Talk:Timeline of major famines in India during British rule

Expansion

Why not expand this to all famines in India, where this can be a subsection? Seems a rather odd restriction otherwise, unless this is due to political bias of some sort. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 41.185.117.226 (talk) 18:35, 28 August 2010 (UTC)

No political bias. There is already Famine in India. For inclusion in a Timeline/List article, there needs to be an article first for the individual famines. The ones during the British rule are the ones most documented and can be written about. (recentism, document raj etc) Difficult to flesh out the older ones (take this for instance]]). If someone creates articles for the older famines, there will be a list for it too. Remember individual articles come first, the list/timeline comes out of them. --Sodabottle (talk) 03:45, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

There is no political bias. It is an encyclopedic article about a specific characteristic of a political era. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 61.12.19.103 (talk) 08:19, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

There is, however, a serious problem with the way that political era has been defined. Most obviously, in 1783-4, very few of the 11 million deaths were in areas where the East India Company had any sort of control (the greatest impact seems to have been in Sikh and Maratha territories in the north-west, where many villages remained depopulated for generations). 79.75.238.113 (talk) 15:57, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

That's a good point. The two famines - in the Punjab and the later one in the Deccan - were not in areas under British rule. The Deccan one, one could argue, was in an area affected by the EIC but the Punjab was rather distant from the EIC. I'm not sure what to do here because the majority of the famines listed are correctly placed in this article. Perhaps Timeline of major famines in India in Areas under British Rule and remove famines that were not in those areas? Or Timeline of major famines in India 1757-1947? @Fowler&fowler:. --regentspark (comment) 16:21, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

Even Timeline of major famines in India in Areas under British Rule runs into problems with the Princely States. For example, Hyderabad was very hard-hit by the 1899 famine (despite a relief loan of 20 million rupees to the Nizam from the central government). 79.75.238.113 (talk) 23:58, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

Not really. The princely states were only nominally independent. They were effectively under British rule. --regentspark (comment) 00:13, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

"Nominally" and "effectively" open up a whole new can of political worms (see Kashmir)! 79.75.238.113 (talk) 08:54, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

This entire dialogue seems to be more keen on exonerating the British under the belief exonerating the British is "unbiased" while calling any criticism of the British biased. This is all while you all seem to know full well the British committed the Irish potato famine and killed 1.5 million Irish people, with the man in charge saying God was punishing the Irish, to then claim this same government should be exonerated for doing the same thing to India 4 times. Oh, and y'all are bringing up contemporary politics like Kashmir... while claiming not to be biased. How stupid can this get? 47.20.242.106 (talk) 07:33, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

According to Will Durant, before the Islamic rule, there was no famine in India. Moreover, "famines" after British rule never occurred in the millions or even hundreds of thousands. Britain has had a history of famine even before the subsequent Indian famines due to their brutal treatment of the Irish. And the "unbiased source" you all cite is a British historian who explicitly made it his business to celebrate the British imperial empire. I honestly think none of you care about human rights and you instead support genocide of Indians and Irish people and feel great pleasure when you make such snide, racist comments. There, that "non-political" enough for you all? What matters are facts and the US journalists who were in those areas reported higher death tolls on British territories than the British did. You racist, worthless scumbags.47.20.242.106 (talk) 08:21, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

Expansion without edit summaries

An IP has expanded the article in nearly two dozen edits, most over a few hours, and all without edit summaries. For those of us who have been attempting to maintain this page over ten years, not to mention creating the individual famine pages before that, it becomes very difficult to deal with this onslaught. It is especially difficult, when Digby 1901 is being used as a source for a famine of 1907–08, when an alleged famine in Rajputana during 1812–1813, again cited to Digby1901 is being claimed to been have occurred also in "British Rajasthan." (Ajmer-Merwara, the only part of Rajputana in British India was not ceded until 1818. Then there are all sorts of MOS violations such as writing (of mortality estimates): 10 to 6.3 million, rather than chronologically forwards, or using the older Wiki &ndash instead of the ndash from the insert menu in the editor. There is a picture that is being attributed to the "famine of 1907-08" when there is no mention of that in the picture. It simply occurs in a book after a page mentioning a famine in 1908, but also after many pages describing other famines, the here the error has been made by the Archives.net's flickr page in interpreting the source. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 12:00, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

I have reverted the edits, per WP:UNRESPONSIVE and WP:CAUTIOUS. Best regards, Fowler&fowler«Talk» 12:14, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

Low mortality estimate for 1896-97 famine

The mortality estimate is significantly lower than even the government-admitted number as reported by Mike Davis in Chapter 5 (Page 158, 2001 edition) of Late Victorian Holocausts. It is also much lower than estimates reported in the Wikipedia article specific to that famine. I suggest that the estimate be corrected, or a range presented.

--Sayak.mukhopadhyay (talk) 03:16, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

What sources does Fieldhouse have for his estimates?

Davis and others quote the journalists that were there in India during the time of the famine such as Nathaniel Hawthorne. I haven't found anything from Fieldhouse. From Davis's book:

When Julian Hawthorne, son of the famous New England writer and Cosmopolitan’s special correspondent in India, reached Jubbulpur in April 1897, three months after Merewether, conditions in the Central Provinces had grown even more nightmarish. On the long, hot train ride up the Narmada Valley (“ the great graveyard of India” according to American missionaries), Hawthorne was horrified by the families of corpses seated in the shade of the occasional desert trees. “There they squatted, all dead now, their flimsy garments fluttering around them, except when jackals had pulled the skeletons apart, in the hopeless search for marrow.” In Jubbulpur, he was escorted by the resident American missionary who took him first to the town market, where he was disgusted by the radical existential contrast between “bony remnants of human beings” begging for kernels of grain and the plump, nonchalant prosperity of the local merchant castes. The poorhouses, meanwhile, were converted cattle-pens terrorized by overseers who, as Merewether had accurately reported, systematically cheated their doomed charges of their pathetic rations. “Emaciation” hardly described the condition of the “human skeletons” Hawthorne encountered: They showed us their bellies – a mere wrinkle of empty skin. Twenty per cent of them were blind; their very eyeballs were gone. The joints of their knees stood out between the thighs and shinbones as in any other skeleton; so did their elbows; their fleshless jaws and skulls were supported on necks like those of plucked chickens. Their bodies – they had none; only the framework was left.

Hawthorne’s most haunting experience, however, was his visit to the children in the provincial orphanage in Jubbulpur. In imperial mythology, as enshrined in Kipling’s famous short story “William the Conquerer” (published on the eve of the famine in 1896), British officials struggled heroically against all odds to save the smallest famine victims. The Ladies Home Journal (January 1896) version of Kipling’s story had featured a famous woodcut by the American artist W. L. Taylor of a tall British officer walking slowly at the head of a flock of grateful, saved children. “Taylor accentuated the god-like bearing of Scott, as seen through the eyes of William [his love interest], standing at the entrance to her tent. The black cupids are there and a few capering goats …” But as W. Aykroyd, a former Indian civil servant who in his youth had talked to the veterans of the 1896– 97 famine, emphasizes, this idyllic scene was utterly fictional. “No particular attention was … given to children in the famine relief operations.” Far more realistic than Scott’s motherly compassion was the repugnance that Kipling’s heroine William feels when, after dreaming “for the twentieth time of the god in the golden dust,” she awakes to face “loathsome black children, scores of them wastrels picked up by the wayside, their bones almost breaking their skin, terrible and covered with sores.” Hawthorne indeed discovered that “rescue” more often than not meant slow death in squalid, corruptly managed children’s camps. After reminding American readers that “Indian children are normally active, intelligent and comely, with brilliant eyes, like jewels,” he opens the door to the orphanage: One of the first objects I noticed on entering was a child of five, standing by itself near the middle of the enclosure. Its arms were not so large round as my thumb; its legs were scarcely larger; the pelvic bones were plainly shown; the ribs, back and front, started through the skin, like a wire cage. The eyes were fixed and unobservant; the expression of the little skull-face solemn, dreary and old. Will, impulse, and almost sensation, were destroyed in this tiny skeleton, which might have been a plump and happy baby. It seemed not to hear when addressed. I lifted it between my thumbs and forefingers; it did not weigh more than seven or eight pounds. Beyond, in the orphanage yard, neglected children agonized in the last stages of starvation and disease. Hawthorne thought it obvious that the overseers, as in the adult poorhouses, were stealing grain for sale with little fear of punishment from their superiors:

"We went towards the sheds, where were those who were too enfeebled to stand or walk. A boy was squatting over an earthen saucer, into which he spate continually; he had the mouth disease; he could not articulate, but an exhausted moan came from him ever and anon. There was a great abscess on the back of his head. Another, in the final stage of dysentery, lay nearly dead in his own filth; he breathed, but had not strength to moan. There was one baby which seemed much better than the rest; it was tended by its own mother.… Now, this child was in no better condition than the rest of them when it came, but its mother’s care had revived it. That meant, simply, that it had received its full allowance of the food which is supposed to be given to all alike. Why had the others – the full orphans – not received theirs?"

