BETWEEN GRAIN AND GRAVEYARDS: THE MORAL ECONOMY OF FAMINE IN COLONIAL INDIA
Subjects/Theme:
Grain Graveyards, Moral Economy, Colonial IndiaDescription
Globalization, Food Systems, and Legal Responses:Governance, Justice, and Sustainability in a Changing World
Edited By: Dr. Joydeb Patra, Ms. Saptaparni Raha
E-ISBN: 978-81-685212-2-3
This chapter examines famines in colonial India as historically produced crises shaped by the interaction of imperial political economy, environmental instability, grain commercialization, and colonial governance. Moving beyond climatic explanations, it argues that British policies of revenue extraction, market integration, laissez-faire administration, and export-oriented agriculture transformed periodic scarcity into mass starvation. The study critically analyses the role of railways, grain trade networks, famine codes, and relief policies in restructuring the moral economy of subsistence, while also foregrounding the lived experiences of peasants, labourers, lower-caste communities, women, and migrants within famine-stricken regions. Drawing upon famine commission reports, district gazetteers, parliamentary papers, vernacular newspapers, missionary narratives, and nationalist writings, the chapter demonstrates how colonial modernity simultaneously expanded commercial circulation and deepened agrarian vulnerability. Ultimately, it interprets famine not merely as an ecological disaster but as a profound moral and political rupture that exposed the contradictions of empire, the fragility of market-centered governance, and the devastating human consequences of subordinating survival to imperial economic priorities.
