THE FLOODS OF ORISSA
The holy region of Orissa, where stand the temples of Juggernath,
“Lord of the World,” and of Tribhuvaneshwar, less famous but “Lord
of Three Worlds” all the same, needs what wealth of holiness it has
got, for its earthly fortunes are small. The ancient Uriya people
live there, speaking a strange and separate language, though it is
said to be near akin to an ancient Sanscrit form, and using a script
like wire netting or a series of circles in a row. In the southern
district near Ganjam they are still counted as part of the Madras
Presidency, but all the rest of their country is now limited to
Bengal, and its officials are responsible to the Lieutenant-Governor
in Calcutta. The greater part of the land is held by Tributary
Chiefs and Rajahs, under the control of a Political Agent, but a
good deal is owned by ordinary zemindars or landlords who sublet
to peasants much in the usual way, come under the authority of the
usual Commissioners and Collectors of the Civil Service, and about
two-thirds of them pay a land-tax or rent to Government, nominally
fixed every thirty years, because they are not included in the
Permanent Settlement of Bengal. There are also a few cultivators
holding direct from Government.
So far the peasants of Orissa are not worse off than other people
who have to live at the mercy of landowners. Their special hardship
comes from the nature of the country and from “visitations of God,”
as they are called; though why God’s visitations are regarded only
as evil it is difficult to understand. Looking inland from the
coast, one can see the beginning of mountain ranges running far into
the interior, and it is there that the Tributary Chiefs and Rajahs
have their territories, there that hill-tribes live, and wandering
elephants abound. But between the mountains and the sea lies a broad
belt of alluvial plain. It is under British control, but permeated
by uncertain and changeable rivers that issue like wild animals
from the mountains and refuse control of any kind. Such rivers are
the Byturni, a sacred stream, where millions of pilgrims bathe on
their way down the Grand Trunk Road to the shrine of Juggernath; the
Brahmani, also sacred as its name denotes, but the chief cause of the
present profane disasters; and the Mahanadi, which threatens the old
capital city of Cuttack, and is sometimes a desert of sand, sometimes
a sea.
In August rain had fallen on the mountains for fifteen days and
nights without ceasing. Foot by foot the water in the sacred rivers
rose. The islands disappeared, the broad miles of sand disappeared,
the water reached the edge of the steep mud banks. Forty years before
it had done the same, and old people began to awake their appalling
memories. At a point called Janardan Ghai, not far from Jenapur, upon
the Brahmani, the embankment had then given way. The breach had never
been properly repaired; only lately a rubble “bund” or break-water
had been constructed, and now on August 20th, in the middle of the
night, it gave way again. In a dark torrent, bearing sand and stones
with it, the irresistible river streamed over all the lower lands
around, covering the crops and melting the mud villages away like
ant-heaps. The land is flat, but in the confusion and darkness the
people crowded up any little slope for safety, or climbed into trees;
and one woman had her baby born as she supported herself among the
branches. When morning came, eight feet of turbulent water lay over
their homes and crops. In November I could still trace the tidemark
of the flood by tufts of dried grass and drift-wood sticking in the
trees high above my head, as you may do in early summer on the banks
of the Severn.
[Illustration: HUNGER.
[_Face p. 136._
]
When I reached Orissa, the first sign I saw of the calamity was a
band of thirty or forty brown skeletons crawling towards me as I
stood in a garden at Cuttack. They said they had walked from their
ruined homes beside the Brahmani, looking for work or food, and
hundreds were wandering over the country in the same way, even as
far as Calcutta, which they counted a fortnight’s walk from there.
