Photographer: Unknown.
Central Provinces, British India.

Among the collection of photos present in the Russian publication, V.M Doroshevich East and War, authored by Russian journalist, Vlas Mikhailovich Doroshevich and published in 1905 in Moscow. Is this horrifying photo of a mass cremation of emaciated famine victims in an unmentioned location of the Central Provinces of British India, dated 1901.

Produced by an uncredited photographer, which in all probability, may have been a British photographer who happened to be on the scene. The image is a powerful documentation of the havoc, epidemics and calamities such as a severe famine can create not just in the lives of the poor but also of the exhaustion it can bring to communities and relief workers.

While cremation traditions over the world, is performed on an individual basis for the deceased, by both the poor and rich alike, as per their capacity. In times of calamities with high casualty rates and stress setting in, mass cremation has always emerged as the norm in human history. Which is exactly what this photo reveals of the 1899-1900 famine that crippled British India towards the end of the 18th century.

Described by the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, at the time, as the worst of all the famines to affect the country in the 19th Century. The 1899-1900 famine had been the result of a monsoon failure and while it had only lasted for the period of a year, its timing and reach had devastated approximately 427,000 square kilometers of India and affected a population of almost 60 million – a large percentage of which had yet to recover from the previous famine of 1897, that had occured barely two year before, and at the time had been struggling from a sharp rise in commodity prices.

The famine is estimated by some scholars to have left over, four and half million dead in the span of a year, due to starvation, malnutrition and disease.