(This article first appeared in The Print on September 13, 2022)
- It is well known that Winston Churchill’s policies to reroute grain from Bengal to the war fronts impoverished the entire province in a few months. And 2.5 to 3.8 million people perished. But famines in colonial India were not just the result of global exigencies of a shocking war. Famine management revealed two other principles of colonialism as it played out in the late 19th century: The colonial government’s impetus to maintain free trade, and the reliance on caste and gender-based hierarchies to perpetuate economic prosperity…