Probably they had heard of my arrival, and collected in the vague
hope of some kind of assistance, or perhaps simply from the instinct
that makes most people fling their misery before any human being for
sympathy. Very likely some were habitual beggars, worn thin by man’s
want of charity, and taking the advantage of extra numbers to impress
me. A man of stone would have been impressed. There is no need to
describe a brown skeleton—the projecting ribs and spiny backbone, the
legs and arms like withered sticks, the deep pits at the collarbones,
the loose and crinkly skin. But when a party of brown skeletons fling
themselves flat on the ground before you, with arms outstretched
beyond their heads and faces rubbing in the dust, when they take your
feet in their bones and lay their skulls upon your boots, what are
you to do? What are you to do when there are fifteen hundred men,
women, and children only waiting to catch sight of you that they may
make the same irresistible and hopeless appeal?
I went to the officials. The Collector, under whose immediate charge
the problem of relief came, was away, but I had a long interview with
the Commissioner in his beautiful home, built on an ancient stone
embankment that protects the town from the river, then hardly visible
in the wide expanse of sand. In the case of both officials I observed
the same difficulties that I found in official life wherever I came
across it in India. Both I believe to have been entirely honourable
and conscientious men, devoted to their rather monotonous but
responsible work, from which they could gain no great glory beyond
the usual steps of promotion, ending in retirement to the obscurity
of some English golf-links. One of them, as I heard afterwards,
had a high reputation among his colleagues in the Service for his
solicitude on behalf of the people under his charge. He studied
their language and customs with enthusiasm, and on one occasion had
displayed conspicuous gallantry in defending them from a gang of
pillaging outlaws, whom he captured single-handed. Yet he was not
the more popular of the two; and though both were, I think, rather
exceptional public servants, they were regarded with more hostility
than veneration. The curse of ordinary officials is that reform
means change, and change means trouble. But a conscientious official
has the further curse that, under the constant pressure of work, he
is compelled to spend most of his time among papers, statistics,
and abstractions. To preserve his sanity under these conditions,
the Indian official is forced to the Club, where he can relax his
mind among his own people, speak his own language, and follow the
pursuits that really interest our race, and so, little by little,
the people of the country, for whose sake alone he is supposed to be
there, appear to him only under the form of cases or numbers—inhuman
subjects, to be avoided in polite conversation.
The Commissioner, from among his barricades of reports, abstracts,
and regulations, gave me the official figures of distress, as far as
was ascertained at the end of the third month after the disaster.
They showed an estimated area of 460 square miles affected by the
flood, with a peasant population of over 300,000; also so many houses
swept away, so much loss in cattle and horses, so many deaths from
cholera after the flood (nearly 2000), and so many rupees already
distributed in relief. From what 1 saw and heard afterwards, I should
put the numbers reduced to a skeleton condition at about 5 per cent.
of the 300,000 population. That does not sound very much, but if you
work it out, it gives 15,000 brown skeletons close to the touch of
death by hunger.
For myself, I cannot think in thousands. I trust economists and
officials to do that for me. But there was one phrase in the official
statement that appeared quite comprehensible even to me: it was,
“Deaths from starvation, nil.” Nothing could well be more explicit,
yet even that simple assertion began to look as elusive as other
economics when I went out into the villages and saw the bony corpses
and was told the official cause of death is always some innocent and
unavoidable sickness like cholera or “bowel complaint,” and that the
official mind has a rooted objection to starvation.
First I went up the line to a place called Balasore, and late at
night visited two Settlement Camps, where a revision of land-titles
was slowly going on, in view of the next great Settlement which was
to take place in twenty years’ time. It was a recent idea of Sir
Andrew Fraser, Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, who with Scottish
providence aimed at thus reducing the work that would await his
fourth successor in office for the year or two before the next
Settlement came. It is true that the present revision would require
further revisions before then, but that did not matter. With this
laudable object, Indian officials were seated in their tents, and
just visible by lanterns a crowd of forty or fifty small holders from
neighbouring villages were gathered round them, all clutching their
precious title-deeds to their bosoms. For six days they had been
waiting there from nine in the morning to eleven at night, just at
the time when harvest needed them most. An official told me it took
about a month to complete the revision in a circle of twenty-one
villages, and the work never stopped but for the rains. Outside
one tent an enterprising shopkeeper had opened a little store of
plantains, rice, and cakes to feed the patient crowd. Some were
little boys whose fathers had died, some represented widows. So under
the dispensation of Scottish providence they waited, and one can only
hope that the officials of eighteen or nineteen years hence will
think of them kindly while enjoying the far-off interest of their
tears.
