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‘Self-Help which Ennobles a Nation’: Development, citizenship, and the obligations of eating in India's austerity years*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2015

BENJAMIN SIEGEL
BENJAMIN SIEGEL*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Boston University, United States of America Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

In the years immediately following independence, India's political leadership, assisted by a network of civic organizations, 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 for 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 grain reserves. And as Indian planners awaited the possibility of 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. Unable to marshal the resources needed to undertake fundamental agricultural reform, 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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 3 , May 2016 , pp. 975 - 1018
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Sunil Amrith, Sugata Bose, Rebecca Chang, Emma Rothschild, and Joshua Specht for their incisive comments on earlier drafts of this article. Feedback from audiences at the Harvard Center for History and Economics, the Yale Modern South Asia Workshop, and the Feast and Famine Seminar at New York University was instrumental in refining these arguments, as were the comments offered by the two anonymous readers for Modern Asian Studies.

References

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40 ‘Food Situation in India: General Circulars Issued by the Food Department’, 1944, External Affairs—War Progs., Nos. 59(49)-W, 1944 Secret, National Archives of India.

41 ‘In Defence of the Wild Grass-Seed’, Free Press Journal, 7 January 1944, IOR/L/I/1/1103, British Library. The continuing effort to foist barley upon Bombay's rice-eaters was a source of enduring frustration; see ‘Barley Again for Bombay?’, Bombay Chronicle, 22 January 1947.

42 Aubrey Dibdin, ‘Diary of a Tour of Inspection of Food Supplies and Rationing in India by Aubrey Dibdin, India Office 1920–45’, 1945, MSS Eur D907, British Library.

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46 ‘Inclusion of Millets, Gram and Maize in the Cereal Group Rations: H.M.'s Meeting with Bombay Food Advisory Council’, 1 March 1946, Food—Rationing—RP-1000/62/1946, National Archives of India.

47 H. K. Matthews, ‘Letter to F.W. Brock’, 12 April 1946, IOR/L/I/1/1104, British Library.

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52 It is unclear why Prasad was given control of this particular ministry; Prasad's autobiography and his collected works reveal little previous interest in the subject. In the former, Prasad recalls a more involved role in the food conservation campaigns of the era than the historical record suggests, referencing ‘my appeal to consume less cereals and to save food grains by missing one meal a day’, and gives no hint as to the influence of other nationalist thinkers. Prasad, Rajendra, Autobiography (New Delhi: Penguin, 2010), 570–72Google Scholar.

53 The influential economist and planner Ashok Mehta would recall that India's leadership embraced self-reliance ‘because, in our view, it was the most rational course’, given that India was seen as having no inherent deficit of natural or human resources. Baru, Sanjaya, ‘Self-Reliance to Dependence in Indian Economic Development’, Social Scientist 11, no. 11 (1 November 1983): 36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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55 Government of India, ‘Draft Reply’, 9 December 1946, IOR/L/E/8/7236, British Library.

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62 Two contemporary accounts of the difficulties of feeding and clothing of refugees are Press Information Bureau, Government of India, ‘Political Freedom and Battle Against Hunger/Planned Withdrawal from Controls/Difficulties of Transition Period’, 15 August 1948, IOR/L/E/8/7230, British Library; and Millions on the Move: The Aftermath of Partition (New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1949). On rapid urbanization in the wake of partition, see Nath, Viswambhar, Urbanization, Urban Development, and Metropolitan Cities in India (New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company, 2007), 3 and passimGoogle Scholar.

63 Writing in June 1947, the Eastern Economist warned that the wanton destruction wrought on grain stores by ‘communal fanatics’ was even greater than the losses incurred by insects and rodents, urging the Central Government to secure markets, lest ‘starvation deaths [put] the casualty list of riots into shade’. ‘Food Wastages’, Eastern Economist, 6 June 1947, 996.

64 Department of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, ‘Guidance for Food Publicity’, 8 August 1947, IOR/L/I/1/1104, British Library.

65 Jain, Jagdish Chandra, Hamari roti ki samasya [Our Food Problem] (Bombay: National Information and Publications Limited, 1947), 44Google Scholar.

