Explore why the catastrophic Na-Anka Durbhikshya of 1866 remains largely missing from historical books and public memory in Odisha
Bhaskar Parichha
The Na-Anka Durbhikshya of 1866 was one of the greatest human catastrophes in the history of Odisha. Yet, more than a century and a half later, books devoted exclusively to this tragedy remain surprisingly few. This is not merely a publishing gap. It is a gap in our historical memory.
The famine was devastating in scale. Around one-third of Odisha’s population is estimated to have perished from starvation and the epidemics that followed. Villages were emptied, families were broken, livelihoods destroyed and thousands were forced to migrate. Yet the Na-Anka Durbhikshya has never acquired the place in public memory that such a catastrophe should command.
One reason is that the surviving record is overwhelmingly colonial. Much of what we know comes from government reports, revenue records, correspondence of British officials, parliamentary papers and famine inquiries. These documents tell us about grain prices, rainfall, procurement, relief measures and administrative failures. But they rarely tell us what happened inside a starving household or an abandoned village.
The famine also occurred at a difficult moment in Odisha’s intellectual and publishing history. Modern Odia journalism was still in its infancy. Utkala Dipika, which became an important source of contemporary information and criticism, began publication only in August 1866. There was no established culture of newspapers, memoirs, and independent historical writing capable of documenting the catastrophe systematically as it unfolded.
Then there is the nature of collective trauma. Some tragedies are remembered through stories; others become silences. The Na-Anka may belong partly to the latter category. For generations, it survived more through oral memory, family recollections, folklore and scattered references than through a sustained written historiography.
There is another uncomfortable explanation. The famine raises difficult questions about colonial governance. It was not simply a natural calamity. Crop failure and drought were certainly factors, but the scale of the disaster was shaped by administrative failures, inadequate relief, poor communication, grain movement, and the economic policies of the colonial state. A serious history of the famine therefore requires us to examine not merely what happened, but who was responsible and why the response failed so catastrophically.
Odisha’s historical writing has understandably focused on other defining moments—the Paika Rebellion, the struggle for linguistic identity, the formation of the province, the freedom movement and the personalities who shaped modern Odisha. The Na-Anka, despite its enormous demographic and social consequences, has often remained a chapter rather than a subject.
Even today, much remains unexplored. What happened to women and children? How did caste relations change under the pressure of starvation? How many people migrated, and where did they go? What happened to artisans, weavers and agricultural labourers? How did landholding and indebtedness change after the famine? What memories survived in villages? How did the famine influence the emergence of Odia political consciousness? These questions demand a history written from below.
There have been important efforts. Anil Dhir and R.C. Mohapatra’s The Great Odisha Famine 1866: Na’Anka Durbhikshya brought together a considerable body of archival material. Bidyut Mohanty’s A Haunting Tragedy: Gender, Caste and Class in the 1866 Famine of Orissa has pushed the discussion towards questions of gender, caste, class, migration and social consequences. Other works have examined the famine within the larger economic history of colonial Odisha. There is, of course, Desh Kala Patra (A Time Elsewhere) by JP Das and a few autobiographies which have only a passing mention of the famine. These works should be seen not as the end of the story, but as an invitation to explore it further.
Perhaps Odisha needs a comprehensive people’s history of the Na-Anka Durbhikshya—a work that combines British archives with newspapers, missionary records, district documents, economic data, oral traditions, folk memory and local histories. Such a book should not merely count the dead. It should recover the lives behind those numbers.
The Na-Anka Durbhikshya is not only a story of hunger. It is a story of governance, inequality, colonialism, resilience, and social transformation. It is also a story about how a society remembers—or forgets—its greatest tragedies. A famine that killed so many should not itself be allowed to disappear from memory.
The most fitting tribute to its victims today would be to tell their story again—this time not merely through the files of the rulers, but through the voices, memories, and experiences of the people who endured it.
(The author is a senior journalist and columnist. Views expressed are personal.)