¹ People's Union for Civil Liberties [PUCL] v. Union of India [UOI] and Others, Writ Petition (Civil), No. 196 of 2001. The full text is available at: http://www.righttofoodindia.org/case/case.html/.

² PUCL v. UOI and others, § 3.

³ Ibid., § 11.

⁴ Ibid., § 17.

⁵ Journalist P. Sainath puts it with characteristic eloquence: “An exclusive focus on ‘starvation deaths’—disconnected from the larger canvas—seems to imply this: if they don't die, everything's alright. If they lose their land, cannot feed their families, see their children enter bondage, are forced into debt-driven prostitution—all that is okay. They just shouldn't starve to death. That's upsetting. It's bad implementation.” P. Sainath, “It's the Policy, Stupid, Not Implementation,” http://www.indiatogether.org/opinions/ps1.htm/.

⁶ Dreze, Jean, Famine Prevention in India (London: London School of Economics, 1988)Google Scholar; cf. Davis, Mike, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 1999)Google Scholar.

⁷ Dreze, Jean and Sen, Amartya, India: Development and Participation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ On the British context for such interventions, see the illuminating work of Vernon, James, notably, “The Ethics of Hunger and the Assembly of Society: The Techno-Politics of the School Meal in Britain,” American Historical Review, 110, 3 (2005): 693–725CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

⁹ As Dipesh Chakrabarty has noted, “The capacity to notice and document suffering (even if it be one's own suffering) from the position of a generalized and necessarily disembodied observer is what marks the beginnings of the modern self.” He argues that where “social thought” sees pain as “specific and hence open to secular interventions,” in religious thought “suffering is existential. It shadows man in his life.” The discourses of food and hunger in modern India brought these countervailing notions of pain—as necessary or preventable—into contention and dialogue. Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Post-Colonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 119–20Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Asad, Talal, “Thinking about Agency and Pain,” in Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 67–99Google Scholar.

¹¹ This is to suggest that, modifying Gyan Prakash's argument, it was not only or even primarily by turning to an “inner and uncolonized tradition” that Indian nationalists were able to appropriate and “reinscribe” colonial governmentality. Cf. Prakash, Gyan, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

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¹⁷ Gyan Prakash, Another Reason, 157. This point was also raised in David Arnold's presentation on “Famine and Ideas of Welfare in India,” at the conference on Welfare, Land and Taxes, Trinity Hall, Cambridge, 3 June 2005.

¹⁸ Report of the Indian Famine Commission, 1880 (Calcutta: Government of India), 31–32.

¹⁹ See, for example: Famine Code: Madras Presidency (Madras: Government of Madras, 1883); Bengal Famine Code, rev. ed. (Calcutta: Government of Bengal, 1892).

²⁰ Naoroji, Dadabhai, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (London: Swan, Sonnenschein and Co., 1901), 24Google Scholar.

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²⁵ Gandhi, “Five Crores Starving,” Indian Opinion, 28 Mar. 1908, CWMG, vol. 8, 156–57.

²⁶ Foucault, Michel, “Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Critique of Political Reason,” in, Faubion, James, ed., Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–84, vol. 3, Hurley, Robert et al. , trans. (London: Penguin, 2001), 298–325, quote p. 308Google Scholar; see also “The Subject and Power,” in the same volume, 326–48, quote pp. 334–35.

²⁷ Bose, Sugata, “Nation as Mother: Representations and Contestations of ‘India’ in Bengali Literature and Culture,” in, Bose, S. and Jalal, A., eds., Nationalism, Democracy and Development: State and Politics in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 50–75Google Scholar; Sarkar, Tanika, “Nationalist Iconography: Images of Women in 19th-Century Bengali Literature,” Economic and Political Weekly, 21 Nov. (1987): 2011–15Google Scholar.

²⁸ Subramania Bharati, “Bharata Samudayam,” Tamil original available at: http://www.tamilnation.org/literature/bharathy/kavithaikal/thesiya1.htm#17._????_????????. I have slightly modified the translation, “Bharat Commonwealth,” in Poems of Subramania Bharathy—A Selection, P. S. Sundaram, trans. (Madras: Vikas Publishing House, 1982).

²⁹ I owe this formulation of the point to an anonymous CSSH reviewer.

