A man guards his family from the cannibals during the Madras famine of 1877 at the time of British Raj, India [976x549]

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a human so emaciated.

Humans can survive longer than you would think without food, even longer with very little food. They definitely werent feeling good though.

He [Hooper] one evening selected seven persons whom he wished to photograph,” The Times of India reported, “but the light not being favourable he said he would come in the morning and photograph them. The next morning he came, and found that they had all died during the night.”

i cannot imagine how he still manages to sit upright. there seems to be no single muscle left in his body

Humans can survive a lot without or little food. As already said. But they won’t survive for long. I think i heard somewhere that if u survive like that, even if you eat enough afterwards, your body stops using nutrients all together and just eats itself and death is inevitable whatever you do.

Why would people resort to cannibalism there's nothing to eat on them! I doubt they even have marrow at this point

Bye reddit and fu Spez (Remember to delete or edit your content before leaving !!)

Literally a skeleton with a thicker head

It was a holocaust. Roughly 20 million Indians died in the span of 10 years from starvation and it was directly linked to the British Empire. You dont need concentration camps to exterminate populations.

You might want to read about The Bengal Famine then. There is a reason why Indians hate Churchill.

During the era of British rule in India (1765–1947), 12 major famines occurred (in 1769–1770, 1783–1784, 1791–1792, 1837–1838, 1860–1861, 1865–1867, 1868–1870, 1873–1874, 1876–1878, 1896–1897, 1899–1900, and 1943–1944) which lead to the deaths of millions people.

[famine list](https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2018GL081477)

Also continued to export food during the Irish famine.

Jesus the pic of the moms with their skeletal babies made me sick. The history of the world is so full of unspeakable terror

> The Famine Commission justified Lord Lytton’s reasoning, Davis writes, saying that if help was meted out during the famine, people would assume that the poor were entitled to it at all times. British trade could not take a backseat for the sake of Indian lives. How sad is it that I can very easily imagine this argument being used today, over a century and a half later...

Fuck, that was hard to read. Thank you for the link though.

>Malthusian economics, convenient interpretations of Adam Smith, and social-Darwinism combined to form an ideology that killed 5.5 million Indians only in the British territories between 1876 and 1878 and anything between 6.1 and 10.3 million people in all of India. So. A genocide.

Dehumanizing definitely giant the right word. These photographs take these people from statistics to a forgotten famine to a punch in the gut for me

Imagine being executed by being [blown from a gun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowing_from_a_gun): >Blowing from a gun is a method of execution in which the victim is typically tied to the mouth of a cannon which is then fired. George Carter Stent described the process as follows:[1] > > "The prisoner is generally tied to a gun with the upper part of the small of his back resting against the muzzle. When the gun is fired, his head is seen to go straight up into the air some forty or fifty feet; the arms fly off right and left, high up in the air, and fall at, perhaps, a hundred yards distance; the legs drop to the ground beneath the muzzle of the gun; and the body is literally blown away altogether, not a vestige being seen." > >This method of execution is most closely associated with the British colonial rule in India. Following the Indian Rebellion of 1857, "blowing from a gun" was a method the British used to execute rebels[6] as well as for Indian sepoys who were found guilty of desertion.[7] Using the methods previously practised by the Mughals, the British began implementing blowing from guns in the latter half of the 18th century.[8] > >The destroying of the body and scattering the remains over a wide area had a particular religious function as a means of execution in the Indian subcontinent as it effectively prevented the necessary funeral rites of Hindus.[9] Thus, for believers **the punishment was extended beyond death.**

During Stalingrad, there are stories about parents eating their own children because they knew if they died of starvation before their children, that other people would kill their children with less mercy than they would.

[Get this](https://scroll.in/magazine/855532/who-was-the-photographer-who-took-these-dehumanising-images-of-the-madras-famine) >Evidently these are extremely fragile lives. “He [Hooper] one evening selected seven persons whom he wished to photograph,” The Times of India reported, “but the light not being favourable he said he would come in the morning and photograph them. The next morning he came, and found that they had all died during the night.”

[ Removed by Reddit ]

Mods should definitely create a sub with a better name and abandon this one. Call it BitsOfHistory or something like that.

I was thinking the exact same thing.

Probably because the Holocaust survivors were typically wearing clothes

The British Empire in all likelihood killed more people during its history then Nazi Germany. The Raj was a fucking nightmare.

You can spend your life immersing yourself in human history and at the end you'd still be ignorant about most of it. We've been at it for a while, my dude.

A lot…and this upsets me

Not just doing fine, British India EXPORTED record amounts of grain back to England every year of the famine

*British. England and Scotland equally took part in the looting and pillaging of India and benefited greatly.

I’m having trouble understanding what cannibals would even EAT after seeing that kind of emaciation. Edit: Okay, I get it. Consider my question rhetorical. I have learned too much.

I believe I saw/read an article about cannibals at the mouth of a river that wait around for the dead bodies to float down.

Like half of the world can share sympathies on the evil shit the British did. They had a habit of being absolutely brutal colonial powers. I don’t want to say they’re the worst, because all of them were fucking terrible, but with shit like the opium wars they’re certainly a strong contender.

But they brought trains!!!

Not for much longer, I would wager.

It's actually come surprisingly far especially considering it got free only in 1947. And the British have given no reparations or formal apologies for looting the country dry and dividing it like they did.

Those people should also look up Indus valley "civilisation".