Indian Famine Research Articles

One Page in the History of Starvation and Refeeding.

There is a long history of starvation, including reports dated back to antiquity. Despite exceptional scientific developments, starvation still exists today. The medical aspects of starvation were well established in the twentieth century, particularly following studies related to the 1943-1944 Bengal famine in India and starved prisoners of war and survivors of World War 2. The refeeding of the starved victims provided disappointing results. Nevertheless, those studies eventually led to the development of a new branch of research in medicine and to the definition of what is now known as refeeding syndrome. This paper briefly reviews the history and groundwork that led to today's understanding of starvation and refeeding, with a particular emphasis on the observations from studies on starved Holocaust survivors and prisoners of war after World War 2. The relevance of these studies for modern times is briefly discussed.

The British East India Company and the Great Bengal Famine of 1770: Towards a Corporate Colonial Biopolitics

ABSTRACT The Great Bengal Famine of 1770 took 10 million lives. The British East India Company’s (EIC) extraction of resources and imposition of brutal tax policies in Bengal exacerbated the disaster. By exploring the intersections of corporate interests, colonialism, and biopolitics, this paper provides a new perspective on the Bengal famine of 1770 by introducing and visualizing it through a unique theoretical framework—corporate colonial biopolitics. Adopting Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, my focus is primarily on the corporate colonial biopolitical strategies enforced by the Company, which led to dispossession, violence, and resource extraction exploiting Bengal’s landscape and impeding the region’s progress and development. The essay unveils the racist policies and profit-driven principles of the EIC and how they prioritized generating revenues, financing its military, and exporting food grain even at the peak of the famine. I point out how the EIC systematically dismantled the Indian agricultural system, fueling deindustrialization in India and ultimately making the region vulnerable to famines. The Bengal famine of 1770 remains unexplored by geographers despite being the first colonial famine in India. One of the primary objectives of this paper is to bridge this gap by shedding light on the geographical dimensions of this pivotal historical catastrophe.

"Martial Law Travels": Gothic Internationalism and Irish Nationalist Newspapers

Abstract: In the nineteenth century, Irish newspaper culture became more experimental in nature. The form of Irish nationalist newspapers as an assemblage of various registers and genres embodied the politics of Irish nationalism and anti-colonialism in the period. These media innovations, as well as the forms of writing disseminated, transformed again during the Great Famine in Ireland (1846–51). During and after the Famine, the gothic was mobilized in newspaper columns, often in service of producing critiques of empire. Examining Irish newspaper writing on famine in India and on the Morant Bay Rebellion, this essay argues that engagement with the gothic in the anti-colonialist press in Victorian Ireland allowed for the emergence of powerful and distinctly internationalist critiques of colonial capitalism and its violent apparatuses.

The Power of Open

Abstract Pratham Books is a not-for-profit children’s picture book publisher headquartered in Bangalore, India, with a mission to see ‘a book in every child’s hand’. Pratham Books has been addressing the book famine in India and by extension the world through its low-cost, high-volume, multilingual publishing since 2004. But upon realizing the limitations of print, they moved towards something more audacious – adopting an open licence to create an innovative digital platform, StoryWeaver, that not only housed Pratham Books’ titles but empowered users to use, adapt, download, and translate books as they saw fit to address the gaps in their own spheres and help put books in children’s hands. In just seven years, StoryWeaver has grown 50 times in size and scope, from a repository of 800 books in 24 languages to over 45 000 books in 314 languages. By disrupting traditional publishing models, Pratham Books’ StoryWeaver has shown us what the future of publishing and reading looks like.

Introduction

Introduction

Extreme rainfall deficits were not the cause of recurring colonial era famines of southern Indian semi-arid regions

Using information contained in the eighteenth to twentieth century British administrative documents, preserved in the National Archives of India (NAI), we present a 218-year (1729–1947 AD) record of socioeconomic disruptions and human impacts (famines) associated with ‘rain failures’ that affected the semi-arid regions (SARs) of southern India. By mapping the southern Indian famine record onto long-term spatiotemporal measures of regional rainfall variability, we demonstrate that the SARs of southern India repeatedly experienced famines when annual rainfall reduced by ~ one standard deviation (1 SD), or more, from long-term averages. In other words, ‘rain failures’ listed in the colonial documents as causes of extreme socioeconomic disruptions, food shortages and human distress (famines) in the southern Indian SARs were fluctuations in precipitation well within the normal range of regional rainfall variability and not extreme rainfall deficits (≥ 3 SD). Our study demonstrates that extreme climate events were not necessary conditions for extreme socioeconomic disruptions and human impacts rendered by the colonial era famines in peninsular India. Based on our findings, we suggest that climate change risk assessement should consider the potential impacts of more frequent low-level anomalies (e.g. 1 SD) in drought prone semi-arid regions.

