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Tirthankar Roy in colonial India: A preliminary exploration

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State, society and market in the aftermath

of natural disasters in colonial India:

A preliminary exploration

Tirthankar Roy

London School of Economics and Political Science

How did South Asian societies rebuild their economies following natural disasters? Based on

five episodes from colonial India, this article suggests that between the mid-nineteenth and

the mid-twentieth century, the response to disasters changed from laissez-faire to more state

intervention. Despite this change, post-disaster rebuilding was complicated by unspecified

rights to lost property, conflicting claims to property, asymmetric information between aid-

givers and receivers, conflicts between agencies, lack of cooperation between gainers and

losers, and in some of these examples, clashes between the colonial state and nationalist

organisations.

Introduction

All regions of the world are, to greater or lesser degrees, exposed to the threat of

acute and sudden environmental shocks, or natural disasters. Some are more ex-

posed than others. Closer home, windstorms, floods and earthquakes have been a

perennial part of life in South Asia, the outcome of such ‘permanent’ conditions

as Himalayan tectonics or the monsoon. Comparative historical data on disaster

mortality suggest a higher probability of death from natural disasters in South

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 45, 2 (2008): 261–94

SAGE Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore

DOI: 10.1177/001946460804500204

Acknowledgements: An earlier version of this article was presented as the Annual Economic History

Lecture of the London School of Economics and Political Science, 2007. I wish to thank participants

and colleagues, especially Meghnad Desai, Janet Hunter, Colin Lewis, Patrick O’Brien, and Peter

Robb, for discussions and comments. Suggestions received from two anonymous referees led to

significant improvements. I also thank Frances Pritchett for permission to reprint two illustrations

from the collection displayed on her website.



262 / TIRTHANKAR ROY


Asia than in the rest of the world (excluding China).1 It is predicted that climate

change will make storm surge and coastal flooding more likely in the region in

future. The interest of the article lies in the process of rebuilding that followed

such large natural disasters in colonial India. On what factors did the success or

failure of reconstruction depend? Does the past have useful lessons for rebuilding

in the future?

Acute collective stress—whether a dearth, a disaster or a civil disorder—offers

many themes that are potentially of interest to the historian. Every major natural

disaster destroys lives, livelihoods and assets. Lives lost cannot be restored, though

many more lives can be saved with timely relief and epidemic control measures.

Some livelihoods bounce back with surprising rapidity, partly because recovery

tends to be a labour-intensive process. It is lost assets that require the most carefully

planned response. The process of economic recovery depends largely on the success

of managed retrieval and reconstruction of assets.

Both the supply of relief or the attempt to save lives, and the process of rebuild-

ing or restoration of destroyed assets, need money, information, infrastructure

and coordination. Who supplies these resources, and how? The market can supply

them only to a certain extent. Demands of equity, and the need for information

and coordination make markets a weak agent in the rebuilding process. Can societal

cooperation supply these resources? Historians have at times noted the capacity

of calamities to forge fellow-feeling between peoples. This feature of natural

disasters like earthquakes, as opposed to man-made ones like war or civil strife,

derives from the fact that the former is more class neutral than the latter. In vulner-

able zones, the rich and the poor both suffer losses. Yet, if the intuitive expectation

that sympathies would overcome class barriers is perhaps true at the relief stage,

it tends to fail at the rebuilding stage. Just when cooperation is most needed, it

can break down as the restoration of assets begins. Since different people own

different kinds of assets, and because property rights are often unclear or disputed

to begin with, the rich and the poor disagree on plans, the state and civil society

come into conflict, and aid-givers blame each other. Disasters become complicated

events because they break up the basis for social cooperation due to a conflict of

economic interests.

The dual failure of markets and collectives demands that relief and rebuilding

be supplied by state agencies.2 State intervention in stress situations, however, is

complicated by the fact that disasters partially destroy public assets, and impair

the state’s capacity to respond. Furthermore, state intervention in times of stress

1 Disaster deaths, excluding famines and epidemics, accounted for 0.4 per 1,000 deaths in South

Asia between 1900 and 1999, 6.1 in China, and 0.2 in the rest of the world (based on EM-DAT

dataset, Asian Disaster Reduction Center, Data Book on Asian Natural Disasters in the 20th Century).2 A more modern economic argument for state intervention builds on the fact that insurance markets

for low-frequency, high-impact risks tend to be incomplete (see the next section for a discussion).



State, society and market in the aftermath of natural disasters in colonial India / 263


is a rather modern idea, and one that has consistently entailed political conflicts.

These conflicts can be understood partly with reference to the event itself, and

partly with reference to the particular context of governance, that is, the nature,

capability, ideologies and ambitions of the state. How did the idea of a state-

managed response to disasters evolve in colonial India? How effective was the

state in the presence of market failure, collective action problems, and political

conflicts? This article is mainly interested in these two questions.

Although the article is primarily interested in Indian history, the questions

connect with a central theme in global environmental history. Historians of natural

disaster suggest that the response to disasters depends on the discourse on caus-

ation. If one takes a long-term view, the discourse on causation has shifted, from

a moral perspective to a rationalistic one, thus creating a ground for markets and

states to play a more active role in supplying relief and rebuilding, and also expos-

ing that role to greater scrutiny. Two hundred years ago, natural disasters tended

to be seen as divine punishment for sins committed by the communities suffering

the stress.3 Such beliefs did not necessarily mitigate the sense of shock or reduce

the demand for human intervention, let alone alleviating the effects, but did add a

moral, and at times cathartic, element to the response. As scientific research pro-

gressed on volcanic activity, atmospheric phenomena, or seismology, the social

meaning of catastrophic events changed. An increasingly dominant alternative

discourse emerged, wherein such events did not appear as a morality tale, but in-

stead as a risk external to the society.4 Acts of god tended to become acts of nature,

even though the two accounts lived together uneasily for a long time.5 The notion

that the effects of disasters could be controlled is a result of this change. In the

course of this change, societies exposed to sustained risk (of, say, a volcanic erup-

tion or a tidal wave) fashioned new strategies of preparedness—for example,

sending grown-up children away while their parents continued to propitiate the

spirits as before. Expansion in infrastructure and information systems meanwhile

increased the capacity of states to predict risks, supply relief and manage rebuilding,

while also increasing the potential losses to public assets from disasters. Urban-

isation, commercialisation, and the development of legal institutions strengthened

the capacity of markets to meet sudden shortages, while at the same time increasing

the potential for conflicts over property, and in some cases even the risks of damage.

In other words, as the natural environment became a technical-economic problem,

3 The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 famously became an occasion for a debate between continental

rationalism and theodicy. See Kendrick, The Lisbon Earthquake; and Dynes, ‘The Lisbon Earthquake

in 1755’. See also several essays in Johns, ed., Dreadful Visitations.4 Ted Steinberg, in his book Acts of God, argues that this change in attitude is associated with dimin-

ished ethical responsibility in the sphere of human action upon nature, making disasters more likely.5 For a recent example, shortly before the Mount Merapi eruptions in May–June 2006, a volcan-

ologist rued, ‘the biggest problem the Indonesians face is getting the local people to believe what the

scientists say’; reported in the National Geographic Magazine, January 2008, p. 55.





natural disasters turned into an occasion to forge new relationships between states,

markets and citizens.

The present article considers five episodes from colonial India in an attempt to

offer a stylised story about how these modern forms of interaction took shape. The

article limits itself to economic history. Being concerned with the role of markets

and states, it leaves out a whole range of other themes, for example, the ethical-

moral dimension, and a great deal of the social dimension as well. My sources,

furthermore, are limited. I do not wish to offer the limited empirical material here

as definitive histories of any one of these episodes. And yet, through a somewhat

confused patchwork, a pattern does seem to emerge that may have relevance to

future research on this subject.

The argument of the article has two parts. The first part comes as no surprise to

the Southasianist. In what might seem to be a timeless pattern, time made a signifi-

cant difference. Between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth, the

response to disasters changed from laissez-faire to intervention. Following a pattern

that is reminiscent of the evolution of a famine relief policy, there is revealed, in

the examples studied here, a desire to develop the capacity, including the intel-

lectual capacity, to recover and rebuild better. Paradoxically, however, the effect-

iveness of state intervention depended on the broad compatibility between private

and social goals. Such compatibility depended on whether or not the state had

legitimacy. Therefore, contests over legitimacy could affect disaster response.

Effectiveness also depended on information and collaboration, the mechanisms of

which needed to be rebuilt after every disaster, and were often fashioned imper-

fectly. As we travel from 1864, the date of the Calcutta tidal wave, to 1935, the

year of the Quetta earthquake, we see the simultaneous unfolding of a more in-

trusive and capable state, and a more critical scrutiny of state action. Disasters,

thus, mirror the political-economic context.