Cosmopolitan pointedly published photographs of famine victims from the Central Provinces next to an illustration of a great monument erected to Queen Victoria. Hawthorne, “on his way home from India,” it editorialized, “heard it conservatively estimated in London that a total of more than one hundred millions of dollars would be expended, directly and indirectly, upon the Queen’s Jubilee ceremonies.” But dying children in remote taluks were no more allowed to interrupt the gaiety of the Empress of India’s Diamond Jubilee in June 1897 than they had her Great Durbar of twenty years before. Critics of Elgin were uncertain which was more scandalous: how much he had expended on the Diamond Jubilee extravaganza, or how little he had spent to combat the famine that affected 100 million Indians. When the government’s actual relief expenditures were published a year later, they fell far below the per capita recommendations of the 1880 Famine Commission. As a new Famine Commission reported in 1898: “Our general conclusion is that, as compared with the past, a considerable degree of success as regards economy had been attained in the relief famine.”

The relief works were quickly shut down with the return of the rains in 1898. Hundreds of thousands of destitute, landless people, without any means to take advantage of the monsoon, were pushed out of the camps and poorhouses. As a consequence, the momentum of famine and disease continued to generate a staggering 6.5 million excess deaths in 1898, making total mortality closer to 11 million than the 4.5 million earlier admitted by Elgin. Twelve to 16 million was the death toll commonly reported in the world press, which promptly nominated this the “famine of the century.” This dismal title, however, was almost immediately usurped by the even greater drought and deadlier famine of 1899– 1902.

Davis, Mike (2002-06-17). Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (p. 151-158). Verso Books. Kindle Edition.

Please and thanks. 47.20.242.106 (talk) 07:48, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

Why aren't the 1901-1902 Famines included?

There was even more deaths from 1901-1902. Also, what about the 1918 Influenza disease that spread due to lack of British concern which killed another 18 million?47.20.242.106 (talk) 08:36, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

Rename to "Timeline of major famines in India"?

Seems weird to mention all the major famines except the ones that occurred shortly after British rule. What about the 1965 and 1971 famines? NickCT (talk) 20:23, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

There were many major famines in India before British rule began. Some were documented by Portuguese travelers and officials who had reached the subcontinent a few centuries earlier. There were quite a few even earlier ones, the nature of India's geography and climate being such. (The physiologies of some animals, notably the zebu cattle, have adapted to much of India's arid climate, for example, and can make do with a calorie-restricted diet for longer periods of time than their non-domesticated ancestors in other parts of their habitat did.). The British era is significant because of the large amounts of data collected mostly by the British. The analysis of it by the British led to the Indian famine codes of 1880, some of which anticipated the entitlements approach to famine, elaborated nearly a century later in Amartya Sen's retrospective work on the Bengal famine of 1943. We can't make it a timeline of all Indian famines because the other data, including the post-colonial, is not as reliable. The British era is significant. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 21:05, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

My question was about the famines that occurred after the Brits left. The way this is setup, it gives a weird impression that famines somehow ended after de-colonialization.

Saying there's "insufficient data" leaves me wondering; insufficient for who? I can find sources that give stats for famine deaths in post-colonial India.

This whole article is sorta awkward, a bit WP:ESSAY and a bit WP:SYNTH. Seems sorta WP:COATRACKy. Seems like some kind of extension of the cartridge-fat myth or the Taj Mahal gemstone myth.

Worth considering that not one of the sources used for this article deal with the subject of "Famines in British India" directly. Seems like we've patched together information from different of different sources to imply a topic has notability.

Also worth considering that this article seems unique in that there are few or no WP articles named "Famine in X during Y occupation" or "Famine in X during Y era".

I think this article has value, b/c the topic of famine in India is something that people might be interested in. But the article really ought to be renamed something like List of Famines in India (similar to List of famines in China) to make it less synthetic. NickCT (talk) 14:32, 2 March 2022 (UTC)

There have been dozens of books (and scholarly ones) written about famines during British rule in India. None have been written about famines before. Few have been written about famines after. I encourage you to start an article Famines in post-colonial India or the more ambitious A timeline of famine in India after 1947. If none of the books used in all the famines from Chalisa to Bengal 1943 are only about the British era, then you should be able to find quite a few to source your article. I wish you good luck. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 01:14, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

How would you feel about an RM or AfD discussion? NickCT (talk) 14:05, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

You can post at WT:INDIA where there is expertise on this topic. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 17:59, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

@NickCT: I have posted at WT:INDIA. You could also attempt an article Timeline of food scarcity in India after 1947. There might be more sources availabe as post-colonial Indian governments have been typically reluctant to acknowledge famines. Best, Fowler&fowler«Talk» 18:13, 3 March 2022 (UTC) Update Fowler&fowler«Talk» 18:18, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

• @NickCT: I don't think we can do that because the India under the British is not the India after the British (that India was partitioned into two, now three, different countries). So, for example, including the Bangaldesh famine of 1974 would be both weird as well as appropriate if we broadened the time horizon of this article.That said, I looked for the 1965 and 1971 famines but couldn't find any articles on them.--RegentsPark (comment) 18:51, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

• @NickCT: RegentsPark is correct. A number of famines during British rule affected regions that are now in Pakistan and Bangladesh as well. See File:FaminesMapOfIndia1800-1885.jpg. Thus the Rajputana famine of 1869 affected parts of Sind and Bahawalpur State which are today in Pakistan; the Bihar famine of 1873–1874 affected parts of what is today Bangladesh; the Bengal famine of 1943, of course, notriously and devastatingly affected the regions of Bengal that now constitute Bangladesh. It would be impossible to restrict those famines to the Republic of India alone. And if India is the India whose sovereignty was consolidated and demarcated during British rule, then as RegentsPark has pointed out, where do we fit the Bangladesh famine of 1974? Best, Fowler&fowler«Talk» 19:23, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

@RegentsPark and Fowler&fowler: - Hi guys. Thanks for the replies. It seems like we're changing the subject and losing the thread a little bit. I am not proposing we make new articles. I'm proposing that we rename or delete this article.

RegentsPark's point about Bangaldesh in 1974 further illustrates why the current title isn't great. It's weird that a famine in Bangaldesh in 1943 belongs on a list, but a famine in the same place in 1974 doesn't belong on the same list. I think people who are looking at "List of famines in X" want to know about famines that happened in a particular geography (i.e. a particular region of the world). Not famines that occurred in a particular time and place.

Again, I'd really challenge you guys to look for "List of famine..." articles that list famines that occurred in a particular time and place. If you can't find similar articles, I think that should indicate this article is synthetic (granted this is an WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS argument).

re "There have been dozens of books (and scholarly ones) written about famines during British rule in India" - Books have been written about the Henan Famine of 1942–1943 and Sichuan famine of 1936. Does that mean we should have a "Timeline of famines during 20th century conflict ridden China"? Of course not. It's pure synthesis. Can you point to a single publication that deals explicitly w/ the subject of British rule and the famines that occurred in India under it? NickCT (talk) 21:08, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

"a famine in Bangaldesh in 1943 belongs on a list," There was no Bangladesh in 1943. I suggest you read up on the history of South Asia.Fowler&fowler«Talk» 21:52, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

And here are some sources on famines during British India; I've updated them with three recent publications. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 22:52, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

