Senjuti Mallik is completing a PhD in Human Geography at the University of Kansas. She writes of-
Colonial Biopolitics and the Great Bengal Famine of 1943
Under the 1935 Government of India Act, all responsibility for agriculture and food policy was transferred to the elected legislature of Bengal from 1937 onward. Hence, there could be no 'Colonial Biopolitics' since Provincial autonomy had been achieved. Bengalis, not White people, were in charge of everything to do with Food production and distribution. However, since the Indians had failed to agree to form a Federal Government, the Viceroy retained control over Defense policy. Sadly, as part of 'food denial' to the advancing Japanese, some food stocks were moved from border areas and, also, boats above a certain size were destroyed. However, this had to do with Military strategy rather than 'biopolitics'.
An estimated 3 million people died due to the Bengal famine of 1943.
It is notable that Provinces where the elected Government had resigned and thus Civil Servants were in charge did not have such massive excess mortality. The lesson of both the 1943 famine and the 1974 Bangladesh famine was that the transition to Democracy, for Bengalis, can coincide with increased corruption, incompetence and excess mortality.
The purpose of this article is to theorize the Bengal famine through the lens of colonial biopolitics.
But such politics had ceased! The plain fact is, had the Brits and the Americans and the Chinese not helped the Indian Army against the Japanese, then Assam and Bengal would have been occupied and food would have been confiscated to feed the hungry soldiers of the Japanese Emperor. It is noteworthy that after the Allies defeated the invaders at Kohima, 100,000 of their soldiers starved to death. This enabled General Slim to go around Japanese positions and thus liberate Burma and the rest of South East Asia.
The colonial strategies and utilitarian principles by the British authorities exacerbated the Bengal famine.
No. The British had put an end to large scale famines in the sub-continent some forty years previously. Had the Japs not defeated the British and occupied Burma, there would have been no famine. Equally, had the British not been able to defend Assam and Bengal, there would have been much greater famine mortality.
Utilizing Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, I point out how the British viewed Indian bodies discursively.
The British may have viewed Dutch bodies as similar to their own, but they could not prevent a lot of Dutch people from starving to death because Hitler had occupied their country. During the Great War, the Germans say that three quarter of a million of their people starved to death. The plain fact is, famine is a weapon of war. If you can starve your enemy into submission, so be it.
To reaffirm their sense of superiority, they reduced their Indian subjects to animal-like beings’ incapable of controlling their own reproduction.
Why didn't the Indians retaliate by reducing the King Emperor to a monkey who masturbated incessantly?
In order to fulfil British goals, Indian people were forced to participate in the war effort.
If they hadn't, they would have become subjects of the Japanese Emperor. More, not less, would have starved. Still, we understand Senjuti's animus against the British who saddled her people with independence when they would have much preferred kowtowing to the Mikado.
This paper situates the local and global politics of the famine as they were wrapped up in the geopolitics of World War II, during which the British colonial authorities were far more concerned about a Japanese invasion of South Asia than they were with the lives of people dying of hunger.
I suppose, it was a bit naive of the Brits to think the Indians would use the gift of Provincial Autonomy to grow and eat more food. Moreover, as Senjuti points out, the fact that the Brits still had responsibility for Imperial Defense (because the Indians had failed to form a Federal Government) also meant that they had an obligation to feed and clothe and wipe the bums of every single Indian.
The article highlights how the implementation of racist policies worsened the famine since it was a product of wartime priorities and calculations.
The priority of wealthy Indians was that they wanted to remain wealthy. They didn't want to become the slaves of the Japanese because they knew what the Japs did to the people of the territories they grabbed. Even Nehru said he would be prepared to go fight the Japs.
I argue that the Bengal famine of 1943 is a historic tragedy of the colonial past,
whereas the 1974 Bangladesh famine was a similar tragedy of the post-colonial past.
which was transformed into a socially constructed catastrophe by the British colonizers.
Very true. The Premier of Bengal's name was Nazimuddin- a typical Anglo Saxon name. On the other hand, Suhrawardy's real name was Bessy Smith. She was a blonde lady from Peckham. Fazl ul Haq, a sweet lass from Yorkshire, was her lesbian lover.
Geographers have never studied the Bengal famine of 1943, and one of the principal purposes of this paper is to fill this void.
She fills it with garbage.
I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.
–Winston Churchill (quoted in Choudhury,; 2021, p. 1; Portillo, 2007; Tharoor, 2010).
Churchill drank too much and said silly things. But it was General Niazi who wanted to change the DNA of the Bengalis by getting his soldiers to rape their women. A fellow officer records him as saying
' Main iss haramzadi qaum ki nasal badal doon ga'- I will change the genetics of this treacherous community. Hearing this, a Bengali officer, Major Mushtaq, went into a bathroom at the Command Headquarters and shot himself in the head. That was the type of 'biopolitics' Bengalis had to fear after the departure of the British. Thankfully, Niazi had to surrender to a Jewish officer of the Indian army.
Churchill’s words seem shocking today, but they reflected orthodox British imperial attitudes toward Indians in the mid-twentieth century.
They didn't reflect the policies of his own party which granted Provincial autonomy in 1935. The Indians could have formed a Federal Government if enough of them had been able to come to an agreement.
The plain fact is, at a time when America wouldn't permit Indian immigration, any Indian who settled in England gained equal civil and political rights. There had been Indian MPs at Westminster (one was a Communist) at a time when no colored people held elected office in the USA.
Tragically, this dehumanization carried significant policy implications that affected the lives of millions, notably during the great Bengal famine of 1943.
Because Nazimuddin was a British man (real name 'Naylor-Smythe') who hated Bengalis.
Several scholarly works have examined the Bengal famine in disciplines like economics (Goswami, 1990; Sen, 1977), history (Islam, 2007; Mukherjee, 2015; Tauger, 2003), and English literature (Bhattacharya, 2016), but geographers have never contributed to this body of work.
Geographers tended to be smart. It is only recently that they have started babbling Foucauldian nonsense.
This paper seeks to fill this void.
not with any geographical information but with a paranoid fantasy. The fact is scholars agree that Wavell, as Viceroy, broke the famine. But, by then the Allies were gaining the upper hand. A lot of the Japanese soldiers were starving.
Geographical interpretations of hunger and famine have become more sophisticated over time. Scholars in famine studies who examined the complex phenomenon of famine gradually realized that famines can hardly be explained by any single, overarching theory (Devereux, 1993);
Nope. Food availability deficit is good enough.
rather, famines reflect complex constellations of social and environmental forces.
which cash out as food not being available for a particular sub-section of the population.
A predominant line of thought was that of Malthus, who blamed the occurrence of food shortages on overpopulation and these Malthusian beliefs were common among British colonial administrators who interpreted famine as examples of Darwinian natural selection (Tauger, 2003).
Malthus was controverting Condorcet. Even if you create a Utopia, population pressure, or immigration, may make food scarce once again. There is no alternative to raising productivity in agriculture if general opulence is your aim.
The idea of ‘complex emergencies’ introduced by Keen (2008) and later adopted by the UN is also worth mentioning in this respect, as colonial famines are manifestations of ‘conflict- generated emergencies.’
