Famine as Policy

Between the great famine of 1876–78 and the Bengal famine of 1943, tens of millions of Indians died in famines that were, in most cases, not caused by an absence of food. Grain moved. Trains ran. Ports exported. The famines were failures of distribution, of policy, and — in the sharpest historical readings — of political will.

The Bengal famine of 1943 is the most documented case. Three million people died in a province from which grain continued to be exported to feed the British war effort. It is one of the most extensively studied episodes in the economic history of the 20th century, and it is a story that Indian schoolchildren are only recently beginning to encounter in their textbooks.

The Initiative takes the great famines seriously as a subject of civic memory. Not to relitigate the past, but to understand how a modern state — Indian or otherwise — should reason about food security, agrarian policy, and the moral weight of administrative decisions in a crisis.

The famines are the sharpest single lens through which to see what colonial governance was, and what a post-colonial state has to be careful never to become.