[Illustration: MY ELEPHANT.]
[Illustration: A VILLAGE CROWD.
[_Face p. 140._
]
Next day I returned to Jenapur, and mounted a large elephant, which,
sad to say, could heartily enjoy a daily meal that would keep any
Hindu in prime condition for six weeks. As upon a watch-tower, for
the next few days I passed up and down the long line of flat country
that had been flooded beside the Brahmani, sometimes crossing over
into the basin of the Kharsua, another of the uncertain rivers
that alternately save and devastate the land. Where it was not
devastated, the country was thickly cultivated in little fields
of rice, pulse, and a kind of millet, and the numbers of planted
mango-trees gave it much the same look as an elm-row part of Essex or
the Midlands. Throughout the district rice was certainly the staple
crop, because, though it is so risky and wants so much water, its
yield is magnificent when it yields at all; and it was one of the
ironies of India that, while here the land had been ruined by the
deluge of rain, on the way up from Madras I passed through miles on
miles of rice fields where the crops stood dying of drought, or were
already cut as straw for thatch or as fodder for the sacred cow.
Even here the drought had been so severe since the flood that the
inferior crops of grain and pulse had failed and could not be used to
alleviate the distress.
But in many of the villages that I visited neither flood nor drought
will matter for many years. Sand like the seashore had covered crops,
and fields, and boundaries, and homes in one indistinguishable
desert. At the first village I came to after my elephant had waded
through the numerous shallow channels into which the river had now
sunk, a crowd of naked people—two or three hundred, I suppose—had
assembled round a Government agent who was issuing little doles of
rice. Similar doles had been issued soon after the disaster three
months before, but otherwise the people had received nothing from
a fatherly Government, because rain was officially due, and they
ought officially to have lived on the subsidiary crops nurtured by
the rain. But the heavens did not comply with official expectations;
cholera came instead, and now the people were dying, not, of course,
from starvation, but from “bowel complaints.”
At sight of me upon the elephant, the people left their doles and
flung themselves prostrate upon the hot sand which had ruined them.
Some brought hoes, and digging three feet down, they showed a few
withered blades from what had once been a rice-field. To that
thickness the sand lay over acres and miles of country along the
low land beside the river, and now on the top of the sand the hungry
villagers flung themselves flat in their appeal. Surely a man who
rode an elephant and wore a helmet, and was white by courtesy, could
save them! What could I do? There were 15,000 living skeletons ready
to join in that prayer, and I had one pocketful of coppers. Rice was
selling at 1½_d._ a pound; it takes two pounds a day to feed a man
decently, and the full wage for a working cultivator was twopence in
ordinary times. Where is charity when things are like that? And where
are economics?
As usual, it was the hangers-on to life who suffered most. Weavers
are useful people, and the village weaver with his wooden hand-loom
can hardly be called a hanger-on in a land where every man and woman
wears several yards of woven cotton, and washes the garment at least
once a day. But how can a weaver live unless women buy his stuff? And
how can a woman buy his stuff when she has just sold her doorposts
and the family brass dish to buy food for her children, or to pay the
police tax for the protection of property? She makes her old rags
do, and the weaver starves. There were starving weavers in all the
villages, and some it seemed impossible to save even with the food
represented by a gift of twopence.
It was the same with the landless labourers who worked under the
ryots for wages. It was the same with the village blind, the village
idiots, and the lepers. No one could afford to employ labour now or
to give alms. In one village a labourer had scooped a little hole in
the ground, and fitted a plantain leaf neatly into it as a bowl for
gifts. But charity was as dry as the heavens, and no alms fell. I saw
the plantain leaf still vainly appealing, but the man had died of
hunger. In another village they were carrying a body to the fire, and
they laid the poor, naked thing down for me to see. It was a woman’s
body, a labourer’s sister, shrivelled and spiky with hunger, like the
skeleton of a starved cat found under the slates. In defence of her
brother, the labourer himself, I must say that he was dying of hunger
too.