This is the old idea of War famines.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) defined a complex emergency as a “humanitarian crisis in a country, region, or society where there is total or considerable breakdown of authority resulting from internal or external conflict [that] requires an international response that goes beyond the mandate or capacity of any single agency and /or the ongoing United Nations country program” (Keen, 2008, p. 2).
Unless it doesn't and the US can simply send enough PL480 food.
Famine studies have been transformed in recent times and the focus on the causes of famine has been relocated from crop failures to the consequences of economic relations, social structures, and political actions (Tauger, 2003).
All of which can lead to crop failure or a breakdown of the distribution mechanism. Interestingly, a famine- e.g. the Cuban food deficit of the Nineties- can lead to improved health and mortality.
In essence, the understanding of famine shifted from Malthusian to a much more politically informed one.
In other words, more nonsense was babbled by bureaucrats.
Concomitantly, as geographers’ understanding of power and politics evolved, they delved into biopolitics and subsequently colonial biopolitics.
In other words, they stopped doing alethic research so as to focus on talking paranoid bollocks.
This line of thought emphasized the geopolitics of famine as well as the analysis of colonial bodies, which were subject to European panopticism,
Foucault was mentally ill and into S&M. But it wasn't true that De Gaulle wanted to watch him poop. Governments may subject dissidents to surveillance, but the thing is costly. They really don't give a fuck if you stick your dick into your Dyson.
monitoring and regulation. Such a perspective is useful in unveiling the political dynamics of famines, how they are produced and reproduced over time and space, and how they were contested.
No. Such a perspective is wholly useless. Bangladesh raised food production four fold. It also started to export a lot of textiles thus gaining foreign exchange. That's why it no longer has famines.
This paper explores the infamous Bengal famine of 1943 by visualizing it through the lens of colonial biopolitics.
One could look at the Holocaust through the lens of Hitler's crazy racial theory. But Bengal was run by Bengalis though, no doubt, the Army remained under British control which is why Wavell was able to use it to break the famine.
The principal aim of biopolitics is to turn individuals into governable objects,
Why bother? They have been governable- at least in Bengal- for thousands of years. Why not aim to turn people into subjects of Newton's Law of Gravity instead?
and colonial famines in India provide a perfect context to examine the role of biopolitics in consolidating and expanding bio-inequality in the Global South and how indifferences of those at the top of the power structures disregard the bodies of the poor people forcing them to die.
There was famine under Nazimuddin and Mujib ur Rahman. There was no famine under Curzon or Ripon. Why? The answer is that Bengalis weren't running things.
Adopting a biopolitical approach helps us to critically analyze how the use of statistics and surveys categorized populations based on factors such as race, religion, class, caste, gender, and so on during a disaster.
But those statistics didn't change anything. Famine is the result of lack of food. Ending famine involves giving hungry people some nice food to eat or else letting them escape to a place with lots of food.
Famine theories also transformed through several bodies of research and debates.
Into worthless shite.
According to Devereux (1993), prosperous nations seldom face famines because
rich peeps buy lots of food and eat that food.
markets are interconnected, and economies are open.
A dirigiste nation may be prosperous without any markets. Indeed, land could be collectivized and there can be a public food distribution system.
As a result, the supply and demand dynamics of food play a significant role in the development of famines.
But famines can occur in non-market economies.
Sen (1982) argued that a major cause of famine is not a sudden decline in food availability, but a sudden redistribution of whatever food is available, highlighting the deeply political nature of famines.
Sen was wrong. He used statistics which were known to be wholly worthless.
Watts (1993) emphasized that while impoverished people are disproportionately affected by famine, hunger, and malnutrition, not all poor people are equally vulnerable to hunger.
The Cuban famine actually improved health outcomes. Doing a bit of agricultural labor and giving up confectionaries can make you fitter.
Vulnerability in this context is crucial here and it is defined by the mechanisms that explain why certain people are more prone than others to suffer from hunger or malnutrition.
But those mechanisms are bleeding obvious!
Perspectives on famine changed from crude Malthusianism to ‘political events’ and eventually to biopolitics. One example is the paper by Nally (2008), who examined the Irish famine of the 1840s and dissected it from the perspective of colonial biopolitics.
But Nally didn't say what was common knowledge at the time- viz. some Catholics were buying up land from their destitute cousins (even ownership of one quarter of an acre was enough to prevent admission to the Workhouse) . It had become obvious that the Popery Act of 1704, which had forced the equal sub-division of Catholic estates had to be circumvented one way or another. Emigration and a great rise in the number of monks and nuns enabled the indigenous people to begin their economic and political rise.
Famines were a way of controlling or terrorizing the population so that they would acquiesce to British rule.
In which case, the strategy backfired completely. The Home Rule party rose and rose over the course of the 1870's and began to turn the tables on the Protestant Ascendancy.
He highlighted how the Great Irish Famine (1845–1852) was shaped by a particular colonial regulatory order to exploit the catastrophe and maximize state power, thus driving Irish life by a logic both deeply colonial and biopolitical.
No. The Popery Act had ruined Catholic Ireland. The Famine was its direct consequence. But, as Catholic landholdings became bigger and more viable, the political pendulum swung away from the Ascendancy. The 1903 Land Act was the final nail in its coffin. Sadly, the interests of Ulster tenants had diverged from the mainly Catholic tenants of the South, so Ireland would have to pay a price in terms of partition.
Sen (1982) developed the entitlements approach for interpreting famine.
The cretin didn't understand that convicts were entitled to food. If there had been no food availability deficit, the police could have arrested every hungry person on some bogus charge and thus ensured they didn't starve to death.
In this approach, in a market economy, a person can exchange what he or she owns for a different collection of commodities.
But not food, if no food is available.
He or she can do this exchange either through trading or production or a combination of both.
Sen was often observed harvesting rice from his garden. Also, he would milk goats even though the goats protested that they were actually Geographers working on Foucauldian biopolitics.
These analyses define why some groups of people who belong to specific occupations such as landless laborers, informal sector workers, artisans, pastoralists, and service- people as vulnerable (Watts & Bohle, 1993).
If there is no food, those with no food are vulnerable to having no fucking food. On the other hand, if there is plenty of food, just by getting arrested for public indecency, hungry people can receive three square meals a day.
Michael Watts envisaged this exchange-entitlement model as a logical first step in building a historical account of famines in different social formations.
e.g. due to potato blight, many Irish Catholics had nothing to eat. This caused them to die. History shows that not getting any food to eat can cause starvation.
Famine scholars such as Amrita Rangasami (1985)
a good investigative journalist. Her article in the EPW shows that the Colonial administrator adopted a humane approach buying products from weavers, brick-makers, etc. at a price which would enable them to purchase food during bad times. Sadly, A.O Hulme's scheme to raise agricultural productivity (thus tackling the problem at the root) could not be adopted because the rich Indians in the Party that he founded were useless blathershites.
similarly reminded us that famine “cannot be defined with reference to the victims of starvation alone and the great hungers have always been re-distributive class struggles: ‘a process in which benefits accrue to one section of the community’ while losses flow to the other”
The silly lady may not have been aware of the big famines under Stalin and Mao. Killing kulaks is a bad idea because you run out of food.
Michel Foucault (1981) used the term biopolitics for investigating governing practices in modern times.
