Three years after independence, in the summer of 1950, India's third food minister, Kanaiyalal Maneklal Munshi, travelled from Delhi to Bihar, where famine was rumoured to be breaking out once more. Across the province, Biharis were said to be subsisting on jute leaves, and in poorer villages, tree branches were being ground into sawdust to pad empty stomachs.Footnote 1 In his visit, dismissing talk of a famine to rival Bengal’s, seven years earlier, as ‘baseless’, Munshi had repeated a call that he and other Indian bureaucrats and politicians had been repeating since independence. In order for India to avoid famine, Indians would need to transform their diets, eschewing the wheat and rice that kept the country wedded to the import of foreign grain. Women, Munshi noted, should take the lead on this front, observing one day a week as a cereal-less day, and helping their families wean themselves from an expensive diet subsidized by foreign exchange. Only then, Munshi held, would India be fed and free, and rid of the food controls loathed by most Indians.
Munshi's tone-deaf exhortation met a hostile reception. Hearing word of the familiar call for Indians to change their diets, a Times of India editorial sarcastically wondered if the starvation deaths in Bihar were the victims’ ‘own fault, because they refuse to change their food habits, [and refuse] to eat grass and leaves?’ Was it right, the journalist wondered, ‘that the Biharis should die in this unpatriotic manner when their ears should be attuned to Ministerial sermons?’ The nation could learn much from Bihar, the author continued, by adopting Tuesday as a day for all Indians to have meals of jute leaves. These fasts in the name of economic self-reliance would ‘prepare the stomach for the remaining five cereal-less days of the week’. The satirical journal Shankar's Weekly, a regular and withering critic of government food policy, ran a caricature of a smug K. M. Munshi surveying skeletal Biharis as they gnawed on trees, clutching a proclamation to ‘eat more vegetables’.Footnote 2
In the years immediately following independence, India's political leadership, assisted by civic organizations and a network of women's groups, sought to transform what, how, and how much Indians ate. These campaigns, this article argues, embodied a broader post-colonial project to reimagine the terms of citizenship and development in a new nation facing enduring scarcity.
Drawing upon wartime antecedent, global ideologies of population and land management, and an ethos of austerity imbued with the power to actualize economic self-reliance, the new state urged its citizens to give up rice and wheat, whose imports sapped the nation of the foreign currency needed to forward a plan of industrial development. In place of these staples, India's new citizens were asked to adopt ‘substitute’ and ‘subsidiary’ foods—including bananas, groundnuts, tapioca, yams, beets, and carrots—and give up a meal or more each week to conserve India's scant reserve of grains. And as Indian planners awaited the possibility of more fundamental agricultural advance and agrarian reform, they looked to food technology and the promise of ‘artificial rice’ as a means of making up for India's perennial food deficit. India's women, as anchors of the household—and therefore, the nation—were tasked with facilitating these dietary transformations, and were saddled with the blame when these modernist projects failed.
Indians were being asked, through an appeal to their diets, to embrace notions of rights contingent upon the completion of duties, helping to actualize the economic self-reliance representing ‘real’, and not merely formal, independence.Footnote 3 India's nationalist leaders had ascended to power with the promise of sufficient food for the nation's citizens, yet the actualization of self-rule found those same leaders unable to deliver upon the promise of material well-being. Unable to marshal the resources needed to undertake fundamental agricultural reform—particularly prior to the first Five-Year Plan period—India's planners placed greater faith in their ability to exercise authority over certain aspects of Indian citizenship itself, tying the remaking of practices and sentiments to the reconstruction of a self-reliant national economy.
By 1951, as India's new Planning Commission came to exert greater authority over national development, the state began to retreat from this model: undertaking projects of land reform and agricultural improvement, India's leadership transferred a smaller share of the burden of national development onto its citizens, reanimating these schemes only at moments of acute scarcity. These schemes perennially antagonized opposition politicians, dissenting Congressmen, and citizens themselves, and by the advent of the ‘new agricultural strategy’ in the mid 1960s, the project of reengineering citizenship had been entirely eclipsed by schemes for technological advance. But for a key period immediately after independence, India's national leadership saw in changed diets and artificial foodstuffs the possibility of renegotiating the terms of post-colonial citizenship and development itself.
In recent years, historians and anthropologists have sought to situate the changing meanings of food and nutrition in modern South Asia, drawing upon foundational studies of Indian foodways, ecology, and religion.Footnote 4 This work, in turn, led to a later series of investigations which identified the rise of nutrition as a governing heuristic for colonial administrators in between the two World Wars, giving a new language for those administrators to address the interlinked concerns of population growth, health, labour, and food supply.Footnote 5 An influential call to interrogate the formation and boundaries of Indian ‘national cuisine’ has seen a proliferation of studies of the transformation of cuisines and the cultural boundaries of food.Footnote 6 Much of this work has centred around culinary transformations in Bengal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, demonstrating how the rise of nutrition and transformations to the region's food economy helped produce the Bengali Hindu middle class, facilitate bhadralok nationalism, and articulate cultural difference.Footnote 7 A smaller proportion of this work has focused on North Indian regional contexts, looking to the rise of commensality in urban India, and examining how an inchoate public conversation about food in the Hindi public sphere underwrote the conceptualization of an idealized and Hindu nation.Footnote 8 Most promising are those recent studies which have sought to demonstrate how the subjects of food, hunger, and nutrition underwrote conversations about welfare, political life, and national development.Footnote 9 Broadly, this work has posited a basic continuity in the terms of the food debate, from Indian economic thinkers’ critiques of the colonial state and its neglect of human welfare in the late nineteenth century to the idioms of national development in the decades surrounding independence, and the debates over the ‘right to food’ in contemporary India.Footnote 10
While affirming the many continuities in India's development discourses over time, this article posits a fundamental shift in paradigms of welfare and development in the years surrounding independence, as Indian nationalists assumed control of state institutions and retained the ‘instruments’, but not the ‘idioms’, of national development.Footnote 11 A recent treatment of food policy in these same years has identified a set of fundamental developmental tensions in independent India's food planning efforts; this article suggests that those tensions are best explained by the independent state's appeal to new paradigms of post-colonial citizenship.Footnote 12
These paradigms, this article proposes, owed much to the promises made by Indian nationalists in the closing decades of colonial rule, and to the shift in developmental thinking which accompanied those same nationalists’ assumption of power in 1946–1947. Saddled with the need to reconstruct India's economy, forward a plan of industrial development, and rid itself of the need for foreign imports, India's leadership proposed a vision of citizenship wherein rights derived from the completion of responsibilities, and wherein preferences were to be subsumed in the name of development.Footnote 13 Jawaharlal Nehru captured this paradigm succinctly when he asserted that India's citizens would ‘have to feel that they are partners in the great enterprise of running the State machine [. . .] sharers in both the benefits and obligations’.Footnote 14 Nehru, and the state’s, implicit framework owed much to earlier contractualist models of citizenship, beginning with the colonial formulation of William Lee-Warner, and subsequently refined by jurists such as Srinivasa Sastri.Footnote 15 It affirmed a communitarian reconfiguration of citizenship, wherein a citizen's rights exist dialectically alongside responsibilities to co-citizens, rejecting the libertarian notion of citizenship holding rights to exist without attached and inherent responsibilities.Footnote 16 And its representatives frequently adopted a religious or ethical idiom, drawing from precepts like that in the Bhagavad-Gita which suggested the right to perform a duty, but rejected a right to the fruit of that action.Footnote 17
The residents of independent India were indeed, as Srirupa Roy has argued, ‘infantile citizens’, in need of ‘state tutelage and protection in order to realize the potentials of citizenship’, and offered rights only conditionally by the new nation-state.Footnote 18 Yet the category of citizenship itself in early independent India drew creatively upon pre-existing social and economic debates, and carried with it an increased appeal to ‘public service’, virtue, and the maintenance of national order.Footnote 19 These appeals were increasingly linked to larger questions of national development.Footnote 20 And it was in the state's campaigns for dietary transformation, this article argues, that the connections between the responsibilities of citizenship and the burden of national development were made most explicit.Footnote 21
Global population, national planning, and wartime experimentation
India's mid-century efforts to remake the national diet drew inspiration from a broad range of late-colonial antecedents, from the rise of population as a global and a colonial problem to the idioms of nationalist planning and wartime experiments in food policy.