The second part of the argument is perhaps less obvious. Beyond description,

the article is also interested in developing a stylised narrative of the economic

history of catastrophe. Towards meeting that goal, the article considers one of the

defining features of modern disasters to be a sudden, exogenous and unexpected

destruction of state capacity. From this starting point, it seems possible to generalise

a pattern of response consisting of three stages, an initial destruction of state cap-

acity, an activation of anarchic unregulated markets and private-order institutions

partly in reaction to the temporary retreat of the state, and an eventual rebound of

the state. I suggest further that the third stage saw intense contestation. The return

of the state was beset with collective action problems, and with political con-

flicts of a kind engendered by late colonialism.6 It is a constrained return of the

6 The collective action problem refers to a scenario where the formation of self-interested ‘coalitions’

becomes likely, and the basis for cooperation becomes weaker. The concept of coalition-based politics

and its potential economic consequences owes much to Olson, Logic of Collective Action.





state, and in the nature of these constraints we may discern change, progress, and

perhaps some regress too in the long run. This is a descriptive model, but it has

one virtue. It offers a common frame for the conflicts we see breaking out after

every episode from 1864 to 1935. That being said, it is important to note the limi-

tations of the model, imposed on it by its focus upon markets and states, and by

the nature of the sources used.

The narrative content of the article is limited by the scarcity of material available

on episodes in the nineteenth century, the short span of collective memory, and

the exploratory nature of the article. I start from 1864 because in the early nine-

teenth century, information channels on major disasters were extremely limited,

and seemingly confined to the mobile trading communities. Few reports from this

time were published. For example, information concerning the 1833 earthquake

in northern India was restricted to British trading posts. Information from Nepal

and Tibet was restricted, outside the Kathmandu Valley, to villages on merchant

routes from Kathmandu to Tibet and to India.7 The year 1864 did not necessarily

break this pattern, but did yield a great deal more documentation.

In general, the demand for and supply of information depended on a variety of

factors, such as the distance from the centre of administration and mass media,

which was overwhelmingly Calcutta in the nineteenth century, the political strength

of the affected population, the taxable capacity of the affected population, and the

interest and reach of the media. The sources on the 1864 tidal wave consist mainly

of reports sponsored by the shipping interests of Calcutta. On the other hand, the

main affected area, the delta south of Calcutta, saw no systematic survey, official

tour, or policy statement. By contrast, the 1876 tidal wave in Bengal generated

voluminous official correspondence, one commission of enquiry, and a personal

tour by the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, Sir Richard Temple. At least one reason

for this interest was that, as far as the countryside was concerned, the affected

population in 1876 consisted of peasants, whereas in 1864 they had been fishermen.

The official interest did not seem to have mitigated the effects of the 1876 wave,

but the events were recorded more carefully. For example, the link between tidal

waves and cholera emerged as a point of discussion, and showed that a feasible

form of intervention was disease control. By the time of the twentieth-century

earthquakes, disasters were a governance problem, and saw the publication of a

7 Short notes published by the Asiatic Society, Calcutta, were among the few documents available

on the early nineteenth-century events. Legend has it that while the members of the Society (then the

Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal) sat down to conduct their annual meeting, the 1842 earthquake

struck their building. Reports published in the London media were also available sources. However,

such reports, based on recall and aimed at readers easily impressed, were very unreliable. For example,

a later reconstruction of a devastating conjunction of an earthquake, a hurricane and a tsunami in

southern Bengal in 1737 proved to be wildly imaginative and contradictory. See Bilham, ‘The 1737

Calcutta Earthquake and Cyclone’. The novelist Amitav Ghosh makes creative use of this storm in

The Hungry Tide, set in the Sundarbans.





series of official reports and press releases on relief and recovery. Legislative

proceedings of the time also contained discussions pertaining to the financing of

the rebuilding process. Further, several non-official channels became particularly

active. Reports were prepared by the press, the railways, the Darbhanga Raj after

the 1934 earthquake in Bihar, political volunteers, and scientists writing for the

Geological Survey of India. I use all of these sources.

What I do not use, with the partial exception of the 1876 wave, are unpublished

administrative documents on the Bihar or Bengal countryside. In principle, such

sources could add significant details, indeed whole new angles, on state-society

relationships. The signal limitation of official sources, though—and the point

applies to the material used here as well—is that they tend to overlook the political

processes that occur within communities. How relationships were reconstituted

between the rich and the poor, parents and children, men and women, how rural

communities came together or fell apart, are subjects of great importance, and

must constitute an important element of what I call rebuilding. What we require

in order to address issues such as these are the sufferers’ own narratives, which

remain weak, if not altogether missing, in the sources used here.8

The rest of the article has three sections. The next section develops a working

definition of natural disaster, demarcating at the same time a particular analytical

space for episodes so designated. The section includes a short survey of the global

literature that sees disasters as economic historical episodes. There are few, if any,

threads connecting the many disjointed scholarships. Given the fragmentary nature

of the literature, any attempt to use it in a straightforward way to organise the em-

pirical material would seem futile. That being said, there are themes within this

literature that help us rethink aspects of societal response to natural disasters

in India. The section thereafter presents the narrative material, and the last sec-

tion concludes.

Historiography

From an economic perspective, how do we historicise the response to natural

disasters? The answer should begin from a definition of natural disasters adapted

to the goals of this article. Definitions available from sociological or anthropo-

logical approaches tend to blur the distinction between episodes, which in ordinary

usage are called ‘disasters’, in an attempt to generalise the features of acute col-

lective stress.9 For example, Oliver-Smith defines disaster ‘as a process/event in-

volving the combination of a potentially destructive agent(s) from the natural

8 That said, sufferers’ narratives have a propensity to become morality tales, so that such evidence

needs to be used cautiously as sources in economic history.9 Kiter Edwards, ‘An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Disasters and Stress’.





and/or technological environment and a population in a socially and technologically

produced condition of vulnerability’.10 This definition is perhaps adequate when

the ‘victim’ is the main point of interest, but it is inadequate when economic re-

building and the politics of intervention are also of interest, for political economy

is sensitive to what and whose assets are lost.

I define natural disasters in this article as episodes that display four features.

First, a population faces a sudden elevated risk of losing lives, jobs and wealth.

Second, these risks tend to be distributed between individuals in a relatively class-

neutral way.11 Third, disasters involve interdependence between agents and events.

The last point means that those agencies potentially able to aid recovery—market,

state, civil society—are themselves affected by the event. In nearly all of the ex-

amples below, markets were strengthened and the state weakened (leaving the same

markets unregulated). And fourth, because natural disasters involve a mass destruc-

tion of private assets, they also involve a tortuous process of rebuilding assets.

This definition draws a helpful boundary between ‘natural’ and ‘man-made’

disasters. Needless to say, there is no disaster that does not involve human agency

in making it worse, nor are there episodes of man-made stress that do not involve

precipitating external causes. The two terms are used in a purely comparative

sense, to distinguish between two types of stress that involve different qualities

of risk and response. South Asia has long been familiar with mass mortality due

to natural causes. Historical scholarship has dealt mainly with famines and dis-

eases.12 Famines, by the definition set out above, were a man-made and tidal

waves a natural disaster. Both types involved elevated risks of losing lives and

livelihoods. With famines, however, the risks rose gradually. Famines were slow

developing processes rather than sudden occurrences. During famines, the risks

were distributed unequally. The agents and instruments of relief remained at some

remove from the event. It was rarely the case in colonial India that government

officers died of hunger during famines. But tidal waves destroyed not only a part

of the society, but also a part of the administration.13 Unlike famines and epidemics,

10 ‘Anthropological Research on Hazards and Disasters’.11 ‘... public calamity is a great leveller’, Maharaja of Darbhanga, quoted in Sinha, The Bihar

Earthquake and the Darbhanga Raj, p. 7; and ‘[s]udden onset [of] natural disasters ... are absolute ...

levellers’, Borland, ‘Capitalizing on Catastrophe’. The risk is that of initial impact. Current disaster

studies suggest plausibly that coping can still be class-biased; see O’Hare, ‘Hurricane 07B in the

Godavari Delta’, and Albala-Bertrand, The Political Economy of Large Natural Disasters.12 Sen, ‘Ingredients of Famine Analysis’, and Poverty and Famines; Hall-Matthews, ‘The Historical

Roots of Famine Relief Paradigms’; Klein, ‘When the Rains Failed’; Dyson, ‘On the Demography of

South Asian Famines’; McAlpin, ‘Famines, Epidemics and Population Growth’ and ‘Dearth, Famine,

and Risk’; Klein, ‘Plague, Policy and Popular Unrest in British India’; Arnold, ‘Cholera and Coloni-

alism in British India’; and Watts, ‘British Development Policies and Malaria in India’.13 Most industrial disasters, by this definition, are man-made. Industrial accidents share two features

with natural disasters, sudden onset and class-neutrality, but do not display the agent-event interaction

to quite the same extent.





natural disasters impaired the means to cope by destroying roads, railways, hos-

pitals, communications, jails, banks, offices, and the lives of officers. Further,

famines did not destroy physical assets permanently, but earthquakes and tidal

waves did. For this reason, the recovery from famines could be remarkably quick,

whereas the rebuilding after an earthquake had to be a protracted affair.

