An Imperial Disaster: The Bengal Cyclone of 1876

Abstract

The Bengal cyclone of 1876 was the worst cyclone disaster anywhere in the world in the nineteenth century. On the night of 31 October, around one million people in the south-eastern districts of Bakarganj, Noakhali, and Chittagong woke to the violence of its wind and rain. Then came a series of storm-waves, which reached a height of 30 feet in some parts. The waves rushed over the ripening crops, swept away cattle, destroyed homesteads and other property, and drowned at least 100,000 people. Nearly as many died in the cholera epidemic and food scarcity that followed. This thesis argues that cyclone disasters, at first glance owing their existence solely to natural causes, are also socially produced. It aims to rethink the Bengal cyclone as an ‘imperial disaster’ – as an event that was shaped, and in some sense created, by the unequal power relations characteristic of British imperialism in India.

The thesis begins by setting the cyclone in the context of long-term social, economic, and environmental change in the affected districts. The focus here is on explaining how vulnerability to disaster is created. Particular emphasis is given to the consequences of the imperial land revenue system. The government encouraged the ‘reclamation’ of forest and newly-formed alluvial land, on the coast and along the rivers, so cultivation could be extended and the land revenue maximised. In the hundred or so years before the cyclone, the number of people exposed to disaster grew significantly. And revenue policy was closely related to the land tenure system, which also helped to increase vulnerability. In eastern Bengal the landowner, occupying the highest level of the tenure-chain, was separated by a great number of intermediaries from the actual cultivators on the lowest level. While those towards the top of the chain prospered through ‘reclamation’, the economic pressures imposed on those at the bottom seriously restricted their ability to manage risk.

The second part of the thesis focuses on the calamity itself, and its immediate, mid-term, and long-term consequences. An examination of the impact of the cyclone along lines of class, gender, caste, and religion demonstrates that different social groups were affected in very different ways, challenging the notion that disasters are socially neutral. A further challenge to the idea of disaster as a purely natural phenomenon is based on an analysis of the government’s relief policy, which was mainly concerned with restoring the power and influence of the state in the affected districts, leaving the actual relief of the population to the market. The ineffectiveness of this policy, the thesis argues, contributed to the severity of the subsequent cholera epidemic, and also had longer-term consequences, including a food scarcity and an increase in crime. This thesis, then, seeks to rethink the Bengal cyclone of 1876 as a problem of deep-seated political, economic, and social inequality, and not just an unfortunate but entirely natural episode in the history of British rule in India.