He was supposed to be teaching philosophy. He pretended to understand History and Econ, but didn't at all. 'Governing practices' are about how to get hold of some tax revenue and then spend it in a manner not too scandalously corrupt or incompetent.
The regulation of the population is referred to as ‘biopolitics’ and was initially accomplished by “diagnosing and dealing with a population that was conceived in the abstract, such as by birth rates, infant mortality, and longevity”
Some actuaries and other statisticians compiled such figures, but they did not conceive of the population as an abstraction.
Foucault introduced the notion of biopolitics which is defined as “the state-led management of life, death, and biological being a form of politics that placed human life at the very center of its calculations”
There is no 'state-led' management of any such thing. The Government did not order your daddy to put his pee pee in your Mummy's chee chee place. Still, Foucault was correct in seeing something very sinister in the fact that Governments are concerned with 'human life', rather than undead Vampires or Zombies.
Food crises and disease were conceived by authorities to be “public health” issues
because they affected the health of members of the public. Sadly, the diseases of ghosts continue to attract little attention from politicians in soi disant 'Democratic' countries.
requiring new regimes of calculation, intervention, and direction
nope. The old way of doing such calculations- e.g. adding up numbers- was good enough.
and these crises are not necessarily accompanied by the prevention of famines or other catastrophes, but rather “allowing them to happen and then being able to orientate them in a profitable direction”
Food availability deficits don't require anybody's permission to occur. Making money by taking food to places where too little is available, can be profitable. But it can also be a loss making enterprise which, nevertheless, is the right thing to do, morally speaking.
Nally (2008), in describing the Irish famine, explored the British government’s famine relief policies and how different laws and disciplines permitted the colonial state to target subaltern bodies.
Scotland too could have had a big famine, but the Scots raised enough money to avert that outcome. However, there was a lot of 'assisted' emigration.
Even though Ireland and Bengal were very different in culture and context, both were British colonies and both experienced famines.
Ireland was a settler colony- i.e. 'Ascendancy' Protestants settled there. Few Brits settled in India. Incidentally, Bengal did not experience any family while it was administered (nizamat) by Brits. In 1770, the East India Company had the 'diwani' but did not control the civil administration. So, it was only after Bengal became self-governing that it had not one but two big famines in 1943 and 1974.
In this instance, I am not blindly exporting the model from Ireland to India; rather, I am applying Nally’s broad analytical approach but paying attention to the unique specificities of biopolitics in India.
The unique specificity is that Brits prevented famine when they ruled Bengal. They didn't prevent famine in Ireland because, quite frankly, many of them hated the Catholic Church or the Gaelic speaking Irish Catholic.
During the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, held during the Irish famine, Britain's superiority in invention and technology was brazenly showcased to the whole world.
Brazen showcasing is a good way to drum up business and drumming up business is a good way to get hold of lots of money which in turn means being able to buy lots of nice food to eat. I suppose this young lady is brazenly showcasing her stupidity so as to earn money and thus have nice things to eat.
Analogous to the 1943 Bengal famine, the British colonial authority blamed the Irish famine on natural causes,
the potato blight was 'natural'. The Bengal famine was a direct consequence of the aggressive war waged by Japan. This Bengali lady thinks that the Brits should have let her country be enslaved by the Japanese. She should read accounts of the Henan famine which occurred in that year. Had Bengal been overrun, the death toll would have been double.
accusing nineteenth century Ireland of being overpopulated to avert such misery.
It was overpopulated. In 1841, the population was twice what it had become in 1960. Even now the population is less than it was before the Potato blight.
Biopower has long been associated with the management of famines and the implementation of controls, surveillance, and regulations to handle disease epidemics.
None of which obtained in Ireland. Why spend money on 'controls, surveillance, or regulations' when what you want is for the Catholic population to fall?
The concept of biopower evolved from its original connotation of enslavement of bodies and control of the population.
So, American slave-states had 'biopolitics'. Europe didn't- at least after the abolition of serfdom.
Among the numerous approaches used to achieve this control were demographic science, the census, statistical analyses, and the interrelationship between a territory’s resources and its occupants.
Nonsense! Censuses were conducted in India only after the tide had begun to turn against the Brits. The fact is, the highly autocratic Russian Empire only had one census- in 1897. Democratic America has had censuses since 1790.
Foucault while describing biopower writes “in a normalizing society, you have a power which is…a biopower, and racism is the indispensable precondition that allows someone to be killed, that allows others to be killed”.
This is nonsense. The Soviets had a census in 1926. They then went on to kill vast numbers of people not on grounds or race but on the basis of 'class origin'. Hitler conducted no censuses on territory he conquered.
He noted that by ‘killing’, he never meant direct killing or murder, but it is indirect murder in every other form i.e., “the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection and so on”
So, Foucault was ignoring actual violence while alleging some occult type of violence. Then he quite literally 'died of ignorance' by having unprotected sex in bath-houses. He doesn't seem to have minded 'exposing' his sexual partners to death.
Biopolitics thus is the power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die.
With your dick- if you don't put a condom on it.
The various ways by which a state manages its people and territories are referred to as its governmentality (Foucault, 1978).
And the various ways in which academics talk bollocks are referred to as stupid shite.
Governmentality, according to Foucault includes the “exercise of discipline over bodies and ‘police’ supervision of the inhabitants of the sovereign’s territory.”
In which case, the UK has no fucking governmentality. Sir Keir Starmer is refusing to send some nice police-women to my house to give me a spanking even though I've been a very naughty boy.
As Heath and Legg write “Enacted through institutions (such as the family or school),
or the bath-house or brothel
discourses (such as medicine or criminal justice) and procedures and analyses (such as surveys and statistics), governmentality aims to maintain a healthy and productive population.”
Why are they not aiming to maintain a dead and ghostly population? The answer is 'Neo-Liberalism'.
Sasson and Vernon claimed, in analyzing the actions of British authorities throughout past famines,
the last famine in England was in 1623. Lessons were learned from it.
that it was not until the Irish famine that they understood famines could be prevented, and the notions of launching relief began between 1846 and 1883, intending to civilize the colonial people.
If England and Wales- and then Scotland- could overcome famine, so could Catholic portions of Ireland if the Ascendancy would take its boot off the necks of the great mass of the indigenous people.
One notable trait shared by the colonial famines of Bengal
none occurred when Brits were in charge
and Ireland
whose Catholic population was viewed with hatred and fear by many Anglo Saxon Protestants
is that many lives may have been saved if effective policies had been adopted at the appropriate times (Nally, 2011a, 2011b).
The Protestant Brits could have saved the lives of the Catholic Irish peasant. But did they want to? In India, things were different. If people die, real wages rise and rent extraction falls. Keeping Indians alive was a matter of good political economy. Then, sadly, Bengalis took over Bengal.
Several forms of colonial governmentality were called into question,
by those who didn't want to pay the Income Tax which the Brits introduced to finance Famine Relief.
including the organization of famine camps based on who could work 12 h a day and who would just get relief. Residency in the camps was made mandatory, and restrictions were imposed to purchase only specific amounts of grains.
In practice, the District Commissioner had considerable discretionary power. The problem was money. Indians didn't want to pay the Income Tax.