On the other hand, in one respect famines and natural disasters seem to show a

common pattern of response. In both cases, the level of state intervention increased,

even though the ways in which it did differed considerably. In colonial India, fam-

ines and epidemics were problems that affected the indigenous population. The

state in the nineteenth century followed a broadly non-intrusive approach to

problems that could be identified with the social and cultural practices of the

indigenous population.14 That said, the general decline in mortality from the early

twentieth century indicated that two things had changed. First, the minimalist

position lost persuasive power after the late-nineteenth century Deccan famines.

Second, public goods and markets worked progressively better as a defence against

famines and epidemics. Such public goods included not only railways, sanitation,

or hospitals, but the institutionalisation of science and medical practice as well,

which contributed to the understanding of causation and prevention of disease.

Unlike famines, which affected the indigenous population, particularly the poor

among them, natural disasters affected both settlers and locals, the rich and the

poor. Therefore, while the state does reveal a detachment in the nineteenth century,

there was also reaction to such distance from powerful lobbies. In the nineteenth

century, state action in emergencies broadly took two forms. Revenue remission

was a standard response, in common with famine relief.15 The other action was

raising a subscribed fund. The history of state-aided charity goes back to the

times when the Company administration was socially not far apart from the prom-

inent commercial classes of Calcutta.16 In the examples studied here, these two

forms of response continued, but on an expanding scale. At the same time, dis-

satisfaction with mere charity grew as well. In the twentieth century, state agents

14 With famines, varying shades of Malthusianism created a bias for neutrality in the nineteenth

century; see Ambirajan, ‘Malthusian Population Theory and Indian Famine Policy’; and Commander,

‘Malthus and the Theory of “Unequal Powers”’. Such a stance might account for the ‘inertia and re-

luctance’ to intervene in the cholera epidemic of the nineteenth century; see Arnold, ‘Cholera and Colo-

nialism’. In this context, if disease mortality did decrease, it was because natural immunity had perhaps

played a larger role than public policy intervention (see Klein, ‘Plague, Policy and Popular Unrest’).15 For one work specifically dealing with cyclones and flood damage, see Bhatta, The Natural

Disasters in Orissa in the 19th Century, pp. 56–57.16 During a tidal wave in southeastern Bengal in June 1822, the Governor General held a public

meeting and collected Rs 1,000 mainly from Bengali notables, with which a boatload of 7,000 sacks

of rice (approximately 280 tons) was sent to the affected district. Report in the Bengali newspaper

Daya Prakash, 29 June 1822, reprinted in Bandopadhyay, ed., Sambadpatre Sekaler Katha [The

Past through Newspapers], p. 103.





seemed to take a more active part in the coordination of rebuilding. I suggest that

this interventionism was shaped partly in reaction to the destruction of state cap-

acity in the initial stages of the event, and partly by the institutional problems that

rebuilding gave rise to. At the level of scientific understanding, there was a parallel

in the manner in which geologists and epidemiologists responded to disasters, by

developing partially testable theories of causation, which in turn led to a technology

of prediction, if not prevention.

Outside South Asian history, disaster studies that are potentially relevant to

the economic historian do not constitute one integrated framework. Global lit-

erature has dealt with themes as varied as collective insurance, political crises

and legitimacy, beliefs and rationality, and the response of the state, society and

markets to these events. A few key problems do emerge, however.

One set of issues deals with risks and insurance. Can preparedness account

for impact?

Economic historians have discussed two ways in which rural populations in

monsoon Asia prepared for famine risks, having larger families and storing grains.17

Preparedness, however, is of limited help in discussing natural disasters, for two

reasons. First, in order to have an insurance effect, disaster risk must be determinate.

If climatic risk is sometimes determinate, that of an earthquake is usually not.18

Second, insurance and preparedness depend on risk perception. Two mediating

factors enter this perception, preferences and bounded rationality. In a physical

sense, some regions are more vulnerable to coastal flooding than others. But com-

munities do often have a choice regarding living in safer areas. Why do communi-

ties choose to live in vulnerable areas? Risks may not be properly perceived because

the elevated probability of disaster occurrence often shows up only on a geological

time-scale. However, even when the probability of occurrence is determinate, for

example with monsoon storm surges, we still see a disregard of risk.19 Do genera-

tions systematically predict risks based on their own limited lifetime experience?

17 See Jones, The European Miracle; Pryor, ‘Climatic Fluctuations as a Cause of the Differential

Economic Growth’; and Anderson and Jones, ‘Natural Disasters and Historical Response’. The par-

ticular interest here is focused not on disaster impact, but on comparative economic growth. On grain

storage, see McAlpin, ‘Dearth, Famine, and Risk’.18 For the same reason, disaster insurance is not a popular market product. Disasters are events

that have a small chance of occurring, but that inflict a very large damage when they do occur. Even

when the risk is known, it may be too small to justify the premium paid. See the discussion in Kunreuther,

‘The Changing Societal Consequences of Risks from Natural Hazards’. See also, on incomplete

markets, Skees and Barnett, ‘Conceptual and Practical Considerations for Sharing Catastrophic/

Systemic Risks’; and on an argument based on capital market imperfections, Froot, ‘The Market for

Catastrophe Risk’.19 For example, Sagar Island on the mouth of the Hooghly in Bengal was swept clean of life by

giant waves in 1831 and 1876. Within a few years on each occasion, the island was repopulated. In

the contest between the memory of ruin and the pull of fertile land, the latter won.





Or is there a conscious weighing of life expectancy against the chance of a disaster

that is involved here? In the mid-nineteenth century, when the life expectancy was

not much greater than the average time-gap between two devastating tidal waves,

a resident of coastal Bengal might rationally have chosen to disregard the risk rather

than arrange for insurance. Bounded rationality can also affect outcomes by creat-

ing cleavages between private actions and social welfare, a problem that has en-

gaged sociologists in particular.20

One reason for such a cleavage between self-interest and social welfare to de-

velop after disasters is the operation of unregulated markets. Daniel Defoe observed

that London traders greatly profited from the plague epidemic of 1665.21 The pos-

session of goods that are in shortage is a source of market power during emergen-

cies. But there is another, more political, source of economic power. The literature

on livelihoods in conflict-ridden societies suggests a variety of ways in which

emergencies tend to break cooperation as the struggle for survival creates a fierce

competition over necessities. Societies in sudden and deep crisis face an alteration

in the comparative political advantage enjoyed by different groups, and, therefore,

in a variety of rent-seeking opportunities. The ‘grabbing hand’ is activated during

the sudden withdrawal or collapse of the state.22 The key point here is that emer-

gencies create gainers as well as losers, and the power of the gainers can account

for the persistence of dysfunctional situations.23 A connected problem is that of

state legitimacy. Historians have recently explored how natural disasters can be-

come an occasion for losing and/or reclaiming political legitimacy.24 Economists

have also emphasised that episodes of ‘disorder’ can become worse if joined with

a contest for legitimacy.25

Finally, disaster studies observe that the cultural response has an impact on the

dynamics of rebuilding.26 This suggestion connects with the emphasis in new in-

stitutional economics on the role of beliefs in the process of economic change.27

Cataclysms pose a cognitive challenge at many levels, one of which is useful

20 See, for example, Bogard, ‘Bringing Social Theory to Hazards Research’.21 Starr, ‘Defoe and Disasters’.22 Shleifer and Vishny, The Grabbing Hand: Government Pathologies and their Cures.23 Korf, ‘Contract or War?’; Goodhand, ‘Violent Conflict’. More recently, disaster studies conducted

by economists and environmentalists have alerted us to the notion of vulnerability as a historically

constructed process. See Kasperson and Kasperson, Climate Change, Vulnerability, and Social Justice;

Albala-Bertrand, The Political Economy of Large Natural Disasters; and Blaikie et al., At Risk. Most

definitions of vulnerability treat the concept as historically contingent. Global warming, population

growth and modernisation processes in the developing world are illustrations used in the literature.24 Borland, ‘Capitalizing on Catastrophe’; Clancey, ‘The Meiji Earthquake’; Schencking, ‘Catas-

trophe, Opportunism, Contestation’.25 North, et al., ‘Order, Disorder, and Economic Change’.26 Hoffman, ‘After Atlas Shrugs’.27 North, Understanding the Process of Economic Change.





knowledge. The great Bay of Bengal storms of the nineteenth century led to the

formation of a theory of cyclones in the region, which was initially meant to warn

and guide merchant mariners. Every earthquake confronted the nineteenth-century

geologist in India with a set of ‘baffling phenomena’. In the course of meeting

these challenges, geologists enriched the understanding of the ‘Himalayan thrust’.28

The other plane in cognition involves perennial conflicts between the moral and

the rational discourses on causation. For example, the notion that earthquakes

were acts of god was dramatically revived by M.K. Gandhi in 1934.

In the narrative material that comes next, the concepts of preparedness, state

failure, anarchic markets and cognitive response reappear, indeed in all the ex-

amples. The immediate aftermath of an acute disaster seems to activate a whole

portfolio of responses. As the state appears to retreat from the scene, the market

and private-order institutions such as the community and beliefs about cosmic

cycles become more active than ever. In addition to these issues, a further theme

can be glimpsed in the examples below, a theme that remains less theorised in

either the famine discourse or the global scholarship on emergencies. This is to

do with disputes that occur over property during the rebuilding process, especially

in an urban setting. In the concluding section, I will try to unify these themes—

anarchic markets, state failure and the return of the state, preparedness, and col-

lective action problems—together into a single historical account.