Sources on famines in India during the period 1770 and 1947

Akerkar, Supriya (2015), "Development of a normative framework for disaster relief: learning from colonial famine histories in India", Disasters, 39 (s2): 219–243, doi:10.1111/disa.12155 Ambirajan, S. (1976), "Malthusian Population Theory and Indian Famine Policy in the Nineteenth Century", Population Studies, 30 (1): 5–14, doi:10.2307/2173660, JSTOR 2173660, PMID 11630514 Arnold, David (2013), "Hunger in the Garden of Plenty: The Bengal Famine of 1770", in Alessa Johns (ed.), Dreadful Visitations: Confronting Natural Catastrophe in the Age of Enlightenment, Taylor & Francis, pp. 81–112, ISBN 978-1-136-68396-1 Arnold, David (1994), "The 'discovery' of malnutrition and diet in colonial India", Indian Economic and Social History Review, 31 (1): 1–26, doi:10.1177/001946469403100101, S2CID 145445984 Arnold, David (1993), "Social Crisis and Epidemic Disease in the Famines of Nineteenth-century India", Social History of Medicine, 6 (3): 385–404, doi:10.1093/shm/6.3.385 Damodaran, Vinita (2007), "Famine in Bengal: A Comparison of the 1770 Famine in Bengal and the 1897 Famine in Chotanagpur", The Medieval History Journal, 10 (1&2): 143–181, doi:10.1177/097194580701000206, S2CID 162735048 Dutt, Romesh Chunder (2005) [1900], Open Letters to Lord Curzon on Famines and Land Assessments in India, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd (reprinted by Adamant Media Corporation), ISBN 978-1-4021-5115-6 Dyson, Tim (1991), "On the Demography of South Asian Famines: Part I", Population Studies, 45 (1): 5–25, doi:10.1080/0032472031000145056, JSTOR 2174991, PMID 11622922 Famine Commission (1880), Report of the Indian Famine Commission, Part I, Calcutta Fieldhouse, David (1996), "For Richer, for Poorer?", in Marshall, P. J. (ed.), The Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 400, pp. 108–146, ISBN 978-0-521-00254-7 Government of India (1867), Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Enquire into the Famine in Bengal and Orissa in 1866, Volumes I, II, Calcutta Greenough, Paul Robert (1982), Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal: The Famine of 1943-1944, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-503082-2 Hall-Matthews, David (2008), "Inaccurate Conceptions: Disputed Measures of Nutritional Needs and Famine Deaths in Colonial India", Modern Asian Studies, 42 (1): 1–24, doi:10.1017/S0026749X07002892, S2CID 146232991 Hall-Matthews, David (2005), Peasants, Famine and the State in Colonial Western India, Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN 978-1-4039-4902-8 Hall-Matthews, David (1996), "Historical Roots of Famine Relief Paradigms: Ideas on Dependency and Free Trade in India in the 1870s", Disasters, 20 (3): 216–230, doi:10.1111/j.1467-7717.1996.tb01035.x, PMID 8854458 Hardiman, David (1996), "Usuary, Dearth and Famine in Western India", Past and Present, 152: 113–156, doi:10.1093/past/152.1.113 Hill, Christopher V. (1991), "Philosophy and Reality in Riparian South Asia: British Famine Policy and Migration in Colonial North India", Modern Asian Studies, 25 (2): 263–279, doi:10.1017/s0026749x00010672 Imperial Gazetteer of India vol. III (1907), The Indian Empire, Economic (Chapter X: Famine, pp. 475–502), Published under the authority of His Majesty's Secretary of State for India in Council, Oxford at the Clarendon Press. Pp. xxx, 1 map, 552. Klein, Ira (August 1973), "Death in India, 1871-1921", The Journal of Asian Studies, 32 (4): 639–659, doi:10.2307/2052814, JSTOR 2052814, PMID 11614702 Maclachlan, Morgan D. (1983), Why They Did Not Starve: Biocultural Adaptation in a South Indian Village, Institute for the Study of Human Issues, ISBN 978-0-89727-001-4 Major, Andrea (2020), "British Humanitarian Political Economy and Famine in India, 1838–1842", Journal of British Studies, 59 (2): 221–244, doi:10.1017/jbr.2019.293 McAlpin, Michelle Burge (2014), Subject to Famine: Food Crisis and Economic Change in Western India, 1860-1920, Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-1-4008-5592-6 McAlpin, Michelle B. (Autumn 1983), "Famines, Epidemics, and Population Growth: The Case of India", Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 14 (2): 351–366, doi:10.2307/203709, JSTOR 203709 McAlpin, Michelle B. (1979), "Dearth, Famine, and Risk: The Changing Impact of Crop Failures in Western India, 1870–1920", The Journal of Economic History, 39 (1): 143–157, doi:10.1017/S0022050700096352 Muller, W. (1897), "Notes on the Distress Amongst the Hand-Weavers in the Bombay Presidency During the Famine of 1896–97", The Economic Journal, 7 (26): 285–288, doi:10.2307/2957261, JSTOR 2957261 Raheja, Gloria Goodwin (2017), "'Hear the Tale of the Famine Year': Famine Policy, Oral Traditions, and the Recalcitrant Voice of the Colonized in Nineteenth-Century India", Oral Tradition, 31 (1), Center for Studies in Oral Tradition, doi:10.1353/ort.2017.0005 Sharma, Sanjay (1993), "The 1837–38 famine in U.P.: Some dimensions of popular action", Indian Economic and Social History Review, 30 (3): 337–372, doi:10.1177/001946469303000304, S2CID 143202123 Stahl, Rune Møller (2016), "The Economics of Starvation: Laissez-Faire Ideology and Famine in Colonial India.", in Thorup, M. (ed.), Intellectual History of Economic Normativities, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, doi:10.1057/978-1-137-59416-7_11

Fowler&fowler«Talk» 22:03, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

@Fowler&fowler: - Nice reference bomb. Obviously I'm not going to look at all of them, but I'll explain why they're all problematic by highlighting the first three.

So the first one (i.e. Akerkar) - This does actually appear to provide direct coverage to the subject in question (i.e. famines in India during colonial rule), so you could say this lends credence to the notability of the subject. Of course, this is a journal article from the journal "Disasters". It's written by a guy from "Oxford Brookes University". Not exactly the highest quality source, but I guess it's better than nothing.

Looking at the Ambirajan reference. The subject of the paper is famine in 19th century India. Not British India. The paper might support the notability of famines in 19th century India but that's not the title or subject of this article.

The Arnold 2013 reference gives direct coverage to an individual famine. The subject of the reference is not famines in British India as a whole, but instead just one single famine.

If you'd like to shorten this list down to references which deal explicitly w/ the subject of British rule and the famines that occurred in India under it, I'll review further. As I said, the Akerkar is sorta decent in that it does provide direct coverage to the subject. It's just not a great quality reference. If there were two or three better quality sources like Akerkar's, you might have a case. NickCT (talk) 02:43, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

• @NickCT: regardless of everything you say, the two India's are not the same entity and listing famines for both pre and post partition India is not going to work. As Fowler has explained, where exactly would the Bangladesh famine of 1974 go? It can't in a list of famines in India article because Bangladesh is not in India. And, what would we do with the Bengal famine of 1943. Should it be removed because the larger part was in what is now Bangladesh? Should we say "a small part of the Bengal famine of 1943" in the list? No, not workable at all. On Wikipedia, we've made a point of distinguishing between the pre-1947 entity that was India and the post-1947 entities of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (cf. History of India and History of India (1947–present)) and your suggestion goes against that grain. Perhaps not consistent with other articles but context can vary (and you know what they say about consistency and hobgoblins!). --RegentsPark (comment) 22:43, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

@RegentsPark: - Don't include the Bangladesh famines at all. Those can go in a "List of famines in Bangladesh", or some similar article. NickCT (talk) 02:43, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

How @NickCT:? Bangladesh is as much a successor state of the British Raj as present-day India or present-day Pakistan are. What "India" are you talking about? The "India" of the British Raj whose geographical extent was the regions of present-day Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, or the post-colonial Indias, either Dominion of India or Republic of India. Please explain. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 07:20, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

@NickCT: Could you tell me where Ambirajan talks about famines in princely states? Note: India (=British Raj or Company rule in India = British India + Princely States. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 06:29, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

@Fowler&fowler: - I'm suggesting we use the term "India" to mean the georgraphic location that constitutes India today. Similarly "Bangladesh" means the geographic location that constitutes Bangladesh today. This is the paradigm that List of famines in China uses, and it's the paradigm that's most in-line with WP:COMMONNAME. NickCT (talk) 15:09, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

@NickCT: We cannot. The statistics for the famines between 1770 and 1943 are for the region that comprises present-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. British Punjab is half in present-day Pakistan and half in p-d India; same with Bengal: half in pd-India; half in pd-Bangladesh. Please see Partition of India. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 17:15, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

We could pretty easily include a footnote for the 1943 famine saying only a portion were in present day India. NickCT (talk) 19:41, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

You are talking through your hat. You can't wing it in this fashion. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 04:45, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

How will you be extracting the mortality statistics for the Republic of India in these famines, most of which affected regions of present-day Pakistan and Bangladesh? Please tell how many people died in the Republic of India in the Great Bengal famine of 1770 and the Bengal famine of 1943, how many in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the People's Republic of Bangladesh? A famine page on Wikipedia has a description of mortality front and center. How will you disentangle the statistics? Fowler&fowler«Talk» 13:29, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

