There was a person called Peter Mundy who arrived in India in 1628 to work as a factor for the East India Company’s then fledgling business interests in our country. Remember that this was a time when the Mughals still ruled over most of the land, and the earliest English visitors were considered to be on an equal footing with the locals despite their foreign origins. Mundy spent some years travelling around Gujarat, Agra and Bengal, documenting everything he saw in writing and as sketches. His journals included an account of the famine in Gujarat that took place in that period, which highlighted how Shah Jahan diverted food routes from the western state to the Deccan plateau, where his army had converged to try and capture more territory. That famine reminded Mundy of similar food shortages that people had experienced in his native land and in that sense, he had a shared feeling of co-suffering with the locals who accompanied him on that trip. They could empathise with each other’s difficulties.

Patachitra scrolls that depict famine. Pics/famine tales