Measuring Colonial Extraction: The East India Company’s Rule and the Drain of Wealth (1757–1858)

This paper revisits the relationship between capitalism and colonialism by examining the case of British India under East India Company rule (1757-1858). The Marxist-nationalist historiography claims that colonialism generated a steady drain of wealth and that this drain was responsible for Indian famines, poverty, inequality, and economic retardation. I use the East India Company budgets to measure the extent of the wealth that was drained through three direct channels: oppressive land taxes, unproductive expenditures on the imperial army and civil administration, and the unrequited export of commodities from India to Britain. I conclude that available figures lend empirical support to the Marxist interpretation. There was a drain of wealth and its effects on the underdevelopment of former European colonies deserve further research.

British Humanitarian Political Economy and Famine in India, 1838–1842

AbstractThis article explores the nature and limitations of humanitarian political economy by discussing metropolitan British responses to a major famine that took place in the Agra region of north-central India in 1837–38. This disaster played a significant role in catalyzing wider debates about the impact of East India Company governance and the place of the subcontinent within the post-emancipation British Empire. By comparing the responses of organization such as the Aborigines Protection Society and British India Society to that of proponents of the newly emergent indenture system, the paper seeks to contextualize responses to the famine in terms both of longer histories of famine in South Asia and of the specific imperial circumstances of the late 1830s. In doing so, it explores how ideas of agricultural distress in India fed into competing strategies to utilize Indian labor in the service of colonial commodity production both within India and around the empire.

Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain's Empire of Camps, 1876–1903 by Aidan Forth

Reviewed by: Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain's Empire of Camps, 1876–1903 by Aidan Forth Mark Condos Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain's Empire of Camps, 1876–1903. By aidan forth. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. 35200 pp. $34.95, £27.95 (paperback). Giorgio Agamben's claim that the concentration camp has become the nomos of the modern – the terrifying idea that the camp has become the model for the way modern states attempt to regulate all social and political life – has provoked heated discussion and new scholarly interest in tracing the ways that the practices of the modern state have historically borrowed from the material and ideological structures of these barbed-wire stockades.1 At the same time, the so-called 'colonial turn' seen in genocide and Holocaust studies has also breathed new life into the debate begun by Hannah Arendt about the colonial origins of modern totalitarianism.2 Against this backdrop, Aidan Forth's Barbed-Wire Imperialism offers an important and timely intervention. Based on an impressive range of material drawn from four continents and over twenty different archives, Forth pieces together the largely forgotten and misunderstood history of what he terms Britain's 'empire of camps' in India and South Africa during the late [End Page 250] nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While his approach is comparative, Forth is keenly attentive to the local particularities and contexts that gave rise to different kinds of famine, plague and concentration camps, and he does well to veer away from sweeping generalizations and overly simplistic comparisons. For instance, although Forth traces the genealogy of these imperial camps back to the same Victorian practices of welfare and social control that gave rise to prisons, factories and work-houses in metropolitan Britain, he also convincingly demonstrates the crucial ways in which racial thinking, Social Darwinism and Partha Chatterjee's 'rule of colonial difference' marked these colonial camps out as entities unique in their own right. Camps were thus both sites for modern practices of confinement and discipline, while also retaining 'outmoded' practices of physical coercion and labour shunned by metropolitan modernity (p. 19). Forth furthermore traces the ways in which a nexus of colonial administrators and 'camp experts' from across the empire refined and adapted these camps to different situations. Victorian prisons and workhouses offered the blueprints for the camp, while famines and plagues in India provided ample opportunities for experimentation, innovation and expansion, until, finally, the camp was exported to South Africa, where it reached its apogee during and after the Boer War. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Forth situates his analysis of the proliferation of these camps within Foucauldian frameworks of knowledge, governmentality and biopolitics. He sees these camps as products of a late-Victorian 'episteme', geared towards 'curing' or 'rehabilitating' 'diseased, destitute, or otherwise "dangerous" bodies' (p. 4). These could range from so-called 'criminal tribes' in India, to victims of famine and plague, and, in the case of Boer civilians, an entire population suspected of harbouring dangerous political loyalties. In so doing, Forth lucidly demonstrates how camps were designed as incubators for loyal, sanitary, orderly and ultimately governable subjects (p. 10). While Forth does not shy away from emphasizing the horrors and suffering faced by those unfortunate souls who found themselves interned as a result of collective and largely indiscriminate containment measures, one of his most important interventions is to demonstrate how these camps were conceived of, first and foremost, as humanitarian responses to famine, disease and war. In so doing, he lays bare the delicate and often reciprocal relationship between colonial repression and aid. Of course, the majority of these crises were either exacerbated or entirely manufactured by the British themselves. [End Page 251] Late-nineteenth century famines in India were aggravated by cash-cropping, ruthless revenue demands and the continuation of grain exports during times of scarcity; plague and disease spread like wildfire through peasant populations weakened by these famines, who were then corralled into unhygienic and overcrowded camps; and the mass displacement of civilians from their homes in South Africa was provoked by the scorched-earth military strategy pursued by Lord Kitchener against Boer guerrillas. And yet, in spite of all this, as Forth demonstrates, the liberal-minded...