Arbitrary break

Sources on British famine policy and famines in India during British rule

Akerkar, Supriya (2015), "Development of a normative framework for disaster relief: learning from colonial famine histories in India", Disasters, 39 (s2): 219–243, doi:10.1111/disa.12155 Ambirajan, S. (1976), "Malthusian Population Theory and Indian Famine Policy in the Nineteenth Century", Population Studies, 30 (1): 5–14, doi:10.2307/2173660, JSTOR 2173660, PMID 11630514 Arnold, David (1993), "Social Crisis and Epidemic Disease in the Famines of Nineteenth-century India", Social History of Medicine, 6 (3): 385–404, doi:10.1093/shm/6.3.385 Burgess, Robin; Donaldson, Dave (2010), "Can Openness Mitigate the Effects of Weather Shocks? Evidence from India's Famine Era", American Economic Review, 100 (2): 449–453, doi:10.1257/aer.100.2.449, In this paper we employ a colonial era Indian district-level database for the period 1875 to 1919 to provide some preliminary insights into the weather-trade-death relationship. This time period contained one of the worst strings of famines in recorded history, with an estimated death toll of between 15 and 30 million people (Visaria and Visaria 1983). It also covers the period when the bulk of the railroad network was built in British India. Currie, Kate (1986), "Famines in 19th century Indian history: A materialist alternative to ecological reductionism", Journal of Contemporary Asia, 16 (4): 475–490, doi:10.1080/00472338685390221 Hall-Matthews, David (2008), "Inaccurate Conceptions: Disputed Measures of Nutritional Needs and Famine Deaths in Colonial India", Modern Asian Studies, 42 (1): 1–24, doi:10.1017/S0026749X07002892, S2CID 146232991 Hall-Matthews, David (2005), Peasants, Famine and the State in Colonial Western India, Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN 978-1-4039-4902-8 Hebert, James R. (1987), "The social ecology of famine in British India: Lessons for Africa in the 1980s?", Ecology of Food and Nutrition, 20 (2): 97–107, doi:10.1080/03670244.1987.9990991, During the nineteenth century India experienced major famines that killed tens of millions of people. Evidence is presented that shows that these famines were more closely associated with disruptions in traditional land/cultivator relationships and changes in support for indigenous crafts than with overpopulation and/or drought. The discussion focuses first on the situation in India before the arrival of the British, the ways in which the British changed the relationships between farmers and their land, and the genesis of famine on the subcontinent. Hill, Christopher V. (1991), "Philosophy and Reality in Riparian South Asia: British Famine Policy and Migration in Colonial North India", Modern Asian Studies, 25 (2): 263–279, doi:10.1017/s0026749x00010672 Klein, Ira (1984), "When the rains failed: famine, relief, and mortality in British India", The Indian Economic & Social History Review, 21 (2), doi:10.1177/001946468402100203, In the five decades ending just after World War I India experienced a grim crescendo of death in which terrible epidemics of malaria, plague and influenza destroyed tens of millions of lives, other endemic diseases were highly fatal, the sub-continent was stricken by the most widespread famines in recorded history, life expectancy fell to twenty years, and population growth was sharply curtailed despite high fertility. McAlpin, Michelle Burge (2014), Subject to Famine: Food Crisis and Economic Change in Western India, 1860-1920, Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-1-4008-5592-6 Mitra, Rajarshi (2013), "The Famine in British India: Quantification Rhetoric and Colonial Disaster Management", Journal of Creative Communications, 7 (1–2): 153–174, doi:10.1177/0973258613501066, Famines were administrative disasters in colonial India which the British government never really acknowledged. Every major famine during the British Raj was preceded and followed by notoriously wooden administrative reports and mathematical speculations about the disaster and possible prevention of the next. This article focuses on the devastating Bengal famine of 1943 and argues that the government used a quantification rhetoric in its report to control and manage famine. Stahl, Rune Møller (2016), "The Economics of Starvation: Laissez-Faire Ideology and Famine in Colonial India.", in Thorup, M. (ed.), Intellectual History of Economic Normativities, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, doi:10.1057/978-1-137-59416-7_11, Stahl investigates the role of liberal economics in the formulation of the disastrous famine policy of the British colonial administration in nineteenth-century India, where millions of Indians starved to death in a series of famines. The chapter examines the influential debates around the Great Famine of 1876–1878. Despite widespread critique from the public in India and Britain, the colonial administrators abstained from active policies to help the famine victims. They did so out of a fear of interfering with self-regulating market forces and creating long-term dependence on public aid. The hegemonic position of free trade ideas and economic liberalism allowed for proponents of a hard laissez-faire line to mobilize considerable intellectual resources, from Adam Smith to Ricardo, to overcome humanitarian critiques. Sweeney, Stuart (2008), "Indian Railways and Famine 1875–1914: Magic Wheels and Empty Stomachs", Essays in Economic & Business History, 26 (1): 147–158, Policy-makers interpreted famines in nineteenth century British India as problems of distribution, rather than food production. Railways provided speedier and cheaper transport than road methods employed during that time. They were more reliable than canals, which needed rainfall to facilitate transport. However, they were expensive to construct and maintain, and the British offered various levels of state support to encourage private investors under the façade of laissez faire capitalism. The effectiveness of the largest investment program in the history of the British Empire, in combating appalling famines, was questionable. There was a failure to overcome acute price increases in wheat and rice, and morefundamentally, deindustrialization and poverty in India, all of which colonial railways encouraged.

I've created a reduced and more focused list. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 16:27, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

Many of these references are quite high quality, but the majority of them still deal with either specific famines (e.g. Mitra, Rajarshi) or specific periods in British India (e.g. Sweeney, Stuart), and are not a comprehensive review of all famines in British India (which is what this article suggests is notable).

Out of curiosity, what's you're argument against renaming to "List of famines in India". You said you thought famines in British India were significant. Doesn't that necessarily mean that "Famines in India" (i.e. the geographic region we call India today) would be more significant (i.e. since it's a broader topic)? NickCT (talk) 15:26, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

They make the point again and again that the British period was notable for major famines with major mortality (unheard of in India before or since). I have added quotes for a reason. The reason is that you are beginning to sound like a troll. You don't have consensus here. The history of your edits on Wikipedia before this betray no familiarity with this topic; you are wasting the time of productive editors. Do what you must. But be warned that there is a limit to AGF. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 16:45, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

Ok. Let's try to make this a little easier. Look at the Klein 1984 reference. The quote is "the five decades ending just after World War I". Is it clear to you that the five decades ending just after World War I is different from the timespan that Brits were in India? NickCT (talk) 19:14, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

Famines in India during British rule, i.e. in the British Raj, which comprised present-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, covered a region significantly larger than what is today India, i.e. the Republic of India. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 16:50, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

Yes. And? That doesn't mean we can't break things down into "List of famines in India", "List of famines in Pakistan", etc etc. I've asked several times why there are NO OTHER ARTICLES ON WIKIPEDIA that list out famines over some no longer extent geographic region. Why do you think that is? NickCT (talk) 19:17, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

It is one of the accidents of history that when India under British Rule was partitioned in 1947, the India of today still came to be called "India." Had the new independent dominions been called Hindustan and Pakistan (as some thought at that time), then how would you have framed your question? Fowler&fowler«Talk» 16:54, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

Why wouldn't it be "List of famines in Hindustan"? NickCT (talk) 19:18, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

The opther problem is that there haven't been any real famines in the Republic of India after British rule ended. The Bihar famine of 1967 is not even undisputedly called a famine; many sources call it a drought. People did die of starvation (the hallmark of a famine), but those numbers were insignificant to the famine mortality between 1770 and 1947. (See for example, the Famine in India article; they don't acknowledge any famines in India after 1947, (see Famine_in_India#Republic_of_India) only droughts.) The Maharashtra drought is called a drought in most sources, or drought and famine; there was even less mortality. Apologies for the impatient tone. I have scratched those sentences. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 17:04, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

What? No real famines? That's nuts. Just b/c a few sources call 1967 a drought, doesn't mean the majority don't call it a famine. This guy certainly looks pretty hungry. Plus, how are you ignoring famines in Bangladesh long after the UK left? NickCT (talk) 19:30, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

Amartya Sen, for example, has promoted the dogma that there are never any famines in democracies, implying that Company rule in India (1765 to 1857) and the Raj (2858 to 1947) were not democraciies, but post-colonial India has been (for the most part). Fowler&fowler«Talk» 17:06, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

There is also this review: Siddiqui, Kalim (2020), "The political economy of famines during the British rule in India", The World Financial Review (July–August) Not rigorously scholarly to be sure, but pointing to some of the issues. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 17:25, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

Yes. That's a good example of piece that provides direct coverage to the subject at least. NickCT (talk) 19:43, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

There is also this virtual exhibition: Sourabh, Naresh Chandra; Myllyntaus, Timo (2015), "Famines in Late Nineteenth-Century India: Politics, Culture, and Environmental Justice.", Virtual Exhibitions, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (2), Environment & Society Portal, doi:10.5282/rcc/6812 It has a timeline as well. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 19:15, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

@NickCT: As to whether your claim that these sources do not constitute enough scholarly evidence for the British period (1765 to 1947) to be the subject of a timeline on famine in South Asia, that a critical number of sources have to be comprehensively about the entire period and purely about famine—not a portion of the period even if they together span the period, and not about famine admixed with something else such as epidemics, railways, commercial cropping, relief, rationing, Malthusian economics, and the like—is valid; and whether my increasing suspicion that you—an editor who has betrayed no history thus far of contributing to famine in South Asia—by politely Wikilawyering on general principles is now verging on trolling with the main goal of removing "British," is also valid, I will let some South Asia conversant admins decide. I created the timeline and most of the famine articles more than a dozen years ago. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, they have indeed been flattered in Bimal Kanti Paul (2012), "Indian Famines: 1707-1943", in Dando, William A. (ed.), Food and Famine in the 21st Century, ABC-CLIO, pp. 39–57, ISBN 978-1-59884-730-7 (See the discussion on plagiarism here) @Vanamonde93, SpacemanSpiff, Tito Dutta, Bishonen, El C, and Doug Weller: I am not pinging admin RegentsPark as he has already joined the discussion as an ordinary editor. I'm sorry I have to do this, but this is not turning out to be a constructive engagement for me. All the best, Fowler&fowler«Talk» 19:15, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

Are you sure your main goal isn't to add "British"? Frankly, this strikes me as rank WP:OR. My only goal is enforcing policy. You're absolutely correct I have no or little background in this topic. I do have a lot of background undoing this type of WP:SYNTHESIS. You don't have to ping anyone. Take a look at WP:DR. Pinging admins isn't the next step, nor are they really in a position to interfere w/ WP:DR. If you feel we've exhausted useful discussion, I'm ready to open an RM or AfD for you. NickCT (talk) 19:36, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

There are many other references. Tim Dyson is the foremost historical demographer of India. Consider his A Population History of India, Oxford University Press, 2019. In its preface, Dyson sums up the different chapters: "famine" makes its appearance only in the British years:

Tim Dyson's preface summarizing the major famines in his book

Chapter 5 addresses the period from 1707 to 1821. This period saw the decay of Mughal power, warfare, and turmoil, and the emergence of British rule. One question here is whether the population grew during the eighteenth century as it seems to have done during the seventeenth century. Among other things, the chapter considers the demographic consequences of warfare and famines—including the 1769‒70 famine in Bengal— (Dyson, Tim. A Population History of India (p. vii). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.) Chapter 7 considers the period 1871‒1921 and addresses several huge calamities which hit the population. After an initial consideration of demographic trends, the chapter examines: the famines of 1876‒78, 1896‒97, and 1899‒1900; the plague epidemic which began in 1896; and the influenza of 1918‒19. Census and vital registration data mean that these crises can be examined in some detail. That said, the chapter also discusses developments which would eventually help to lower (i.e. reduce) mortality. They include: changes in famine relief; increases in knowledge about diseases and their transmission; rises in vaccination coverage; Dyson, Tim. A Population History of India (p. vii). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition. Chapter 8 addresses the period 1921‒71. Therefore it combines consideration of changes either side of August 1947. The chapter begins with a review of demographic trends. There was modest progress in reducing mortality before 1947, and major progress afterwards. As a result, there was considerable population growth—and this gradually led to mounting interest in birth control. Among other things, there is discussion of: the reasons for the improved mortality of the 1920s and 1930s; the Bengal famine of 1943‒44; the demographic consequences of Partition; Dyson, Tim. A Population History of India (pp. vii-viii). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.