³⁰ Loveday, Alexander, History and Economics of Indian Famines (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1914)Google Scholar.

³¹ For the demographic evidence, see Dyson, T., ed., India's Historical Demography: Studies in Famine, Disease and Society (London: Curzon, 1989)Google Scholar.

³² On the broader colonial context, see Worboys, M., “The Discovery of Colonial Malnutrition,” in, Arnold, D., ed., Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 208–25Google Scholar. The best discussion of India is Arnold's, David “Discovery of Malnutrition and Diet in Colonial India,” Indian Economic and Social Review 31, 1 (1994): 1–26Google Scholar.

³³ Here the early interest taken by the League of Nations in the question of nutrition helped to “globalize” it. The League's work on the impact of poverty and unemployment on industrial workers' diets in Europe lent itself to global replication. On this process, see Amrith, Sunil, Decolonizing International Health: India and Southeast Asia, 1930–65 (New York: Palgrave, 2006), ch. 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁴ The proliferation of family budget studies suggested, implicitly, that this was the case.

³⁵ Gangulee, N., Health and Nutrition in India (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), 26–27Google Scholar.

³⁶ See McCarrison, Robert and Norris, Roland, “The Relationship of Rice to Beri-Beri in India,” Indian Medical Research Memoirs 2 (1924)Google Scholar; Gangulee, Nutrition; W. R. Aykroyd, “Nutrition in India,” in, League of Nations, Health Organization, Intergovernmental Conference of Far Eastern Countries on Rural Hygiene, C.H. 1235b, Geneva, Apr. 1937; W. R. Aykroyd, Note on the Results of Diet Surveys in India (Simla: India Research Fund, 1940). For further discussion of this distinction between rice and wheat, see Arnold, “Discovery of Malnutrition.”

³⁷ For a sense of the older tradition of colonial writing on diet and race, see Johnston, John Wilson, A Contribution to the Dynamics of Racial Diet in India (Edinburgh: Mclachlan and Stewart, 1876)Google Scholar. For an early contrast between “ordinary” diets and those under conditions of captivity, see Cornish, W. R., Reports on the Nature of the Food of the Inhabitants of the Madras Presidency and on the Dietaries of Prisoners in Zillah Jails (Madras: United Scottish Press,1863)Google Scholar. For a more detailed discussion of these themes, see Arnold, “Discovery of Malnutrition.”

³⁸ Aykroyd, “Nutrition in India.”

³⁹ See, for example, Choudhury, A. C. Roy, Report of an Enquiry into the Standard of Living of Jute Mill Workers in Bengal (Calcutta: Government of Bengal, 1930)Google Scholar; Adyanthaya, N. K., Report of an Enquiry into the Family Budgets of Industrial Workers in Madras City (Madras: Government of Madras, 1938)Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ Gangulee, Nutrition, 128.

⁴¹ Wills, L. and Mehta, M. M., “Studies in Pernicious Anaemia of Pregnancy,” Indian Journal of Medical Research 17 (1930): 777–92Google Scholar; Balfour, Margaret, “Maternity Conditions and Anaemia in the Assam Tea-Gardens,” Journal of the Association of Medical Women in India 21 (1933): 28–38Google Scholar; and Balfour brings together concerns with childbearing women, and industrial workers, in, “Diseases of Pregnancy and Labour in India, with Special Reference to Community,” Proceedings of the Seventh Congress of the Far Eastern Association of Tropical Medicine (Calcutta: Far Eastern Association of Tropical Medicine, 1927), 318–28.

⁴² Aykroyd, W. R. and Rajagopal, K., “The State of Nutrition in Schoolchildren in South India,” Indian Journal of Medical Research 24, 2 (1936): 419–38Google Scholar; Aykroyd, W. R. and Krishnan, S., “The State of Nutrition of Schoolchildren in Three Towns of South India,” Indian Journal of Medical Research 24, 3 (1937): 707–26Google Scholar.

⁴³ Gangulee, Nutrition, 119.

⁴⁴ Alter, Joseph, “Gandhi's Body, Gandhi's Truth: Nonviolence and the Biomoral Imperative of Public Health,” The Journal of Asian Studies 55, 2 (1996): 301–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Arnold, David, Gandhi: Profiles in Power (London: Longman, 2001)Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ Pyarelal, Epic Fast (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1932), 44.