Illustrations, 1864–1935

In autumn, the Coastal Bay of Bengal is exposed to powerful cyclonic storms, ac-

companied by tsunamis. On the early morning of 5 October 1864, a violent cy-

clone made landfall in lower Bengal, followed shortly by a 20-foot wave. The

wave came up the Hooghly to reach Calcutta city about midday. Before subsiding

in the late afternoon, the wave left the riverfront in Calcutta in a state described as

‘melancholy in the extreme’. Fragments of sail boats, ships, fallen trees were

strewn all over. ‘[D]imly in the distance the opposite shore was lined with ships

massed together on the shore.’ Bodies of men and animals went floating past, ‘but

living or dead no rescue could be attempted’ (see Figure 1).29

What struck contemporaries as particularly odd was how little or badly public

facilities were used for the public good. Sixty miles south of Calcutta, at Khejuri,

there was a telegraph station. The storm wave reached Khejuri four hours before

it reached Calcutta. The irate business community in the city, largely European,

28 Significant examples include the father and son, Thomas (1816–78) and Richard (1857–1936)

Oldham. The former, Director of the Geological Survey of India, compiled the first catalogue of

Indian earthquakes. Richard developed a theory of waves based on studies of individual earthquakes.29 Gastrell and Blanford, Report on the Calcutta Cyclone, p. 4.





was sore on the point that ‘the idea of utilizing the telegraph does not appear to

have occurred to Government, for no code of signals have been arranged by which

any such information could be brought to the notice of the parties interested’.30 The

wave destroyed Calcutta port. In the previous 30 years, maritime traffic in Calcutta

had increased fourfold.31 But the port lacked proper docks. In a span of three hours,

the storm surge tore every ship from its mooring, and ‘planted ships in gardens

and ... on public roads’. The city administration rested with a Municipal Council

peopled by government nominees, who found themselves paralysed in the absence

of higher orders. ‘[T]hey have ... done nothing’, the embittered merchants of

Calcutta declared.32

It was not only the state that failed. Private charity failed too. An appeal issued

by a European merchant drew a handful of citizens to a meeting held on 13 October.

30 Bengal Hurkaru, Account of the Great Bengal Cyclone, 1864, p. 5.31 The number of ships docking at Calcutta increased from 372 in 1833 to 1,126 in 1863, and the

total tonnage about seven times, the mean tonnage having increased from 371 to 808. Adley, The

Port of Calcutta, p. 8.32 Bengal Hurkaru, Account of the Great Bengal Cyclone, p. 14.

Figure 1

‘Dimly in the Distance the Opposite Shore was Lined with Ships Massed

together on the Shore’; Bengal Hurkaru, Account of the Great Bengal Cyclone

Source: Illustrated London News.





Acting on vague reports of devastation in southern Bengal, the group raised enough

money to load a ship with rice and sent it southward. The money raised in the

public meeting was £ 2,500, whereas the value of cargo lost in Calcutta was £ 3 mil-

lion. In fairness to public authorities, the mentality of the Permanent Settlement,

wherein formally the property rights on land and informally some extent of govern-

ance power had been handed over by the East India Company to landlords called

zamindars, was still strong. This meeting turned into a polite quarrel between the

zamindars and the merchants. Baboo Digumber Mitter, more or less the only rep-

resentative of the zamindars in this meeting, ‘clearly and plainly accounted for’

the unavailability of his brethren for monetary contribution, as most of them had

left the city for their estates to celebrate the festive season.33 Information about the

scale of the disaster was a black box. The leading English newspaper of the city

estimated a loss of 2,000 lives. But the signs were ominous. For days ‘the mails

sent southward have been returned, there has been no one to receive them’. The

‘dak runners’ reported that not only were the addressees and their villages missing,

but the counterpart runners were missing too. It was only after the rice boat returned

to Calcutta that news began to filter in about south Bengal. A later enquiry placed

mortality conservatively at nearer a 100,000.34

In the days following the waves, Calcutta saw sudden shortages of food, labour

and security. Guarding the broken ships was of utmost importance.35 Grain riots

were imminent. In Atcheepore, owners of the few private grain stocks that were

still intact would not sell grain ‘except at murderous rates’.36 At Fort Gloster, ‘the

people surrounded the house of the Engineer residing there, and were so clamorous

in their cries for food, that, that gentleman at one time believed that his life was in

danger’.37 Many residents were believed to have carried away and concealed the

possibly contaminated grain that was thrown up on the river bank.

Grain was not the only commodity selling dear. Services had risen in price too.

‘The few passenger boats that survived realised a handsome income for several

days following.’38 Cargo boats were in demand at exorbitant rates. Wages of dock

labourers increased five times overnight (see Figure 2).39 On the evening of 5

October, the workers were on their night break. Many did not report next morning

to the ships with which they had a contract, but disappeared in the daily labour

33 Ibid., pp. 14, 72.34 Gastrell and Blanford, Report on the Calcutta Cyclone.35 ‘A body of 50 men selected from sailors on shore have been appointed to watch over all stranded

property’, Bengal Hurkaru, Account of the Great Bengal Cyclone, p. 12.36 Gastrell and Blanford, Report on the Calcutta Cyclone, p. 89.37 Ibid., p. 90.38 ‘Sums varying from rupees 2 to rupees 10 were paid for crossing the river, the usual charge for

which is one anna’, Bengal Hurkaru, Account of the Great Bengal Cyclone, p. 3.39 ‘Coolie’s wages sprung to Rupee 1 daily, and lascars and khallassees were employed at Rupees

3 to Rupees 5, while their monthly wages vary usually from 9 Rupees to 12 Rupees’, ibid., p. 3.





market. The police, who should have been saving lives, were sent after these

absconders, and ‘... very properly [punished] their conduct’, when some of them

were caught.

The longer-term impact of the storm was on strengthening the long-standing

demand for docks in Calcutta. Months after the 1864 cyclone, the merchants of

Calcutta issued a report harshly critical of the port.

Our facilities for loading and discharging ships are a reproach to a commercial

city, there is perhaps no shipping port in the world, however humble that does

not in this respect contrast favourably with this city of magnificence and mud.

We have no wharves, jetties or landing stages, no steam or hydraulic cranes.40

After much wrangling over the proper institutional framework for such invest-

ments, serious efforts at modernisation did begin from the second half of the 1860s.

Twelve years later, on the night of 31 October 1876, a larger storm surge came

up the Meghna further east. A freshwater bore was a normal return tide that occurred

on a full moon, which that night was. Faced with the storm wave that came inward

40 Ibid., p. 38. See also Adley, The Port of Calcutta.

Figure 2

Dock Labourers in Calcutta, 6 October 1864

Source: Illustrated London News.





from the sea, the freshwater accumulation could not reach the sea, but was pushed

back. Consequently, a massive pile of water accumulated, which, in the shape of

a 20-foot wave, swept over an area of 3,000 square miles. In this territory, more

than 200,000 lives were lost. Where hamlets were surrounded by dense vegetation,

survival was more likely. Many amongst those who survived the wave had found

themselves stuck on top of large trees. Villages close to the shore and in compara-

tively open country had few survivors.

Between 1864 and 1876, the provincial bureaucracy had expanded. If the 1864

cyclone resulted in paralysing the agents of the state, the 1876 cyclone killed

them. ‘Most of the local .. officials were drowned ... deputy magistrates, police

inspectors, ... civil judges, notaries.’41 Most boats were destroyed, so that the district

authorities were left with no means to tour the countryside. As before, insecurity

quickly increased. The rivers in the region had had a long history of gang robbers.