Beyond the Archive Gap: The Kiplings and the Famines of British Colonial India

Members of Rudyard Kipling's nuclear family lived in India for approximately thirty years (roughly 1870–1900), and all four Kiplings (Rudyard, Lockwood Kipling, Alice MacDonald Kipling, and Alice Fleming) published writing based on that experience. As postcolonial readers of Rudyard Kipling’s work in particular have often pointed out, their representation of life in the British Raj was highly ideological and often quite limited. For that reason, my digital thematic collection, "The Kiplings and India: A Collection of Writings from British India," balances the presentation of digital editions of texts by the Kiplings themselves with writing by contemporary Indian reformers and activists like Pandita Ramabai, Rukhmabai, Behramji Malabari, and Dadabhai Naoroji. The project is being built in the Scalar platform, and Scalar's visualization and path frameworks help users learn about a series of thematic debates in British Indian life: the famines, women's rights under civil law (especially marriage law and the rights of widows), and the advent of the Indian nationalist movement. Here I will explore texts focusing on one particular thematic thread, the differential representation of late nineteenth-century Indian famines in writings by the Kiplings as well as Pandita Ramabai, Naoroji, and others.

Drought and Famine in India, 1870–2016

AbstractMillions of people died due to famines in India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; however, the relationship of historical famines with drought is complicated and not well understood. Using station‐based observations and simulations, we reconstruct soil moisture (agricultural) drought in India for the period 1870–2016. We show that over this century and a half period, India experienced seven major drought periods (1876–1882, 1895–1900, 1908–1924, 1937–1945, 1982–1990, 1997–2004, and 2011–2015) based on severity‐area‐duration analysis of reconstructed soil moisture. Out of six major famines (1873–74, 1876, 1877, 1896–97, 1899, and 1943) that occurred during 1870–2016, five are linked to soil moisture drought, and one (1943) was not. The three most deadly droughts (1877, 1896, and 1899) were linked with the positive phase of El Niño–Southern Oscillation. Five major droughts were not linked with famine, and three of those five nonfamine droughts occurred after Indian independence in 1947.

