For the environmental historian, perhaps a place to start would be the conclusion, titled “Landscapes of Hunger.” In it, as in much of the book, Benjamin Robert Siegel details how central hunger and the production of food has been to the making of the modern Indian nation-state.
But there is no truth in this idea whatsoever. The modern Indian nation-state does procure food for the public distribution system but the thing doesn't greatly matter. Food production played no part in the making or the evolution of any significant component of the Indian nation state. I can't think of any country where it has done so.
Landscapes stay the same whether or not there is hunger. Hungry people either buy food or move or die. When they move they may cut down forests or terrace mountain tops or tap aquifers or whatever- but when that happens the landscape is changing because hunger has been displaced. You can certainly point at environmental degradation and say it is caused by gluttony or greed. But you can't say it was caused by hunger. The hungry die or move away or get jobs in factories in which case food is imported.
To speak of landscapes, however, is to recognize hunger not only as a condition of suffering but also as a social terrain,
in the sense that thirst is a social terrain
which has been shaped by forces ranging from economic pressures to political priorities, from colonial histories to evolving environmental crises, from land tenure debates to food cultures.
but hunger, like thirst, is easy to fix. No human landscape is currently affected in India by this.
This is perhaps the greatest strength of the book: to consider hunger within a complex relational field.
Why not thirst as well? How about educational and recreational opportunities? The truth is employment and educational and relationship opportunities can change landscapes. But, currently, since hunger and thirst are easy to fix, they don't don't do so. It simply isn't true that lack of basic food and drinking water is causing mass migration. The cost of bringing in food and water is relatively low. It is employment and education etc. which are the problem.
Through six chapters, Siegel traces India’s “food problem”
which was a 'poverty problem'. States need resources. If productivity is very low- at or below subsistence- the State can't do very much. That is a problem if your bunch of gobshites have taken over the state and suddenly find there's not enough money for everybody to get a fancy office and a chauffeur driven car and a nice Ministry where bollocks can be incessantly talked.
through shifting arenas and diverse perspectives,
sadly Siegel is completely ignorant of India. He doesn't get that things which matter to academics now- e.g. India's high mortality from Spanish Flu and Bengal's high famine mortality during the Second World War ,simply didn't matter at all to contemporary politicians. Gandhi and Nehru never mentioned the Flu megadeath and only mentioned the Bengal famine because Indian politicians were responsible and thus pretending that wasn't the case was needful. However, every IAS officer of the Fifties or Sixties has a story of the local Congress leader pulling strings to cover up malnutrition deaths or early warning signs under the Famine code. But then Medical examiners in the States or in England had always been accused of yielding to political pressure to list deaths of inanition under some other heading. On the other hand, when Amartya Sen predicted a famine under Mrs. Thatcher he may have been influenced by stories of acute hunger in inner cities which circulated on the Left. More recently, of course, we have had a UN rapporteur on food saying that Scottish bairns are at risk of starvation because their Mums don't have enough access to arable land to grow deep fried Mars bars for them. This is because evil Tory toffs have taken away the crofter's smallholdings so as to create vast Grouse shooting moors for themselves. Hunger is reshaping the Scottish landscape. This is why the Scottish National Party which to separate from the UK so that a Scottish Nation State can feed its starving people.
This cretin, Siegel, writing stupid shite about India, will soon have students who will want to write equally stupid shit about not just the proposed Scottish Nation State's struggle to grow sufficient deep-fried Mars bars to feed its starving crofters but the struggle of the good folk of California to save their population from dying of thirst.
a challenge for any historian,
unless they are Indians and aren't utterly stupid
but especially for those writing on the postcolonial period.
because there is no Nation State in the precolonial period.
Although the story is primarily a political one—on contested processes of nation making
in which case it has nothing to do with hunger or thirst or the need to go to the toilet
—environmental historians and historians of agriculture will nevertheless find Hungry Nation instructive for demonstrating how the politicization of food neither begins nor ends in the soils of the farmer’s field.
Because politics is not agriculture. Even 'environmental historians' understand this. Similarly stand-up comedy regarding food does not begin or end in the soil of the farmer's field. Japanese tentacle porn does not begin or end with the octopus in the ocean.
To understand why India as a modern nation is held responsible for feeding its citizens,
it is vital to understand that nations have citizens and citizens need to eat. If you already knew this you shouldn't be doing a PhD. You'd be smart enough to get a job delivering pizzas.
Siegel begins with the story of food under colonialism.
The Brits put an end to famine by the beginning of the Twentieth Century. On the other hand there was a big famine in Iran during a time when the British Imperial Army was carrying out operations there.
The Bengal famine of 1943, which claimed the lives of at least three million people, has long been mobilized as a scathing indictment against the supposedly liberal and benevolent British Empire, most famously by the economist Amartya Sen in Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (1981).
