Portrait of Romesh Chunder Dutt, circa 1911. Reproduced by permission of Dhananjayrao Gadgil Library, Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics (GIPE), BMCC Road, Pune 411004 (India). Gupta, Life and Work of Romesh Chunder Dutt, front piece.

Romesh Chunder (R.C.) Dutt (1848 – 1909) was born into a Bengali family of British East India Company employees who were well known for their literary and academic achievements. Just two years after graduating from the University of Calcutta in 1866, he left India for Britain to study at University College London before appearing for the Indian Civil Service examination in 1869. He was successful and became the second Indian to be appointed an Indian civil servant, being employed as an assistant magistrate and collector¹. In 1883, he became the first Indian to be appointed district magistrate, eventually serving in Bengal, Burdwan and Orissa. After retiring from the Civil Service, he became a professor of Indian history at University College London in 1897. From 1898, he was a regular contributor on famine and tariff debates in the internationally recognised newspaper The Manchester Guardian, known for publishing alternative perspectives.

In the late 1860s, an economist stepped into a ​“small room in a smoky lane” of London, ​“crowded with members of a large family” (Dutt, 1896, pp. 27 – 8). The economist remarked that the mother, her teenage daughter and small baby were crammed into the space. He could not help but notice the coal absent from the furnace, the broken windowpanes and the light clothing on their starved bodies. It ​“presents”, wrote Dutt (1896, pp. 27 – 8), ​“a sight of misery compared to which the poorest classes of people in our own country are well off.” Dutt, born and raised in Calcutta (now Kolkata), Bengal, thousands of miles away, had sailed to London in 1868. He had come to take the Civil Service examination, which until recently had been open to only British candidates; Dutt himself would soon become the second Indian ever to serve as a civil servant in the British government in India. But he had also travelled to see with his own eyes the progressive and modern Britain and Europe that he had been taught and read about at home.

Dutt had graduated from the University of Calcutta in 1866. From 1856 – 7, the British East India Company had established three universities in the main centres of imperialism in India: Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. These institutions were to diffuse ​“the improved arts, science, philosophy and literature of Europe; in short, European knowledge” (Wood’s 1854 despatch, quoted in Seth, 2007, p. 2). At the same time, in early 1857, a rumour had spread among the sepoys, Indian soldiers, in the service of the British East India Company that the grease to lubricate the cartridges in their guns was a mixture of pigs’ and cows’ lard. To load the guns, they had to bite off the ends of the lubricated cartridges. Oral contact with the cartridges, then, was an insult to both Muslims and Hindus. A revolt, referred to as the Indian Mutiny, broke out on 10 May 1857 in northern India, not far from Delhi, and eventually spread to Delhi, Kanpur and Lucknow. Prior to this, Indians had not mounted such an overt, organised attack against their foreign rulers. The British saw no other solution than to reorganise the Indian administration. Control over the Empire of India was passed from the British East India Company to the British Crown. To further secure and legitimise their rule, the British were now said to have a ​“civilising mission”: while India was regressive and poor, its foreign rulers preached that they would bring progress and modernity, qualities they themselves possessed. 

Yet when Dutt saw that mother and her children freezing and hungry in a rundown room in London, the civilising mission did not hold up. How could a country civilise and enrich another, if it had so much poverty of its own? ​“The London Labourer”, wrote Dutt (1896, p. 27), ​“is one of the most harrowing sights that civilisation can hold up to your view.” Dutt was reversing the gaze after centuries of Europeans, including British, travelling to India to observe a population perceived as drastically different from their own. Along with others, he used the scientific method of comparison to study the Indian economy. In such a way, he and his contemporaries gained authority, objectivity and credibility.

Dutt was a part of the first generation of modern Indian economists who had graduated from imperial universities. Born predominantly between the 1840s and 1850s², they spent their lives studying India’s economy. They were a group of middle-class men from Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras. Some were professors of economics, some judges, other merchants or bankers working for imperial companies and institutions. Some had seen their families lose their riches as foreigners took over such lucrative economic activities as tea plantations and jute production. Some sought to better understand the worrying poverty they witnessed in the course of interviewing the poor. All of them were convinced that India was not doing well, and that the British, as their rulers, were not doing enough to better the condition of the average citizen. This group of economists became known as the Early Nationalists, as they began India’s fight for independence. The civilising mission was failing. 

Dutt’s travelling offered him a way to study regress at home. Through his travels, he realised that theorising poverty meant he had to observe it. Both Dutt and George Sims described their observations of the poor as journeys. Sims (1883, p. 3) argued that it was necessary to ​“encounter misery that some good people think it best to leave undiscovered”, which was ​“as interesting as any of those newly-explored lands which engage the attention of the Royal Geographical Society.” The journey to see ​“How the Poor Live”, wrote Sims (1883, p. 3), was about giving the poor ​“a little scientific attention” in order to find ​“remedies” to cure poverty. Similarly, after Dutt’s first trip to Europe, he headed to rural Bengal to collect data on rural poverty. Dutt claimed that economists needed to see rural poverty to understand and study it. In his first publication on those findings, he took his readers on a journey through the Bengali countryside. First, he (Dutt, 1874, pp. 60 – 1) described the ​“paddy fields spreading their sea-like expanse,” then he led his readers to places less familiar to those living in the cities: ​“Let us leave the main road, … and in about half an hour reach one of the shady villages.” At the end of the description of the village, he wrote: ​“A spot so secluded seems devoted to peace and rural happiness; – alas! It is the home of poverty, suffering, and ignorance” (Dutt, 1874, p. 61). Dutt’s studies of the rural poor made him the founder of Agricultural Economics in India. His data collection in the countryside became part of his major contribution to explaining the causes of poverty and famines (Dutt, 1874; 1901).

Dutt’s theory rejected the imperial discourse that blamed the famines on India’s high population growth and dry climate. The Malthusian population trap, used by the British to explain Indian famines, argued that famines occurred as an automatic mechanism to check population growth beyond the means of food production. This was not backed up by the statistics, argued Dutt. Population growth was slower in India than in many other countries, including Britain, which was also far more densely populated. Nor were droughts or lack of food to blame. ​“It was not the want of food supply, but it was the want of money to buy food, which caused famines in localities where the crops failed.” (Dutt, 1902, p. 23). Dutt agreed with the imperial famine report that stagnant real wages and rising food prices restricted access to food, especially for farm labourers who were unable to support themselves. In the nineteenth century, deaths from famines were double the normal rate experienced in India only a century earlier, despite an unchanged climate³. From his work, Dutt concluded that droughts or supply shocks did not guarantee there would be a famine, but that droughts caused higher food prices and thus reduced access to food for a large group of Indians who then could not afford it. 

Dutt found that the lack of access to food was caused by politics and not some natural Indian weakness, whether population growth that was too high or some other reason. There was simply not enough money to pay for food. According to Dutt, India was forced to export grains to Britain, reducing the food supply during a time when grains were needed at home. This pushed up food prices. Moreover, G.D.S. Iyer argued that railways had facilitated the exporting of grain, discouraging storage necessary for dryer seasons. And there were excessive land taxes that caused greater poverty among the rural population. In the late twentieth century, Amartya Sen developed his own theory of famines, also based on rural data collection. Like Dutt, he found that Indian famines were caused by a lack of access to food, rather than a lack of supply⁴. What Sen showed is that the imperial structures that Dutt observed lived on almost a century later.

About the author

Maria Bach is a junior lecturer and post-doctoral researcher at the University of Lausanne. She is the author of Relocating Development Economics: The first generation of modern Indian economists. She hosts and produces the history of economic thought podcast Ceteris Never Paribus.