 By the end of 1838, approximately 800,000 people had died of starvation, as had an even larger number of livestock.The famine came to be known in folk memory as "chauranvee", (Hindi, literally, "of ninety four,") for the year 1894 in the Samvat calendar corresponding to the year 1838 CE.There had been a number of droughts and near-famines in the region in the first third of the nineteenth century.