The Secrets of Hawthorne's Writing Desk

The Secrets of Hawthorne's Writing Desk Julian Hawthorne (bio) JULIAN HAWTHORNE (1846–1934), whose work took many forms and whose career led him in multiple directions, was the son of American author Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne. Born in Salem, Massachusetts, he and his two sisters spent some of their childhood in Concord once the family settled there, growing up in the company of the literary luminaries of the day. After Nathaniel Hawthorne was named American consul to Liverpool, the family moved to England from 1853 to 1857, then traveled to Italy for an extended stay. Julian Hawthorne pursued his education at Harvard in 1863 but never reached graduation; after his father's death in the spring of 1864 he assumed the role of head of household and came to occupy his father's study, the writing chamber described in these pages. Testing out new possibilities, this young man, whose athletic build and prowess led some to urge him to consider prizefighting, sought training as a civil engineer in Dresden in 1868–69. It was there that he met Minnie Amelung, whom he married in 1870 and with whom he would have seven children. While employed as an engineer in the New York Docks Department, he published his first story ("Love and Counter Love; or, Masquerading") in Harper's Weekly Magazine in 1870, and from this time on endeavored to make his living as a writer. In Germany and England during the next ten years he continued to place stories in American magazines, and in 1873 published a novel titled Bressant, soon followed by Idolatry: A Romance. Over the next decades he produced a wide variety of works, including forays into gothic horror, detective fiction, cultural commentary, and textbook surveys of history and literature. Among his most memorable achievements are two studies of his family background: Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife (1884) and Hawthorne and His Circle (1903). From the early 1880s to the mid-1890s he spent most of his time in New York, serving in 1885 as literary editor of the New York World; from 1894 to 1897 he lived in the West Indies, and in the later part of this period, more and more drawn to journalism, he published reports on the 1897 plague and famine in India (in Cosmopolitan magazine) and on the Spanish-American War (in William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal). In later years many of the projects that he took on were determined by a pressing need for money. In addition to his family, he had a longtime lover requiring support—Edith Garrigues (whom he would ultimately marry after the death of his wife in 1925). Under these circumstances, he lent his name to a speculative mining venture organized by an old friend, and though he consistently maintained his innocence, after litigation by shareholders in 1913 both he and the friend were convicted of mail fraud, resulting in a one-year sentence in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary for Hawthorne. Following his release, in 1914 he published The Subterranean Brotherhood, an argument against inhumane incarceration. Resuming work as a journalist, covering baseball for the Boston American, he was able to interview Babe Ruth, but he soon decided to move to California, where he continued to produce pieces appearing in the Los Angeles Herald and also tried his hand at screenplays. In the summer of 1934 he died in Newport Beach, where, after a private ceremony, his ashes were scattered. The selection here is taken from Hawthorne and His Circle, published by Harper & Brothers (New York and London), 1903. —SD [End Page 184] The study was on the third floor of the house, secluded from the turmoil of earth, so far as anything could be in a city street. No one was supposed to intrude upon him there; but such suppositions are ineffectual against children. From time to time the adamantine gates fell ajar, and in we slipped. It seemed a heavenly place, tenanted by a being possessed of every attribute that our imaginations could ascribe to an angel. The room and its tenant glimmer before me as I write, luminous with the sunshine of more than fifty years ago. Both...

'A Sensation More Appalling and More Appealing': Photography and Famine Relief in Ireland and India

In his biting 1861 history of the Great Irish Famine, John Mitchel comments on the degree to which James Mahoney’s drawings in The Illustrated London News of “naked wretches dying on a truss of wet straw” helped feed appeals for alms. But would those appeals have been more effective had it been possible to use photographs instead of drawings? (Photography was still in its infancy in 1846-48; there are no photographs of the famine.) The Madras Famine of 1876-78 (which reached its horrific nadir in 1877) provides a fascinating test case of the hypothesis that photographs are in fact more effective than other forms of illustration in provoking not merely a sympathetic affective response, but the sort of generosity that is quantifiable in monetary terms. Engravings based on photographs were published in The Graphic midway through the Indian Famine Relief fundraising campaign; a comparison can thus be made between the pace of fundraising efforts before those images had been published (when the photographs themselves were in limited circulation at fundraising meetings and so on) and the pace of fundraising efforts after sketches closely based on the photographs had been published in mass circulation publications. As was the case with the Great Irish Famine, the publication of images in mass circulation weeklies seems to have no effect on the pace of fundraising efforts.

Land, women and techno-pastoral development in southern Karnataka, India.

Techno-pastoral desires are statist aspirations for orderly, hierarchical landscapes where land, beasts and nature are managed through technical expertise to generate profits. Women and land, I argue, occupy particular places in Indian techno-pastoral imaginaries as the nation-state recalibrates profits that can be harvested from the regenerative capacities of life itself. Through a case study of southern Karnataka, where the megapolis of Bangalore is located, I show that working class women and agricultural land have a shared genealogy in the region's bio-economic development. I study three historical moments where population and food production have vexed state authorities: the South Indian famine of 1875–1876 that left more than 20% of the population dead; the early 20th century efforts at building the Krishnaraja Sagar Dam, and state-sponsored birth control clinics in the 1930s; and the 1950s–1960s population control programmes and Green Revolution interventions. The growing literature on bio-economies focuses on pharmaceutical industries; clinical trials; and commodification of organs, tissues and cells; however, by working with surrogate mothers incorporated not as labourers but with their wombs coded as land, this study attempted to map the long histories of bio-economies, spanning land and living tissue, in and around Bangalore. I argue that rather than bio-economies, the term ‘necro-economies’ might be more useful for describing how land and women are incorporated into techno-pastoral desires.

