper Doab region. 43 Unconfirmed mortalities on account of the famine stood at 2%–3% of the population, while the number of dead cattle stood at 99,000 according to an estimate by Sir Arthur Cotton. 44 In Smith’s view, the districts across the upper Doab and the entire Province were ‘troubled by the irruption of numerous bodies of starving villagers wandering hither and thither in search of food or work’. 45 The spate of migrations through the famine period affected 2%–3% of the population as per the government’s recorded statement. Cumulatively, up to 500,000 people migrated in the western section of the Province with Saharanpur (16,000, 2%), Meerut (25,000, 3%) and Muzaffarnagar (20,000 3%) totalling 71,000 migrants. 46 These figures appear to be underestimates.
The vast mass of distressed population suited Smith’s plan to organise these persons at work sites in order to enhance connectivity by road and address repairs required by the canal, which had been stalled on account of the events of 1857. Many chose to work on government relief sites due to the prevailing conditions of hunger and starvation. As more persons joined the category of the famine poor, work sites received a steady supply of persons who were classified by their capacity to perform manual work. 47 Work was divided into gender, age and levels of hunger, while payments in terms of food were measured against what the government viewed as a full day’s work. Many were denied bare subsistence as they failed to carry out tasks that were designated under the notion of a ‘full day’s work’. 48 Food charts were frequently updated, showing the measure of rations allocated against the amount of work done in hours. For instance, agriculturists and non-agriculturists were expected to do a full day’s work on roads and earthworks. Women and children could be made to carry baskets of earth for road work. And finally, the aged and sick who could do no work at all were kept out of the work site and therefore denied the possibility of obtaining food.
The famine report did not just advocate the organisation of labour on work sites but made a strong case to create conditions of surveillance to coercively push distressed persons into relief work sites. The famine policy in the 1860s mirrored the earlier colonial policy towards alleged dacoits or thugs by targeting social groups who were known to subsist entirely on pastoral work. 49 The articulation of such a policy was not a novelty that inaugurated a new paradigm in colonial rule, but crystallised a long-pending demand of the government to rein in graziers and pastoralists by creating juridical limitations on their ability to access pasture. 50 What followed was the enactment of successive legislation that targeted the mobility of Bunjaras and Gujar pastoralists and even village performers such as the Nats and Kanjars, all considered liable for criminal prosecution. 51 Also included were eunuchs who were persecuted for being ‘taken to sodomy and the emasculation and kidnapping of young boys’ or wandering children who were tried as juveniles and flogged in district jails across the NWP. It was proposed that the reformatory schools would impart skills such as carpentry, cultivation and blacksmithy followed by a certificate given by the warden of the establishment. To this end, a bill was proposed ‘for the establishment and regulation of reformatory schools for juvenile offenders’. 52
The jail manuals of NWP from the late 1860s indicate that reformatory institutions had a high number of cultivators, labourers and artisans admitted as prisoners. Jails on average saw a daily intake of 16,417 persons in the NWP of which 1,639 persons were considered civil and revenue prisoners. Convicts numbered 42,369 and prisoners under trial, 31,847. Many were in jail in violation of the Rent Act X arrested by the collector’s office for the non-payment of rent. Convicted labour was expected to work on roads, provide menial services and manufacture goods. The jails emerged as an institution that facilitated the transfer of famine distressed to work sites. They were first arrested and then put to work in famine relief works. Such instances were increasingly brought to light by the colonial government’s own surveys to evaluate the working of jails in the province.
In the late 1870s almost a decade after the enactment of the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 and the Cattle Trespass Act of 1871, the famine regime had fructified into a full-fledged attack on non-proprietorial caste groups affected by famine-like conditions. This is found in a survey of 1879 commissioned by the government to evaluate the conditions in jails, and classify infirmities according to diseases such as cholera, smallpox, fevers and bowel syndromes across the Province. 53 This was part of health surveys that revealed caste-wise deaths due to starvation mainly amongst the Chamars, Julahas, Pasi and Bhangis. The surveys conducted in jails revealed instances of starvation as well as extreme forms of punishment. This was reported by Wyer, deputy collector of Azamgarh, who reviewed jails in Budaon. He reported glaring evidence of torture and flogging upon emaciated and starved persons, accused of theft during famine. 54 His commentary drew attention to the wounds inflicted on famine-distressed persons as inmates were found to be emaciated, starved and almost dead with floggings carried out in the presence of the civil surgeon. In response, it was stated that the floggings were reserved for only those inmates whose conduct was found to be in violation of jail rules. Yet, Wyer’s report shows that those who were arrested shared a common charge of famine pilferage. 55
The criminalisation of the famine poor forms an important backdrop to the famine policy, which conceals a broader working of a proprietorial regime. This article has tried to show how from the earliest settlements in areas like the upper Doab (Western Provinces) there was a concerted push to repress agro-pastoral caste groups. This was central to protecting proprietors who were themselves faced with the merciless nature of the land tax. It resulted in an overall process of extraction that during 1803–60 created both a punitive rental regime and the presumed ‘criminalisation’ of a large section of the rural poor.