In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, Indian economic thinkers transformed India's pervasive hunger from a Malthusian inevitability into a trenchant critique of colonial rule.Footnote 22 Yet as famine and hunger emerged as political concerns—threatening colonial administrators not only with death and disease, but with shocks to labour and revenue collection—these administrators began to abstract the idea of India's ‘population’ as a problem of governance.Footnote 23 These developments dovetailed with a broader, global perception of the world's population and its anticipated ‘overpopulation’: in the first decades of the twentieth century, experts across the world began to interlink the planetary problems of ‘land, migration, territory, soil, density, emptiness, arability, colonization, and settlement’.Footnote 24 In the colonial context, the questions of land, populations, and their diets, health, and productive capacity for labour grew increasingly interconnected, frequently through the new scientific language of nutrition.Footnote 25 In India, these concerns began to take institutional form in the 1920s: the founding of the Nutrition Research Laboratories in Coonoor, and the subsequent publication of India's first nutrition textbooks, demonstrated how the legitimacy of colonial sovereignty had grown sutured to the improvement of lands and human health. And studies like American anthropologist and missionary Charlotte Viall Wiser's influential five-year survey of food habits in a United Provinces village suggested how Indians’ putatively fixed habits—a colonial bogey since at least the turn of the twentieth century—might be rebuilt along scientific lines.Footnote 26
Indian nationalist planners, by the 1930s, had begun to conceptualize an increasingly bounded Indian economy, proposing the need for ‘national food planning’ in the name of self-sufficiency.Footnote 27 As Indians increasingly began to perceive the nation as a body whose national development would be predicated upon ‘morally and physically healthy citizens’, they looked to the promise of ‘reconstruction’ to restore that body to health.Footnote 28 Reconstruction would not only plan for food production to meet India's growing needs, but would repair the structural defects of India's food economy: beyond problems of production, the nation's food stores were further lessened by a deficient transportation system and poor storage facilities which condemned supplies to rot and consumption by rodents and insects. Gandhian thinkers further decried the waste of industrial food practices, from the milling of rice to the manufacture of vanaspati [vegetable oil]—but they and modernist planners alike agreed that nearly 10 per cent of India's food was wasted annually.Footnote 29 The imperatives of national food planning were most powerfully expressed by Radhakamal Mukerjee, the Lucknow-based polymath who tied together the concerns of population, land use, and food planning in a series of influential publications in the 1930s and early 1940s, most notably his 1938 Food Planning for Four Hundred Millions.Footnote 30 Among his proposals was a forceful call to promote ‘a mixed diet based on several staples’ in place of rice and wheat, promoting beans, pulses, and edible roots as salutary for national health, and invaluable ‘insurance against the shortage of staples’.Footnote 31
India's nationalist planners and their incipient institutions began to echo the call for a transformed diet: in 1935, the nationalist physicist Meghnad Saha began underwriting, through the National Institute of Science, the publication of Science and Culture, a journal which emerged as the primary vehicle for debates over the future course of national reconstruction.Footnote 32 In an early issue, Subhas Chandra Bose submitted to the journal a list of key questions about national planning, asking whether it would be desirable to plan a national diet for India.Footnote 33 The question of a ‘standard diet’ did not presuppose the flattening of culture in the name of national unity, but it did animate discussions over systematic agricultural planning with India's food needs in mind. When the Congress Working Committee, headed by Jawaharlal Nehru, met that same year to formalize a plan of national reconstruction, it recommended that such planning be coordinated with the new Central Nutrition Board.Footnote 34 Yet Congress's planning agenda was interrupted in 1939, when Britain's declaration of war against Germany on behalf of India led to the party's mass resignation from its provincial ministries.
The experience of the Bengal Famine of 1943 underscored the fundamental insecurity of diets deriving their weight from cereal staples, and the need to fashion a national diet more resilient to inevitable disruptions. In the wake of famine, India's colonial administrators relinquished moral authority over the food question, leaving nationalists with a potent claim to legitimacy. Yet those nationalists would take many cues from the colonial government's embrace of austerity, and a new set of economic paradigms linking individual behaviour to national outcomes. In the face of nationalist ferment, the British government relied increasingly upon the putatively neutral idioms of economics to express wartime imperatives.Footnote 35 And it was under the auspices of the permanent economic adviser to the Government of India, Sir Theodore Gregory, that the transformation of individual consumption was formally sutured to the promise of national strength. Gregory, a confidant of John Maynard Keynes, had served in this position since 1938, exerting a heavy influence over India's wartime economic planning.Footnote 36 His 1941 treatise, ‘Problem of Personal Economy in War-Time’, posited an intensified connection between individual behaviour and macroeconomic outcomes during wartime: even if India's scarcity conditions allowed for only minimal reduction of consumption, Gregory asserted, guidance, exhortation, and ‘sumptuary legislation’ were well suited to Indian economic and cultural contexts.Footnote 37 Gregory's oversight of many food committees suggests his influence on later state projects. As chair of the 1943 Foodgrains Policy Committee, Gregory moderated a dispute between Debi Prasad Khaitan, a Calcutta jute merchant representing the Indian Chamber of Commerce, and W. H. Kirby, rationing advisor to the Government of India.Footnote 38 To Khaitan's suggestion that, in the new Calcutta rationing programme, individuals be granted some mechanism for choosing their preferred grain, Kirby and Gregory affirmed the notion that choice should be ‘entirely subsidiary’ to ‘keeping the people off the starvation point’. The notion that preference should be subsumed to national ends would grow increasingly important as nationalist food planners took control of policy-making bodies.