Duncan (2020) emphasized the British authorities' state-sanctioned atrocities, such as
preventing Japan conquering India
withholding food from prisoners,
a justiciable matter
evicting people from their lands,
which also happens to white people in Britain
and employing police constables, minor court officials, and prison guards while paying them a pittance and entrusting them with the job of enforcing the law.
British used to pay their employees! How very cruel!
Famines can also be visualized as another form of excessive geopolitics as Chaturvedi (2003) argued that the partition of India (a direct consequence of British imperial mapping)
British imperial mapping was a direct consequence of Indians being shit at defending themselves. If only Churchill had let Japan conquer India, it would have been merely enslaved rather than partitioned.
is a perfect example of excessive geopolitics,
Churchill was a bad man. He defeated Tojo and Hitler. What a bastard!
tearing apart the country of India into communities of Hindus and Muslims,
Pakistan also tore itself apart. This was because Yahya Khan's real name was John Kent.
resulting in never-ending conflicts and violence. He raises the issue of geopolitical imaginations and images of India, posing the question of whose land was partitioned, thereby claiming that excessive geopolitics transforms borders into rivalries such as 'our' land vs. 'their' land.
Did you know that Churchill invented Islam and Hinduism? Previously, all Indians were following Shinto religion and worshipping the Japanese Emperor.
Divisive categories such as religion, caste, tribe, and community
not to mention gender. Churchill passed a law in 1940 forcing all Indians to either have a penis or a vagina.
were implanted at the core of the social structure of India by the British rulers.
Also British ordered all Indians to stop hanging from trees by their tails.
Legg (2006) argued that maps were used as a means of regulating space.
Which is why we can easily regulate the Andromeda galaxy by making a map of it.
These maps obscured the tales underlying local struggles and conflicts, and so served as a vehicle for fresh calculations of territorial conquest and forcible land acquisition.
Narendra Modi conquered UK by making a map of it. He installed Rishi Sunak as his puppet Prime Minister. Thankfully, Sir Keir Starmer (real name Begum Khalida Shaitan) drew another map and thus was able to turn UK into, what Vance calls 'the first Islamic country with nuclear weapons'. (Pakistan follows the Mormon faith)
Famines were frequent phenomena throughout South Asian history,
till the Brits got the hang of running the place.
but it was not until the establishment of colonial censuses and vital registration after the 1860s that their demographic characteristics could be accurately analyzed.
They could be estimated well enough. The first full census was conducted in 1881.
Famines were also widespread throughout the pre-colonial period, albeit they were far less severe and frequent than during the colonial period
unless the reverse was the case
It is also worth noting that historians lack extensive data on pre-colonial famines due to low literacy rates in medieval and ancient times, a lack of censuses, modern record-keeping systems, mass media, and other modern modes of communication such as telephones, telegrams, trains, and aircraft.
In other words, before the Brits came, Indians were pig ignorant. Sadly, Churchill prevented Japan from conquering India and so it was forced to become independent.
Famines occurred mostly because of the aftereffects and damage of wars and rebellions throughout the Mughal dynasty. Khondker (1986) claimed that pre-British famines were caused by localized food shortages for a limited time,
just like the post-British famine in his country
but colonial famines were caused by repeated economic crises when a significant number of people were unemployed with no income to buy food.
Whereas, in Bangladesh in 1974, unemployed people had lots of money to buy food but they just couldn't be arsed.
The reasons for the periodic occurrence of famines in colonial India have been long debated.
The answer was always either drought or flooding or both along with a crop blight.
Although other reasons such as colonial exploitation, population expansion, and global geopolitics were blamed for these calamities, El Niño-induced droughts and the failure of monsoon rains over South Asia were widely viewed as the proximate cause in each of these 19th-century famines (Purkait et al., 2020).
Because that was what they were. It wasn't the case that the Government was so busy surveilling everybody while they were taking a dump that people refused to eat food so as not to have to shit. This caused great distress to the Viceroy. He would often wake up Mahatma Gandhi in the middle of the night and piteously plead with him to at least fart loudly.
There were approximately 25 major famines during the British Raj (the period of rule by the British Crown over the Indian subcontinent from 1858 to 1947 following the dissolution of the British East India Company).
But, if you look at any particular famine- e.g. the upper Doab famine of 1861- you find that it was opposition to, or lack of cooperation with, the Civil authorities which contributed most to excess mortality. The plain fact is, an ungovernable tract will be food insecure because nothing is secure. It doesn't matter who rules it, the primary responsibility for the maintenance of life must fall on those who live there.
Tharoor (2018, p. 235) points out that from 1770 to 1900, 25 million Indians are estimated to have died in famines, compared to only 5 million deaths throughout the entire world from wars from 1793 to 1900.
But China lost 75 million over the course of the nineteenth century. The plain fact is, India was better administered by the Brits than China under its own rulers.
Among the countless famines that India suffered, Bengal was affected most severely. The first and worst of these was in 1770, which is estimated to have taken the lives of 10 million people The Great Bengal Famine of 1770 was the first of the horrendous famines and it opened the door to future famines in South Asia during colonial rule.
But Bengalis, not Brits, were in charge of the administration in 1770.
The list of major famines during the British rule as pointed out by Tharoor (2016) are: The Great Bengal Famine (1770), Madras (1782–1783),
again, the vast majority who died were not British subjects
Chalisa Famine (1783–1784) in Delhi and surrounding areas,
not ruled by the Brits
Doji bara Famine (1791–1792) around Hyderabad,
Indian ruled states showed much higher losses than British administered territory
Agra Famine (1837–1838),
The Brits did provide relief to about 2 million people.
Orissa Famine (1866),
which did get the Brits thinking about designing a Famine Code
Bihar Famine (1873–1874),
which Sir Richard Temple successfully coped with
Southern India Famine (1876–1877),
the setting of Kipling's story 'William the Conqueror'.
Bombay Famine (1905–1906)
I suppose she means the famine of 1900, the last of its kind. Important lessons were learned from it and there were no more big famines. I suppose, the Indian nationalists didn't want to highlight this famine too much because their own supporters had made a lot of money from it.
and the Bengal Famine (1943–1944).
under a lovely English lady by the name of Nazimuddin.
Purkait (2020) illustrated the 12 major famines during the British Rule (1765-1947), which were unevenly distributed throughout the colony (Fig. (Fig.1).1).
I think it was lessons from the Orissa famine which set the wheels in motion.
The famine in 1876–1878 initiated the foundation of the first Indian Famine Commission of 1880 that consequently laid the commencement of India's subsequent relief system, namely the Famine Codes (Maharatna, 1992).
So, Bengal was spared famine so long as it was directly ruled by the Brits. Good to know.
The Bengal famine of 1943 was one of the worst disasters in twentieth century South Asia.
It would have been ten times worse if the Japs had invaded and grabbed all the rice for their own Army.
It was devastating in terms of its scale, causing three million deaths and occurred during the midst of World War II, when India was under the British Raj.
India was being defended by Britain and America. African troops were brought in to fight the Japanese. This was because Churchill was very evil.
This period during the Second World War, Asia faced several famines simultaneously. Other famines that occurred during the same time as Bengal included the Henan Famine in China (1942–1943), as well as the Vietnamese famine in 1944–1945.
