A HISTORICAL STUDY ON MIGRATION FROM BUNDELKHAND DURING COLONIAL FAMINES

Abstract

When the rains failed in Bundelkhand, cultivators did not simply wait for relief; they moved. This paper examines migration as a central, though historiographically underexamined, dimension of the region's experience of colonial famine, distinguishing the short-distance, seasonal flight of villagers toward relief works and neighbouring towns from the longer, often permanent, streams that carried Bundelkhandi and wider United Provinces labour toward the Assam tea gardens, the mill towns of Bombay and Kanpur, and, through the machinery of indentured emigration, to sugar colonies as distant as Mauritius, Fiji, Trinidad and British Guiana. Drawing on the Famine Commission reports, the 1897 provincial relief resolution, census migration tables, and the historiography of Indian indentured labour (Tinker, Northrup) and internal plantation migration, the paper argues that famine acted as a recruiting sergeant for colonial labour markets far beyond Bundelkhand itself, and that the region's demographic losses recorded in the 1901 and later censuses reflect not only mortality but also migration that in many cases became permanent. The paper also considers the social selectivity of migration—by caste, gender and household position—and the fate of those who returned, or did not, once the rains resumed. It closes by situating Bundelkhand's famine-era migration within the broader colonial political economy of labour circulation, in which distress in one province regularly became labour supply for another.