An Imperial Disaster: The Bengal Cyclone of 1876 by Benjamin Kingsbury

Author:Benjamin Kingsbury [Kingsbury, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Asia, India & South Asia, Modern, 19th Century, Historical Geography
ISBN: 9780190050252
Google: 3_pyDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-10-15T00:31:24.767551+00:00

By the 1870s Bengal had a vigorous Bengali-owned press, with papers in English as well as the Bengali vernacular. These papers professed loyalty to the Crown, but were often severe in their criticisms of the government. Their reportage and commentary on the cyclone offers a useful counter-balance to the official version of events.

The first news of the disaster reached the Calcutta papers on 6 November: Peacock’s telegram had arrived earlier that day from Dacca. The response from The Bengalee, a paper of the Bengali gentry, was one of anxiety for both the survivors of the cyclone and the residents of the metropolis. ‘Backergunge is the great rice Golah [granary] of Calcutta,’ it wrote, ‘and any great calamity there cannot but affect us materially.’ The paper thought there hadn’t been such a terrible disaster in Bengal since the famine of 1770. Relief in large quantities would have to be provided by the government, the landlords, and ‘fellow countrymen in affluent circumstances’—the readers of The Bengalee. If it wasn’t forthcoming, the paper added, disease would be sure to follow.

Debate in the Bengali papers of late 1876 was dominated by two topics. One was the forthcoming imperial durbar at Delhi, at which Queen Victoria would be proclaimed empress of India. The other was the famine underway in southern and western India. The coincidence of these two events had already led the papers to question the government’s financial priorities. Now the cyclone was brought onto the stage too. ‘Bengal is in no mood for mirth’, The Bengalee wrote. ‘She has lost by the storm-wave of the 31st ultimo in all likelihood about several hundred thousands of her children … The Deccan is being desolated by a widespread famine, the full magnitude of which is not yet known. And yet our rulers are about to proclaim with the sound of trumpets an addition to the royal title which no one in particular is fond of.’ The great expense of the durbar was coming at a time when the government’s finances were, by its own admission, not in good shape. ‘In the present position of the Exchequer, it is not pleasant to think of half a million sterling being wasted on an approaching state pageant.’

The tone of the criticisms became more aggressive as it became clear that they were being ignored. In a neat inversion of the justification for the durbar—that Indians were incapable of understanding power without spectacle—The Bengalee described the event as a product of Disraeli’s ‘oriental imagination’. If it took place while the country was in the grip of a famine, and had just suffered the worst cyclone disaster in recorded history, it would leave ‘a very unpleasant impression’. ‘What is necessary for the Government to prove at this moment is that it thinks more of the welfare of its subjects than of personal displays of power and magnificence. The financial position of the country is such that it can hardly bear the expenses of a tamasha [grand show], while millions stand in sad need of pecuniary help.

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