However, the extensive looting that followed was not done by professionals.42

Large quantities of stored grain were carried away by unknown strangers. Mer-

chants’ storages were robbed. Boxes of valuables were stolen, or were just found

and kept. Ornaments were taken from the bodies of the dead or the injured. The

police looked on, and in some cases joined the looters. The water carried building

material from the coasts to the inland, ‘with the result that those further inland

have gained much that the former have lost’. There were frequent disputes, which

occasionally turned violent. Boxes containing valuable property were thus ‘found’

and appropriated. There was no easy way for the state agencies to settle these

claims, and they left it to the village elders to handle the best way they could. For,

‘the finders ... entertain doubts as to the rights of the claimants’.43

In 1876, we see a rudimentary system of state relief in operation. In keeping

with the prevailing ideology of distress relief, this effort did not exactly address

the issue of saving lives. The goal, rather, was to revive private trade, and prevent

more serious forms of insecurity by demonstrating the existence of the state. The

objective of this policy was ‘to let the poor people see that the authorities are

thinking, caring, feeling for them’ in their misery.44 That being said, a more deter-

mined state effort could be seen six months later in dealing with the cholera epi-

demic that broke out the next summer, though this effort also did not succeed

41 Minute by the Lieutenant Governor of Bengal, 21 Nov. 1876, in The British Parliamentary Papers,

House of Commons (B.P.P. [H.C.] hereafter), Papers on the Subject of The Bengal Cyclone, p. 4.42 On the looting of property and grain in general, see ibid., p. 4; A. Smith, Officiating Commissioner

of the Chittagong Division, to the Secretary of the Government of Bengal, 23 Nov. 1876, in

B.P.P.(H.C.), Papers on the Subject of The Bengal Cyclone, p. 17; E.E. Lowis, Commissioner of the

Chittagong Division, to the Secretary to the Government of India, 27 Apr. 1877, in ibid., pp. 83–84.43 A. Smith, Officiating Commissioner of the Chittagong Division, to the Secretary of the Gov-

ernment of Bengal, 23 Nov. 1876, B.P.P.(H.C.), Papers on the Subject of The Bengal Cyclone, p. 21.44 Minute by the Lieutenant Governor, in B.P.P.(H.C.), Papers on the Subject of The Bengal

Cyclone, p. 5.





too well in containing a scale of ‘mortality unprecedented even in the annals of

cholera’.45 Curiously enough, the Bengal zamindars appeared to be missing again

from the action. If on 5 October 1864 they had left Calcutta for the festivities in

their estates, on 30 October 1876 they had returned to Calcutta, leaving their

estates to deal with the disaster as best they could.46

What did succeed in saving lives were stored grain and the local grain markets.

The storm had occurred only days after an abundant crop of autumn rice had been

harvested. Since part of the water was tidal, the flood subsided quickly. Much of

the rice that had been stored underground in containers remained intact. The labour

market was again very active in disposing of the dead, and drying the grain required

many hands. When officers managed to reach the districts a few days later, the

sight that greeted them was of a grim-faced population digging up the foundations

of their destroyed homes to access grain pits, and drying the grain. They were too

busy staying alive to find the time to grieve over the dead. Grain markets revived

very quickly, first, because grain rushed into the bazaars, and second, because of

distress sales.47 These resources did not save the countryside from water shortages,

the consequent epidemic, several years of poor crops, and navigation problems

caused by submerged trees on the river-beds or ‘snags’.

Calcutta and Assam were struck by an earthquake 20 years later, on 12 June

1897 (see Figure 3 for a commemorative picture postcard of the event). Once

again we observe the marginal presence of the state or charity, and greatly activated

labour and grain markets; however, there were much better information flows,

thanks to press reports in Calcutta. Thinly inhabited, Assam experienced relatively

low mortality. But Assam was a politically important territory. The town Shillong

had served as the summer capital of Bengal until 1874 and the capital of Assam

thereafter, and was the retreat of a powerful tea planter community. Letters written

by the members of this community in newspapers in Calcutta suggest that the

character of Shillong as an idyllic retreat, complete with golf links, picnic spots,

polo grounds and clubs, was shaken, possibly beyond repair, by the earthquake.48

These letters complain bitterly about the rise in wages and prices in the town, in

a language almost reminiscent of a class war. ‘It seems hard,’ one outraged cor-

respondent wrote, ‘that the coolies should be allowed to profit so immensely by

our misfortunes.’ The labourer, who was ‘about to amass a small fortune at the

45 From the Junior Secretary to the Government of Bengal to the Commissioner of the Chittagong

Division, Calcutta, 4 May 1877, B.P.P.(H.C.), Papers on the Subject of The Bengal Cyclone, p. 85.46 ‘With the exception of one or two, none of the zemindars did anything’, E.J. Barton, Officiating

Magistrate of Backergunge, to the Officiating Commissioner of the Dacca Division, 16 Mar. 1877,

B.P.P.(H.C.), Papers on the Subject of The Bengal Cyclone, p. 75.47 ‘[B]oat-loads of rice are coming to the several large hats ...’, ibid.48 These letters, my principal source for this episode, are compiled in The Englishman, The Earth-

quake in Bengal and Assam.





expense of those who can ill afford it, has himself lost practically nothing, for the

excellent reason that he has nothing to lose ...’.49

Calcutta experienced the earthquake on a smaller scale, but the effect was of a

different order. Once again, ‘large squads of coolies are now at work’, as a hurried

rebuilding began in the city soon after the earthquake. A part of this activity can

be explained by what was seen as the extortionate demands of landlords for rents

and harder lease terms. However, more than rents, house-owners in the non-

European quarters were afraid that the authorities would at some point conduct

an inspection and declare many houses unsafe for habitation. There was increasing

pressure from the Europeans for the adoption of a building code, which would

have had such an effect. In many houses, ‘It seems almost criminal to permit such

repairs to be carried out’.50

Skipping 40 years, we now move to the two episodes from the twentieth century,

the 1934 north Bihar earthquake and the 1935 Quetta earthquake. We observe, by

contrast with the previous cases, the much larger scale in which the state and civil

society became involved. It is also important to note the uneasy coexistence of

state and private institutions in a political context in which the legitimacy of each

was being questioned by the other.

49 Ibid., pp. 198–99.50 Ibid., p. 278.

Figure 3

Commemorative Picture Postcard of the Shillong Earthquake

=

Source: Author’s collection.





The Bihar earthquake occurred on 15 January 1934.51 Towns along the main

railway line, from Motihari on the Nepal border to Darbhanga in the east and

Monghyr to the southeast, suffered extensive damages, including heavy loss of

life, breakdown of railways and telegraphs, and collapse of embankments and

bridges. That morning a Hindu festival had drawn a large number of people to a

morning bath in the Ganges in Monghyr. Many of the bathers who had come from

distant villages then moved to the bazaars for purchases. The next day was the

Muslim festival of Id, which added numbers to that contingent. At 2.15 PM, a series

of milder tremors were followed by ‘a thunderous stunning boom’. Seconds later,

blackness engulfed Monghyr as a huge cloud of dust rose from the collapsing town.

Soon after the earthquake, the horrified District Officer observed in Monghyr

that the Civil Surgeon’s house and the jail walls had collapsed, bringing down

both the healthcare and the security systems. In Muzaffarpur, too, the jail walls

collapsed, as had the Imperial Bank walls and the Treasury building. In the eyes

of the administrators, these were towns where, over the next few hours and days,

convicts walked out of jail, the bank walls had collapsed, and the police was either

dead or otherwise busy. Before saving lives, the civil administration had to guard

the jails, the banks and the Treasury. Later, nationalist critics of the regime would

suggest this as one of the reasons for the poor relief effort.52 Finally, the com-

munication system collapsed. Telegraphic communication was destroyed. Postal

communication was dislocated. More news was available on towns that had suf-

fered less damage, whereas a town such as Motihari where damages were very severe,

and indeed the entire Bihar countryside, remained outside circulation for days

(see Figure 4). While telegraphic communication and electricity were restored

relatively quickly, the complete network of the Bengal and North-Western Railway

became functional more than a year later. The earthquake had also crippled pub-

lic finances, for the municipalities lost a large part of their income which came

from house tax.

Had there been more resources to spend, relief agencies would still have had

to solve the puzzle of who was affected where. The victims of the tragedy formed

a selective group. Women, city-dwellers, Indians and merchants lost more lives

than did men, villagers, Europeans—which category included many indigo and

sugar planters—and labourers. The majority of those who died in the Bihar earth-

quake were women, because it occurred during the day when women were inside

51 For general descriptions, see East India Railway, Report on the Earthquake on 15th January

1934, Bihar, Report on the Progress of Earthquake Reconstruction in Bihar, 1934; The Statesman,

‘Record of the Great Indian Earthquake’; Sinha, The Bihar Earthquake and the Darbhanga Raj;

Bihar Central Relief Committee, Devastated Bihar; Andrews, The Indian Earthquake; Auden and

Ghosh, ‘Preliminary Account of the Earthquake of the 15th January, 1934’.52 ‘It is suspected, and rightly, that many lives have been lost because of the delay in removing the

heaps of brick and dust which held under them many a living being’, Bihar Central Relief Committee,

Devastated Bihar, p. 52.





homes engaged in domestic work. Mortality varied closely with the condition,

age and quality of the building. Thus, the European population, consisting of

officers and planters, by and large escaped death because they lived in houses that

did not collapse in the first few seconds, giving the occupants time to run out on

to the streets. The only European to die in Monghyr was one Miss Frances

Christian, member of an old planter family, who stayed inside her house too long

in an unwise attempt to save her dog.

Mortality was especially heavy in the bazaars. The lanes here were so narrow

and the masonry so weak that falling bricks obliterated the lanes, and trapped

those trying to escape by running outside. ‘The poor householders and shopkeepers

never had the semblance of a chance to escape’ in Muzaffarpur. Monghyr suffered

in the same way. In Darbhanga bazaar, the same situation was repeated.53 Masonry

houses caused more damage, whereas mud-built houses caused less. The brick-

and-mortar house was common in the bazaars. These houses belonged to merchants

and shopkeepers, including (especially) the Marwari businessmen. In villages,

53 W.B. Brett, ICS, in debate on Darbhanga Improvement Trust at the Bihar and Orissa Legislative

Council, 3 Sept. 1934, cited in Sinha, The Bihar Earthquake, p. 44.

