Hungry Nation
Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India

Independent India's struggle to overcome famine, hunger, and malnutrition, as told through the voices of politicians, planners, and citizens alike.

Benjamin Robert Siegel (Author)

9781108425964, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 April 2018

290 pages, 12 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.7 x 1.7 cm, 0.61 kg

'Siegel's excellent research throws up facts that have traditionally escaped readers, whose preoccupation has largely been with the politics which underscored the departure of the British and the division of the country along communal lines.' Syed Badrul Ahsan, Asian Affairs

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

1. The Bengal famine and the nationalist case for food
2. Independent India of plenty
3. Self-help which ennobles a nation
4. The common hunger of the country: merchants and markets in plenty and want
5. All the disabilities which peasant and land can suffer
6. The ideological origins of the Green Revolution
Conclusion. Landscapes of hunger in contemporary India.

Subject Areas: 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], Asian history [HBJF]