The village houses in this part of Orissa, as in most parts of
India, are built of mud plastered on to a bamboo framework, with
wooden doorposts and rafters. They are thatched with rice straw or
palm branches. At the first rush of the flood, the houses dissolved
like children’s castles in the tide, and I saw flat and bare plots
of land where they had stood. Even the houses that had escaped the
water were almost as bare, for the people had been obliged to sell
the scanty stock of furniture that Hindu villagers possess—brass pots
and plates, a corn bin, cooking vessels, and perhaps a bed—in order
to pay the rent which the zemindars or landlords continued to exact,
though I was told the officials had ordered a suspension.
The native official “tahsildars,” acting as village tax-collectors,
had also compelled them to sell everything they had, even to their
wooden doorposts, as I said, for paying the “chaukidari” tax (or
“tikut,” as they call it) which supports the village police. It is
a small tax, paid quarterly, and running from a halfpenny up to
1_s._ 4_d._ a month per house, but the police pay used formerly to
be raised from special plots of land set apart in each village for
the purpose, and the imposition of a hut-tax for the purpose ten
years ago had always been regarded as a grievance. Nor does it matter
whether a tax is great or small when you have to sell the family
plate, valued at eighteenpence, to pay it. Just before my journey
through the country, this tax had also been officially remitted,
but it was collected up to a day or two previously, and was always
mentioned by the people as one of their most irritating grievances.
No one loves a tax-collector, but in time of famine there is
something particularly galling in selling one’s property to feed the
police for preserving it.
In Orissa itself and in Calcutta the British officials were being
rather angrily criticized for negligence, but apart from the
necessary failure of a system which tries to administer welfare
through foreign rulers who live completely isolated from the people,
I do not think the officials were to blame. They had given a little
relief at first. When the rains that ought to have fallen did not
fall, they gave a little more. They remitted a tax, and called on the
zemindars to remit rent. They did not discourage a band of Indian
volunteers, some of whom belonged to a reforming Vedantic Order
in Calcutta, from distributing private relief. Sir Andrew Fraser,
Lieut.-Governor of Bengal, who was then on progress through Orissa,
and spent a day in the famine district, told me relief works were
just going to be undertaken, and the Government expected to spend
about £20,000 on the business of keeping alive and starting again.
He probably knew as much about starvation in the abstract as any
official could, for he was in control of the relief in the Central
Provinces during the terrible famine of 1900.[35] The officials had
also made the usual advances, called “takavi” loans, to holders of
two to ten acres for the purchase of new seed and stock upon the
security of their holding.
On the whole, the violent personal attacks upon the officials
appeared to arise chiefly from the habit of all peoples who are
compelled to submit to a fatherly despotism. Being themselves
excluded from a voice in their destiny, they turn savagely upon the
Government whenever distress or disorder supervenes, and the only
real hope I could see in the situation was the appearance of the
little bands of volunteers who in true Swadeshi spirit were spreading
the conception of self-reliance throughout India. Sir Andrew Fraser
and the higher officials welcomed their efforts, but the average
Anglo-Indians and the journalists of Calcutta either treated them
with contempt, or shrieked “sedition!”
Whatever blame lay with the authorities seemed to arise from the
usual official tendency to make light of distress for fear of
increasing difficulties, and to temper benevolence with bad manners.
I think both tendencies were interestingly combined in a Bengali
Deputy Magistrate, who was superintending the relief in one of the
larger villages. I was myself travelling with Mr. Madhu Sudan Das,
a resident of Cuttack, highly educated on European lines, the only
Uriya graduate of Calcutta, and a man well known throughout India
for his unlimited generosity and devotion to his own people, whose
rights he had often vindicated against aggression. From early manhood
he had been a Christian, though perhaps not a very dogmatic and
ecclesiastical Christian, his faith being founded entirely upon his
heartfelt admiration of Christ’s prayer, “Father, forgive them, for
they know not what they do.” “The man who could utter that prayer
while dying under torture was divine,” he often said to me. “The
moment I heard the prayer, I recognized that truth, and I have never
doubted it since.”