Wartime events would bring this notion to new prominence in the Food Department. The fall of Burma in 1942 prompted a memorandum within the department suggesting that the public should be encouraged to replace rice with other grains, since a preponderance of India's rice stores were alleged to come from Burmese imports.Footnote 39 By early 1944, Delhi's Lady Irwin College, the premier institution of home economics in India, had been tasked with planning wheat and kambu [pearl millet] dishes for South India's ‘habitual rice-eaters’; in Hyderabad, a thousand people were reported to have attended a cooking demonstration at the War Services Exhibition.Footnote 40 The import of Australian wheat in September led the Madras government to add wheat in place of some of its rice ration, with a ‘wheat propaganda officer’ appointed to help popularize its use. And along the Malabar coast, 93 public and private ‘Civic Restaurants’ were set up to showcase new recipes. Yet the alleged beneficiaries of these schemes chafed at the notion that their diets were composed of interchangeable calories. Bombay's nationalist Free Press Journal decried its citizens ‘being made to swallow barley’ in place of regular grains.Footnote 41 ‘Who are the people whose food is barley,’ it groused, ‘and for whose benefit was this barley ordered?’ Rationing officers had looked favourably upon the deployment of wheat and tapioca in India's South.Footnote 42 But in Cochin, famine relief workers with experience in distribution noted that tapioca could only be deployed in dire emergencies to pad ‘those parts of the stomach which the ration is not enough to fill’.Footnote 43
Indians’ putatively unchangeable dietary preferences—particularly those of rice-eaters—were occasionally used to exculpate colonial officials for its late colonial failings. Beverley Nichols's Verdict on India, a popular apology for British rule in India, recounted a train ride spent with an Indian officer in the Food Administration in the wake of the 1943 famine. ‘Food’, Nichols recounted the officer declaring, in an exoneration of British famine policy ‘means [rice], and nothing else. It doesn't mean meat, nor fish nor eggs nor potatoes; it doesn't mean corn, nor millet, nor even bajri [pearl millet] which bears many resemblances to rice. [. . .] If you gave [Bengalis] anything else, most of them wouldn't know what to do with it.’Footnote 44 Yet in the final years of colonial rule, the Department of Food increasingly touted the possibility of Indian dietary reform. In late 1944, W. R. Aykroyd—the influential nutritionist and director of the government's Nutrition Research Laboratories in Coonoor since 1935—noted that wartime efforts had ‘shown that it is possible to exercise a considerable degree of control over the diet of the people’, and that popular canteens staffed by women might be useful in promoting ‘socially inferior’ grains in peacetime.Footnote 45 Ground-level administrators debated the quantity of millets, maize, or other grains which could be substituted in rations before courting public disaffection.Footnote 46 But so, too, did they follow the example of the Madras Food Department, which in early 1946 appointed a permanent public relations officer charged with a press, radio, poster, pamphlet, and cinema campaign designed to explain rationing and austerity schemes, and to popularize unfamiliar foods in the hungry south.Footnote 47 These eleventh-hour campaigns hinted at the more ambitious reengineering of citizenship and diets in tandem that India's nationalist leadership would soon attempt.
Independence, national reconstruction, and the food question
The post-war ascension of the Indian National Congress to power saw a fundamental transformation to the orientation of development planning. The nationalist leadership, prior to the war, had ‘intended to accomplish what they had critiqued the colonial state for not being able to do, i.e., to bring about the benefits of material progress through scientific means to be shared equitably among all citizens’.Footnote 48 Yet its post-war assumption of centralized state power saw the Congress ‘[lose] sight of the vision of eradicating poverty, morbidity, and illiteracy that had inspired the debates on national development in the colonial era’: the ‘instruments’ of national development came to enjoy primacy over its ‘idioms’, drawing greater inspiration from colonial bodies like the Department of Planning and Development rather than Congress's National Planning Committee.Footnote 49
Famine in Bengal and enduring post-war shortages had underscored the calls for a transformed national diet: the National Planning Committee, meeting in 1945 and 1946, affirmed that wartime experiences had ‘woken up Government to its wider sphere of duty: [meeting] the food requirements of the people’.Footnote 50 Another sub-committee on national priorities, chaired by Jawaharlal Nehru, affirmed that in ‘any well-conceived plan of national Development, the provision of adequate food must be the most important item with the highest priority’.Footnote 51 As world food prices soared, provincial rations were slashed, and India's representatives petitioned for an increased allotment of grains at the Combined Food Board in Washington DC, the formation of India's interim government in September 1946 saw control of India's food policy shift into the hands of veteran Congressman Rajendra Prasad, designated minister of Food and Agriculture.Footnote 52 Yet as the incipient government forwarded the imperatives of economic self-reliance, shifting the object of development from human welfare to national autarky, it looked increasingly to citizens themselves to undertake the burden of that task.Footnote 53
As nutritionists and economists continued to draft plans for the reconstruction of India's food economy and national diet, customers voiced resentment at the substitutes for wheat and rice which continued to appear in their rations.Footnote 54 India's Bureau of Public Administration, recognizing ‘the difficulty of persuading the people to consume [coarse] grains such as maize and barley’, suggested that shops appeal to consumers’ sense of national sacrifice when distributing them.Footnote 55 The Congress leadership increasingly framed the food crisis as a matter best solved through individual or household-level action, affirming in a December 1945 meeting that ‘everyone should realize his personal duty [regarding food] and perform it to the best of his ability, believing that if everyone acted likewise India will be able to surmount all difficulties with courage and confidence and be able to save thousands of poor lives’.Footnote 56 A Congress Working Committee meeting in March 1946 contended that the responsibility for conserving scarce foodstuffs fell at the level of the household.Footnote 57
Simultaneously, Indian scientists were envisioning new technologies by which individuals and households might actualize their duty to conserve. Addressing the 1946 Indian Science Congress in Bangalore, the agricultural scientist M. Afzal Husain called for the establishment of a ‘National Institute of Food Technology’ to incubate synthetic foodstuffs: beyond promoting the consumption of yeasts, tapioca, and tubers, reducing cereal consumption and freeing land for valuable cash crops, the institute would promote ‘synthetic rice’ to free India from the ravages of Malthusian logic.Footnote 58 Later in the year, the chair of the Indian Institute of Science's biotechnology department, V. Subrahmanyan, wrote to the Ministry of Food to propose that a new Food Conservation Board include in its mandate the promotion of ‘less commonly used food materials’ like groundnuts, soybeans, sweet potato, and tapioca, which had been given new priority in planning.Footnote 59 A year later, the scientist would publish an extensive article in Science and Culture outlining his plan for an organization in New Delhi that would undertake this task.Footnote 60 The journal's editors responded approvingly, contending that ‘that which appears to be a strange method of getting food today may become the usual method tomorrow’.Footnote 61