66 Omprakash, Hamari Khurak Aur Aabadi Ki Samasya [Our Food and Population Problem], 3.

67 On the Bombay Plan, see Thakurdas, Purshotamdas et al., A Plan of Economic Development for India (New Delhi: Penguin, 1944)Google Scholar; and Chibber, Vivek, Locked in Place: State-Building and Capitalist Industrialization in India, 1940–1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 85–109Google Scholar.

68 ‘Note by Sir Shri Ram Containing Suggestions for Meeting the Food Shortage in India’, 1947, Agriculture—G.M.F.—8–152/47—G.M.F., National Archives of India.

69 Thakurdas, Purshotamdas, Final Report, Foodgrains Policy Committee, 1947 (Delhi: Manager of Publications, Government of India Press, 1948)Google Scholar. Thakurdas and Shri Ram's enthusiasm for these plans might be seen in light of the Bombay Plan's emphasis on increasing Indians’ purchasing power rather than boosting agricultural production itself.

70 Patvardhan, V. S., Food Control in Bombay Province, 1939–1949 (Poona: D.R. Gadgil, 1958), 128Google Scholar.

71 Letter from P. C. Joshi to Rajendra Prasad, 25 October 1947, reprinted in Communist Party of India, India's Food Crisis, Analysis and Solution: Memo of the CPI to the Government of the Indian Union (Bombay: People's Publishing House, 1947).

72 ‘Food and Nutrition Exhibitions’, 1947, Home—Public—157/47, National Archives of India.

73 Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, ‘Directive on Food Publicity’, 9 December 1948, Home—Public—51/469/48-Public, National Archives of India.

74 Controls were removed in December 1947 and reinstated after major price spikes in September 1948. Chopra, R. N., Evolution of Food Policy in India (Delhi: Macmillan, 1981), 52–56Google Scholar.

75 Gandhi, M. K., ‘The Problem of Food [6 October 1947]’, in Gandhi, Mohandas K., Delhi Diary (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1948), 65–68Google Scholar.

76 As Ornit Shani notes, the new state ‘was able to appropriate aspects of the Gandhian citizenship notion and its political vocabulary as a means of justifying some key policies of resource allocations. This gave Indian governments a mantle of legitimacy and the ability to resist contestation and dissent in the early formative decades.’ Shani, ‘Gandhi, Citizenship and the Resilience of Indian Nationhood’, 661.

77 On Nehru's modernizing philosophy, see Parekh, Bhikhu, ‘Nehru and the National Philosophy of India’, Economic and Political Weekly 26, no. 1 (5 January 1991): 35–39, 41, 43, 45–48Google Scholar.

78 Brown, Judith M., Nehru: A Political Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 192Google Scholar.

79 Burma, D. P. and Chakravorty, Maharani (eds), History of Science, Philosophy, and Culture in Indian Civilization, vol. XIII Part 2: From Physiology and Chemistry to Biochemistry (New Delhi: Centre for Studies in Civilizations, 2010)Google Scholar.

80 Bose, Sugata, His Majesty's Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India's Struggle against Empire (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), 125CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

81 ‘Importance of Food Technology (Speech on the occasion of taking over of Cheluvamba Mansion at Mysore from the Government of Mysore for the Central Food Technological Research Institute on 29 December 1948)’, in Nehru, Jawaharlal, Jawaharlal Nehru on Science and Society: A Collection of His Writings and Speeches, Singh, Baldev (ed.) (New Delhi: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, 1988), 70–71Google Scholar.

82 C. Rajagopalachari, ‘Inaugural Speech at the Central Food Technological Research Institute, Mysore’, 21 October 1950, C. Rajagopalachari / V Inst. / Speeches and Writings by Him / 11, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.

83 ‘Utilisation of Land: Note to Food and Agriculture Ministry and to Ministry of Works, Mines and Power, 6 February 1949 (File No. 31(41)/49-PMS)’, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Second Series, Gopal, S. (ed.) (New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 1984–2006), vol. 9, 70. Henceforth SWJNGoogle Scholar.

84 ‘Self-Sufficiency in Food’, SWJN, vol. 9, 70.

85 ‘Letter to C. Rajagopalachari’, SWJN, vol. 9, 71–72.

86 Nehru, Jawaharlal, ‘We Should Pull Together [A Speech Delivered at the Meeting of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (22nd Annual Session), New Delhi, 4 March 1949]’, in Independence and after: A Collection of Speeches (New York: Day, 1950), 193–95Google Scholar.

