centered on Delhi in 1335–1342 (which is reported to have killed thousands). Busy and faced with a difficult situation, the Tughluq couldn't properly address the famine. Pre-colonial famines in the Deccan included the Damajipant famine of 1460 and the famines starting in 1520 and 1629. The Damajipant famine is said to have caused ruin both in the northern and southern parts of the Deccan. Abd al-Qadir Badayuni claims to have witnessed cannibalism in Hindustan in a famine in 1555. The 1629-1632 famine in the Deccan and Gujarat, was one of the greatest in India's history. In the first 10 months of 1631 an estimated 3 million perished in Gujarat and one million in the Deccan. Eventually, the famine killed not only the poor but the rich as well. More famines hit the Deccan in 1655, 1682 and 1884. Another famine in 1702–1704 killed over two million people. The oldest famine in Deccan with local documentation sufficiently well-preserved for analytical study is the Doji bara famine of 1791–1792. Relief was provided by the ruler, the Peshwa Sawai Madhavrao II, in the form of imposing restrictions on export of grain and importing rice in large quantities from Bengal via private trading, however the evidence is often too scanty to judge the 'real efficacy of relief efforts' in the Mughal period. According to Mushtaq A. Kaw, "Many Famines were recorded in Kashmir from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The Mughals and Afghan rulers in Kashmir took Measures to fight them, but as the paper intends to show, their measures were too weak and in certain aspects were even worse than those of their predecessors. Contemporary sources point to a noticeable variation in the occurrence of famines over different years. They show that these famines took place on a great scale. We are told that great damage was caused to the standing crop when there was an unprecedented flood. For instance, the great flood of 1640-42 alone wiped out 438 villages in the region of Kashmir. (Famines in Kashmir, 1586-1819: The policy of the Mughal and Afghan rulers/ Mushtaq A. Kaw.) Some historians argue that Moguls took a patrimonial attitude towards the peasantry that mitigated the effects of famine. Mike Davis, for example, claims that Akbar, Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb relied on tax relief, the distribution of free food without demanding labor in return, food export embargos and price controls. Abraham Eraly, on the