The arrival of independence in August 1947 saw India's citizens looking expectantly to the state to make good on its promise of sustenance. The depth of India's food crisis had grown even more pronounced by partition: the bulk of British India's arable land was now across the border, in Pakistan. The refugees who streamed into camps in West Bengal needed massive quantities of foodgrains, and those who arrived in cities strained India's already-overburdened rationing system.Footnote 62 Beyond its immediate human toll, communal violence also frequently saw the looting and burning of urban grain stores.Footnote 63 Days after independence, the new nation's Department of Information and Broadcasting asked press members to help stave off food riots, warning that ‘India's political freedom must not be allowed to prove illusory by a complete collapse on her food front.’Footnote 64 ‘Until now,’ the author of a Hindi booklet, Our Food Problem, wrote a few months before independence, ‘we have blamed the British for the food problem. But now, as they prepare to depart, we are confident that our own, people-loving government will reach out to farmers, increase our national production, and increase the prosperity of the people through the proper distribution of food.’Footnote 65 A Congress organizer, introducing the book Our Food and Population Problem, affirmed that same nationalist promise a few months later. ‘If a country cannot give its citizens the right food,’ he asked, ‘and enough of it, are not its economic arrangements useless?’Footnote 66
Indian industrialists, eager to free the Indian economy from imports and increase its citizens’ purchasing power, asserted a distinct influence over the nation's economic arrangements. Two of the authors of the ‘Bombay Plan’, the textile magnate Lala Shri Ram and industrialist Purshottamdas Thakurdas, quickly assumed control of two major food planning bodies.Footnote 67 Shri Ram, who would soon be placed in charge of the subsidiary food campaign, reached out to representatives of the Ministry of Agriculture's ‘Grow More Food Campaign’ in June 1947.Footnote 68 Predicting the agricultural losses of partition, Shri Ram encouraged the Ministry to promote the production of potatoes, yams, beets, carrots, and tapioca. The Indian consumer should ‘turn to maize, bananas, and date palms, and above all, grow food in every free area of land. [Not] doing so should be considered an unpatriotic act.’ Rajendra Prasad soon appointed a Foodgrains Policy Committee with Thakurdas as its chair. Thakurdas—who had previously chaired Bombay's Provincial Food and Commodity Advisory Board and the Central Foodgrains Policy Committee of 1943—echoed Shri Ram in recommending the inclusion of subsidiary foods in rations to lessen the demand for cereals.Footnote 69
The recommendation of these industrialists prompted loud objections. Bombay's supply commissioner wrote to the Committee to protest, noting that ‘bananas, sweet potatoes, carrots, turnips are supplementary and not substitute foods’.Footnote 70 P. C. Joshi, general secretary of the Communist Party of India, lambasted the ‘reactionary recommendations of the [committee] dominated by representatives of Big Business and rich growers’, which had eschewed discussion of agrarian reform.Footnote 71 Yet objections like these were soon drowned out by state representatives who increasingly linked the question of diet to citizens’ responsibility for national unity and development. In March 1947, Rajendra Prasad presided over a ‘Food and Nutrition Exhibition’ in Delhi, showcasing alternatives to wheat and rice through lectures, films, and cooking demonstrations to female guests.Footnote 72 In December 1948, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting requested media outlets to join the campaign for changed diets, appealing ‘to the upper class people to avoid and discourage all activities involving waste of food, and to urge on them the need for a minimum use of cereals in their diet, [enabling] the less rich classes to get more cereals’.Footnote 73
In the months after independence, Nehru and the Congress's left-leaning modernizers’ national food planning schemes were assailed by Mohandas Gandhi, who, with the support of influential businessmen, successfully campaigned against food controls.Footnote 74 Yet Gandhians and modernists found common ground in asking citizens to steward the project of self-sufficiency in food. Decrying the ‘centralisation of foodstuffs’ in an October 1947 prayer meeting, Gandhi asked citizens to grow food at home and undertake regular fasts. ‘If the whole nation realized the beauty of [religious] partial self-denial,’ he contended, ‘India would more than cover the deficit caused by the voluntary deprivation of foreign aid . . . If many must die of starvation, let us at least earn the credit of having done our best in the way of self-help, which ennobles a nation.’Footnote 75
Votaries of a village-centred model of India's economic reconstruction would lose out to the modernizing vision of the Nehruvian state. But on the food front, Jawaharlal Nehru and other bureaucrats would frequently use the Gandhian language of self-reliance, denial, and cooperation to express the imperatives of state-driven development.Footnote 76 As prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru's endorsement was materially and symbolically essential in the campaign for Indians to practise austerity and transform their food habits. In public, Nehru cast these tasks as fundamental responsibilities of post-colonial citizenship, framing personal transformation and individual responsibility as a critical instrument for national development.Footnote 77 Privately, Nehru brooded over the nation's foundering agricultural schemes and Indians’ unwillingness to cooperate with these plans in what Judith Brown had described as his characteristic ‘exasperated paternalism’.Footnote 78
The prime minister's support underwrote new scientific initiatives: the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research had called, at independence, for a laboratory to advance food technology in the service of the nation, and Subrahmanyan was tasked with establishing it on land donated by the Mysore government.Footnote 79 Nehru inaugurated the All-India Institute of Food Technology in late 1948. ‘We are eating wrong things,’ Nehru declared in his address, ‘and we are eating too much of them.’Footnote 80 Nehru exhorted the Institute to help India conserve foodstuffs by developing ‘new types of composite foods which will be useful in times of emergency’.Footnote 81 The veteran Congressman C. Rajagopalachari—long a foe of centralized planning on Gandhian grounds—would later defy the prime minister by unilaterally removing food controls in 1951, as chief minister of Madras. But at the inauguration, the then-governor general of India echoed the prime minister in a second address. ‘If the cow or the goat,’ Rajagopalachari asked, ‘can build her own body and make and give beautiful milk out of the simple grass or leaves she eats, why should man with all the science available to him relegate grass and leaves to the realm of inedible things?’Footnote 82