But Christian though he was, and though his daughter had studied in
Cambridge, and now lived in Cuttack like an English lady without a
shade of “purdah,” he was almost worshipped as the saint of Orissa
by the poor among his countrymen. I have seen a man with a frightful
running sore entreat Mr. Das to lend him the eighth of a penny that
he might touch the sore with it and be healed. Another came with a
brass bowl and implored Mr. Das to dip his finger into the water that
his wife might be delivered from her dangerous labour, and the moment
he dipped his finger into the water, the child was safely born.
Unhappily, in spite of his Christianity and saintly reputation, Mr.
Das appeared to act on official minds much as a hedgehog would on a
naked man who found one rolled up in his bed. On arriving one night
at a dak-bungalow or rest-house, we found that two of the three rooms
were occupied by a Bengali magistrate and a colleague. So having
arranged that Mr. Das, who was oldish and invalid, should have the
other room while I slept in the free air like the elephant, we sent
in our names to the Deputy Magistrate and were invited to enter.
Knowing Mr. Das well by reputation, he had evidently determined not
to fall below the standard of European dignity. Consequently he
received us with his legs on the long arms of his deck-chair—an
attitude which, I suppose, he had observed as customary among English
officials when they receive “natives,” and I could not correct his
impression.
Mr. Das began by requesting him to hear the petitions of three or
four widows who stood lamenting outside the door because their
husbands had died of starvation. Entrenched behind his legs, the
official refused to comply, stating that he had already heard their
cases, and had proved to his own satisfaction that the men had not
died of starvation, but of something else. Mr. Das then went through
a number of other cases, in most of which the official said he
thought he had made examination, but could not be sure. Anyhow, all
charges of neglect or harshness against the officials were absolutely
false, and he was not there to be cross-examined. With prickly
insistence, Mr. Das continued his interrogations upon the complaints
of the villagers, till at last the Deputy Magistrate, irritated past
human endurance, refused to say any more, and waving good-night to
his boots we left the room.
On our return journey, a day or two later, we discovered that he had
sent out orders by the _chaukidars_ or village police to all the
villages round, commanding the people not to come out to meet us
under threats of unknown penalties. So great is the terror inspired
by officials and police under a bureaucracy, that very few came of
the hundreds who had before thronged our path in hopes of winning
some assistance, or merely of seeing the elephant and their national
favourite. The few who did come told us the truth with fear, and
perhaps we should never have got at the real facts if we had not
found a chaukidar in one village actually going round from house to
house with the order. Yet Mr. Das was a man whose assistance in such
a crisis any one but an official would have been delighted to secure;
for the people trusted him absolutely, in spite of his foreign
religion, and no one living understood them better. It was only that
he was the kind of man who perturbs tabulated columns.
Most administrators would find it much easier to appreciate a Rajah
or Tributary Chief who lived about twenty miles from Cuttack, and
expended, as I was told, £335 on a breakfast which he expected
to offer the Lieutenant-Governor with the usual trimmings of
dancing-girls, fireworks, and other delights. At such a breakfast
cases of starvation could hardly occur, and nothing would interrupt
the cheers, loyalty, and goodwill, such as Simla and the Anglo-Indian
papers were expecting from the proposed Advisory Councils of
Notables. Yet £335 did seem a largish sum to consume at one meal in
the midst of a starving people. Perhaps the Lieutenant-Governor
thought so too, for I believe he continued his progress without
accepting the entertainment. One would like to know how that meal was
ever consumed. Perhaps the elephants were called in to help.
FOOTNOTES:
[35] “The Great Famine,” by Mr. Vaughan Nash (Longmans, 1900).