Sen didn't blame the Brits. He confirmed the view that initially prevailed that there was a food surplus, not a deficit. But Sen was and is as stupid as shit. He had somehow got the idea that urban workers ate two or three times the amount of food they normally would have done because their wages had gone up. This meant there wasn't enough left over for the poor in the villages. The Bengalis should have put in rationing the way the Brits did. Incidentally, Tegart- the cop who defeated the Jugantar revolutionaries- was put in charge of catching black-marketeers in England during the War. The police officers he had trained in Calcutta could have done something similar.
Rather than mine this seminal event for evidence of neglect and colonial apathy, Siegel recasts the famine as a moment of political reckoning in his first chapter. Witnessing the scale of devastation and suffering, the nationalist movement took on the elimination of hunger as a priority, which would readily distinguish them from the colonial administration.
This is stupid shit. The Brits had brought in the Famine Code. Now Congress was running things, it would be their own people who would decide whether or not to implement in when warning signs appeared. This meant the Government would need to lay its hands on food and transport it to where it was needed. Had India followed sensible policies it would have become a food exporter in the Fifties. Instead it went in for begging bowl diplomacy. But so did Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
I suppose the Americans could say they did 'Nation building' in India because the Pusa Institute was started with money from an American in 1905 and the Rockerfeller Foundation and later the Ford Foundation etc. started interesting themselves in what would become the 'Green Revolution' from the Thirties onward. To some extent, American Aid prised open the door for the transfer of this technology. The irony is that an Indian Revolutionary had become the Director of Mexico's Agriculture Research program and thus had been in on the ground-floor. He returned to India after Independence but seems to have concentrated on politics. There are other examples, some recent, of Indian scientists in the provinces getting ignored because it is easier for Delhi to import from America on a turn-key basis.
Not only this, but relief efforts drew support from across India, affectively bonding a diverse group of Indians and transforming the famine into a national symbol.
If the Bengalis didn't care why would anybody else? What soldered the Nation together was the Muslim threat rather than a Malthusian disaster which Indians assumed had always existed.
The literature on famine has been of deep importance to South Asian historiography,
which is shit.
and by picking up where these scholars left off, Siegel makes a signal contribution, linking the tragedy in Bengal both to anticolonial sentiment and later political trajectories.
so, this is a signal contribution to yet more stupid shit
More than this, we are urged to seriously consider what it means for political subjecthood to be formed in conditions of food scarcity.
As opposed to places where Champagne rains down from the sky and every bush yields a hamper from Fortnum & Mason. Without scarcity there is no economics or politics.
This is not the only place where colonial history gave shape to the food problem in postcolonial India. The early twentieth century and interwar years saw the rise of nutritional research institutions, robust consensus around “malnutrition” as a widespread problem in the subcontinent, and the construction of food and diet as objects of imperial intervention.
There was Famine Code based intervention. That was all.
Thus, when nationalist leaders—such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Chandra Bose, Meghnad Saha, and Mahatma Gandhi—began to include food in their plans for the country, they were following in the wake of the colonial denigration and manipulation of Indian diets.
Also Viceroy was sucking off every Indian male thus draining the country of vitality. Moreover colonial denigration and manipulation of Indian languages was causing incessant bollocks talking.
Highlighting the contentiousness of these debates is another area where Siegel excels, by recovering an archive of expert and amateur opinions on how to address the food problem.
Grow more of it and distribute it better. That was it.
These works ranged from agricultural officials and social scientists crunching the numbers on India’s food deficit and modeling ways to plan for it, to the self-published tract Independent India of Plenty (1946), where a Tamil farmer advocated for the state to do away with such vices as smoking, drinking, gambling, racing, and even cricketing so that India can focus on becoming a nation of abundance.
While letting rural girls have babies like crazy. It was obvious that you needed to get them into big factory dormitories from about the age of 12 or 14. They would quit but then only have one or two kids. Still, in a market upswing, they'd come back to work.
The other thing is that India needed to encourage the production of tastier food and better quality alcohol and tobacco and so forth. There have to be high value to weight agricultural exports to drive the expansion of transport and cold storage and other such networks. Taxing smokers and drinkers and gamblers and so forth would finance primary schools and health care.
Such a unique and colorful source surely deserves the privilege of being the title of Siegel's second chapter. However, this initial plurality of voices faded away, and planning at the national level increasingly became focused on infrastructural improvements and technological advancements, as Siegel details in chapters 3 of the book.
No. Planning at the national level increasingly focused on stupid shit involving 'turnpike theorems' which said the equivalent of 'for a beggar to rise up first he must have a super yacht and a private jet. Then he could go into private equity or start a hedge fund. Eventually, he'd acquire work-skills essential to becoming a waiter or janitor.'
Given the scale of India's food problem, however, the author might have dwelled more on how data on the hunger crisis was produced.
Why? The answer was sampling and extrapolation. What else could it have been?
Certainly no matter how one crunches the numbers, there was a problem, but I wonder whether the techniques by which the data was assembled played any role in conditioning a response.
No. The 'response' automatically produced its own data. There were different responses and so no two sets of data bore any relation to each other. Also the responses were disconnected to reality so nobody gave a fart about them.
