Gujarat Famine

April 27, 1702

A prolonged drought devastated western India as the Mughal tax system buckled under Aurangzeb's Deccan wars. European travelers described villages emptied and bodies unburied in the roads. The Mughal chronicles record mortality in the hundreds of thousands. Imperial decline was being measured, above all, in the bellies of peasants. The famine accelerated Maratha and British encroachment into Gujarat's weakened principalities.