The Famine Behind Ranabaali: What Really Happened in Madras, 1876–78

Ranabaali, which opened in theatres on 16 October, puts Vijay Deverakonda in the 1870s as Singanamala Bobbili Ranabaali, a man from Rayalaseema who turns on the British officials running a starving province. Rashmika Mandanna plays Jayamma. Arnold Vosloo plays the commissioner, Sir Theodore Hector.

Nothing in the coverage we reviewed identifies the rebel as a documented historical person. The famine, though, is not invented. It is one of the worst disasters in recorded Indian history, and most people watching the film this weekend will have learned very little about it at school.

So here is the short version.

A drought that became a catastrophe

The rains failed across the Deccan in 1876. Crops collapsed across the Madras and Bombay Presidencies and the princely states of Mysore and Hyderabad. By 1877 the famine had spread north into parts of the Central Provinces and the North-Western Provinces.

Historians now link the drought to a severe El Niño event, the same climate pattern that drove famines across China, Brazil and parts of Africa in the same years. At its widest, the famine covered about 670,000 square kilometres and a population of around 58.5 million.

How many died is still argued over. Official estimates for British-run provinces come to roughly 5.6 million excess deaths. Later demographic work puts the figure higher, around 8.2 million. The journalist William Digby, writing at the time, put it at 9.4 million. The honest range is 5.6 to 9.6 million.

The policies the film is angry about

The film's premise, as early reviews describe it, turns on grain being taken out of the region while people starved. The history is close to that, though the mechanism was policy rather than plunder.

During the famine years, record quantities of wheat, about 6.4 million hundredweight, were exported from India to Britain. The government of Viceroy Lord Lytton held to the belief that markets should move grain where prices were highest and that state interference would make things worse. Grain flowed out of districts where people could no longer afford it.

Relief, when it came, was tied to hard labour. In January 1877 Sir Richard Temple, sent to oversee relief, introduced what became known as the Temple wage: about one pound of grain and one anna for a full day's work on relief projects, with less for women and children. The logic was that anything more generous would create dependency.

Dr W. R. Cornish, a senior medical official in Madras, argued that this was below what a working body needed. In March 1877 Madras raised the ration part of the way toward his recommendation. Part of the way.

What came after

The scale of death, and the public argument over the relief system, led to the Famine Commission of 1880. Its work fed into the Indian Famine Codes, which set out how future scarcity should be recognised and managed. They became the template for decades of famine administration.

If you want to go deeper than a film can, the book most people start with is Mike Davis's Late Victorian Holocausts. It's polemical, and some historians push back on parts of it, but it's the work that brought this famine back into public conversation.

Does the film do it justice?

Early Telugu reviews have been mixed. Reviewers have broadly credited Ranabaali for choosing a rarely told chapter and treating it seriously, and praised the first half, the lead pair and Ajay-Atul's songs. The common complaints are a predictable second half, repetitive action and a near three-hour runtime. AltBollywood hasn't reviewed the film, so we're not adding a verdict of our own here.

What's worth saying is this: Telugu cinema just put a colonial famine at the centre of a star vehicle. Whatever its box office, that's a story choice worth noticing.

Our earlier coverage of the film's casting is here. For more stories on how history and politics show up in Indian pop culture, see Culture Curry.

Ranabaali at a glance

• Release date: 16 October 2026 (theatres)

• Director: Rahul Sankrityan

• Producers: Naveen Yerneni and Y. Ravi Shankar, Mythri Movie Makers

• Music: Ajay-Atul

• Cast: Vijay Deverakonda, Rashmika Mandanna, Arnold Vosloo, Easwari Rao

• Runtime: about 2 hours 58 minutes

• Streaming: not yet announced

Historical figures in this piece draw on the Report of the Indian Famine Commission (1880), the Imperial Gazetteer of India, and later demographic estimates compiled by historians including Tim Dyson and Arup Maharatna.

Frequently asked questions

Is Ranabaali based on a true story?

Its setting is real: the Great Famine of 1876–78 in the Madras Presidency. The coverage we reviewed doesn't identify the title character as a documented historical figure.

How many people died in the Great Famine of 1876–78?

Estimates of excess deaths range from about 5.6 million to 9.6 million, depending on the method and the area counted.

What was the Temple wage?

A relief ration introduced in January 1877 that paid a man about one pound (roughly 450 g) of grain and one anna for a full day's labour on relief works.

When did Ranabaali release?

16 October 2026, in theatres.