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16 results

  • 2 - Independent India of Plenty

  • Benjamin Robert Siegel, Boston University
  • Book:
    Hungry Nation
    Published online:
    20 April 2018
    Print publication:
    26 April 2018, pp 50-85

  • Summary

    Spanning the years between the Bengal Famine and the formulation of India's first Five-Year Plan, this chapter investigates the consolidation of claims made about food and its proper provision by the leadership of the new state. The promise of sustenance grew more daunting when nationalist leaders realized the magnitude of India’s postcolonial challenges: much of the country's agricultural land was now in Pakistan, refugees were making increased demands on the state, and food and currency reserves were nearing depletion. This chapter traces the transfer of power in India’s Food Ministry and diplomatic corps, investigates the a major food experiment in the form of an ill-fated effort to deregulate markets in food, and examines popular visions of the food problem in the years after independence. Placing the machinations of government in conversation with popular sentiment expressed in pamphlets and petitions, this chapter argues that this period of fundamental political and economic uncertainty also saw a democratization of visions of development. This proliferation of plans for how India might achieve plenty, it suggests, was tied to evolving understandings of the meanings of self-rule and self-reliance, and changed notions of citizenship and welfare that would structure later developmental schemes.

  • Conclusion: Landscapes of Hunger in Contemporary India

  • Benjamin Robert Siegel, Boston University
  • Book:
    Hungry Nation
    Published online:
    20 April 2018
    Print publication:
    26 April 2018, pp 220-233

  • Summary

    A brief conclusion reviews the state of India's food predicament in the years since the introduction of Green Revolution technologies. This review of developments since the 1970s suggests the ways in which the transformation of the food problem from a political concern to a technocratic one, and the rise of a politic emphasizing production over equitable distribution, has narrowed the opportunities for a creative solution of India's food problem. The evidence of this foreclosure, this conclusion suggests, is found in the unsettling statistics concerning India's devastating levels of hunger and malnutrition. Even as India holds and exports great quantities of food, its entrepreneurs run major agro-industrial projects overseas, and obesity and diabetes plague the nation’s wealthy, the nation is home to a quarter of the world’s starving population (230 million people), forty percent of Indian children still suffer from malnutrition, and political parties can make immense capital over the promise of a “full roti” for every citizen. India’s failure on the food front is framed, in this conclusion and this book, by a historical winnowing of possibility, and a move away from the ideals of equity and welfare which animated nationalists and fueled decades of vital debate.

  • 4 - The Common Hunger of the Country: Merchants and Markets in Plenty and Want

  • Benjamin Robert Siegel, Boston University
  • Book:
    Hungry Nation
    Published online:
    20 April 2018
    Print publication:
    26 April 2018, pp 119-151

  • Summary

    The 1943 Bengal famine eclipsed the efforts, that same year, to bring India’s larger cities and towns under statutory rationing. India’s urban working classes cheered on the decision to fully regulate food markets, while producers lamented the implementation of mandatory procurement by the state, and traders raised their voices against what was perceived as an unbridled effort to stamp out their livelihood. By independence, Gandhi had joined the call of wealthy peasants, industrialists, and traders to deregulate the food sector and restore the free market — a move which, when implemented in 1948, saw skyrocketing food prices and a renewed threat of famine. Over the next two decades, this chapter shows, contentious debates over the role of the state in food markets confounded efforts to develop a rationing system which would, as one provincial economic advisor declared, force Indians “to share the common hunger of the country.” As Indians grappled with competing rationing schemes, they debated the roles that the market and intermediaries would play in postcolonial Indian economic life. The 1965 establishment of the Food Corporation of India represented the rise of a competitive system facilitating the political and economic ascent of wealthy agriculturalists in decades to come.

  • Introduction

  • Benjamin Robert Siegel, Boston University
  • Book:
    Hungry Nation
    Published online:
    20 April 2018
    Print publication:
    26 April 2018, pp 1-20

  • Summary

    A brief introduction to Hungry Nation outlines the key interventions of the monograph, while chronicling the rise of food and hunger as potent sites of grievance for Indian nationalists in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In formulating their critique of colonial rule, economic nationalists like Dadabhai Naoroji and R.C. Dutt saw in India’s recurrent famines the dramatic demonstration of India’s worsening poverty under British rule. Rejecting the ecological explanations of their colonial masters, as well as the bogey of India’s deficient or lazy peasants, these Indian thinkers intuited that the real origin of the nation’s recurrent famines lay in its peoples’ inadequate purchasing power, and an imperial administration far more eager to extract and export agricultural produce than to look after popular welfare. These critiques were mirrored in India’s vernacular press, and intertwined with a new imperial and global interest in the dynamics of population, nutrition, health and economics. By the 1920s and 1930s, however, the rise of colonial agricultural and nutritional institutions had done little to better Indian welfare, and Indian planners began to aver that only self-rule and national planning undertaken by Indians themselves could alleviate the nation’s recurrent famines and perennial malnutrition.