Directly caused by the Japs and their Vichy running dogs.
The main causes of the Bengal famine of 1943 accepted by many researchers after innumerable debates are: (a) an absolute shortage of rice, due to the loss of imports from Burma, and rice exports from Bengal to Sri Lanka (since it was one of the strategic bases against Japan; the British called it Ceylon) and to those regions of the British empire that could not get rice from Southeast Asia after the fall of Burma;
In other words, Bengalis were able to sell rice they owned to people who could pay for it. This was because Churchill was very evil.
(b) the 'material and psychological' consequences of World War II, creating a drastic increase in the price of rice;
because the supply had fallen
(c) the incompetence of the government of Bengal
run by elected Bengalis
to control the supply and distribution of food grains in the market, thus generating large scale hoarding; (d) delayed response after the onset of famine; and (e) the government of India's procrastination in putting into operation a nation-wide system of moving supplies from food surplus to deficit areas (Law‐Smith, 2007; Mishra, 2000).
Provincial autonomy meant the Center was weak and could not force surplus states to supply deficit states.
One important characteristic of the famine that Sen (1977) noted was it created an uneven expansion of incomes and purchasing power. People who were involved in military and civil defense works, in the army, or industries associated with war activities were covered by distribution arrangements and subsidized food prices.
In other words, the market was not allocating resources.
Ó Gráda (2015) pointed out that more than half of India’s war-related output was produced in Calcutta and the number of military workers in the city was one million. As a result, they could access abundant supplies of food
No. They could access sufficient, not abundant, food. Otherwise they would not have been so callous as to deny food to starving people.
while others faced the consequences of rising food prices. Impoverished families sold their lands in exchange for stacks of rice.
So, Bengalis were making a profit from the misery of other Bengalis. This was Churchill's fault.
Due to this gruesome situation, the city of Calcutta witnessed crimes such as selling girls and women and even consumption of meat from dead cows.
In Kansas, Senjuti has noticed that people bite and eat live cows. The cows say 'Moo!' in a piteous manner.
Calcutta witnessed the famine in the form of destitute masses from the rural areas who travelled there from the surrounding rural districts. People thought if they could move to Calcutta,
where the guys they had voted for ruled the roost
they had a better chance of survival than anywhere else in Bengal because the city had so many people engaged in war-related activities (Mukherjee, 2015).
Unless they were engaged in fucking-over-the-starving activities.
Figure 2 depicts a picture of a family who moved to Kolkata to obtain food.
from the Bengali masters of Bengal
Charitable organizations offered relief by providing meals in their kitchens. Meals were given at the same time of the day in more than one kitchen, which prevented poor people from getting more than one meal.
Bengalis gave some charity to other Bengalis. But they didn't want them to contract obesity related diseases.
The soup supplied in the kitchens was cooked with low-quality millet and vegetables. Collingham (2012) observed that poor food quality in the kitchen induced ‘famine diarrhea’, which resulted in more fatalities. In the same vein, Nally (2011a, 2011b, p. 221) argued that material space acted as a means of biopolitical regulation
because immaterial space had gone to Hollywood to act as one of the Three Stooges.
as during the Irish famine, several locations, like as "workhouses, food depots, soup kitchens, public work operations, outdoor relief schemes, allowed the state to target and manage Irish destitution.".
Only if they felt like it.
The famine swept across at least 60% of Bengal's net cultivable area, affecting more than 58% of the rural households and reducing over 486,000 rural families to a state of beggary (Goswami, 1990).
The survivors could look forward to pogroms and ethnic cleansing.
The harshest phase of the famine lasted for eight months (March to October 1943) but its impacts were felt for a much longer period, creating starvation and epidemics. Among the numerous devastating effects of the famine, the mass starvation phase culminated in epidemics caused by weak immune systems due to hunger. Throughout Bengal even during the end of January 1944, it is estimated that there was a total of 13,000 hospital beds available for famine victims considering an average of 2300 people dying each day out of starvation and diseases (Mukherjee, 2011).
Bengalis didn't understand that Provincial Autonomy meant that they were in charge. It was up to them to feed their own people. Obviously, it would be too much to ask for them to fight the Japanese. Still, at least they could bury their own dead- which Sheikh Mujib tells us, they refused to do after the great cyclone in East Pakistan. Apparently, it was left to White RAF squaddies to do the job.
Context and background of the famine
When Fazl ul Haq became Premier he passed pro-tenant legislation. But this meant agricultural credit would be more difficult to come by. Then, his ally, Sharatchandra's brother went over to the Japanese. Had Churchill and Roosevelt not defeated Tojo, nobody's title to land would have been worth the paper it was printed on.
In March 1942, the Japanese Army completed the occupation of Burma (now Myanmar). During this time, there was a serious shortage in rice production as India used to have 15% of its rice imports from Burma. After the capture of Rangoon in 1942, the shipments of Burmese rice to Bengal were stopped by the Japanese army, contributing greatly to the food shortage there (Ó Gráda, 2008). The loss of Japanese imports resulted in the requisitioning of rice reserves in areas vulnerable to the Japanese invasion,
which reduced the incentive to invade
as well as large-scale hoarding (Ó Gráda, 2015).
which the Bengalis could have eliminated in the same way that Tegart- a formed top cop in Bengal- was doing back in the UK
Bengal was also lacking wheat, dried legumes, mustard, sugar, and salt. As a result, the wholesale price of rice rose from 14 Rupees (Rs) per maund on December 11, 1942, to 37 Rs per maund by August 20 (1 maund = 37.32 kg) (Sen, 1977).
Sadly, its politicians, though good at making speeches, knew shit about agriculture.
Theories and debates on the causes of the 1943 famine
The reasons behind the causes of the Bengal famine have been widely scrutinized. The Family Inquiry Commission (FIC)
Famine Inquiry Commission. The majority on it were Indian
was appointed by the Government of India in 1944 to investigate the causes of famine. According to the FIC, the famine was caused by two factors: First, during 1943 there was a serious shortage in the total supply of rice available for consumption in Bengal, as compared to the normal supply (Islam, 2007). Secondly, there was an exorbitant increase in the price of food beyond the purchasing power of people who were usually reliant on the supply of rice in the markets throughout the year.
The Famine Inquiry Commission (FIC) upheld a Malthusian view of food shortages by blaming the local population and explaining that food shortages and famine were routine phenomena of colonial India (Mukerjee, 2014). The Commission blamed
the War and
natural calamities
but not
(along with) the tendency of Indians to breed excessively.
This is because it takes nine months to make a baby. It is obvious that the human population can't suddenly increase by ten or twenty percent in a single year.
It advocated the Food Availability Decline theory (FAD)
because there was a FAD
by highlighting those shortages of rice were one of the basic causes of the famine (Famine Commission, 1945). The report was viewed as fallacious by different scholars
with an axe to grind
after it was thoroughly investigated as there were discrepancies between the testimonies and the information published by the FIC. (see Mukerjee, 2014).