If you want I can give you an exact count of the 349 references to famine in Dyson's book. My guess is that 90% are to the British years. There are quite a few books on the history of India that make a mention of major famines only (or mostly) in the British years. I becomes difficult for me because you are unfamiliar with the topic; you seem to be only nitpicking on general principles. There is only so far you can go with that without knowledge of the subject topic. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 21:27, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

So, you're inferring that b/c this source only covers famines during British years that 1) famines were somehow linked to British rule, and 2) the topic of famine during British rule is a notable subject. These are GREAT examples of WP:OR and WP:SYNTH. Again, you should concentrate on policy and not my familiarity with the topic. If you aren't synthesizing this topic, it should be easy for you to offer sources which explicitly deal with the topic. NickCT (talk) 14:43, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

His is the major population history of India. The full title of the book is: "Population History of India From the First Modern People to the Present Day." He doesn't just cover only famines during the British years, he covers all events that affect population. Famines, epidemics, wars, migration, all belong to those topics. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 16:20, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

@NickCT: There is also Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf's Metcalf, Barbara D.; Metcalf, Thomas R. (2012), A Concise History of Modern India, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-1-107-02649-0, which is one of the most widely used text books on modern Indian history. There are 21 references to "famine" in the book. The first is to the Great Bengal famine of 1770 in which a quarter of the population of Bengal died (i.e. 10 million of 40 million people). The last but one is the Bengal famine of 1943 at the end of British rule. The last is to an economic crisis and food shortage that threatened a famine in the late 1960s (the book does not mention Bihar by name) and led to the green revolution in India. Please read WP:TERTIARY which states:

Many introductory undergraduate-level textbooks are regarded as tertiary sources because they sum up multiple secondary sources. Policy: Reliable tertiary sources can help provide broad summaries of topics that involve many primary and secondary sources and may help evaluate due weight, especially when primary or secondary sources contradict each other."

Famines in Metcalf and Metcalf's A Concise History of Modern India, Cambridge, 2012

The first mention is: As the British initially knew nothing of Indian rural society, their first attempts at revenue management, under Hastings, involved a series of disastrous experiments in leasing and auctioning the right to collect taxes. These chaotic experiments, along with British ignorance, dramatically worsened the impact of a famine that struck usually well-watered Bengal in 1770. Up to a quarter of Bengal's population may have died, and the province's available assets were reduced for decades to come. (p. 112) That as you will see is soon after the beginning of the British period (1765–1947). The last but one is: Meanwhile, events in war-torn India were rushing towards a crisis, as the Japanese penetrated the jungles of Assam. Most devastating in its impact was the great Bengal famine of 1943, in which some 2 million people may have perished. As in the case of Bengal's only previous major famine, that of 1770, at the outset of British rule, that of 1943 was a product of administrative failure. Precipitated by the stoppage of rice imports from Japanese-occupied Burma, the food shortage was allowed to worsen into a crisis by the government's decision to divert grain from the countryside to the city in order to make available ample food supplies for the military and the restive population of Calcutta. After these wartime images of suffering and death, the enduring image of ‘sonar Bangla’ (golden Bengal) as a land of plenty, could never be recovered. (p. 244) That is more or less the end of the British era. Well what the book say about the situation in Bihar in 1967 is this: (its last mention where it fails to mention "Bihar" by name): Mrs Gandhi had at once to confront a critical economic situation. Monsoon failure in 1965, and a continuing drought into 1966, brought about an unprecedented decline of some 19 percent in food grain production in one year. Faced with the spectre of famine, a desperate India turned to the United States for assistance. Grain imports averted disaster, but development had come to a dead halt. At this moment of crisis, Mrs Gandhi abandoned her father's focus on public-sector industrial investment, and set out to increase agricultural production by whatever means possible. To secure further US aid, she devalued the rupee; and, with the goal of bringing about food self-sufficiency, she turned to a new agricultural strategy pioneered by the American Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. At its heart lay new high-yielding varieties of seeds developed in Mexico and the Philippines. Under the agricultural package programme, dissemination of these new seed varieties was to be combined with the use of chemical fertilizers and enhanced irrigation. The objective was to bring all of these inputs together in one place at one time, and so avoid the dissipation of benefits – seeds here, fertilizer there – common under the earlier plans which endeavoured to give something to everyone. The result was the so-called ‘green revolution’. In the single year 1967/8 Indian agricultural production leapt ahead by 26 per cent, and national income rose 9 per cent. Does that compare with the famine at the beginning of British rule 1770 in which a quarter of Bengal's population died and the one at the end of British rule (Bengal famine of 1943) in which 2 million people died? There are 19 references between the two Bengal famines.

Fowler&fowler«Talk» 03:46, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

• Another textbook used around the world is written by the major historian of South Asia, the late Burton Stein: Stein, B. (2010), Arnold, D. (ed.), A History of India (2nd ed.), Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, ISBN 978-1-4051-9509-6 It has 57 references to "famine." Of these, one is in the list of illustrations, and five in the bibliography. That leaves 51. Of those, 50 are firmly in the British period, including quite a few in a subsection on famines. The last is to the period of post-colonial South Asia. This is what it says: The full consequences of widespread famine were averted – or perhaps merely delayed – in India, Pakistan and, since 1972, Bangladesh by the ‘Green Revo lution’. That transformation of agriculture in the subcontinent began during the 1960s with the introduction of a package of improvements in rice and wheat cultivation consisting of a combination of new high-yield seed varieties, chemical fertilizers and pesticides and irrigation based upon tube-wells, elec tric pumpsets and widespread electrification. The result was a quantum leap in grain production. (page 385) This lends further credence to the tertiary sources not assigning weight to any famines in post-colonial India. The notable famines are in the British period. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 15:51, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

• Review articles are also a form of tertiary source used in determining due weight. Tirthankar Roy is an economic historian at the London School of Economics. He is the author of many books on the British period in which famines make a notable appearance. He has also written a review article, an LSE working paper (not sure where it was eventually published): It begins with: Famines were a frequent occurrence in South Asia until 1900, and were often devastating in impact. A series of nineteenth-century famines were triggered by harvest failure. Food procurement for World War II, combined with a crop failure, caused the harshest famine of the twentieth century, the 1943 Bengal famine. Famine-like conditions recurred also in 1966 and in 1972, but the extent of starvation-induced death was limited on both occasions. and later All of the three interpretations - geography, manmade-as-political, and manmade-ascultural - have been prominent in the scholarship and popular history of past Indian famines, especially for the time when detailed records of famines were kept. This starts as recently as the mid-nineteenth century, though the occurrence of famines in India has a much longer history. The years for which some systematic documentation exist were also the years when more than half of India was ruled first by the British East India Company (until 1858), and then the British Crown (1858-1947). The political angle in the second approach, therefore, is directly or indirectly influenced by readings of European colonialism in the region.

This is precisely what I said at the beginning of this discussion. In other words, although I'm not advocating any political angle, the famines for which detailed records exist occurred during the British period. But the British also found major solutions to alleviating the distress. The Indian Famine Codes (1883) for the management of famines have been used by the UN, and the WHO in famines worldwide well into the 21th-century. So, there are all kinds of reasons for which the British period is significant. Again: there were famines in India before the British arrived, but they are infirmly documented, so infirmly as to contitute little more than legends. The British not only documented the famines which may have been exacerbated by their economic policies (although the jury on that is still out) but they ultimately also found ways of preventing and managing famines. Those ideas were used in the prevention of major famines in India after 1947. There is no question that there were no major famines in independent India. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 15:27, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

• Another review article is: Ghose, Ajit Kumar (1982), "Food Supply and Starvation: A Study of Famines with Reference to the Indian Subcontinent", Oxford Economic Papers, New Series, 34 (2): 368–389, doi:10.1093/oxfordjournals.oep.a041557, PMID 11620403 He ends his article with: "Famines were social rather than natural phenomena, and a most cogent statement of this fact was recorded by the Famine Commission of 1880:"

  "The first effect of a drought is to diminish greatly, and at last to stop, all field labour, and to throw out of employment the great mass of people who live on the wages of labour. A similar effect is produced next upon the artisans, the small shop-keepers, and traders, first in villages and country towns, and later on in the larger towns also, by depriving them of their profits, which are mainly dependent on dealings with the least wealthy classes; and, lastly, all classes become less able to give charitable help to public beggars, and to support their dependents. Such of the agricultural classes as possess a proprietary interest in the land, or a valuable right of occupancy in it, do not require as a rule to be protected against starvation in time of famine unless the calamity is unusually severe and prolonged, as they generally are provided with stocks of food or money, or have credit with money-lenders. But those who, owning only a small plot of land, eke out by its profits their wages as labourers, and rack-rented tenants-at-will living almost from hand-to-mouth, are only a little way removed from the class of field-laborers; they possess no credit, and on them pressure soon begins."