Returning to Delhi, Nehru directed the Ministry of Food and Agriculture in February 1949 to examine whether Delhi's open spaces—including the length of New Delhi's imposing Rajpath, in particular—could be used to plant food crops, as an example of the importance of citizens growing their own food.Footnote 83 On the same day, inaugurating a planned township several hours from Delhi, the prime minister reported that he had begun subsisting on a mixture of wheat and sweet potato flower, and urged citizens to emulate his example. ‘The people’, he warned, ‘should understand their duties and responsibilities [. . .] in making the motherland great. They talk of rights and privileges—and forget all about duties.’Footnote 84 Nehru's timing was not incidental: privately, the prime minister was lamenting the failure of the Grow More Food campaign, complaining about Food Minister Jairamdas Daulatram's mediocre performance in a letter to C. Rajagopalachari, and urging a redoubling of the effort to promote new foods as staples.Footnote 85 Addressing the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, Nehru estimated that the 10 per cent food deficit India faced in a bad year could be compensated for only through increased output, more land, or inducing Indians to change their food habits en masse.Footnote 86
The advisory visit of John Boyd-Orr to India in April and May lent new credence to Nehru's exhortations. The former secretary of the Food and Agriculture Organisation had long viewed India as one of the world's most important battlegrounds in the world's struggle for more food: Boyd-Orr had contributed a foreword to Nagendranath Gangulee's 1939 primer on nutrition in India, and the Food and Agriculture Organisation chief's proclamations were cited reverentially in Hindi texts on food and population.Footnote 87 Boyd-Orr spoke at Teen Murti, the prime minister's residence, to urge ‘a war-like psychology and drive on the part of the people and Government alike’ with regard to the food problem.Footnote 88 Several days later, Nehru delivered an address on All India Radio, insisting that ‘there must be no waste and there must be no feasting while we fight for every ounce of food’.Footnote 89 Nehru repeated the call in several addresses over the following weeks, exhorting every Indian to think of him or herself as a ‘soldier on the food front’, planting food crops and stamping out waste.Footnote 90 Media across the political spectrum rallied behind the prime minister's suggestions.Footnote 91 Nehru wrote to India's chief ministers in summer 1949 to encourage them to replace the rice or wheat in their province's rations with a substitute starch once a week, and to grow subsidiary foods on their estates.Footnote 92 Nehru did so himself in July, having the lawns of his residence planted with groundnut, millet, maize, and sweet potatoes, in addition to bananas, tapioca, bitter gourd, and aubergines—harking back to the Second World War, when the viceroy and several governors and princes replanted their own estates as vegetable gardens.Footnote 93 Indira Gandhi gave tours to visitors, and Nehru proudly proclaimed that his household was free of rice, subsisting instead upon sweet potato.Footnote 94
Aware of the impropriety of public feasting in the face of widespread shortage, India's food ministers met in Delhi in August 1949 to discuss the imposition of new food austerity measures. Extending wartime legislation, the Ministry of Food enacted a uniform, national Guest Control Order structuring the types and quantity of food legally permissible at gatherings, allowing for unlimited attendees at events where non-rationed food would be served, and capping the number at 25 for those serving wheat or rice.Footnote 95 (Provincial governments, however, balked at the enforcement of these rules, and even ministerial gatherings saw them flouted.)Footnote 96
These enforcement failures did little to shake Nehru from his belief in the possibilities of remaking Indian notions of national responsibility through dietary transformations. Britain's high commissioner reported on these campaigns with anxiety, worrying that directives like Nehru's were inadequate palliatives for India's serious food problem.Footnote 97 Yet Nehru expressed a deepening commitment to the notion that Indians must remould their diets in the name of national development. In a letter to Jairamdas Daulatram in late October, Nehru encouraged the food minister to cut out rice from the rations allotted to wheat-eating areas. ‘We must take this risk in regard to rice,’ Nehru wrote, ‘and I believe that the country would be prepared for it, if only we set about it in right earnest and tell them what we are doing and what we expect them to do. If certain pinch is felt here and there, we need not be afraid.’Footnote 98 When West Bengal's chief minister, B. C. Roy, wrote to Nehru to appeal for increased provision of foodgrains, the prime minister tied his support to a demand that Roy persuade Bengalis to change their food habits. ‘It is dangerous’, Nehru warned, suggesting that Bengalis might take to tapioca, ‘for us to be subservient to a particular type of food which may not be available tomorrow. We live on the verge of a world war, and no one knows what will happen.’Footnote 99 Implicit in Nehru's order was the notion that adherence to regional tastes was an impediment to establishing the type of citizenship that would forge national unity through national self-reliance.Footnote 100
‘Miss a meal’, subsidiary foods, and the Indian ersatz
In the wake of independence, public officials and institutions were increasingly expected to embody emerging notions of citizenship and service, and representatives of civic society similarly took this task upon themselves.Footnote 101 Accordingly, the state-driven efforts to transform diets through an appeal to the responsibilities of citizenship were matched by a parallel effort from civil society. In September 1949, a group of Indian leaders—including representatives of the Congress, the Constituent Assembly, the All-India Harijan Sevak Sangh, the Servants of India Society, All-India Refugee Association, All-India Women's Conference, the All-India Hindu Mahasabha, and the All-India Anglo-Indian Association—signed their support for the ‘Miss a Meal Movement’, organized by Jag Parvesh Chandra, a Lahore refugee turned Delhi politician, consumer advocate, and Congress worker.Footnote 102 The group asked Indians to pledge to give up one meal a week, contributing the grains saved to a national fund, and in so doing, foster ‘the national habit of uniting and striving jointly at a time of crisis and emergency’.Footnote 103
Rajendra Prasad and Rajkumari Amrit Kaur—a founder of the All-India Women's Conference, and independent India's new health minister—gave early support, prompting bureaucrats and politicians nationwide to affirm their own approval.Footnote 104 The governor of Punjab's pledge of drawing only six days’ rations was followed by the Bombay premier's announcement that he would be skipping two meals a week; Bengal's minister of civil supplies declared that he had given up rice altogether.Footnote 105 Citizens were urged to make food pledges, like that asked of non-cultivators in Bombay to ‘reduce my consumption of food grains by using non-cereal foods and to avoid wastage of food in the kitchen and on the table’.Footnote 106 Ration shops in Uttar Pradesh began to stock pledge forms, and representatives of government godowns announced that they would reduce grain supply to stores in proportion to the number of pledges received.Footnote 107
In early 1950, Chandra spoke about the movement to a gathering of businessmen and bureaucrats in Hyderabad, estimating that the movement would make up for 7 per cent of India's estimated 10 per cent total food deficit, saving approximately 400 crores rupees each year—‘the total sum of the amount spent by the nation on 52 meals a year’.Footnote 108 Yet more than killing the black market and freeing India from the yoke of foreign imports, missing a meal would
train you in the art of self-discipline, for control of the palate, as Gandhiji taught us, was the basis of self-discipline. . .A country become a great nation, when the people living in that country are not just human beings but think, behave, and act like true citizens, ready to discharge their duties willingly and gladly. A true citizen is he who thinks more of his duties and less of his rights; for in the final analysis, rights flow from duties well performed. Rights divorced from the performance of duties, is a contradiction in terms and a mockery of democracy.