The FIC said what most people in the administration thought at the time. Elected politicians were to blame. They said 'after considering all the circumstances, we cannot avoid the conclusion that it lay in the power of the Government of Bengal, by bold, resolute and well-conceived measures at the right time to have largely prevented the tragedy of the famine'. Mukerjee is a scientist. She knows shit about Indian history or agriculture.
The degree of crop shortfall in late 1942 and its impact in 1943 have dominated the historiography of the famine. The issue reflects a larger debate between two perspectives: one emphasizes the importance of Food Availability Decline (FAD) as a cause of famine, and the other focuses on the Failure of Exchange Entitlements (FEE).
Which is meaningless. People who had money could exchange it for food. The rich didn't starve.
The FAD explanation blames famine on crop failures brought on principally by crises such as drought, flood, or devastation from war. The FEE account agrees that such external factors are in some cases critical, but holds that famine is primarily the interaction between pre-existing "structural vulnerability" (such as poverty)
poverty can be defined as not having enough food.
and a shock event (such as war or political interference in markets) that disrupts the economic market for food.
So not having food can cause you not to have food.
When these interact, some groups within society can become unable to purchase or acquire food even though sufficient supplies are available.
because they can't exchange their labor for food. Why did this happen in Bengal? The answer is that the politicians were shit at running food-for-work programs or just setting up 'langars'- i.e. food kitchens.
Both the FAD and the FEE perspectives would agree that Bengal experienced at least some grain shortages in 1943 due to the loss of imports from Burma, damage from the cyclone, and crop disease due to pest attack (Padmanabhan, 1973). However, the FEE analyses do not consider food shortages as the predominant factor.
Because FEE is stupid meaningless shite. Sen would later predict a famine in Thatcher's England.
Academic consensus generally follows the FEE account, as formulated by Amartya Sen,
No. Stupid Bengalis think they have to follow Sen.
in conceptualizing the Bengal famine of 1943 as an “entitlements famine”. In this view, the prelude to the famine was generalized war-time inflation.
Very true. The peasants saw that the prices of Radios and TVs were rising. It wasn't the case that the lack of food meant that its price was too high for them to afford.
The problem was exacerbated by prioritized distribution and abortive attempts at price control. High inflation rates caused a fatal decline in the real wages of landless agricultural workers. Sen (1981) disagreed with the explanation put forward by the Famine Inquiry Commission and affirmed that the Bengal famine was not caused by a decline in food availability, but by a failure of entitlement to food.
But 'entitlement to food' only failed because corrupt Bengalis were running things.
He termed the Bengal famine an “artificial famine”
created by Bengalis just like the Partition deaths.
and emphasized class as one of the main determinants of famine vulnerability.
Because high class people have lots of money and food and nice clothes.
He also pointed out that the supply of rice was just around 5% lower than the previous five-year average and was, in fact, 13% greater than in 1941, even though there was no famine in 1941 (Sen, 1982).
Sen was relying on wholly fictitious statistics. His daddy knew the truth. Sen waited till daddy died before publishing this shite.
In Bengal during that time, the zamindars (local landlords) were at the top of the revenue-collecting ladder. The peasant or chasi (primarily lower caste Hindus or lower caste Muslims) cultivated the land and paid his rent to the landowner (Mukherjee, 2011). Food hoarding was a crucial factor in the case of this famine.
Why hoard stuff unless it is scarce?
The most noteworthy factor that Sen (1981) emphasized was that in the Bengal famine, it was the underprivileged occupations that were most affected—fishermen, agricultural laborers, and transporters – whereas the beneficiaries were big farmers, merchants, and rice mill owners (Sen, 1977).
In other words, guys who had the vote did well. Those who didn't were welcome to just fuck off and die.
The inflation benefitted these latter groups, whose incomes soared, and whose food consumption also climbed up. Food was deliberately stockpiled in the village stores of wealthy landlords and tradesmen,
all Bengalis
who were impatiently awaiting the appropriate moment for inflation to cause price increases (Collingham, 2012). The years 1942 and 1943 experienced inflation across all sectors, predominantly because of high war expenditures due to the Japanese invasion of Burma in 1942. The colonial government financed its expenses by printing more money and the Reserve Bank of India was compelled to print notes about two and half times their total value (Gadgil & Sovani, 1944), creating an enormous increase in prices.
Bengalis were welcome to impose on themselves a rationing system similar to the one in the UK. If they failed to do so, it is because they were shitty people.
More recently, a groundbreaking work was done by Mishra et al. (2019) who used weather data to study soil moisture levels where they discovered that out of the six major famines between 1870 and 2016 in India, five were linked to soil moisture drought, but that the Bengal famine of 1943 was not caused by drought.
Because there were floods. Mishra et al are as stupid as shit.
Even the rainfall was also above average during that year. They concluded that the 1943 Bengal famine was not caused by drought but rather was a result of a policy failure during the British era.
Viceroy should have told flood waters to fuck off.
This cutting-edge approach to uncovering the causes of famine during 1943 attracted widespread media attention (Safi, 2019).
Everyone knows there was a cyclone and massive flooding. But too much water is just as bad as too little.
One study (from a commentary) recently published even conceptualized the Bengal famine as a genocide (please see Mookerjee, 2022).
Bengalis did actual genocide against each other soon enough. Then they imported Pakistani soldiers so as to do some more.
Responsibility of the colonial authorities
The role and responsibility of the British government during these crisis months were always highly questioned.
They had no role or responsibility because Bengal was autonomous as far as food and agriculture was concerned.
The interventions by the government of Bengal
which was in Bengali hands
in the province’s wholesale rice markets in 1942 and 1943 triggered the crisis.
Japan wasn't at fault in any way.
Greenough (1982) calculated that even after deducting the losses due to the halt of Burmese imports, the Midnapur cyclone, flood, and crop disease due to pest attack (see Padmanabhan, 1973), 90% of the usual supply of rice was available in 1943.
These figures are meaningless.
There was also no deficiency of rice in Bihar, Orissa and Assam indicating that there should not have been any shortages in Bengal provided the surplus grain was accurately circulated, which the Indian Government failed to accomplish (Law‐Smith, 2007).
Because the Indian Government was full of Indians.
During the famine, the utilitarian principles and profit-seeking attitude of the British administrators
who had cunningly changed their names to Sen or Mukherjee or Nizamuddin
dictated that for Britain to satisfy Indian demands, shipping and supplies had to be sourced for British soldiers fighting the Germans at that time.
Very true. British soldiers are eating only rice and hilsa fish. RAF used to send a lot of planes to Bengal to pick up supplies of these two items. They would then fly five thousand miles to Europe.
Also, supplying food to Indian civilians would have risked British civilian food supplies.
That's the only reason RAF was not flying nice dishes of 'bangers and mash' to starving Indians.
The total amount of wheat harvested in the British Empire during the 1943–1944 year was 29 million tons, but the war cabinet strategically preserved it for the future.
Which is why nobody in the British Empire was allowed to eat any bread or biscuits for those two years.
So, despite Bengal’s rice shortages, the British Empire had sufficient wheat to send to the famine victims (Mukerjee, 2014).
Under Wavell, some of that wheat did get to them. No thanks go to any Bengali in this regard.
Even in 1943, at the height of the famine, the UK imported 26 million tonnes of food and raw materials for its civilian population, creating a stockpile of 18.5 million tonnes at the end of the year.