⁴⁶ Alter, “Gandhi's Body.”

⁴⁷ See, inter alia, “Dietetic Changes,” Harijan, 27 July 1935, in, Gandhi, M. K., Diet and Diet Reform (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1948), 86–87Google Scholar; “Minimum Diet,” Harijan, 31 Aug. 1935, in ibid., 30; “Polished v. Unpolished,” Harijan, 26 Oct. 1934, in ibid., 44–46.

⁴⁸ Gandhi, Diet and Diet Reform.

⁴⁹ Robert McCarrison, letter to Gandhi in Young India, 15 Aug. 1929, in ibid., 24–25.

⁵⁰ Gandhi, “National Food,” Harijan, 5 Jan. 1934, in Diet and Diet Reform (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1949), 29–30.

⁵¹ Gandhi, “Unfired Food Experiment,” Young India, 18 July 1929, in ibid., 18.

⁵² Gandhi, “National Food.”

⁵³ See, for example, Gandhi's notion of a “cloth famine”: Speech to Students of Gujarat Mahavidyalaya, Ahmedabad, 13 Jan. 1921, CWMG, vol. 22. For further discussion, see Bayly, C. A., “The Origins of Swadeshi (Home Industry): Cloth and Indian Society, 1700–1930,” in Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 172–209Google Scholar; and Tarlo, Emma, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India (London: Hurst, 1996)Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ Gandhi, “A Talk to Village Workers,” extract from a talk given on 22 Oct. 1935, in Diet and Diet Reform, 31–33. On this occasion, Gandhi had invited almost one hundred village workers to his ashram and had prepared for them a special meal that reflected his vision for “national food”: cheap, wholesome, vegetarian, and distinctively Indian.

⁵⁵ Indeed, the language of nutrition was at least as crucial in this regard as was the resort to indigenous medical and scientific practices that Gyan Prakash emphasizes in Another Reason.

⁵⁶ Wellcome Contemporary Medical Archive Centre, London, papers of R. McCarrison, GC 205: R. McCarrison, Nutrition and Health, Being the Cantor Lectures Delivered before the Royal Society of Arts, 1936 (London: The McCarrison Society, n.d.).

⁵⁷ Gandhi, “Unfired Foods,” Young India, 15 Aug. 1929, in Diet and Diet Reform, 26–27.

⁵⁸ “Findings of the International Commission of Experts Appointed by the Health Committee of the League of Nations,” Harijan, 25 Apr. 1936, in Diet and Diet Reform, 101. The original report was: League of Nations, Report on the Physiological Bases of Nutrition, League of Nations Document A.12(a), 1936.

⁵⁹ Gandhi, “Polished v. Unpolished.”

⁶⁰ Cullather, Nick, “Foreign Policy of the Calorie,” American Historical Review 112, 2 (2007): 337–64CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

⁶¹ Following, here, the usage of Mitchell, Timothy, The Rule of Experts: Egypt, Technopolitics, Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002)Google Scholar. I am grateful to an anonymous CSSH reviewer for clarifying this point.

⁶² For a recent perspective on the intellectual history of planning in India, see Zachariah, Benjamin, Developing India: An Intellectual and Social History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶³ National Planning Committee, Population: Report of the Sub-Committee, Chair: Dr Radhakamal Mukherjee, K. T. Shah, ed. (Bombay: Vohra and Co, 1947), 144–45. The Planning Committee's reports were published after 1947, but their discussions took place between 1938 and 1940, and should therefore be read in the context of the debates of the 1930s.

⁶⁴ National Planning Committee, Population, 127.

⁶⁵ Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan, “Customs of Governance: Colonialism and Democracy in Twentieth Century India,” Modern Asian Studies 41, 3 (2007): 441–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁶⁷ Marx, Karl, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Fowkes, Ben, trans. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 130, 134Google Scholar. For an elaboration in the Indian context, see Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ National Planning Committee, Population, 14.

⁶⁹ Chand, Gyan, India's Teeming Millions (London: Allen and Unwin, 1939)Google Scholar.