Chandra's speech neatly linked together the project of dietary transformation and the reimagination of rights in post-colonial India. Yet his movement was not infrequently lambasted as misguided and ineffectual. One former prince wrote to Chandra to gripe that ‘Out of the 300 and odd millions [in India], His Highness thinks not more than one million could profitably miss a meal. The other 300 million are so under-nourished that they should get an extra meal and not miss a meal.’Footnote 109 Orissa's law minister concurred that ‘more than half of the population do not get two meals a day. . .To such a population I feel diffident to suggest the campaign of fasting.’Footnote 110 Yet the ethos resonated in official publicity. Addressing the nation over All-India Radio on the food crisis and the perils of foreign aid, Nehru urged Indians to take up the Movement's signature act. ‘Each one of us,’ he enjoined, ‘should demonstrate active sympathy and desire to help by giving up one meal a week.’Footnote 111 Nehru proposed sending surplus foodgrains to famine victims, and the Ministry of Food began to devise mechanisms for collecting and distributing them.Footnote 112
As public institutions and representatives of civil society urged an austerity ethos, the Central Food Technological Research Institute and the government's Subsidiary Food Production Committee worked to provide the institutional and scientific mechanisms for the transformation of Indian diets. In early 1949, as scarcity loomed once more, the Ministry of Health had inquired of state governments whether banana roots were eaten by the poor in their respective provinces, looking to promote them in daily diets and scarcity crises alike.Footnote 113 The Ministry of Food examined a similar proposal to distribute imported Iraqi dates in place of rationed cereals.Footnote 114 These schemes grew more concrete with the creation of the Subsidiary Food Production Committee, chaired by industrialist Lala Shri Ram, and staffed by the senior Madras bureaucrat Sonti Ramamurty and the secretary of the Ministry of Food. Shri Ram reported directly to Rajendra Prasad, and asserted ‘that meeting the shortage of food is not merely the business of the Governments but of the 330 million people of the country’.Footnote 115 Taking as its mandate the promotion of bananas, sweet potatoes, tapioca, groundnut flour, and synthetic cereals, the Committee met throughout the following year, building upon the work of the 1947 Foodgrains Policy Committee. The Committee's report posited that a ‘substantial reduction in the consumption of cereals in this country’ could be effected through the production and consumption of alternate foodstuffs, beginning by appointing development officers to foster the expansion of each crop.Footnote 116
The campaign offered, at least in theory, the possibility of feeding more citizens at no cost to the state. And as one British intelligence offer reported, the ‘attempt to persuade the public to change their diet by eating more “substitute” foods like potatoes and sweet potatoes is discernible in all statements by government officials about food self-sufficiency.’Footnote 117 One such statement came from Governor General C. Rajagopalachari, who called in a radio address for a ‘fanatical zeal’ for the food campaign. ‘The fashion must be set,’ he said, ‘for greater consumption of ragi, cholam, maize and millet. . . . Like jail-going, hobnobbing with outcastes, spinning, [and] wearing Gandhi-caps, millet food must be made a patriotic high class fashion.’Footnote 118 In August 1949, Shri Ram petitioned India's provincial food members to embrace the campaign, through publicity and by bringing subsidiary foods into the ration as soon as production targets were met.Footnote 119 The Ministry of Food similarly asked provincial ministries to consider distributing subsidiary foods in place of wheat and rice, requesting rationing administrations to estimate ‘how far [their] increased consumption can be popularised’.Footnote 120 By the end of the year, a glut of bananas and sweet potatoes were being made available at cooperative stores and ration shops in Bombay Province; in the new guest control and public austerity measures enacted across India the following year, subsidiary foods would continue to be permitted in unlimited quantities.Footnote 121
Encouraged by the drive for subsidiary and substitute foods, the Central Food Technological Research Institute revived earlier, futuristic proposals for an ersatz grain to replace rice and wheat. The Institute's director, V. Subrahmanyan, had pledged to underwrite Nehru's promise of food self-sufficiency by 1951, promising that a quarter of the nation's grain consumption could be replaced by that date with sweet potatoes or tapioca.Footnote 122 ‘Artificial rice’ would be a key component of that campaign. As early as 1945, the nationalist agricultural scientist M. Afzal Husain had postulated that since ‘chemists have produced rayon, nylon, [and] plastics’, there should ‘be no reason why they cannot produce artificial rice from tuber starch’.Footnote 123 And a decade earlier, Sonti Ramamurty of the Subsidiary Food Production Committee had witnessed a Travancore maharajah importing tapioca into the state during the war. The schoolchildren fed on tapioca alone, Ramamurty recalled, were ‘rickety’, but the civil servant continued to tout the possibility of a rice substitute based on tapioca supplemented with groundnut flour for protein.Footnote 124 In 1948, Ramamurty had contracted a manufacturing firm in Coimbatore to formulate a prototype, and on the Subsidiary Food Production Committee, he took charge of the ‘artificial rice’ project, while Lala Shri Ram steered the production of ‘a flour mixed from tapioca and wheat flour to make chapattis in North India’. Publicly declaring his intent to manufacture a substitute cereal that would satisfy ‘the psychology of people accustomed to eat cereals’, Ramamurty asked the Central Food Technological Research Institute's V. Subrahmanyan to undertake pilot trials for the rice in Kerala.Footnote 125 A pilot plant was established in Mysore, and the Committee set to work formulating distribution plans for South and North India.Footnote 126
The project captured the imagination of the bureaucrats whose more staid agricultural schemes were stagnating. In April 1951, Rajendra Prasad sampled chapattis and halva made from tapioca in the Central Food Technological Research Institute laboratories.Footnote 127 In the summer, Subrahmanyan was called to speak to ministers in Travancore-Cochin about the possibility of scaling up consumption of synthetic rice.Footnote 128 In Delhi, one minister surprised colleagues with the announcement that the rice they had eaten at lunch was in fact the Institute's ersatz version.Footnote 129 ‘The grains that we now make are round,’ V. Subrahmanyan proclaimed at the pilot plant in Mysore, but ‘we can make beautiful, white rice-shaped grains which can satisfy even the most fastidious consumers’.Footnote 130
Fastidiousness aside, Indian consumers took poorly to these ersatz grains, evidencing scant demand. An early, critical assessment from Madras pointed to the reluctance of producers to switch to tapioca from proven cash crops, and the dim potential for the ‘dietetic habits of a nation [to] be altered by propaganda, persuasion or fiat’.Footnote 131 The conclusion was not unwarranted. Artificial rice was deployed to a small famine in Southern India in 1952, but there was little interest outside of famine conditions.Footnote 132 The first artificial rice factory in Trivandrum was shuttered shortly after its inauguration.Footnote 133 Save for a small number of famine victims in Rayalaseema, producers in Mysore, and enthusiastic bureaucrats in Delhi, few Indians ever tasted the much-touted artificial rice.Footnote 134 Before production could be adequately scaled up, the state had grown reluctant to ask citizens to reimagine their rights, their responsibilities, and their diets in tandem.Footnote 135
‘A work suited primarily to the genius of women’
As male bureaucrats and scientists forwarded the twinned imperatives of austerity and alternate foodstuffs, Indian women, the ‘anchors of the household’, were saddled with the burden of remoulding the diets of their husbands and children, and in so doing, recasting the relationship between the household and the nation.
Colonial planners and nationalist organizations had cast women as essential agents of India's national development, interweaving the aims of household health and national well-being.Footnote 136 One of the earliest primers on ‘domestic science’ in India linked the promulgation of the field to the advancement of national health and hygiene.Footnote 137 W. R. Aykroyd would nonetheless lament, a decade later, that ‘the women of India have not yet been enlisted in the campaign for improved nutrition’; the National Planning Committee's 1938 sub-committee on ‘woman's role in planned economy’ suggested that women would play a key role in constructing a national diet after independence.Footnote 138 During the Bengal Famine, the left-wing Mahila Atmaraksha Samiti—the ‘Women's Self-Defence League’—had affirmed repeatedly that women's duties towards the nation were split equally between self-defence and the provision of food.Footnote 139 The connection between the maintenance of the home and the uplift of the nation grew more explicit after independence. Social worker Rameshwari Nehru would write, shortly after independence, that ‘the home is the foundation on which the structure of society is built’, and that its improvement would ultimately underwrite national development.Footnote 140
The All-India Women's Conference, well connected to the mainstream Congress leadership, emerged as the dominant voice of nationalist women after independence.Footnote 141 One of the Conference's presidents would declare that ‘our aim is to make the woman a healthy and useful member of society; a good mother, self-reliant, and a responsible citizen conscious of her rights and responsibilities’.Footnote 142 Those rights and responsibilities quickly converged around the provision of food to the home and the nation. In 1946, the Conference declared that the 14th of every month was to be designated a ‘Special Food Day’, tasking each chapter with teaching its members ‘the duty of the people to cooperate’ in the tasks of avoiding waste and using substitute foods.Footnote 143 A second resolution in 1949 saw the All-India Women's Conference ask its members to begin growing substitute foods in kitchen gardens; soon, the group organized mobile demonstrations and canteens to promote the same.Footnote 144 One member asserted that the conservation of food and the promotion of new foodstuffs ‘is a work suited primarily to the genius of women. Let it not be said that women have failed in a task of such supreme national importance.’Footnote 145
Yet even as the Conference affirmed, through its initiatives, the state's contention that ‘women, more than men, could effectively help Government in the solution of food problem’, India's bureaucrats assigned to women the burden of failure for their modernist schemes.Footnote 146 Nehru was particularly damning in his twinning of female agency and the food crisis. Visiting the Gujarati village of Gandhinagar, he contended that women should not complain about grain shortages, but instead, ‘carry on with what they get’. Noting India's expenditure on food imports, he asserted that it had been women's desire for sugar which had forced the government to purchase it from abroad; their propensity for black market purchases of rationed commodities had further undermined government food control efforts.Footnote 147 The failure of women to keep up the new imperatives of post-colonial citizenship was seen as underwriting India's continued dependence.