Meanwhile, nice Bengalis like Subhas Chandra Bose were fighting for the Japanese. Why did Churchill not send food to Hitler and Tojo so they could feed their Bengali sycophants?
The Indian Central Food Department
under British dudes with names like Sen and Srivastava
intended to set up a central purchasing organization, but the government mismanaged the situation and did not inform the surplus provinces about setting up procurement machinery until the end of January 1943.
This would have made no difference. It wasn't till the Battle of Kohima that food could be moved towards the Eastern front. Otherwise, it would end up feeding the invaders.
Bengal expected delivery of 350,000 tonnes of rice between April 1943 to March 1944 from neighboring states, but, unfortunately, received only 25,000 tonnes of rice supplied by Orissa
Bengal was in danger of being conquered by the Japanese who would have confiscated its rice and fish to make sushi for their own soldiers. Did the Bengalis feel they had a duty to secure their own independence? No. Don't be silly. Even now, eighty years later, they are whining that Viceroy did not come and feed them and wipe their bottoms and encourage them to learn Japanese.
It is simplistic to ascribe all the failures by putting the entire blame only on the British government.
It is simplistic not to blame Bengalis for having been conquered by a much smaller number of Turks or Britishers. Sadly, Churchill prevented them being conquered by the Japanese. They are still very angry about it.
As mentioned earlier, there were different other complex issues like market failures, policy failures, malfeasance by government agencies, as well as different unethical practices by private companies. A more nuanced view also acknowledges the role of Punjab, which had a surplus of food grains in 1943–1944. There was an ongoing politics between the Punjab peasants’ lobbies and the ruling party that utilized the wartime soaring prices of food grains to compensate for the losses the Punjab peasantry had suffered earlier during the economic depression of the 1930s. The government sought to safeguard its rural vote bank by publicly advocating for allowing the wartime grain markets to operate on a laissez-faire basis (Yong, 2005). Many peasant leaders in Punjab encouraged farmers to resist the procurement of food crops by government agencies at a fixed price. This wartime prosperity of Punjab specifically when Bengal suffered helped to reproduce uneven development within India.
Later, some nice Punjabi and Pathan soldiers came to East Pakistan and killed and raped a lot of people. Sadly, an evil Jew named Jacobs received the surrender of General Niazi.
Official declaration and news of this ‘British- induced famine’
not to mention British-induced defense of India from the Japanese
were deliberately suppressed from the people of Bengal to serve British interests. In August 1942, Bengal’s chief finance minister, Fazlul Huq,
He was the Premier
warned colonial authorities of a potential famine because of these policies.
He was the authority in Bengal. He should have warned himself.
He was ignored by the British Governor of Bengal, John Herbert.
A back-bench MP of singular stupidity. Haq ran circles around him.
At the same time, press regulations were employed to interrupt the circulation of any information from Bengal.
How come Ian Stephens broke the story? He was based in Calcutta. The answer is, he shifted blame from Suhrawardy and Nazimuddin to White people in Delhi who had no power over food.
This was not the first time the government have concealed news of the famine. While researching British responses to famine throughout the last 200 years, Sasson and Vernon (2015) discovered that famine news was not extensively disseminated in the British press and that the key concern was the negative impacts on tax reduction, as noted during the 1770 Bengal famine as well.
But John Company didn't have the nizamat in 1770. You could say the famine was its excuse for seizing it.
Racism reduces human beings to the race (phenotype) to which an individual belongs (Sharp, 2008).
No it doesn't. You can invent a race which has no fucking phenotype whatsoever. Jinnah's 'two nation theory' is an example.
Racist ideology involves an elaborate classification of mind and personality linked to physical features.
No. It may involve a crude classification but there is nothing 'elaborate' about it.
In the European geopolitical imagination, any race other than whites was conceived to be more bodily driven in their instincts and even viewed as having animal instincts more tied to the body than their minds
That is a racist statement stigmatizing Europeans. Incidentally, there is no 'European race'.
(Sharp, 2008). Duncan (2007) demonstrated how race was used as a significant criterion to intensify the internal differentiation within the native Ceylonese population and used as biopower by the British colonizers to fragment and govern the indigenous people in nineteenth-century Ceylon.
Why didn't the Ceylonese do the same to the Brits? Then they would have ruled over Yukay. Oh. I see. The Brits ruled Ceylon because they had a kick ass Navy. Being Racist doesn't actually give you super-powers.
Race here was analyzed not only as utilized as a useful tool for segregation but also in the context of 19th-century environmental determinism and theories of tropical degeneration.
This lady isn't stupid and ignorant. It's just that she can't help being a darkie.
Europeans who were born in Ceylon were regarded inferior to other Europeans born in Europe and close to the indigenous population (Duncan, 2020).
Nonsense! Plenty of British aristocrats were born in India or Ceylon or other such places. Their chums at Eton or Harrow didn't consider them inferior at all. Perhaps this silly lady means 'country bottled' Whites- i.e. those born in the East who lived there all their lives.
Brown bodies were portrayed as disease-prone due to body odor, and these smells were viewed as spreading illness by contaminating the air.
Brown people may have viewed White people as 'mlecchas' of this type. But if the Whites had a kick ass Navy and Army, the darkies had to keep their comments to themselves.
Longhurst (2001, p. 3) argued that bodies play a significant role in people’s experiences of place, and, drawing on work concerned with embodiment and spatiality, she proclaimed, “the body is the potential to prompt new understandings of power, knowledge and social relations between people and places.”
Sadly, it is the brain, not the body, which has the potential to understand stuff.
Similar notions can be linked to the Bengal famine. For example, the British considered the Greeks to be sturdier than anyone else and prioritized them based on their skin color and body stature.
No. The Greeks were good fighters who defeated Italy and tied up a lot of German troops. Helping them helped win the war.
Choudhury (2021, p. 7) highlighted these remarks when Leopold Armery, commented: “Winston may be right in saying that the starvation of anyhow under-fed Bengalis is less serious than sturdy Greeks, but he makes no sufficient allowance for the sense of Empire responsibility in this country.”
Amery was wrong. The Brits cared about as much about starving Bengalis as Bengali politicians.
An additional statement uttered by Lord Wavell was “Apparently it is more important to save the Greeks and liberated countries than the Indians and there is reluctance either to provide shipping or to reduce stalks in this country.”
Presumably, 'stocks' is meant. Wavell and Amery were supposed to stick up for India. But India didn't greatly matter. That's why Amery wasn't in the War Cabinet. Unlike the Great War, in the Second World War India was gaining more in terms of its own defense needs than it was contributing to victory in Europe. Indians still don't seem to get that, had India been independent, a large portion of it would have been swiftly conquered by the Japs.
It is worth emphasizing that while most biographies of Churchill mention the bombing of Germany, none of them includes the 1943 Bengal famine.
Because it was irrelevant. Bengalis let their own people starve while other Bengalis eagerly joined Hitler and Tojo so as to enslave their own country.
The absence of this disaster in popular biographies of Churchill symbolizes it as a non-significant event. Hickman (2009, p. 242) analyzed popular Churchill biographies and the 1943 Bengal famine, where he documented one quote when Churchill responded to an American critic of the British Raj: “Before we proceed any further, let us get one thing clear. Are we talking about the Brown Indians, who have multiplied alarmingly under the benevolent British rule? or are we speaking of the red Indians who, I understand, are almost extinct?”.
