British Raj
Famine Years Deaths
Great Bengal Famine 1769-1770 10
Chalisa famine 1783-1784 11
Doji bara famine 1789-1795 11
Agra famine of 1837-38 1837-1838 0.8
Eastern Rajputana 1860-1861 2
Orissa famine of 1866 1865-1867 1
Rajputana famine of 1869 1868-1870 1.5
Bihar famine of 1873-74 1873-1874 0
Great Famine of 1876-78 1876-1878 10.3
Odisha , Bihar 1888-1889 0.15
Indian famine of 1896-97 1896-1897 5
Indian famine of 1899-1900 1899-1900 1
Bombay Presidency 1905-1906 0.23
Bengal famine of 1943 1943-1944 1.5
Total ( 1765-1947 ) 1769-1944 55.48
The British Raj (/rɑːdʒ/; from rāj, literally, rule in Sanskrit and Hindustani) was the rule by the British Crown on the Indian subcontinent from 1858 to 1947. The rule is also called Crown rule in India, or direct rule in India. The region under British control was commonly called India in contemporaneous usage, and included areas directly administered by the United Kingdom, which were collectively called British India, plus those ruled by indigenous rulers, but under British tutelage or paramountcy, called the princely states. The whole was never officially called the Indian Empire, only informally. As India, it was a founding member of the League of Nations, a participating nation in the Summer Olympics in 1900, 1920, 1928, 1932, and 1936, and a founding member of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945. This system of governance was instituted on 28 June 1858, when, after the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the rule of the British East India Company was transferred to the Crown in the person of Queen Victoria (who, in 1876, was proclaimed Empress of India). It lasted until 1947, when it was partitioned into two sovereign dominion states: the Dominion of India (later the Republic of India) and the Dominion of Pakistan (later the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the eastern part of which, still later, became the People's Republic of Bangladesh in 1971). At the inception of the Raj in 1858, Lower Burma was already a part of British India; Upper Burma was added in 1886, and the resulting union, Burma (Myanmar), was administered as an autonomous province until 1937, when it became a separate British colony, gaining its own independence in 1948.