  • 6 - The Ideological Origins of the Green Revolution

  • Benjamin Robert Siegel, Boston University
  • Book:
    Hungry Nation
    Published online:
    20 April 2018
    Print publication:
    26 April 2018, pp 183-219

  • Summary

    This chapter traces the emergence and implementation of Green Revolution paradigms in India. In contrast to the international historians who see actors in the United States forcing the adoption of a new strategy centered around fertilizers, seeds, and irrigation, this chapter argues that Green Revolution paradigms were operative in India from independence and earlier. The notion that the targeted concentration of inputs would lead to greater productivity, even at the cost of social equity, existed in the agricultural sector well before the early 1960s. This chapter traces these paradigms through the operations of research and extension institutions in India and locates their ascendance in the late 1950s, as the lure of agrarian reform faded. It then examines the complex interaction of national and international events that led to the adoption of Green Revolution strategies between 1964 and 1967 – including the role of a new Food Minister, C. Subramaniam, the transformative effects of the Bihar Famine, and Lyndon Johnson's “short tether policy." The chapter outlines the rise of agrarian discontent in the wake of these transformations, hinting at what the rise of inequity as an acceptable political idiom meant for Indian welfare, and the nation’s “food problem” as a whole.

  • 5 - All the Disabilities Which Peasant and Land Can Suffer

  • Benjamin Robert Siegel, Boston University
  • Book:
    Hungry Nation
    Published online:
    20 April 2018
    Print publication:
    26 April 2018, pp 152-182

  • Summary

    India’s independence came bundled with the promise of agrarian reform that would rationalize a byzantine system of colonial land holdings. The popular call of “land to the tiller,” however, and the state-led project of abolishing zamindari, or hereditary landlordism, was at odds with the national aim of greater food production. Small landholding and peasant cultivation represented a victory for citizens’ equity, but flew in the face of the best recommendations of planners and agricultural economists. Furthermore, the call of India’s socialists and the left wing of the Congress for collective farming along Soviet or Chinese lines drew the ire of India’s wealthy peasants and free-market champions. This chapter examines debates over agrarian reform, and visions of how Indians might best plant, work, and harvest in the interests of food for all. It suggests that as agrarian capitalists found new ways of organizing in the wake of Congress' political overreach, the popular vision of small peasants working alone or cooperatively to produce food for a hungry nation began to lose its luster, setting the stage for the Indian state to abandon its claims to equity in agricultural planning.

  • 3 - Self-Help Which Ennobles a Nation

  • Benjamin Robert Siegel, Boston University
  • Book:
    Hungry Nation
    Published online:
    20 April 2018
    Print publication:
    26 April 2018, pp 86-118

  • Summary

    In the years immediately following independence, India’s political leadership, assisted by a network of civic organizations, sought to transform what, how, and how much Indians ate. These campaigns, this chapter argues, embodied a broader postcolonial project to reimagine the terms of citizenship and development in a new nation facing enduring scarcity. Drawing upon wartime antecedent and global ideologies of population and land management, the new state urged its citizens to trade rice and wheat, whose imports sapped the nation of the foreign currency needed for industrial development, for "substitute foods." And as Indian planners awaited the possibility of fundamental agricultural advance and agrarian reform, they looked to food technology and the promise of ‘artificial rice’ as a means of making up for India’s perennial food deficit. India’s women, as anchors of the household—and therefore, the nation—were tasked with facilitating these dietary transformations, and were saddled with the blame when these modernist projects failed. Unable to marshal the resources needed to undertake fundamental agricultural reform, India’s planners placed greater faith in their ability to exercise authority over certain aspects of Indian citizenship itself, tying the remaking of practices and sentiments to the reconstruction of a self-reliant national economy.

  • 1 - The Bengal Famine and the Nationalist Case for Food

  • Benjamin Robert Siegel, Boston University
  • Book:
    Hungry Nation
    Published online:
    20 April 2018
    Print publication:
    26 April 2018, pp 21-49
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  • Summary

    Focusing on the Bengal Famine of 1943 and the subsequent transformation of nationalist politics and popular sentiment, this chapter demonstrates how a provincial tragedy was transformed into a national atrocity that galvanized the call for self-rule in the dying days of British rule. The 3.5 million famine deaths in Bengal were dwarfed by earlier nineteenth century families which had killed tens of millions of Indians. Yet as photographs, films, plays, charity appeals, and vernacular reports carried news of the Bengal Famine far the province’s borders, citizens elsewhere came to see these deaths as man-made and preventable. Repulsed by news of trucks and railway cars ferrying rice to British soldiers, Indians saw in the betrayal of “Golden Bengal” the ultimate proof of imperialism’s moral and economic failure. This chapter demonstrates how, in spite of bitter internecine contestation, Congressmen, Communists, and sympathetic Britons came to share the belief that only a popular, national, and free government would enjoy the confidence needed to stave off famine. The suturing of popular ideas about sustenance and good governance in the wake of the Bengal Famine would subsequently grant newfound legitimacy to the national planning efforts that India's ascendant government would endeavor to implement.

Hungry Nation
  • Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India
  • Benjamin Robert Siegel
  • Published online:
    20 April 2018
    Print publication:
    26 April 2018
  • This ambitious and engaging new account of independent India's struggle to overcome famine and malnutrition in the twentieth century traces Indian nation-building through the voices of politicians, planners, and citizens. Siegel explains the historical origins of contemporary India's hunger and malnutrition epidemic, showing how food and sustenance moved to the center of nationalist thought in the final years of colonial rule. Independent India's politicians made promises of sustenance and then qualified them by asking citizens to share the burden of feeding a new and hungry state. Foregrounding debates over land, markets, and new technologies, Hungry Nation interrogates how citizens and politicians contested the meanings of nation-building and citizenship through food, and how these contestations receded in the wake of the Green Revolution. Drawing upon meticulous archival research, this is the story of how Indians challenged meanings of welfare and citizenship across class, caste, region, and gender in a new nation-state.