• Finally, I have been meaning to expand the Indian Famine Codes article to add it to the List as a comprehensive summary of the British efforts in the diagnosis, prevention, and management of famines. I have a feeling you, NickCT, seem to be associating something negative with "British" in the title. It is not a pejorative or political term. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 15:34, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

Arbitrary break 2

• It is my understanding that famine in British India is a commonly studied topic that has received considerable scholarly attention. Scholarly sources need not have covered every last famine for the list to be a viable one: they only need to have covered the general topic, and they have. If there's enough coverage of famines in the Republic of India, I don't see why it shouldn't also be a viable article, but I'm not aware of such coverage. Similarly, if there's coverage of famine in any pre-British kingdom, that could be covered in its own article. Famine in India already exists, and is large; a merger is not feasible, and the scope of that article is very poorly defined; really it should be "Famine in the Indian subcontinent" or equivalent. For similar reasons of defining scope, I don't see how reworking this as a list of famines in India is reasonable, I'm not seeing any argument to get rid of this article entirely. Vanamonde (Talk) 20:07, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

  I agree with Vanamonde here. If we can't get agreement, then I suggest WP:DRN. Doug Weller talk 10:00, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

  @Vanamonde93 and Doug Weller: - Thanks for weighing-in guys. I think my fundamental complaint here is best encapsulated by Wikipedia:Irrelevant Intersections for Lists. User:Vanamonde93 is absolutely right that scholarly sources have covered a number of individual famines in British India, or short periods of famine in British India. But that's not enough to say "Famine in British India" is a stand-alone topic. Let me pose a couple questions here, 1) if I found a bunch of scholarly sources covering different famines in 15th century Europe, would that justify a "Timeline of major famines in 15th century Europe" article? If yes, doesn't that simply open a Pandora's box of potential articles? Unless sources indicate that the subject as a whole is notable (i.e. they cover the entire topic of "Famines in India during British rule"), we shouldn't use them to infer the notability of a topic. We shouldn't combine material from multiple sources covering individual famines in a given period to imply the topic famine during the period is an encyclopedic topic. That's WP:SYNTH. 2) As an WP:OTHERCONTENT/WP:OTHERSTUFF argument; does it not strike you guys as odd that there are basically no other "List of famines in Y country during X period" articles? Any thoughts on why?

  My preference would be to rename/move here. Failing that, I'd go for WP:TNT.

  Can we just WP:RM instead of the rigmarole of WP:DRN? NickCT (talk) 14:05, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

  NickCT, you're misrepresenting what I wrote; I said "Famine in British India" has been covered as a whole by reliable sources, and an article is therefore viable. No, it doesn't strike me as odd that comparable articles don't exist; many are likely notable, they just haven't been written. Famine in the Soviet Union, for instance, is quite likely notable. And if we're applying your own argument to your proposed title; there's far fewer sources treating famine over the entire course of Indian history, i.e., over ~5000 years, than there are discussing famine in British India. Vanamonde (Talk) 15:12, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

  Yes, this can be sourced, eg p.2 of this book] has a brief timeline of periods where there were famine and where there were few in BI. The "Centre for Development Studies, University College of Swansea" has published at least two.[1], Doug Weller talk 15:20, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

  So when I look at the Majumder source, the subject seems to be the Public Distribution System. I'd think it supports the notability of the Public Distribution System. The Sibbons/Kynch source is a great example of direct coverage, but the book is published by the University of Wales. It seems sorta academic, no? NickCT (talk) 16:57, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

  @Vanamonde93: - Ah sorry. When you wrote "Scholarly sources need not have covered every last famine", it made me think the sources you were referring to hadn't covered topic as a whole. Can you point to what you think is a good example of a source that has covered the topic as a whole? User:Fowler&fowler provided one or two, but they seem to be journal articles from obscure journals/authors.

  Famine in the Soviet Union isn't an article, so I guess the notability is yet to be demonstrated. That said, it wouldn't make sense to me that there would be a "List of Famines in the Soviet Union" article if there wasn't a "List of Famines in Russia" article.

  Re "fewer sources treating famine over the entire course of Indian history, i.e., over ~5000 years, than there are discussing famine in British India" - British India is a small portion of the history of India. I'm not sure how there'd be any articles covering famine in British India that wouldn't also be covering famine in what is today the geographic region of India (excluding ones about Pakistan). NickCT (talk) 15:52, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

  @NickCT: did you see the sources just above your last post that I mentioned? Doug Weller talk 15:58, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

  I'm sorry.... I've replied above. I was taking some time to actually read the sources. NickCT (talk) 16:57, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

  NickCT, if you're demanding sources that specifically cover "Famines in British India" to accept the validity of this article, then by your own argument using those sources to demonstrate the notability of "Famines in India" is synthesis. You can't have it both ways; if we need sources covering the entirety of the topic, then we have such sources for this (Klein, Stahl, Mitra, Hill, and several more), and are notably lacking sources that cover famine over the course of 5000 years of history; if we're collating lists based on some subdivision that makes sense to WP editors, then this subdivision is more meaningful that most others, given that it's a covering a single administrative unit. Vanamonde (Talk) 16:02, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

  @Vanamonde93: - Ok. So look closely at the Klein source. It starts of with "the five decades ending just after World War I". Is it covering the entire history of British India? Or just those five decades? It also isn't covering just famine. It's covering diseases and overall life expectancy. Almost all of the sources for this article are like Klein. They're not giving direct coverage to Famines in British India. They're covering a single famine, a small time period (i.e. a few decades), or even a topic which isn't famine but just general mortality.

  re "demonstrate the notability of "Famines in India" is synthesis" - I'm not trying to demonstrate the notability of Famine in India. I'm saying the topic of "Famine in India" has got to inherently be more notable than "Famine in British India", b/c the latter is a subset of the former. It could be that List of Famine in India wouldn't be notable.

  re " if we're collating lists based on some subdivision that makes sense to WP editors" - I thought we were collating lists if lists themselves were notable. NickCT (talk) 17:20, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

  If your concern is synthesis, then "Famines in India" is not inherently superior as a title, as I've demonstrated. If your concern is notability, then renaming isn't an option to deal with it. Either way, your arguments are still utterly confusing to me. I'm not going to analyze each and every source, because it's unnecessary; many of them are case studies of British responses to famine in India; that they focus on a single instance, or a short period, does not mean they're not examining the general phenomenon. We're going in circles; if you're not persuaded by three people who've edited South Asian content for a really long time, you should open an RM or AfD. Vanamonde (Talk) 19:43, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

  re "many of them are case studies of British responses to famine in India" - I don't think any of them cover a general British response to all famines that occurred in British India. I think some of them may discuss a response to certain famines. I don't think there was a general response. Responses changed with time.

  re "three people who've edited South Asia" - Well.... as I've said in several deletion discussions over WP:FANCRUFT, often times familarity with a subject is an impediment to good application of policy. That may be the case here. Probably a good reason this question shouldn't have been WP:FORUMSHOPPED.

  re "We're going in circles" - Ok. Well listen, answer me one hypothetical. Say I collected a set of books with titles like "Terrorism in 60's Britain", "The Lockerbie bombing", and "IRA Attacks in the UK". Now say I make the supposition that these books demonstrate the topic "Timeline of Terroist Incidents during the Reign of Queen Elizabeth" is a notable and encyclopedic topic. Hopefully you'd agree that supposition is nonsense? Can you tell me why it's nonsense, and why that same logic doesn't apply here?

  re "you should open an RM or AfD" - Even if you didn't object to the "British India" thing, it should be clear the title has problems with WP:SUCCINCT. It's also not clear to me why we're calling this a "Timeline" rather than the more common "List". Shouldn't we at least RM the title on those grounds? NickCT (talk) 00:01, 9 March 2022 (UTC)

  I'm not really bothered if you don't think there was a general response; my understanding of the source material is that there is coverage of famines in British India as a whole. What form that article takes (list, timeline, prose only) is not something I'm particularly interested in. If it's a timeline, then "timeline" in the title is entirely appropriate. Vanamonde (Talk) 03:16, 9 March 2022 (UTC)

  @NickCT: Did you see the references to the two major textbooks on Indian history (in the section above) written by Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf, and Burton Stein? To Tim Dyson's Population history of India from the First Modern People to the Present Day (also above)? Did you see the review articles by Tirthankar Roy and Ajit K. Ghose? Fowler&fowler«Talk» 16:04, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

  PS @NickCT:. By your own admission you are not conversant with the history of South Asia. Yet you feel comfortable in making statements such as " User:Fowler&fowler provided one or two, but they seem to be journal articles from obscure journals/authors." Please tell me how you made that judgment? Take me through the steps. How is the journal Disasters obscure? The journal has an impact factor of 2.641. Journals with factor < 3 constitute 80% of all journals. How did you determine that Supriya Akerkar is an obscure author? She's a woman by the way. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 16:43, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

  2.641 is a pretty middling journal. Akerkar, who's not notable enough for a Wikipedia page, is at Northumbria University. A middling academic institute.

  Why would I need to be knowledgeable about South Asian history to assess the quality of a source?

