Maybe these were welcome guests in Indians' minds and hearts
Independence Day: 165 million unaccounted Indian victims of the British colonial regime
By Yogada Sharma, ET Online
Last Updated: Aug 13, 2023, 03:54 PM IST
Synopsis
A research article published last year has brought to light how policy-induced famines killed tens of millions of Indians in 40 years,1880 to 1920, the deaths which have never been attributed to the colonial regime. And the number of deaths in the period could easily be higher due to improper documentation by the government.
How many Indians did the British colonial regime kill? When a considerable number of people today, in the UK as well as in India, assume that the British Raj was beneficial too for India, this question may not attract the attention it should.
However, recent research has put this question back in the spotlight by arguing that the number of people killed by the British Raj has been grossly underestimated. Just 40 of the total 200 years that the British ruled India, deaths that the colonisers are responsible for can easily surpass all famines in the Soviet Union, Maoist China and North Korea combined. The number even surpasses the deaths from both the World Wars, including the Nazi holocaust.
A research article published last year has brought to light how policy-induced famines killed tens of millions of Indians in 40 years,1880 to 1920, the deaths which have never been attributed to the colonial regime. And the number of deaths in the period could easily be higher due to improper documentation by the government.
The mystery of 165 million excess deaths
Last year, Dylan Sullivan and Jason Hickel published their research ‘Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and Mortality since the long 16th century’ in the journal 'World Development' which caught a lot of attention.
They analysed mortality indices in context of hunger and deprivation, arguing that economic welfare has a substantial influence on mortality and if the share of people unable to access essential goods required for survival increases, then mortality may also be expected to increase. They argued that the colonial regime used a system of one-sided tariffs to crush Indian manufacturing. By purchasing Indian exports with Indian tax revenues, the colonial regime created a drain of surplus to Britain
Using census and other government data, they estimated that excess deaths caused by the policies of the British regime could be between 60 million and 165 million, depending on different benchmarks.
"If we estimate excess mortality from 1891 to 1920, with the average death rate of the 1880s as normal mortality, we find some 50 million people lost their lives under the aegis of British capitalism," they write. "But this estimate must be considered conservative. India’s 1880s death rate was already very high by international standards. If we measure excess mortality over England’s 16th- and 17th-century average death rate, we find 165 million excess deaths in India between 1880 and 1920. This figure is larger than the combined number of deaths from both World Wars, including the Nazi holocaust."
They pointed out that in the 1870s India’s crude mortality rate had already risen considerably higher than early modern England. Life expectancy between 1880 and 1920 dropped dramatically from 26.7 years to 21.9. The country’s death rate per 1,000 touched 37.2 in the year 1880. The number had increased to 44.2 between 1911-1920.
Hickel says while India’s death rates in the 1920s through 1940s were, on average, lower than in the 1880s, they remained very high by international standards. India’s mortality rate from 1921 to 1950 was higher than England’s in the 16th and 17th centuries (even though for the latter, modern medicines, basic vaccines, sanitation systems, etc did not exist). In fact, it was higher even than the average mortality rate that afflicted China during the Great Famine of 1959-61.
Indian life expectancy did not reach the level of early modern England (35.8 years) until 1950, after decolonization, the research paper said. The post-independence government succeeded in halting the endemic mass mortality that had prevailed under British rule and delivered sustained improvements in life expectancy, climbing to almost 70 years today.
Hickel says there is now an academic consensus that famine is intimately tied to dictatorship and repression, and must be considered a type of mass atrocity crime.
A research article published last year has brought to light how policy-induced famines killed tens of millions of Indians in 40 years,1880 to 1920, the deaths which have never been attributed to the colonial regime. And the number of deaths in the period could easily be higher due to improper...
economictimes.indiatimes.com
