Western India was struck by the "Deccan famine" between 1630 and 1632 as crops failed after three consecutive years of Indian monsoon failures. While traveling through the region, Peter Mundy, an English merchant with the East India Company, vividly described the traumatic scenes of starvation, mass mortality, and even cannibalism in his travelog. In fact, such scenes of catastrophic drought-induced famines are widely noted in historical documentary sources suggesting that the Indian subcontinent has frequently experienced multi-year to decade-long severe droughts unlike any observed in the last 150 years when the reliable measurements of monsoon rainfall became available. Nonetheless, the historical accounts are scattered, subjective, and their veracity cannot be always confirmed.