Doji bara famine

The Doji bara famine (also Skull famine) of 1791–1792 in the Indian subcontinent under the Maratha Confederacy, Hyderabad, and East India Company. It was brought on by a major El Niño event lasting from 1789–1795 and producing prolonged droughts.^[1] Recorded by William Roxburgh, a surgeon with the British East India Company, in a series of pioneering meteorological observations, the El Niño event caused the failure of the South Asian monsoon for four consecutive years starting in 1789.^[2]

The resulting famine, which was severe, caused widespread mortality in Hyderabad, Deccan, Gujarat, and Marwar (then all ruled by Indian rulers).^[3] In regions like the Madras Presidency (governed by the East India Company), where the famine was less severe,^[3] and where records were kept, half the population perished in some districts, such as in the Northern Circars.^[4] In other areas, such as Bijapur, although no records were kept, both the famine and the year 1791 came to be known in folklore as the Doji bara (also Doĝi Bar) or the "skull famine," on account, it was said, of the "bones of the victims which lay unburied whitening the roads and the fields."^[5] As in the Chalisa famine of a decade earlier, many areas were depopulated from death or migration. According to one study, a total of 11 million people may have died during the years 1789–1792 as a result of starvation or accompanying epidemics of disease.^[6]