Later chapters of Hungry Nation move away from discussing national politics to describing how planning schemes for agriculture and food systems took shape in the emergent political culture of independent India.
It did so in an ad hoc manner with considerable regional variation. This is still the case as is obvious when you look at the very different procurement rules in Punjab as compared to Bihar or Karnataka.
Although the busy chaos of the bazaar has long been an icon of the enterprising nature of Indian traders, in the postwar years, the national government sought greater control and regulation over food suppliers.
Because greater control was asserted during the War years.
These actions drew the ire of merchants and elicited special criticism from Gandhi, who viewed rationed food and regulated markets as antithetical to the project of self-rule.
But nobody was listening to him by then. Anyway, he told each interviewer what she wanted to hear. To this guy he'd talk like an atheistic communist, to the next guy he'd say the opposite.
As chapter 4 shows, this was but one arena in which scarcity was used to justify illiberal measures for securing the nation’s food supply. Chapter 5 turns to the project of land reform, a topic that may be of particular interest to environmental historians and historians of agriculture. The peasant-led bhoodan movement
It was led by Vinobha and JP and other such nutters. They weren't peasants. It was a complete fiasco. The whole state of Bihar was gifted away without any landless person actually getting title to anything.
against the tyranny of the zamindari, or landholding, class met with increased pressures of capitalist rationalization.
Fuck does that mean?
As India’s attempt to emulate China’s programs of collectivization failed,
There was no 'attempt'. There was talk of cooperative farming but talk was all it was.
the dream of land reform
big zamindaris were broken up in most places. Kerala and Kashmir did this in more of a top down manner. Other States passed laws but implementation varied. Still there can be no doubt that median farm size fell a great deal. This did increase the supply of agricultural land as coparcenary holdings were broken up and some chose to sell and shift to the cities. But the reverse also happened. People who went to the Cities saved up money and bought land so as to become viable farmers themselves.
gave way to proposals that were more lucrative for agriculturists and politicians alike. The last chapter, “The Ideological Origins of the Green Revolution,”
this is an oxymoron. The Green Revolution was wholly pragmatic. Ideologues opposed it.
thus demonstrates how the postcolonial nation-state ultimately conceded to a technocratic consensus
No. The postcolonial nation-state stopped listening to gobshites. In India we blame LBJ for trying to get a pound of flesh vis a vis Vietnam in return for 'Free Money' and PL480. However, in the early Seventies there was a 'Club of Rome' Malthusian pessimism which coincided with high cereal prices. This meant the Americans were perfectly happy to watch Bangladesh starve in a manner they had been unwilling to let Bihar starve less than a decade ago. I think Mujibur Rehman's getting slaughtered- along with his family- was a wake up call.
and adopted a policy of state-sponsored capitalist agriculture, one that promises plenty while leaving many unfed.
Which forces them to move to where they can work for a low wage and thus feed themselves. I am shocked that Siegel does not mention the fact that the State is leaving many people not just unfed but also with unwiped bums. Why is President Biden not turning up with pizzas and Cherry Coke for hungry peeps? Why is he not wiping their bums after they take a dump? The answer is Neo-Liberalism which is very very evil.
This book proves to be especially relevant in light of ongoing farmer protests in India,
they backfired. AAP swept the Punjab polls. This was scarcely the outcome those who funded that stupidity were banking on. Going forward, urban votes will be cheaper than rural votes in Punjab and Haryana and so 'deliverables' for better off farmers and middle-men will shrink. Interestingly, the only Dalit to be CM had issued a letter asking for details of landowners with holdings above the statutory levels. The letter was withdrawn but became a factor in Jats switching support to AAP.
which have remained heated and contentious in the face of an apathetic central government.
Because there was no way BJP could win in Punjab. The question was Western UP where its calculation proved correct. Let Punjab stew in its own juice. Haryana will get needled on the Chandigarh issue to go in the opposite direction. But it is UP which matters.
Food remains an arena with great revolutionary potential,
Whereas Religion is what actually decides things.
especially as the façade of developmentalism grows ever more fissured.
Fuck developmentalism. Rahul has an Mphil from Cambridge in 'Development Studies'. The thing is retarded.
Hungry Nation reminds us not only that these tensions run deep but also that the failure to resolve questions of farmers’ rights, land reform, and food distribution has deferred the consequences to a new generation.
Similarly failure to resolve questions of right to orgasm has caused new generations to be born since the time of Adam. Once everybody can orgasm all the time thanks to proper Government policies, everybody will stop having babies and the race will die out.
Siegel has written an excellent postcolonial history, which reveals the looming specter of hunger within the textures of Indian political culture and agrarian life.
Siegel is writing about a country he knows nothing about. His punishment is that sooner or later he will have to referee a dissertation about the looming specter of hunger within the texture of America's political culture and agrarian life. It is a sad commentary on developmentalism in America that even after two and a half centuries of post colonial nation building it has still not resolved questions of land reform and food distribution preferring to defer the consequences to a new generation of stupid cretins getting a worthless credential in a discipline which turned to shit fifty years ago.
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