Figure 4

Motihari Town, January 1934

Source: Auden and Ghosh, ‘Bihar Earthquake’.





the initial tremors were often enough warning for people to rush into the open. In

Monghyr, on the other hand, ‘40% of the business men’ perished.54

The countryside did face totally unprecedented challenges. A large number of

wells had been filled with sand in the areas worst affected. The immediate rem-

edy was to dig bore-wells. However, due to over-use, some of these government-

constructed bore-wells soon became unusable. Water had gushed out from earth-

quake fissures and formed large lakes. These lakes took weeks to dry. In this

region of very thick alluvial deposits, sand poured out through vents opened during

the earthquake, and formed a layer on cultivated land. In the areas where sand de-

posits were measured, the depth of the layer was seen to vary from a restorable

six inches to more than two feet, which almost destroyed the land underneath.55

Survey of India estimates available in early 1935 found that the entire region in

the epicentre of the earthquake had subsided by a foot or more, and had tilted

towards the southwest, the direction in which the drainage ran. ‘It is possible that

very disastrous floods may occur’.56 The prediction was partially borne out by the

extensive flooding that took place during the 1934 monsoon.

However, the countryside escaped with a lower rate of mortality and loss of

assets. Grain and labour markets revived quickly. ‘Clearing of the debris was a

task which required thousands of labourers and huge sums of money’ in both the

towns and the countryside.57 The earthquake occurred early in the sugarcane crush-

ing season. A number of crushing factories were destroyed, and railway lines

which carried the sugarcane to the factories were also damaged. Cut cane had to

be taken to the crushing mill within four days. There was a brief return to the

bullock-run mills in the villages, which few cultivators remembered how to use

effectively. Those who managed to produce gur in that season made a windfall,

because prices were high due to supply shortages and the railways offered a freight

discount as part of the relief package. Markets almost failed, and yet ‘unscrupulous

contractors’ trying to capture the cane at distress prices were somehow held in

check by an arrangement struck in Muzaffarpur, whereby orders from crushing

mills in Bengal and south Bihar were centrally distributed amongst cane growers.

These facts, which showed that the rural society was bouncing back relatively

54 Bihar Central Relief Committee, Devastated Bihar, p. 20.55 In the latter part of 1934 and early in 1935, government surveyors reported on the problem,

which was less serious in extent than was at first believed. The only solution tried was to plough in

the sand with the soil where the sand deposit was too thin to impair fertility. The ordinary plough

used in north Bihar did not go deep enough for the job.56 Bihar, Report on the Progress, p. 14.57 Bihar Central Relief Committee, Devastated Bihar, p. 52. This post-disaster labour market was

highly segmented. While urban wages reportedly increased, rural wages fell because of the loss of

cultivation, the uncertain prospect of marketing crops, and the presence of few employers. The Bihar

Central Relief Committee employed people to clear sand deposits and retrieve wells at extremely

low wages; see Andrews, The Indian Earthquake, p. 85.





quickly, also suggested to relief agencies that the most vulnerable class was not

the rural poor, but persons of ‘better social standing’, chiefly shopkeepers.

In most towns relief funds were quickly spent in immediate relief, leaving

little for rebuilding. In Darbhanga town, however, the authorities, emboldened by

a generous loan offered by the Maharaja, saw the earthquake as an opportunity

for town planning. The proposal was to create a Darbhanga Improvement Trust

that would carry out the reconstruction and sell plots or developed sites to bidders.

The District Magistrate issued orders prohibiting the reconstruction of private

houses in the bazaar area, and recommended shifting the shops to another location

instead. However, the literally god-sent chance to build a planned town partly at

the state’s expense pleased no one. ‘Protest meetings, panicy [Sic.] representations,

press propaganda and the like became the order of the day.’58 A large number of

people wanted to finish building their homes before the rains arrived, and as the

District Collector put it, ‘there was no knowing what would happen during the

rainy season’.59 But there were deeper dissensions, and some of these took on a

communal colour. A delegation from the Hindu Mahasabha discovered that the

agitators consisted primarily of ‘the Musalmans and the Marwaris’, and were ‘mis-

guided partly by self-interest and partly by vague and imaginary fears’.60 The

authorities had to invoke Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code, making

assemblies unlawful. However, the proposal could not be imposed by force, for the

merchants’ resistance could mean too little funding would be available for the project.

The Legislative debate that finally approved the bill, thanks to the support of

the majority of merchants, revealed that both the rich and the poor had their own

reasons for opposing the move. The buildings and property undamaged by the earth-

quake would be acquired by legislative action for road building.61 Losing the rent

of a good location was central to these objections. On the other hand, there was

also the fear that when the bill became law, the rich would, albeit reluctantly, buy

up the best plots in the Trust area and make good their losses the best they could.

The poor would be left out,62 as they consisted of many whose lands would be ac-

quired to build the new bazaar site. These lands were not valuable in terms of rent.

The poor would get compensation, but the new sites were likely to cost more. There

was the fear of the market: ‘the Bill provides some sort of exchange, but the ques-

tion is in what manner the exchange will be made’.63 Those displaced by the

bazaar road extension might be able to acquire alternative land at prices lower

than what the Trust would charge them.64 In short, wherever the rents and profits

58 Sinha, The Bihar Earthquake, p. 29.59 Ibid., p. 30.60 Ibid., p. 28.61 Maulavi Shaikh Muhammad Shafi, cited in Sinha, The Bihar Earthquake, p. 52.62 W.B. Brett, cited in ibid., p. 74.63 Sinha, The Bihar Earthquake, p. 54.64 Brett, replying to objections made by another member, cited in Sinha, The Bihar Earthquake, p. 86.





earned by shopkeepers depended on their location within the city, the rich had

more to lose from relocation. On the other hand, the rich had more private means

with which to compensate themselves for such losses, while the poor did not.

Therefore the poor opposed such moves too.

The collective action problem might have been a little easier to handle but for

the fact that the earthquake occurred during an unhappy time in Indian politics.

Repeated failures at the roundtable conferences had left the Indian nationalists

dejected and divided. The Great Depression had left New Delhi bankrupt. Experi-

ments in federalism had already induced Delhi to maintain a conscious distance

from provincial administration. This distance now came in handy. The only imme-

diate sign of Delhi’s interest in the episode was a reconnaissance aircraft that

flew over the affected area a few times three days after the event. For subsequent

aerial assistance, the Bihar administrators had to rely not on the airforce, but on

an outfit called Captain Bernard’s Circus. The Viceroy started a relief fund, but he

was in competition with a nationalistic relief fund started by the local Congressman

and later the first President of India, Rajendra Prasad. Both funds raised very

little money because government agencies refused to contribute.65 Bihar’s best

bet was the central budget, which showed a small surplus. The Finance Secretary

refused to part with this surplus on the ground that since the correct scale of the

damages could not be known, the government might end up spending too much

money.66

Administrative command rested with the Magistrates and Collectors. However,

these agents of the state at best tolerated, and frequently fought with, the nation-

alistic volunteers who poured into Bihar. Several among these relief workers had

come from outside the region and were members of the Congress. While prominent

Indian businesses and wealthy individuals such as the Maharaja of Darbhanga,

David Ezechiel of Calcutta, and the Tatas of Jamshedpur, donated money and ma-

terial or set up relief camps, the principal organisations involved, such as the

Marwari Relief Society, Ramakrishna Mission and the Servants of India Society,

were either sectarian or nationalist.

M.K. Gandhi reached Bihar on 15 March 1934, when the politics of relief was

going wrong. In a short and sharp speech delivered in Muzaffarpur, Gandhi made

65 For a benchmark, the Viceroy’s fund collected Rs 1.35 million for the 1905 Kangra earthquake.

Kangra had a population of 400,000. The two funds for north Bihar, which had a population of

13 million, raised Rs 4.7 million. According to Ram Saran Das, the legislative member who debated

the issue of earthquake finance, the rebuilding would cost Rs 50 million. This was a rough guess, of

course, as the Finance Member pointed out.66 ‘Until ... the Government of India are aware of the sum that will be required for grants to the

poor people in Bihar for rebuilding their houses, ... it is impossible to say whether there is a problem’,

Alan Parsons, in India, The Council of State Debate, Vol. I, 1934 (8 Feb. to 27 Apr. 1934), Seventh

Session of the Third Council of State, p. 415.





two points. First, that the relief funds should not be used for charity, but for re-

building. The second point came from a worldview that was uniquely Gandhian:

I want you everyone to be superstitious enough with me to believe that this

disaster is a divine chastisement for the great sin we have committed, and are

still committing, against those whom we call untouchables ... .67

His tour in Bihar increasingly turned into a moral campaign of this sort. The cam-

paign was abandoned when the poet Rabindranath Tagore criticised Gandhi for

what, in his view, was an uncharacteristic case of bad faith,

What is truly tragic is the fact that the argument Mahatma Gandhi used, by

exploiting an event of cosmic disturbance, far better suits the psychology of

his opponents than his own ... .68

This dispute in the wake of the earthquake became a point of contemporary interest,

embarrassed Charles Andrews, a close associate of both, and induced him to write

a book on the earthquake. The debate needs to be seen in the context of Gandhi’s

distinctive approach to nationalism, one part of which Tagore shared, and another

part he did not. Both had expanded the meaning of nationalism beyond an anti-

colonial struggle to include a critique of inequities within Indian society.69 They

differed in their means. Tagore believed that the road to moral strength lay in edu-

cation, while Gandhi believed in appeals to conscience. Gandhi’s words also need

to be understood in the context of his critique of Western modernity. Earthquakes

in particular had long been seen as acts of god in northern India, indeed in the pre-

modern world, and his words on this occasion used this timeless language of

atonement that every disaster triggered among ordinary people.70

If the state effort was bogged down in politics, the markets were activated.