  Why would you mention she's a woman? NickCT (talk) 17:30, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

  Because you said: It's written by a guy from "Oxford Brookes University". Not exactly the highest quality source, but I guess it's better than nothing."Fowler&fowler«Talk» 17:33, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

  Ah. My mistake. I generally don't look at the gender of authors. NickCT (talk) 18:14, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

  Well, if you have assessed the quality of the source, you should be able to tell us in five sentences why the content, the hypothesis, arguments advanced in it, are middling. Please do. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 17:39, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

  She's not at Northumbria University, she's at Oxford Brookes University as her link states. She did her PhD at Northumbria. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 17:55, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

  Ah. You're right. She got her PhD from Northumbria. Not really too consequential though as Oxford Brookes is also middling. NickCT (talk) 18:35, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

  @NickCT: Your response to the reference: Ambirajan, S. (1976), "Malthusian Population Theory and Indian Famine Policy in the Nineteenth Century", Population Studies, 30 (1): 5–14, doi:10.2307/2173660, JSTOR 2173660, PMID 11630514 was

  "Looking at the Ambirajan reference. The subject of the paper is famine in 19th century India. Not British India. The paper might support the notability of famines in 19th century India but that's not the title or subject of this article." How did you determine that the article is not about 19th-century British India? Fowler&fowler«Talk» 17:27, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

  The title of paper has "19th century" in it. British India was not just the 19th century. You are taking sources that cover famine in several different points in British India and combining them to infer the notability of the topic as a whole. Seems like classic WP:SYNTH.

  I'm not arguing with Ambirajan. Maybe he's right. Maybe Malthusianism caused famine in 19th century British India. Still doesn't mean this article is notable....

  Humurously WP just died for me. I think that's an indication this debate should pause for today. We don't want to break WP anymore.... BTW, if you could stop putting in multiple replies it might be helpful. It becomes a little bit "wall-of-text-y" when you do that.

  Look forward to discussing in greater depth later. NickCT (talk) 18:12, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

  OK, you can reply to this tomorrow. In my understanding "SYNTHESIS" applies to conclusions, i.e. "Do not combine material from multiple sources to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by any source. Similarly, do not combine different parts of one source to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by the source. If one reliable source says A and another reliable source says B, do not join A and B together to imply a conclusion C not mentioned by either of the sources. This would be improper editorial synthesis of published material to imply a new conclusion, which is original research."

  You seem to be applying it to the titles and scopes of articles. The article India is a featured article, which covers the following topics: Etymology of India, History of India (including pre-history, ancient-, medieval-, early modern-, and modern history), Geography of India, Biodiversity of India, Politics and government of India, Foreign-, economic- and strategic relations of India, Economy of India, Socio-economic challenges in India, Demgraphics of India, Languages of India, Religions of India, Visual art of India, Architecture of India, Literature of India, Performing arts and media of India, Society of India, Clothing of India, Cuisine of India, and Sports and recreation in India.

  I know of no high quality source written by authors with their own Wikipedia pages, with appointments at major universities, and with Ph.D. also at the same—the standard to which you are holding Supriya Akerkar—and published by renowned academic publishers that comprehensively cover all these topics. If you do, please let me know. So should we AfD India? If not, why not?

  You seem to be also suggesting that a Timeline of Famines in British India is subsumed by a Timeline of Famines in India. But the latter is subsumed by Timeline of Famines in Asia, that that in turn by Timeline of Famines in the World. So, by that logic, why have the topic "India," as it is subsumed in "Asia," that latter in "Earth?" Fowler&fowler«Talk» 21:21, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

  re "You seem to be applying it to the titles and scopes of articles" - I am. Yes. We write articles about topics b/c those topics are WP:NOTABLE. We know they're notable b/c they recieve signicant and direct coverage in reliable sources. You're combining a bunch of less significant, less direct coverage from multiple sources to conclude a topic is notable.

  Take for example the books like "Famine in Africa: Causes, Responses, and Prevention" or "Famine in European History". These are examples of tertiary sources that provide direct and comprehensive coverage to the topic of Famine in a given region. They strike me as "good" evidence that topics like "List of Famines in Europe" or "List of Famines in Africa" might be notable. I don't see sources of this grade for famine in British India.

  Frankly, after more source review, it's not 100% clear to me that there should be any "Famine in Country X" articles. Or maybe only one or two. Very few high quality sources exist that provide comprehensive coverage of famine in a given country. If sources aren't doing it, why should we be doing it on Wikipedia?

  No. We shouldn't AfD India b/c of books like India: A History and many others. It's not necessary that a source covers every single subsection to support notability, just that it is comprehensive (i.e. they cover the topic as a whole). If in some crazy world there were no sources that summarized India (i.e. its history, politics, economics, religion all together); if sources only dealt specifically with either the Language or the religion or the economics seperately and distinct from one another (in the same way your sources for this article only deal with specific famines or speicific periods), then I guess we might think about deleting India. It would be a pretty crazy world though.

  re "why have the topic "India," as it is subsumed in "Asia," that latter in "Earth?"" - Imagine a WP where we determined that "Asia" wasn't notable enough for its own article (in the same way "List of famines in India" isn't notable enough). How would it make sense in that scenario that "India" would be notable enough for its own article? NickCT (talk) 17:17, 9 March 2022 (UTC)

  I am pretty sure there is no reliable scholarly source that covers the gamut of section topics covered in the Wikipedia India article, WP's oldest country FA, now in its 18th year. I've spent a lot of time thinking about that article. You may examine both the article and talk page histories. Keay's book is a popular trade book that we don't use in that article. I'm also sure the same applies to most WP country FAs, as I've been looking at those as well for nearly 15 years. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 01:06, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

  Perhaps not the full gamut, but you accept that there will be a wide range of sources that cover most of the section topics covered in the Wikipedia article, right? Sources that provide comprehensive overviews of India, like Keay's book. There are no comprehensive overviews of major famines in India during British rule.

  I'm sure the India article is great and that you've contributed positively to it. I'm not sure it's super relevant in this discussion. NickCT (talk) 13:54, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

  Keay is a lot more third-rate than Supriya Akerker's article, which you have dismissed. All he has is a bachelor's in history. He's written touristy books on a range of topics from China to Indonesia to the Middle East to Kashmir etc etc. He has a racy style which endears him to the ordinary non-scholarly readers. Again, there is absolutely no reliable scholarly book that covers India comprehensively in the manner you are expecting books to cover famines in British India. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 15:05, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

  And there were absolutely no outright (undisputed, major) famines in India after independence. See Amartya Sen's quote in the article and of quite a few others against whose scholarly output and reputation John Keay would be found wanting in both knowledge and nuance. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 15:08, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

  Out of curiosity, when you see images of starving people in 1951 Bihar, what do you think? Fake news? NickCT (talk) 16:03, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

  1951? Fowler&fowler«Talk» 16:30, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

  Why don't you and I got to RS/N on the topic of whether the sources that state there were no outright famines in India after independence are reliable? I'll present half a dozen. And you can present half a dozen that claim there were. How about it? Fowler&fowler«Talk» 16:34, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

  You didn't answer my question. Where are the pictures of starving people coming from? NickCT (talk) 16:46, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

  1951, 1967 - Shortages and famines were common. NickCT (talk) 16:45, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

  Malnutrition is not the same thing as famine. There are malnutritioned children in India today. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 16:54, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

  This guy? Malnutrition? Famine? NickCT (talk) 17:09, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

  How many pictures would you like of malnutrition in the UK or the US? All anorexics, for example, are malnutritioned. Some die of starvation. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 18:22, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

  Food insecurity and anorexia are definitely problems in the US and UK. But usually there aren't photojournalists taking photos of it, calling it "famine". NickCT (talk) 19:25, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

  Is WP beholden to photojournalists or major scholars of famine such as Amartya Sen who say there has been no major, large-scale, outright, famine in India after independence? There was scarcity, drought, severe shortage, and threat of famine in Bihar in 1967, but most scholars of famine do not call it a major famine, let alone a severe or great famine of the sort that plagued British India intermittently for nearly 200 years, whose excess mortality shows up on the decadal censuses. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 20:23, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

  Well, I'd certainly agree that pre-independence famines were worse than post-independence famines. In post-independence "geographic India" there was never anything to match the 1900 famine. Let's hope there's never anything that will match it again.

  That said, saying there were "no famines" post-independence seems like a weird revisionist attempt to prove out a thesis. Probably pretty insulting to all the folks who died.

  Scholars provide interpretations. Photojournalists provide images of things that actually happened. Call it "scarcity", "drought", "severe shortage", whatever you like. There were folks starving to death from hunger. NickCT (talk) 16:01, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

  That was my error. I have reinstated Sen's fuller quote in the lead which says 'major' famines. I apologize. I didn't realize that I was changing his meaning so radically. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 16:40, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

  "Famine," by the way has a specific meaning.

  Rubin, Olivier (2016), Contemporary Famine Analysis, Springer Briefs in Political Science, SpringerNature, ISBN 978-3-319-27304-4 mentions a short definition: A famine is a discrete event identifiable by an increase in mortality caused by mass starvation and diseases." In other words, 1) a famine is an atypical event; chronic hunger such as among malnutritioned children in India today is not famine. 2) a famine is accompanied by diseases to which the enfeebled fall victim, and 3) a famine by definition has excess mortality brought on by mass starvation; starvation that results in migration, unemployment, as long as it does not cause mortality that appears to be excessive in a population's census, is not famine. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 01:39, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

  I'm not going to debate the semantics of the word "famine". I don't doubt that there are some sources that might argue the word is misapplied to the post-independence famines. All that really matters to me is that a majority of sources call them famines today.

  Also, you recognize that the contemporary Indian government was calling them famines, right?