The Great Odisha Famine of 1866: Lessons for the 21st Century

Not only did the great Odisha Famine of 150 years ago result in the death of a million people, it formed a tentative start of formulating an official response to major calamities in modern India. The Famine Commission Report of 1867 and the Indian Famine Code of 1880 were considered part of the relief and welfare measures to address the countless casualties caused by famines, food scarcity, starvation, epidemics and malnutrition. It is argued here that historical episodes, such as the 1866 famine and the Paika Rebellion of 1817, fought against the British, should be seen as a ‘process’ rather than simply as an ‘event’. Therefore, we should examine deeper causes such as land relations, uncontrolled market and free trade apart from administrative failures as the common perception does. This conceptual discourse on the famine takes a human rights perspective to examine the role of the state, civil society organisations and the media in preventing disasters and alleviating human suffering. Over 150 years after the occurrence of the famine and 200 years after the rebellion, some of the structural reasons behind them still continue to deprive the masses to their right to life.

The Great Famine in Nationalist and Land League propaganda 1879-1882

Introduction In late 1870s news of famines in India and China appeared continuously in Irish newspapers. The reporting of these famines in Ireland sometimes directly alluded to Ireland’s Great Famine with The Nation reporting: A great deal has been said about over-population in India, just as there has been talk about overpopulation in Ireland, and Earl of Beaconsfield, or some other political leader, may yet call for three cheers for famine for having removed the redundant people....

Institutional and community adaptation from the archives: A study of drought in western India, 1790–1860

The analysis of the socioeconomic effects of, and societal adaptation to, extreme climatic events in the past is an important tool in preparing for future adaptation. However, the history of social responses to climate is relatively understudied, and analyses that do exist take a broadly historical perspective, detached from current vulnerability, adaptation or resilience theory. This analysis attempts to address this empirical scarcity through an examination of drought responses in early-nineteenth century western India, particularly at the government level. The analysis reveals a sociopolitical system that was highly robust in the face of climate stress, despite high levels of vulnerability at the individual level, with hegemonic structures maintained by a system of grain dealer/moneylenders. The period witnessed a move towards market-driven drought response, which apparently reduced adaptive capacity in the short term by allowing speculation in the grain market. This is likely to have been buffered in the medium term by increases in cultivation, greater market openness and the almost universal acceptance of market-driven drought policy by government actors, resulting in a swift response. However, the apparent success of adaptation measures during the first half of the nineteenth century may have masked vulnerabilities to more extreme climatic events, contributing to the catastrophic Indian famines of the late nineteenth century. This bears similarities to the ‘catastrophe hypothesis’, the significance of which is discussed. The study argues for a greater focus on social responses to extreme climatic events in the past in order to address contemporary challenges.

A Populist Approach to Foreign Policy: Governor William A. Poynter, the South African War, and the Indian Famine, 1899–1901

A Populist Approach to Foreign Policy: Governor William A. Poynter, the South African War, and the Indian Famine, 1899–1901

Regulatory options for genetically modified crops in India

The introduction of semi-dwarfing, high-yielding and nutrients-responsive crop varieties in the 1960s and 1970s alleviated the suffering of low crop yield, food shortages and epidemics of famine in India and other parts of the Asian continent. Two semi-dwarfing genes, Rht in wheat and Sd-1 in rice heralded the green revolution for which Dr. Norman Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. In contrast, the revolutionary new genetics of crop improvement shamble over formidable obstacles of regulatory delays, political interferences and public misconceptions. India benefited immensely from the green revolution and is now grappling to deal with the nuances of GM crops. The development of GM mustard discontinued prematurely in 2001 and insect-resistant Bt cotton varieties were successfully approved for commercial cultivation in 2002 in an evolving nature of regulatory system. However, the moratorium on Bt brinjal by MOEF in 2010 meant a considerable detour from an objective, science-based, rigorous institutional process of regulatory approval to a more subjective, nonscience-driven, political decision-making process. This study examines what ails the regulatory system of GM crops in India and the steps that led to the regulatory logjam. Responding to the growing challenges and impediments of existing biosafety regulation, it suggests options that are critical for GM crops to take roots for a multiplier harvest.

Framing Atrocity: Photography and Humanitarianism

This article examines the evolution of atrocity photography and its links with humanitarian movements in the late nineteenth century. It argues that photographic images and the language of atrocity must be studied together in order to appreciate the relationship between them which was encapsulated in a genre depicting the ravaged or mutilated body. Three moments in the evolution of the relationship between humanitarianism, photography and atrocity are considered: the Bulgarian ‘atrocities’ of the late 1870s; the Indian Famine in the Madras and Bombay Presidencies of 1876–78; and the campaign to reform conditions in the Belgian Congo between 1903 and 1913.