It's a good question. Perhaps Senjuti is under the impression that she is a full blooded Iroquois, which is why she has settled in her ancient homeland of Kansas.
Orientalism, according to Edward Said (1979), is a discursive and geopolitical assertion of difference between East and West that is written throughout the texts of Western culture, whether through travel diaries, news stories, paintings, or other representations.
According to me, it is some stupid shit a Protestant nutter pulled out of his arse.
In the case of orientalism, power was exercised through institutions that described the Orient.
In which case the Orient could have easily colonized the Occident by setting up an institution to describe various types of White dudes.
The people within the spaces of the Orient were not allowed to speak for themselves but were described and characterized by others (Sharp, 2008).
Also, they were used as furniture. The Ottoman Empire consisted largely of ottomans. Safavid Iran was full of Sofas.
The Orient was always seen as being different and backward from Europe, which was considered developed. Both Heath and Legg (2018) and Duncan (2007) pointed out that in terms of science, Asian sciences were considered far inferior, and like ‘mere children’ in comparison to Europeans.
This is still the case. No doubt, Senjuti thinks Narendra Modi should encourage the teaching of Vedic Science in Indian schools.
The natives were visualized to be close to nature, but Europeans held that the native people are incapable of modifying nature and were unable to exploit natural resources. The Bengal famine exemplifies this notion, in which the Bengali people were dependent on the British for the allocation and distribution of their resources even in a crisis.
That is certainly Senjuti's own view. Her big grievance seems to be that Churchill prevented Japan taking over her part of India.
Paralleling orientalism, a unique focus on the notion of subaltern geopolitics by Ashutosh (2019) gives a counter topography of South Asian territories that do not center around the state. He revisited the 1955 Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung,
Nehru's foreign policy triumph which soon turned into a disaster. First Chou En Lai took down his pants and made fun of his puny genitals. Then, in 1965, his other great pal, Sukarno, sided with Pakistan in the War. Panchsheel turned out to mean 'We punch you and you reel'.
referring to it as the "threshold moment for postcolonial geography" since it depicted an alternate South Asia with the capability implanted in postcolonial nation-states
to take a nice big bite out of Indian territory. Suddenly, the Indians remembered why it was they had been happy to let the Brits rule them.
where anticolonialism succumbed to postcolonial state formation.
In India, that happened with Partition in 1947.
This event transcended national and state lines, serving as a model for overcoming marginalization and forging new kinds of belonging.
Which failed immediately. Still, what was cool was that Hindus and Muslims got together in Indonesia to kill Chinese Communists.
Foucault’s biopolitics placed human life as the center of calculations,
He made no calculations. He was too stupid.
and rather than preventing a catastrophe, the state-led management or government allowed these calamities to occur to acquire a profit (Foucault et al., 2008).
Like in Bangladesh in 1974?
In the Bengal famine, the government’s role in dealing with the famine, including famine relief, was arranged from the vantage point of prioritizing their interests. The primary focus was on winning the ongoing war, and all requirements related to the war were reinforced.
Don't win wars. Get conquered and be enslaved. Then Foucault will be happy.
Correspondingly, all actions undertaken by the colonial government during the Irish famine were delayed (Nally, 2011a, b).
Ireland had 105 MPs at Westminster in 1847. Why did they do nothing about the famine? The truth is they didn't care.
The government's measures and policies (closure of Irish food depots, delayed suspension of the Navigation Act, retraction of the Corn-laws, etc.) were not aimed at alleviating food scarcity or saving Irish lives; rather, they were all strategically implemented to achieve desirable outcomes for the British.
People act in their own self-interest. How bizarre!
Foucault’s governmentalized state included the population as a field of intervention and political economy was one of the prime objectives of the state. This conception is explicitly portrayed in the Bengal famine.
Where Bengalis let other Bengalis starve just as Irish MPs let Irish men and women starve a century previously.
From compelled tax collection during a crisis to forced participation in the war, Bengal was the site of exploitation for the British and the subaltern body served as a platform to exercise their power.
Churchill should have let the Japanese enslave the Bengalis. Their subaltern bodies could have been used in some Sado-Masochistic way which would have delighted Foucault.
Legg (2006) noted that for analyzing the population expansion of Delhi (1911–1947), the released report on the Relief of Congestion in Delhi paid no attention to the working conditions of the workers or the issues of illness and their causes of transmissions.
Since Indians made that report, what else can you expect?
The measuring parameter was the minimal space required for a person, without delving into the underlying issues. Overcrowding and poor sanitation were blamed only for illness transmission, ignoring the socioeconomic consequences of poor living circumstances and poverty
that consequence is 'illness transmission'
. Humans were not viewed as persons but as objects.
Why, then, were they not sold to the highest bidder or used to create nitrogenous fertilizer?
People were regarded as items that may be discarded at any time in this "extended laboratory of urban modernity" (Legg, 2006, p. 724).
The Delhi of my childhood could be called many things but not 'an extended laboratory' as opposed to latrine.
While analyzing Foucault’s discourses on governmentality and biopower, Duncan (2007) argues that while the government has the purpose of managing the welfare and improvement of its people's lifestyle (wealth, health, life span),
Not in the UK or America. Maybe, in France, Macron slides up to you and tries to manage your health or wealth. The proper response is to kick him in the balls.
the assumption surrounding it involves a modern and broadened view of managing and regulating the population.
Kamala Harris wants to manage and regulate the population. She will enforce minimum size limits on all dicks. Trump will be reclassified as a little girl. Sad.
This 'modern' assumption was founded on such goals, which could only be fulfilled by replacing traditional practices and unscientific beliefs with “modern” rational ones. Through agricultural commercialization, colonial regimes in India devastated indigenous agrarian food systems.
Which is why the population went up- right?
The physical landscape of India was transformed by the construction of dams, telegraph lines, roads, and railways.
Also its people were encouraged to walk on two legs.
Wilson (2016) argued that this geological imperialism was motivated by a desire to enhance a civilization that was perceived to be backward.
Why bother to enhance something shitty? Just replace it.
Often studies (Duncan, 2020; Scott, 1995) include modern governmentality highlighting the daily and moral lives of the colonized population.
Useless studies by shitheads- maybe.
Scott (1995) asserted that modern power is not about capitalism,
Capitalism asserted Scott had shit for brains.
but the very point of its application, which is involving the conditions in which a body has to live and define its life and noted how South Asian governmentalities were inaugurated by the insertion of Europe into the lives of colonial subjects.
But Nepal wasn't conquered because its people are brave, not blathershites. Politics can be about corruption, vendetta and the venting of imaginary grievances. But that sort of politics can lead to the conquest of your country. Some countries, like Britain, were so good at defending themselves that they could provide this service, for a fee, to protectorates and dependencies. But being a dependent suggests that your polity is either unviable or your people are shitty. The study of economics and geography and history can enable a people to do better 'mechanism design' and thus become less shitty. Sadly, Foucault's shite is mere paranoid raving. Going in for it will make you stupider than nature intended.
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