  Sorta weird that what the government was calling a "famine" then is no longer a "famine" now, no? Revisionism.... NickCT (talk) 16:06, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

  The title of the page has "major famines." There were no major famines in India after independence. Some 2,500 people died in the Bihar famine. In contrast, there were at least a dozen major famines, half a dozen great famines, and a handful of catastrophic famines (see scale in the lead). The total excess mortality in famine in India during British rule was of the order of 60 million (and likely more). (Parenthetically, not a single Briton in India is known to have died of starvation during those years. British India was obviously not a democracy, a major point of Amartya Sen. But Britain itself dd not have universal franchise and the lot of the poor, especially children was not especially comfortable by today's standards (witness Dickens). So, Sen's point about democracy and famine can't really be applied to historical famines using today's notions of democracy, which really did not exist anywhere.) Fowler&fowler«Talk» 16:37, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

  Sorry for a late response. Little busy IRL at the moment. I'll get back in greater depth shortly.

  re "The title of the page has "major famines."" - Is it not clear to you how you are cherry-picking certain famines to prove your thesis?

  re "was of the order of 60 million" - Again, I'm absolutely not arguing famines in "geographic India" weren't worse under British rule than they were post-independence. That's obviously true and granted. It's also beside the point, which is that famines existed both pre and post.

  re "Some 2,500 people died in the Bihar famine." - That's the "official" estimate right? Most of the sources I've seen put it substantially higher (i.e. 50-200k). Still obviously much smaller than earlier famines. NickCT (talk) 22:21, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

  This statement seems to bely a misunderstanding of Wikipedia in general. Wikipedia is not a textbook. It's written for everyday readers. The fact a subject has coverage in RS written for ordinary non-scholarly readers is a good thing for establishing notability. Tertiary sources (i.e. Keay's) trump secondary sources (i.e. Akerker's).

  Keay is not a tertiary source. WP:TERTIARY specifically mentions text books that have been vetted for DUE coverage. Review articles on the other hand do constitute tertiary sources, and there are review articles on famines in India during British rule. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 16:44, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

  Look..... if you don't understand why a book written and published about a topic is more likely to indicate notability of the topic than a journal review, I'm not sure I can help you. NickCT (talk) 16:53, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

  The journal review evaluates all serious sources on that topic. WP:TERTIARY specifically mentions "textbooks," which Keay is not by a long shot, because widely used scholarly undergraduate text books (e.g Romila Thapar's Ancient India, Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf's A Concise History of Modern India, or or Burton Stein's History of India have to be vetted for balance. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 18:28, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

  I'm not really sure what you mean by "reliable scholarly book". I'm following guidelines laid out in WP:RS to figure out which sources to consider. There's lots of RS that covers India comprehensively. NickCT (talk) 15:55, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

  So am I. Keay does not cover India comprehensively in the way the India page does, not even close. And what he does cover is not as reliable as Supriya Arkerker is about what she covers. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 16:32, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

  Keay covers topics like politics, government, economy and religion, right? In other words, it touches on a large number of subsections in the India article. I don't understand why you're getting hung up on one reference. Are you denying that reliable sources exist that cover multiple aspects of India as a country? NickCT (talk) 16:51, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

  Together they do, but singly they don't, in the same way they do and don't famines in colonial British India. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 16:56, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

  You are denying that RS's exist that provide coverage on most of the subsections in the WP article India? NickCT (talk) 17:04, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

  Subsections they do, in the same way they do on each and every famine in British India. See Joanna Simmonow's review article, with generous quotes, that I'm about to post in a separate section below. She is an Assistant Professor of South Asian History at Heidelberg and her PhD thesis was on "regional and transnational history of famine relief, nutritional development and food aid in late colonial and early postcolonial India." So, she would know. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 17:19, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

  re "in the same way they do on each and every famine in British India." - That's patently false. Very few sources mention every famine in British India outside of some kind of simple list.

  I'm a tad confused by the Simmonow article. If the title specifically calls out "1858–1947", is it covering all of British India, or just those 90 years? NickCT (talk) 22:30, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

  I checked Keay. There is no mention of "cuisine," "chicken," "mutton," "tandoor," "naan," "pilaf," or "pilau," "biryani," "idli," "dosa," "coriander," "cumin," "turmeric," "cardamom," or "ginger," which are all mentioned in India#Cuisine. There is "curry," but in "curry favour." Fowler&fowler«Talk» 02:43, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

  Ha! Well, I guess if missed out on the food then he clearly missed the best part.

  But seriously know, you'd agree that Keay touches on politcs, governmennt, different eras in Indian history and at least some of the cultural subsections.

  Again, I'm not arguing that sources cover every subsection. Just most of them. NickCT (talk) 22:24, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

  Please see WP:SOURCETYPES which states, "Many Wikipedia articles rely on scholarly material. When available, academic and peer-reviewed publications, scholarly monographs, and textbooks are usually the most reliable sources." In fields as vast as "famine" or "India" in which you can find sources for the craziest of assertions it is imperative for us to choose only the best sources, which are the scholarly ones. That solves the problem of reliability but not of due weight. For the latter, we still need tertiary sources such as widely used textbooks or survey/review articles which are vetted for balance. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 17:31, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

  I have added several paragraphs to the lead of the Timeline in this edit. It helps to explain why the British era is significant. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 22:03, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

A proposal

Even though I bristled at first, I can't stress enough how much I have benefitted from your critique @NickCT:. I had created these articles and the timeline quite a few years ago, and then forgotten about them. At the time it was the only article anywhere that used up-to-date sources. There has been much written by scholars since. The article needs to be seriously updated. It does a poor job of explaining why this is a notable topic, what the overall picture was of food scarcity and famines during this period. The British, as I've explained to you, may or may not have directly caused some of the famines, but they certainly created systems of relief, diagnoses, and prevention. The Indian Famine Codes of the 1880s were used around the world in the prevention and amelioration of famines for a hundred years. Perhaps after this article is revamped the title could be changed to Timeline of major famines and relief paradigms in India during British rule I don't have any issues with that kind of change. If the British deserve blame (which I'm not sure they do), they certainly deserve credit for their contribution to the knowledge about famines. So, getting rid of this article is pointless, and it likely won't happen. Making the kinds of perfunctory changes you were suggesting earlier (in RMs etc.) is also pointless. But I'm all for making the kind of change I've suggested above, once the article has been updated and its individual famine articles as well. (One of the problems with famine articles is that everyone with a rescue fantasy and their brother drives through these articles and tries to bump up the mortality numbers.) I would request that you allow me to improve the article and we can revisit the issue after several months. Best, Fowler&fowler«Talk» 18:07, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

I'll take a look at this a bit later, but my first thought is that this would be even less WP:CONCISE than the current title. NickCT (talk) 22:31, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

Joanna Simonow's review article (2022), with quotes

Simonow, Joanna (2022), "Famine relief in colonial South Asia, 1858–1947: Regional and global perspectives.", in Fischer-Tiné, Harald; Framke, Maria (eds.), Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 497–509, ISBN 978-1-138-36484-4, (p. 497–498) Famines and food scarcities of various degrees accompanied colonial rule in India. Only about a dozen of them have received scholarly attention. For long, this attention has been distributed rather unevenly, with literature on famines in the second half of the nineteenth century being more extensive than research dealing with famines in the early colonial period. But, with the growth of scholarly work on the latter, the balance is shifting.

In 1769/70 famine conditions surfaced in Bengal, Orissa, and Bihar, resulting in the estimated death of 10 million Indians in Bengal alone – a third of the province's population. Millions of Indians died of starvation in the south of India from 1781 to 1783, and a year later in north India as well because of the rapid succession of another major famine crisis. Droughts were frequent in the North-Western Provinces, in 1803/4, 1812/13, 1817–19, 1824–26, and 1833, often spilling over into severe subsistence crises. This spate of food crises anticipated the onset of yet another major famine in 1836/7, which threw the Doab region into havoc and caused the death of an estimated 15 to 20 per cent of the population.

In the second half of the nineteenth century famine conditions devastated Orissa in 1866/7 and ravaged the Madras Presidency, the Deccan region, and the North-Western Provinces from 1876 to 1878. Even greater in scope were the famines of 1896/7 and 1899/1900, which held almost the entire subcontinent in their grip. ... Mortality was excessive during these latter famine crises. Historians have estimated that between 12 and 29 million died between 1876 and 1902.

Following the improvement of colonial mechanisms to identify and contain famine conditions, their scale decreased in the early twentieth century. Yet scarcities as well as outright famines continued to haunt India's agriculturalists. They were particular frequent during and in the aftermath of both world wars, when the wars' economic, social, and political repercussions increased the vulnerability of India's agricultural labourers to subsistence crises.11 It was not until the great Bengal Famine of 1943/4, however, which resulted in the death of an estimated 3 million Bengalis and displaced even more, that mass starvation again resulted in horrific sights of emaciated bodies and corpses filling the streets of urban centres of British India.12 Following the worst South Asian famine of the twentieth century, the nation's political elite prepared for independence even while the country remained on the brink of famine.

(p. 510) Despite the copious literature on famines in colonial India, the history of famines still provides scholars of South Asia with new points of departure to deviate from common scales of analysis and to explore largely untouched primary sources

Citation

Is this a reliable source that can be used for this article: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.501717 ? Gabbar13 (talk) 16:24, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

I would think that would depend on what you want to use it as a source for. As a source for saying that someone wrote an open letter to Lord Curzon saying XYZ it probably would be a reliable source, though that doesn't necessarily mean that the information is suitable for inclusion in the article. As a source for stating XYZ as a fact, however, it almost certainly wouldn't be a reliable. JBW (talk) 17:16, 20 November 2022 (UTC)