All-India Women's Conference members nonetheless continued to view their efforts as instrumental in modelling domestic solutions to the food crisis. In July 1949, a month after Jawaharlal Nehru delivered a series of speeches on citizenship and the food problem on All India Radio, Indira Gandhi convened a meeting that led to the formation of the Women's Food Committee, Delhi, seeking to popularize subsidiary foods among women.Footnote 148 In Bombay, Lilavati Munshi, outgoing All-India Women's Conference president and wife of food minister K. M. Munshi, organized several state-funded substitute food exhibitions.Footnote 149 A year later, in the wake of the Subsidiary Foods Production Committee's report, the Ministry of Food announced that it would be turning over the task of substitute food promotion to a new All-India Women's Council for Supplementary Foods, funded by the Ministries of Food and Agriculture and comprising ‘representatives of all-India Women's Organisations and prominent women active in public, social and Parliamentary life’.Footnote 150
The Council soon organized a series of exhibitions in Bombay and Delhi demonstrating recipes without rice and wheat. Rajendra Prasad inaugurated the Delhi exhibition, where Lilavati Munshi contended that the nation's food problem ‘had baffled the greatest of our men’, but that women would no doubt find a solution, given that ‘it is their province to handle food’.Footnote 151 The Council's first booklet, touting substitute foods costing eight annas or less, was soon supplemented by an ambitious two-volume cookbook.Footnote 152 And after two initial schemes for cafeterias in Bombay fell through, the Council opened the Annapoorna restaurant in Delhi in January 1951. India's ‘most democratic restaurant’ was staffed by women and served a buffet of substitute foods, quickly becoming an important political pilgrimage site. Beyond ‘thousands of middle class and poor customers’, the cafeteria drew a steady stream of parliamentarians and diplomats, in addition to catering the 1951 Indian National Congress in Delhi. Appealing to women as the ‘food ministers’ of their own households, the All-India Women's Conference continued to expand the Annapoorna chain nationwide, establishing 32 branches by 1955.Footnote 153
Even as the state continued to fund and subsidize the All-India Women's Conference and its Annapoorna chain of restaurants, the nation's bureaucratic leadership continued to saddle women with the blame for Indian households’ putative inability or unwillingness to change their food habits. As late as the mid 1950s, Nehru was proclaiming that on the matter of food, ‘women will justify themselves [sic] not so much by making demands but by the part they play in the building up of new India’.Footnote 154 If rights, in post-colonial India's emerging conception of citizenship, stemmed only from the proper completion of duties, that compact was expected even more acutely of the nation's women.Footnote 155
Against the backdrop of a worsening food crisis, and India's continued inability to meet the targets of the renewed Grow More Food Campaign, legislators, writers, and satirists inveighed against the calls to miss meals and transform diets, their objections an implicit rejection of the new state's transferral of developmental responsibilities. These critiques linked substitute foods to the historical deprivations of famine, and rejected the modernist notion that, in the name of nation-building, one calorie might be just as readily taken as another.Footnote 156
The earliest, most trenchant critiques came from the Communist Party of India, which accused the Congress of promoting subsidiary foods and austerity at the expense of real agrarian reform. The Communist Party of India broadsheet People's Age reported frequently upon the callous statements of India's food officials. A 1948 report lambasted the Foodgrains Policy Committee's emphasis on substitute foods, and took Jairamdas Daulatram to task for asking a group of villagers, as they waited outside a ration depot, ‘why after getting political freedom they have made themselves slaves of taste?’Footnote 157 Two years later, as scarcity broke out nationwide, a party circular doubled down on these charges. ‘They advise the starving people to “miss a meal a week”,’ it read, ‘who are not getting even one full meal a day!’Footnote 158 These partisan critiques soon dovetailed with a broader assault on India's food ministers and bureaucrats, like the jabs at K. M. Munshi which appeared in the Times of India and Shankar's Weekly.
Increasingly, legislators and politicians voiced their own objections to the state's quixotic projects. Later in 1950, Madras parliamentarian and physician A. L. Mudaliar—later director of the World Health Organization—deplored that ‘when such suggestions are made to people who miss not only a meal in a week, but a meal every day, and who have neither vegetables nor anything else to consume, we ask: “What is the competence of the honourable Minister for Food to give such advice?”’Footnote 159 An internal Ministry of Agriculture review assessed India's various Guest Control Orders as ineffective as they were unpopular, useful ‘mainly for the psychological value’.Footnote 160 Nehru's estranged secretary, M. O. Mathai, would recall the prime minister's faith in the Subsidiary Food Production Committee as akin to a ‘drowning man clutching at a straw’.Footnote 161 And C. Rajagopalachari drafted a private memorandum in January 1952 decrying state efforts to manage the minutiae of food production and consumption as an affront to personal liberty and a source of India's enduring hunger—presaging his unilateral lifting of food controls in Madras six months later.Footnote 162 Assessments from overseas were no more sympathetic. ‘The tragedy,’ an Eastern World correspondent wrote of the Miss a Meal campaign, ‘is that millions of Indians have no choice of forgoing a meal, but are savagely dieted by poverty.’Footnote 163 Implicit in these rejections lurked the notion that India's efforts to remake personal practice and sentiment represented the desperate campaigns of a weak state unable to actualize the promise of sustenance which had animated the nationalist struggle.
