In December 1982, the noted developmental economist Amartya Sen, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998, published an essay titled “How Is India Doing?” in the New York Review of Books.Footnote 1 In that essay, Sen outlined a provocative thesis. His central assertion was that while postindependence India had failed woefully to address persistent malnutrition among its poor, it had managed to stave off the specter of famine. Sen attributed India's ability to avoid the outbreak of famine and starvation to its democracy and, specifically, its free press. He cogently argued that owing to India's unfettered media, the first signs of impending food shortages were swiftly reported, leading to public action on the part of its political order.
In stark contrast with India, between 1958 and 1962, during Mao Tse-Tung's Great Leap Forward in the People's Republic of China (PRC), thirty to forty million of its citizens perished in a famine. The famine was a direct consequence of profoundly misguided economic policies. Owing to the opacity of its authoritarian political system, the world did not learn of this terrible calamity for more than a decade. Among other works, Jasper Becker's book Hungry Ghosts carefully documented the horrors that befell significant swaths of the country as famine swept across the land.Footnote 2
Today, India is more than self-sufficient in food production, even as it grapples with issues such as sustaining agricultural productivity and rural well-being. Unfortunately, the one concern that Sen appropriately flagged, the problem of malnutrition, still stalks the land. Nearly seventy-five years after independence, public policy in India has failed to forthrightly tackle this issue. More than a third of the world's malnourished children live in India. By way of comparison, according to the World Bank, India has five times as many malnourished children than the PRC.
The two books discussed here deal with particular aspects of India's attempts to feed (and nourish) its vast population both before and after independence. Nico Slate's Gandhi's Search for the Perfect Diet is a deft and careful exploration of the philosophical underpinnings of Gandhi's dietary views. Those with even a passing familiarity with Gandhi's copious writings will be aware that from adulthood onward, he gave considerable thought to questions of food and diet. In his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, for example, there is a discussion about how, as a law student in London, he faced pressure to consume meat but fended off these blandishments.Footnote 3
Slate's work, though quite admiring of Gandhi, is hardly an uncritical account. This is evident in his extremely judicious assessments of a number of initiatives that Gandhi undertook in his quest for a diet beyond reproach. What is most appealing about Slate's discussions is his ability to adroitly place them in the larger context of Gandhi's exemplary role in India's nationalist struggle. In one of the earliest discussions of Gandhi's dietary proclivities, Slate carefully deals with the issue of reducing salt consumption. In pursuing this analysis, he wastes no time in linking Gandhi's efforts to reduce his own salt consumption to his famous opposition to the onerous colonial salt tax. Gandhi's famous Salt March of March 1931 is a staple of nationalist history and lore. What makes Slate's focus novel and intriguing is his ability to link Gandhi's larger political goal of opposing this tax to his personal commitment to reducing or even eliminating salt from his diet.
Slate's discussion highlights that throughout Gandhi's involvement in the nationalist struggle, questions of food and diet became inextricably intertwined with his politics and his vision for India after it attained independence. To that end, Slate provides a substantial discussion of Gandhi's efforts to pursue a diet consisting of raw grains and vegetables. The focus on vegetarianism, of course, was closely linked to Gandhi's commitment to the concept of ahimsa, or the avoidance of harm to all living beings.
As Gandhi pursued this quest for an ideal diet, Slate shows, he was also aware that his beliefs and practices occasionally bordered on the eccentric. Nevertheless, Slate argues, based on much evidence he has amassed, that Gandhi did not lack a scientific temperament. Even as he sought to resurrect the system of Ayurveda, a traditional corpus of medicine in India, he subjected its prescriptions to rigorous tests. Among other matters, Slate shows how Gandhi was instrumental in shutting down a naturopathic hospital that had made dubious medical claims.
In one of the last chapters of the book, Slate tackles one of Gandhi's most effective political tactics, namely, a resort to fasting to highlight his distress about specific political matters. It was also closely tied to his views of diet, health, and faith. Fasting simultaneously had both dietary and religious underpinnings. Denying the body food, Gandhi believed, was part of a healthy lifestyle. It also had religious significance, as in both Jainism and Hinduism, it was linked to spiritual growth. His most famous fast, of course, was during the horrific religious riots that swept the city of Calcutta in 1946 after the Muslim League declared “Direct Action Day.” In an attempt to end this internecine bloodshed, Gandhi undertook a fast unto death, if necessary. His standing among the warring groups was so great that this episode helped quell the violent strife that had engulfed the city.
Slate concludes his study with a sympathetic account of Gandhi's lifelong quest to link his dietary choices to the lives of others. Concerned about the plight of Indian indentured laborers who had been forced to harvest sugar in execrable conditions, he eliminated sugar from his diet. Simply stated, Slate argues that Gandhi's diet reflected his politics.
While Slate's work is mostly focused on Gandhi's quest to formulate a diet in keeping with his political beliefs, Benjamin Robert Siegel's book, Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India, deals with the larger question of feeding an impoverished nation in the twilight of British colonialism and the decades thereafter. To that end, Siegel starts with an unsparing account of the horrors of the Great Bengal Famine of the early 1940s. His discussion of the onset and consequences of the famine are not especially novel. However, he ably demonstrates the sheer callousness of the British colonial authorities in the face of the famine. Simultaneously, he shows how news of the Bengal famine resonated across India, generated widespread sympathy for the suffering in the state and its environs, and boosted nationalist sentiment against British rule.
Given the salience of the Bengal famine and the penurious state of much of the country in the wake of independence, one of the principal concerns of India's leadership was to produce adequate food. Sufficient agricultural resources that could meet the dietary needs and preferences of the population were clearly not at hand. Faced with this conundrum, India's policymakers focused on three strategies: First, they, along with an array of bureaucrats and scientists, urged consumers to replace rice and wheat, which were in short supply, with cereals, fruits, and vegetables. Second, they resorted to a strategy of rationing essential foodstuffs. Much of the citizenry were reluctant to change their dietary staples, and rationing encountered opposition from both grain traders and some politicians. Finally, they turned abroad, especially to the United States, for food assistance. As has been amply documented elsewhere, and Siegel reiterates, the United States proved to be of limited assistance.
In a subsequent chapter, Siegel provides an analysis of the failure of India's halfhearted efforts at land reform. Following this discussion, Siegel ably traces the ideological sources of the Green Revolution. This agricultural transformation relied on the use of hybrid, disease-resistant seeds and shorter growing seasons to enable double-cropping. Francine Frankel's 1977 book India's Green Revolution: Economic Gains and Political Costs previously discussed some of the issues covered in this chapter.Footnote 4 However, Siegel's contribution lies in carefully tracing the key economic ideas as well as the role of specific individuals in boosting this technological solution to the problem of chronic food scarcity. Here he shows a keen understanding of the intersection of the roles of foreign and mostly American scientific and technical expertise, Indian domestic politics, and prevailing agricultural conditions in India. Siegel concludes the book with a disturbing discussion of how, despite having mostly solved the problem of good production, India still holds the dubious distinction of being unable to provide adequate nutrition to a vast swath of its population.
In recent months, as farmers’ protests have wracked the land, in the wake of the government's attempt to change India's farming laws, Indian agriculture is again at a crossroads. How the country responds to the new challenges that are confronting Indian agriculture, including the ravages of climate change, will determine its sustainability and productivity.