⁷⁰ Mukherjee, Radhakamal, Food Planning for Four Hundred Millions (London: MacMillan, 1938)Google Scholar.

⁷¹ National Planning Committee, Population, 145.

⁷² Gangulee, Nutrition, 199.

⁷³ Ibid., 200–1.

⁷⁴ Ibid., 234.

⁷⁵ Venkatesan, V., “Hoarder's Delight,” Frontline, 25 Apr. (2008): 22Google Scholar.

⁷⁶ Aykroyd, W. R., “The Economic Aspects of the Problem of Nutrition in India,” Indian Journal of Social Work 2, 3 (1941): 269–82Google Scholar.

⁷⁷ A synthesis of Aykroyd's many studies can be found in W. R. Aykroyd, B. G. Krishnan, R. Passmore, and A. R. Sundararajan (Coonoor Nutrition Research Laboratory), Indian Medical Research Memoirs, No. 32, The Rice Problem in India (Jan. 1940), British Library; Asia, Pacific and Africa Collection; India Office Records [henceforth IOR], V/25/850/92.

⁷⁸ Aykroyd et al., The Rice Problem in India.

⁷⁹ As Michel Foucault put it in his lectures on sovereignty and biopolitics, “One might say this: It is as though power, which used to have sovereignty as its modality or organising schema, found itself unable to govern the economic and political body of a society that was undergoing both a demographic explosion and industrialization.” Foucault, M., Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, Macey, David, trans. (London: Penguin, 2003), 249Google Scholar.

⁸⁰ Jawaharlal Nehru to B. J. K. Hallowes (Deputy Commissioner, Allahabad and President of the Famine Relief Fund of Gonda), 26 June 1929, in, S. Gopal and Uma Iyengar, eds., The Essential Writings of Jawaharlal Nehru (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 12.

⁸¹ Cf. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended.

⁸² Nehru to B. J. K. Hallowes, 26 June 1929.

⁸³ IOR/M/4/936, Food: Rice Study Group, Feb.–Jun. 1947; IOR/M/4/809, Food: International Emergency Food Council; Singapore Sub-Committee on Rice, Oct. 1946–Oct. 1947.

⁸⁴ Nehru, Jawaharlal, The Discovery of India (Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund/Oxford University Press, 2003 [1946]), 496Google Scholar.

⁸⁵ Ibid., 498.

⁸⁶ Greenough, Paul, Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal: The Famine of 1943–4 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982)Google Scholar. This remains the best English language history of the famine.

⁸⁷ Sen, Bhowani, Rural Bengal in Ruins, Chakravarty, N., trans. (Bombay: People's Publishing House, 1945)Google Scholar.

⁸⁸ Mahalanobis, P. C., Mukerjea, Ramakrishna, Ghosh, Ambika, A Sample Survey of the After-Effects of the Bengal Famine of 1943 (Calcutta: Statistical Publishing Society, 1946)Google Scholar; Narayan, T. G., Famine over Bengal (Calcutta: Book Company, Ltd., 1944)Google Scholar. See also the classic analysis in Sen, Amartya, Poverty and Famines: An Essay in Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981)Google Scholar.

⁸⁹ Greenough, Prosperity and Misery. See also Greenough, Paul, “Indian Famines and Peasant Victims: The Case of Bengal in 1943–4,” Modern Asian Studies 14, 2 (1980): 205–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁹¹ Ibid., 497.

⁹² Appadurai, Arjun, “How Moral is South Asia's Economy?—A Review Article,” The Journal of Asian Studies 43, 3 (1984): 481–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quote p. 485.

⁹³ Gandhi, Talk with Mridula Sarabhai, Sevagram, 26 Oct. 1944, CWMG, vol. 78, 234.

⁹⁴ Sardesai, S. G., Food in the United Provinces (Bombay: People's Publishing House, 1944), 19Google Scholar.

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⁹⁶ Namboodiripad, E. M. S., Food in Kerala (Bombay: People's Publishing House, 1944), 16Google Scholar.

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⁹⁸ Chand, Gyan, Problem of Population (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1944), 10Google Scholar.

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¹⁰² Report of American Famine Mission to India, led by Schultz, T. W., cited in Henry Knight, Food Administration in India, 1939–47 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1954), 253Google Scholar.