Reflecting the maturity of an import-substituting industrialisation, the range of

products had expanded beyond food. Leading English language newspapers printed

advertisements by the Asbestos Cement (India) Limited for ‘permanent, econom-

ical and resisting’ building material, Jardine Menzes for reinforced concrete, canvas

and twine, sugar mill machinery and construction grade steel, the Vauxhall car,

which drove easily through ‘river beds, hills and boulders’, traction trucks, life

67 Andrews, The Indian Earthquake, p. 70.68 Ibid., p. 73.69 For an excellent discussion of this theme, see Das Gupta, Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography.70 On ‘superstitions’, see the report on the 1833 Bihar earthquake in Asiatic Journal and Monthly

Register, 1834, quoted in The Statesman, ‘Record’, p. 43. In 1934, rumour had it that in Nepal, tem-

ples had been spared; The Statesman, ‘Record’, p. 37. Curiously, the earthquake was harsh on temples

in the Darbhanga raj; see Sinha, The Bihar Earthquake, p. 10.





insurance, architects and surveyors, overhead cables, safe drinking water plants,

and strength-building nourishment foods such as Fry’s 4 Foods in One that re-

juvenated the body, brain and nerves at the same time. The full-page advertisement

by Mackintosh-Burn, a Bengali-Scottish firm of architects and surveyors, in a

special issue of The Statesman, showed four photographs, each one of them of

a large palatial house belonging to the Rajah of Darbhanga. Three of them, con-

structed with lime and mortar, were in partial ruins, whereas the fourth, con-

structed with cement by Mackintosh-Burn, remained unharmed. Goodlass-Wall

Paints wrote: ‘the earthquake has passed ... and the time has come when you must

... worry about the essential question of the preservation of your new building by

using paints’.71

Of particular significance in this spate of advertisements is the projection of a

new concept of building, the main ingredients of which were steel, reinforced

concrete and synthetic paints. This package increasingly became popular in pre-

ference to brick-and-mortar. While it is hard to draw a connection between the

earthquake and the rise of this new building code, it is significant to note that the

manufacturers believed there was a connection, and used the press effectively to

convey the message. This mode of campaign was a twentieth-century innovation.

When, on May 31, 1935, an earthquake occurred in Quetta, relief and rebuilding

were organised on a strikingly different principle of authority.72 The surrounding

countryside was much more thinly populated than in Bihar. However, the fact

that the earthquake occurred at night, and its concentrated impact on one large

town made the human consequences more disastrous. Quetta was a garrison town.

‘By great good fortune’, a report stated somewhat dubiously, the severity of the

shock ended abruptly at the small channel of water that separated the ‘civil lines’

from the cantonment.73 The cantonment was largely intact, and by six o’clock

the next morning the commanding officer, General Karlslake, was in control of

the relief operation. One major problem that plagued relief in Bihar, namely the

legitimacy and bad faith surrounding state action, was thus avoided. The period

of initial anarchy and state failure was also remarkably short-lived in Quetta.

However, the army’s problems were many. Medical aid was one of these. All

three hospitals in the city area had collapsed, and the civil medical personnel

were either dead or too injured to take up the duty. The dead and injured included

nearly all the town’s police force. On the second day, small parties of strangers

were seen patrolling the town borders. Using the undamaged railway line, out-

siders had entered Quetta. Given the uneasy relation that existed between the

71 The Statesman, ‘Record’, p. 40.72 Quetta was the principal town of British Baluchistan, the westernmost province of what was

then British India. The region has now been incorporated into the Baluchistan province of Pakistan.

For a descriptive-geological account, see West, ‘Preliminary Geological Report on the Baluchistan

(Quetta) Earthquake’.73 Pinhey, Report on the Quetta Earthquake, p. 2.





British-Indian army and the Pathan tribesmen of the area, these movements took

on a political colour, and were dealt with brutally.74 Once again, guarding state

property took precedence over other matters (see Figure 5). The threat did not

come only from the tribesmen. Quetta, before the earthquake, was a major trading

centre, and home to many Shikarpuri Sindhi merchants. While entire households

died following the earthquake, their ‘relatives’ arrived from Shikarpur and Punjab

to lay claim to what remained beneath the debris (see Figure 6 on the condition of

the merchant quarters). The individuals allowed into the city were not allowed

access to the ruins, but only shown the arrangements that were made for protection.

The social world of the soldiers did not extend much beyond the Quetta Club.

And because they knew no one in the town, they trusted no one. On 1 June, the

army dealt with the vexed question of trust by announcing a ban on the entry of

all civilian outsiders into the city. In the next week or so, a heavy barbed wire

fence was put up around the city. ‘This fence is guarded and patrolled day and

74 Jackson, Thirty Seconds.

Figure 5

Guarding the Residency in Mastung, Southwest of Quetta

Source: Skrine, ‘The Quetta Earthquake’.





night by piquets of about 200 infantry and 200 civilian police and will be well

lighted by electric light at night. In the case of banks a special guard has been

provided for their protection.’75

The sealing of the city was viewed outside Quetta as a political move, designed

to keep the ‘volunteer’ out of the picture. By means of a large number of press

statements, the army authorities painstakingly explained that ‘volunteers’ were

unprofessional, and would obstruct the work of the army.

During the critical weeks following the earthquake the one form of assistance

which was not merely redundant, but definitely embarrassing to the overworked

authorities, was that of volunteer workers who had nothing but their personal

services to give and who were in most cases ignorant alike of the locality and

of the mentality, the customs, and above all the language of the inhabitants.76

75 India, Quetta Earthquake, p. 14.76 Ibid., p. 27.

Figure 6

Hindu Quarters at Mastung

Source: Skrine, ‘The Quetta Earthquake’.





Charity work was confined to the towns that received refugees. The Memon Relief

Society of Karachi, the Japan-Bombay Silk Merchants Quetta Earthquake Com-

mittee of Hyderabad, and sporadic attempts by others combined together to accom-

modate a few thousands in camps. The only voluntary group allowed into Quetta

was the Boy Scouts from Punjab. They were put to the task of exhuming dead

bodies which had by then remained under the rubble for 50 days. Under unex-

plained circumstances, the Boy Scouts left Quetta in October, when their job was

far from over.77

Two categories of people paid a price for this exclusiveness, the rightful claim-

ants to property, and the dead and the dying themselves. Army rule made it simpler

to legalise the process of rebuilding and reclamation.78 And yet, the distance be-

tween the military administration and the civil society created huge information

problems that made the new laws difficult to apply. Who needed help? Who did

unclaimed property belong to? Who were the genuine claimants?

During the official salvage operation, a large number of account books were

recovered. The committee in charge of the salvage appointed court clerks or munims

to read these books, make a preliminary report on debt and credit, and safeguard

against false claims and entries. Many surviving debtors had become bankrupt

and many creditors were dead. Claimants to their assets were ready to file claims

for the recovery of debts.79 In February 1936, a set of special courts were set up to

deal with the civil cases arising from the earthquake. The Provincial Relief Com-

mittee, headed by the Viceroy’s Agent, consisted of members nominated by the

Agent, including army officers, and prominent citizens and civilians. The Com-

mittee was entrusted with the task of verifying claims against property, and

77 The uneasy relationship between the army and the civilians is also reflected in reports in the

Indian media about the alleged ruthlessness with which the army did its job. The army, in turn, was

at pains to release press statements regularly. According to one vernacular newspaper story, Halwai

Jethanand, a merchant, was buried in the debris of his shop for 47 days, and managed to escape

through a secret exit, whereupon he was seized by the authorities as a looter; see India, Quetta Earth-

quake, p. 22. According to one Brookes who found himself trapped, relief parties ‘dug frantically ...

not caring whether their blows were falling on the earth or people, dead or alive. Several people’s

limbs ... were cut on account of the blows given by the spades.’ Press releases by the army denied the

existence of these individuals.78 Beginning with the proclamation of Martial Law on 31 May 1935. The Temporary Building

Code superseded previous building rules in the city, which had been provided for the construction of

earthquake-proof buildings in the city. The army invoked special provisions reserved for war-time to

raise a Roads Battalion. A section was added to the Municipal Acts to prevent overcrowding in the

new settlements where licensed construction labourers were housed. In 1937, a permanent building

code forbade the construction of any new buildings on temporary lines. The Quetta Distribution of