The completion of India's First Five-Year Plan at the end of 1951 saw an assertive revision of India's agricultural planning. The prime minister had fended off internal political challenges from Sardar Patel and Purshottamdas Tandon—conservative voices whose antipathy towards socialist planning may have rendered the transformation of Indian citizenship, rather than that of agrarian structure, a more palatable shared goal.Footnote 164 Beyond an emphasis on industrial development, the Plan concentrated on the coordinated transformation of rural India's social and economic conditions, affirming food production as a primary national goal. (These schemes were far more ambitious than the Grow More Food Movement, which had sought to induce production through relatively small monetary investments.) ‘Unless the food problem is handled satisfactorily,’ the Plan held, ‘economic conditions in the country will not be stable enough to permit the implementation of the plan.’ Its overwhelming focus on increasing agricultural output rendered the goal of transforming Indian diets a ‘valuable supplement to the food supply.’Footnote 165
Yet the campaign to remould citizens’ diets and their relationship to the state in consort never fully receded from the national conversation. In years of higher agricultural production, when imports waned, the discussion of subsidiary foods, ersatz foodstuffs, and austerity receded from the limelight—only to reemerge forcefully at moments of crisis.Footnote 166 It was often industrialists and businessmen who continued to press for these ends. A year after the publication of the First Five-Year Plan, the Andhra Chamber of Commerce heard the state's outgoing industrial and development commissioner outline a scheme for a private subsidiary foods lobby.Footnote 167 He, like the industrialists who had spearheaded the first subsidiary foods campaigns, was likely motivated by the aim of freeing up agricultural land used for cereals for the increased cultivation of exportable goods.
Officials joined industrialists in reviving the language of citizenship, rights, and responsibility to urge dietary transformations at moments of crisis. The 1957 Foodgrains Enquiry Committee, chaired by Ashok Mehta in the wake of a failed monsoon, lamented the turn away from subsidiary foods, which the economist held was ‘an unfortunate result of the feeling that our food problem [was] purely transitory’.Footnote 168 Mehta urged the Ministry of Food and Agriculture to establish a new department to promote the production and consumption of substitute foods. In June, a new Congress resolution reaffirmed the need for their consumption; the year afterwards, Lala Shri Ram would resurface to urge the creation of a ‘Ministry for Non-Cereal Foods’—proposals which earned the praise of the Eastern Economist.Footnote 169 By the end of 1957, the prime minister had revived the language of personal transformation, exhorting Indians to ‘change your food habits in accordance with the needs of the country’.Footnote 170 Nehru's ‘exasperated paternalism’ remained in evidence. ‘I am very worried,’ the Prime Minister declared as the crisis continued, ‘about this habit which seems to be growing of everybody asking somebody else to feed him, [of] everybody going to the State Government and saying, give us this, give us that. . .Somehow, mind [sic] has become so perverted that we must have so much rice, and not take the other things which are better than rice, and in fact prefer starvation. I do not understand it.’Footnote 171 Indians’ failure to remake their diets, Nehru proposed, was a fundamental defect in their understanding of rights and responsibilities.
The most iconic revival of the campaign came in the mid 1960s, with the outbreak of war with Pakistan presaging India's most significant food crisis since independence in the form of the Bihar Famine. The new prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, took up the call to ‘miss a meal’ once more. Newspapers echoed Shastri's call, at rallies, for weekly ‘dinnerless days’, with the new slogan ‘Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan’—‘Long live the soldier and the farmer’—braiding together the aims of food and national defence.Footnote 172 Congress rallied behind the prime minister, asking party workers to go door-to-door in support of a new food austerity campaign.Footnote 173 The Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry urged its members to refrain from receptions or dinner parties for the duration of the war, mooting a proposal to grow sweet potatoes in vacant factory lots.Footnote 174 And as war ended, the central government sponsored a conservation campaign showing two chapattis separated from a third. ‘Every third chapati you eat,’ it proclaimed, ‘is made from imported wheat. Let's not eat it.’Footnote 175
These calls for austerity, restraint, and the subjugation of preference were of little concrete value, yet they tapped into a familiar idiom born of the immediate post-independence years. In January 1966, riots broke out in Kerala over the absence of rice in the rationing system, with protestors rejecting wheat sent from Punjab. As she jailed the Communist leaders said to be organizing the riots, Indira Gandhi tapped deeply into that idiom. ‘I pledge,’ she told the rioters, ‘to surrender my rice ration for the people of Kerala. I also pledge not to eat or serve rice until the food situation there is normal.’Footnote 176
Conclusion
‘Adversity,’ Education Minister Maulana Azad stated on India's first anniversary, ‘is part of this independence package. The government needs courageous citizens. We have to lift burdens like strong, real men.’Footnote 177 An analogous advertisement for a major bank ran a month after India's independence, carrying the words of a nationalist financier, T. A. Pai, who would later become first president of the Food Corporation of India. ‘No food minister can give us food,’ Pai wrote, ‘and no finance minister can give us economic stability and independence, unless and until every man and woman in the country helps them.’Footnote 178
The language of adversity, austerity, and sacrifice suffused public institutions and public speech throughout India's early independent years, structuring the efforts of state institutions and national leaders to remake Indian diets. This ethos built upon a diverse range of late colonial antecedents, from the international Malthusian debates over population, land, and people and the economic writing of early Indian nationalists to the colonial language of nutrition and the schemes for reconstruction proposed by Indian planners.Footnote 179 Independence brought the nationalist concerns of human welfare and the amelioration of India's agriculture to the fore of national planning efforts, but the need to forward a plan of economic self-reliance and free up resources for industrial development saw India's leadership transferring the burden of food planning to citizens themselves, appealing to the qualities of virtue, shared burden, and sacrifice sutured to notions of post-colonial citizenship. In the years between independence and the First Five-Year Plan, in particular, that leadership could frame enduring scarcity as an incomplete assumption of the obligations of citizenship. ‘If you cannot give up your sugar, your wheat or your rice for a while,’ Nehru contended in an emblematic parliamentary debate in 1950, ‘then the biggest army will not be able to protect you, because you lack inner strength.’Footnote 180
The government of early independent India, Sunil Khilnani has argued, ‘was transformed from a distant, alien object into one that aspired to infiltrate the everyday lives of Indians. . . . The state thus etched itself into the imagination of Indians in a way that no previous political agency had ever done.’Footnote 181 The campaign to remake Indian diets exemplified this transformation, and the ways in which a state initially unable to actualize fundamental social and economic change attempted to restructure the sentiments and behaviours of its citizens themselves, casting them as a fundamental obligation of post-colonial citizenship. Over the next decade, India's post-colonial leadership would grow more confident in the state's ability to undertake fundamental structural reform, and the 1950s were a high-water mark in the state's ‘romance with developmental planning’.Footnote 182 The remaking of diets, however, remained a convenient idiom for a state at moments of scarcity and developmental uncertainty.
By the time the technological advances of the Green Revolution began to take root in India in the form of the ‘new agricultural strategy’ of the mid 1960s, the focus of development planning had wholly shifted. If, in the earliest years of independence, the new state had looked to citizenship as an opportune site for transformation in the name of development, the relative inattentiveness of the state to the agrarian unrest and concentration of incomes wrought by the Green Revolution spoke to a paradigm of development that had become radically disjunct from questions of citizenship and shared sacrifice.Footnote 183 The connection between citizenship and agricultural development would be left, in years to come, to representatives of the ‘new farmers’ movements’ whose populist narrative suggested that earlier nation-building efforts had been inimical to agrarian citizenship.Footnote 184 For a crucial period, however, India's public institutions and figures asked citizens to reimagine their relationship to the new state and their co-citizens, saddling Indians, and women in particular, with the bodily transformations that would help realize the goal of national self-reliance. As India's institutions and politicians charged citizens themselves with responsibility for their own sustenance, so, too, it charged them with the burden of the nation's development.