¹⁰³ Knight, Food Administration.

¹⁰⁴ Report of the Foodgrains Enquiry Committee, 1957 (New Delhi: Ministry of Food and Agriculture, 1957), 26–27.

¹⁰⁵ On this point, see Hodges, “Governmentality.”

¹⁰⁶ Mehta, Uday S., “Indian Constitutionalism: The Articulation of a Political Vision,” in, Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Majumdar, Rochona, and Sartori, Andrew, eds., From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 13–30, 26–27Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁷ Rudolf Mrazek, Sjahrir (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 333.

¹⁰⁸ See, for example, Gourou, Pierre, The Tropical World: Its Social and Economic Conditions and Its Future Status, Beaver, S. H. and Laborde, E. D., trans. (London: Longman, 1973)Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁹ IOR, M/4/745, “Indonesia: Rice from Indonesia to India”: Viceroy to Secretary of State for India, 30 Aug. 1946.

¹¹⁰ IOR, M/4/745, “Indonesia: Rice from Indonesia to India”: Special (Food—Southeast Asia), 18 Sept. 1946.

¹¹¹ Ibid.

¹¹² For a consideration of the parallel developments concerning the United Nations and its organizations in the field of public health, see Amrith, Decolonizing International Health, ch. 2.

¹¹³ IOR, M/4/745, “Indonesia: Rice from Indonesia to India,” Government of India—Food Department to Indian Agent General, Washington, D.C., 17 Sept. 1946.

¹¹⁴ Space constraints prevent my delving into the origins of food aid from the United States to India, but see the excellent account in Dennis Merrill, Bread and the Ballot: The United States and India's Economic Development, 1947–1963 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).

¹¹⁵ Foodgrains Enquiry Committee, 1957.

¹¹⁶ Gandhi, “Speech at Prayer Meeting,” 3 Nov. 1947, CWMG, vol. 89, 467–68.

¹¹⁷ Ibid.

¹¹⁸ Ibid.

¹¹⁹ Gandhi, “A Letter,” 13 July 1947, Bihar Pachhi Dilhi, CWMG, vol. 88, 328.

¹²⁰ Gandhi, “Speech at Prayer Meeting,” 18 Feb. 1946, CWMG, vol. 83, 153.

¹²¹ Gandhi, “Question Box,” Harijan, 24 March 1946, CWMG, vol. 83, 240.

¹²² Gandhi, “Speech at Prayer Meeting,” 6 Oct. 1947, CWMG, vol. 89, 294–95.

¹²³ Gandhi, “Mass Murder,” Harijan, 25 Aug. 1946, CWMG, vol. 85, 165–66.

¹²⁴ Gandhi, “Speech at Prayer Meeting,” 6 Oct. 1947.

¹²⁵ Gandhi, “Speech at Prayer Meeting,” 18 Feb. 1946.

¹²⁶ One of the moving testimonies in Urvashi Butalia's collection of oral histories of Partition makes this connection explicit: “Such good relations we had that if there was any function that we had, then we used to call Musalmaans to our homes, they would eat in our houses, but we would not eat in theirs and this is a bad thing, which I realize now. If they would come to our houses we would have two utensils in one corner of the house, and we would tell them, pick these up and eat in them; they would then wash them and keep them aside and this was such a terrible thing. This was the reason Pakistan was created.” In, Butalia, Urvashi, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (London: Hurst, 2000), 31Google Scholar.

¹²⁷ Gandhi, “Speech at Prayer Meeting,” Srirampur, 10 Dec. 1946, CWMG, vol. 86, 214.

¹²⁸ Gandhi, “Speech at Prayer Meeting,” New Delhi, 23 Sept. 1946, CWMG, vol. 85, 362.

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¹³⁰ Chatterjee, Partha, “Development Planning and the Indian State,” in, Chatterjee, P., ed., State and Politics in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 271–97Google Scholar.

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¹³⁴ Barbara Harriss, Child Nutrition and Poverty in South India: Noon Meals in Tamil Nadu (New Delhi: Concept Publishing), 10.

¹³⁵ Chatterjee, Partha, Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the Word (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

¹³⁶ At http://www.righttofoodindia.org/case/case.html/.

¹³⁷ See Frontline, 25 Apr. 2008.