Salved Property Law British Baluchistan (Emergency Administration) Regulation, 1935, was the

basis for conducting compensation and reclamation.79 The Government of India at one point toyed with the idea of declaring a moratorium on all

liabilities.





recommending an amount of compensation to the Claims Commissioner. The

compensation came from the Viceroy’s Relief Fund. The Committee started work

on 27 July 1935. At that time, 500 claims were being submitted to the committee

every week, but the committee could hardly process more than 50 per week. The

Committee set up a sub-committee of non-officials, whose job it was to verify

the truth of the claimant’s occupation and the extent of the property owned. The

principle of compensation was that ‘a tailor was provided with a sewing machine;

a hotel keeper was assisted to set up a hotel; a dentist was enabled to purchase the

necessary apparatus; a tonga owner (but not a tonga driver) was provided with a

tonga and horse’.80

If this job was barely feasible in the case of an artisan, it was horribly compli-

cated for a merchant, or for the destitute, widows, orphans and students. The bench-

mark often used for the purpose was the amount of property salvaged, which

clearly provided a very inadequate picture of the property owned. The sub-

committee, therefore, ‘needed to go into great detail’, and soon found the job over-

whelming.81 The sub-committee was then divided into two more sub-committees,

with no distinct improvement in the disposal of cases. Towards the end of 1935,

all these sub-committees were abolished, and in their place, one grand sub-

committee began working. The procedure was to receive an application from out-

side Quetta for compensation, which was returned to the authorities in the places

these applications came from for verification. The value of the property salvaged

by the applicant was then verified by the Claims Commissioner’s office, after which

the Provincial Relief Committee made a recommendation regarding the amount

of compensation. For a year, dozens of officers pored over account books, dealt

with claims and counter-claims, invented new laws to close the loopholes of the

old ones, and were still far from clearing the papers. Almost exactly a year later,

the operation was closed.

Due to the ban on entry, the relief was carried out with too few people. By

3 June, or the fourth day of the earthquake, officially 5,000 bodies had been ex-

tricated, identified and disposed of. However, the estimated casualty was 25,000

to 30,000. Even granting that a large number of bodies were taken away in the

early hours of 31 May before organised relief began, the numbers did not match.

Indeed, days after the earthquake, officials were still debating whether or not to

extricate the more than 10,000 bodies still buried in ruins, with senior admin-

istrators advising against such a course of action.

The sealing of the city initially weakened the role of the market in the rebuilding

process. This effect, however, did not last. Labourers being recruited for recon-

struction work needed to be exempted from the restriction on entry. The city was

80 Pinhey, Report on the Quetta Earthquake, p. 49.81 Ibid., pp. 30–31.





rebuilt ward by ward, and residents of relief camps were persuaded to return to the

city when a ward was available for habitation again. These rebuilt areas usually

consisted of a large number of rickety temporary structures, earning them the

epithet ‘tin towns’. A fine matching of who occupied whose property was impos-

sible to maintain. However, in cases where an owner of a space could be identified,

the person was often charged high rents for prospective commercial ventures.82

The workers lived on the outskirts of the cantonment area. As the centre city was

reoccupied, they moved to habitable buildings in the city, avoiding the thoroughly

unpopular tin town. A brisk rental market between the owners of reoccupied pre-

mises and gangs of workers, rather than controlled coordination, directed this

resettlement.

Conclusion

To conclude, I first boil down the narrative material into three propositions, and

then suggest ways to take the story forward in time. The three propositions are: in

the nineteenth century, the main agent of relief and rebuilding was the market;

between the 1864 Calcutta tidal wave and the 1935 Quetta earthquake, the idea of

the state as the principal agent of disaster relief was established; and along with

state intervention, the social practices of preparedness changed.

How did markets work? The market produced gainers and losers. Whenever

disasters struck towns, the losers included powerful commercial interests. Markets

perhaps worked best where property rights were unambiguous and assets remained

intact. The capacity to labour, for those fortunate enough to survive, and food stocks

displayed these characteristics. The demand for labour increased dramatically

after disasters, for, while reconstruction was a particularly labour-intensive process,

the labour supply fell because of mortality and injury after disasters. Urban prop-

erty, on the other hand, gave rise to battles over succession claims, rent-protecting

moves, and was subject to opaque community practices. In short, while the prop-

ertied and the proletariat were both affected by an event, it was felt differently.

This difference sometimes led to a conflict of interest, and sometimes a closing of

ranks. A corollary of this statement is that poverty is not a particularly useful tool

for analysing the impact of natural disasters.

State action moved along two planes in the nineteenth century, tax remission

and charity. At the same time, the notion that the state should organise relief and

supervise rebuilding took root. It would be simplistic to see in this movement an-

other example of colonial ‘governmentality’. On the contrary, state control was

partly a reaction to a sharp loss in control, and partly reflected the inevitable need

to redefine and reconstitute private property rights in the rebuilding phase. Property

disputes in this phase varied according to two rules of thumb. First, between two

82 Ibid., p. 18.





disasters separated in time, a process of capital accumulation and urbanisation

made the response to the later event more difficult. And second, comparing a rural

and an urban event, the complex property rights of urban housing made the re-

sponse to the latter more difficult. I propose that we see both these rules at work

when we compare 1934–35 with 1864. Rebuilding and compensation processes

were necessarily complicated by unspecified rights to lost property, conflicting

claims to property, asymmetrical information between relief-givers and receivers,

conflicts between relief agencies, lack of cooperation between gainers and losers,

formation of lobbies, and in Bihar and Quetta, clashes between the state and na-

tionalist organisations. Controlled rebuilding was most in evidence during the Quetta

earthquake, no doubt partly because of the town’s cantonment status and stra-

tegic importance. The strong position of the military enabled the authorities to cut

through collective action problems by means of legislation and martial law, but

there were trade-offs involved with this course of action.

At the level of the society at large, there was an improvement in knowledge.

The range of documentary sources expanded over the 70-year time-span. A part

of the new knowledge consisted of scientific studies on prediction and causation.

The 1930s earthquakes gave rise to reports and recommendations on building

codes that stressed the importance of reinforced concrete foundations.83 Urban

planning and house construction changed in Quetta and Bihar. The Calcutta docks

were a result of the 1864 cyclone.

Throughout these five studies, we observe the presence of an initial retreat or

destruction of the state capacity, a strengthening of anarchic markets and private-

order institutions, and the eventual, if constrained, return of the state. This sequen-

tial model, I believe, continues to be useful in understanding disaster situations

in present times.84 There is, in other words, a case to be made for suggesting that

analytical narratives of the past can offer useful lessons for those facing disaster

risks in present times. And yet, there are also differences between the present and

the past, which mainly concern the third stage in the sequence. While collective

action problems and disputes over property rights still appear in the rebuilding

stage, the nature of the rebuilding problem has shifted, in at least five ways.

First, if disaster response depends, as I suggested, on the discourse on causality,

it is necessary to note that the discourse on causality is changing again. The nine-

teenth century saw a shift from disasters as acts-of-god to disasters as acts-of-

nature; from the late twentieth century the discourse has been shifting again to

83 Auden and Ghosh, ‘Preliminary Account’, p. 227, for example.84 A recent study of the Kobe earthquake of 1995, for example, discusses the destruction of state

capacity and the state’s subsequent rebound. The study also shows the important role played by

macroeconomic policies and market-based supplies in bringing about a speedy recovery. Interestingly,

one of the reasons for markets working well was the existence of an excess capacity characterising

cartelised and monopolistic markets. See Horwich, ‘Economic Lessons of the Kobe Earthquake’.





disasters being, at least partly, the result of human action upon nature. Furthermore,

the sense of a shared global environment has grown stronger. These new parameters

have changed the pattern of response in important ways. For example, in the late

twentieth century, the quantum of free assistance increased, bringing in the risk

of free riding and corruption. Second, partly as an effect of the sense of a global

commons, an important role is today played by the international community.

While significantly larger aid per capita is available, the uneasy relation between

the donor and the aid-receiver, especially when only one party is authorised to

use the relief money, becomes at times a destabilising factor.85 Third, to the extent

that some, or any, disaster risks can be insured against, moral hazard becomes

likelier, that is, vulnerable individuals and groups are more likely to act in ways

that might increase the aggregate vulnerability. The prospect of raising money

more easily than before, whether from the capital market or from state agencies,

can have a similar effect. Fourth, institutional complexities at the rebuilding stage

have increased. Rapid urbanisation and capital accumulation in an environment

of unclear and poorly specified property rights, conditions that characterise most

developing countries, make any contemporary disaster pose a far more complex

legal challenge than one in the past. And fifth, a part of the challenge of disaster

relief today derives from the coordination problems that arise when faced with a

proliferation of agencies. The state has many more levels and components than

it had in the 1930s. Problems of intra-governmental conflict take on particular

urgency during episodes of acute stress.86 These contentious issues characterise

managed rebuilding in ways that were not so prominent in the past.

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state, society and market in the aftermath of natural

Documents