87 Gangulee, Nagendranath, Health and Nutrition in India (London: Faber and Faber, 1939)Google Scholar; Gupta, Rameshwar, Aaj ka Manav Jivan Uski Samasyen [Today's Population Problem] (Bombay: Chetna Prakashan Vibhag, 1952), 32Google Scholar. A rich discussion of Boyd-Orr's career and its contexts is in Bashford, Global Population, passim.

88 In private, there was a major debate raging between the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Food: the former, with the prime minister's support, was holding to the goal of self-sufficiency by 1951 and hoped to use Boyd-Orr's authority to underwrite their claim, while the latter were using the estimates of the current FAO director, Norris Dodd, to suggest that India would perhaps be able to reduce its food imports to 1.5 million tons annually. ‘Though they share one Minister,’ a British observer noted, ‘the ministries are situated two miles apart, and their approach to the common problem about as wide apart, too.’ Office of the Adviser in India to the Central Commercial Committee, ‘Adviser in India's Report No. 18’, April 1949, DO/133/108, National Archives (United Kingdom).

89 ‘Need for All-Out Food Drive: Pandit Nehru's Call to Nation’, Times of India, 30 June 1949.

90 ‘Popularise Grow Food Campaign’, Times of India, 4 July 1949; ‘Sober Rejoicing Throughout India’, Times of India, 17 August 1949.

91 ‘There is practically nothing new in the Prime Minister's broadcast on food’, the Indian Express opined after one broadcast, affirming Nehru's call for sweet potatoes and tapioca to replace wheat and rice. ‘[If] Pandit Nehru felt called upon to emphasise the obvious, the inference is that the people as a whole have not yet reconciled themselves to the austerity standards recommended.’ ‘Nehru's Broadcast’, Indian Express, 1 July 1949. Bombay's free-market Commerce noted that Nehru's call ‘is meant for everyone who has a tendency of treating such appeals as those meant for everybody else but himself—a tendency which has been responsible, to an appreciable extent, for several of our economic ills to-day’. ‘India's Food Problem: Pandit Nehru's Appeal’, Commerce, 9 July 1949, IOR/L/E/8/7230, British Library.

92 Nehru, Jawaharlal, ‘Letter dated 1 July, 1949’, in Nehru, Jawaharlal, Letters to Chief Ministers, 1947–1964, vol. 1 (Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund; distributed by Oxford University Press, 1985), 415Google Scholar. In August, Nehru wrote to R. K. Patil, the government's food commissioner, to see if Teen Murti could be supplied with boxes for growing food. File No 31(71)/49-PMS, SWJN, vol. 13, 75.

93 Among other booklets issued, see Indian Council of Agricultural Research, Vegetable Growing in the Delhi Province, 2nd ed., ICAR Booklet 5 (New Delhi: Imperial Council of Agricultural Research, 1946)Google Scholar.

94 ‘Compound Lawns Become Farm’, Times of India, 25 July 1949. In 1942, a confidante had written of Nehru's embarrassment at the indulgent, Western tastes he had inherited from his father, Motilal, contending that the only ‘weakness’ he indulged was an ‘an occasional demand for mashed potatoes’. In 1943, at the height of the Bengal Famine, Indira and Jawaharlal exchanged several letters on the need to plant wheat and rice at Anand Bhavan, their family residence in Allahabad. See Shridharani, Krishnalal, Warning to the West (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1942), 259Google Scholar; and ‘Letter from Nehru from Ahmadnagar Fort Prison, 23 September 1943’, in Gandhi, Indira (ed.), Two Alone, Two Together: Letters between Indira Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru 1940–1960 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1992), 273–74Google Scholar.

95 Ministry of Food, ‘Food Policy—Austerity Measures—Guest Control’, 1 November 1949, Home—Public—51/373/49, National Archives of India.

96 Unable and often unwilling to undertake the burden of monitoring transgressions, particularly as the decontrol of foodgrains outpaced the Order's withdrawal, individual states began to flaunt these regulations, forwarding alternate Guest Control Orders at the provincial levels or sometimes discarding them altogether. Within several years, the Order had been effectively withdrawn throughout the country. ‘Food Austerity Measures’, 1957, Agriculture—Basic Plan—86(1)57 BP II, National Archives of India; ‘Food Austerity Measures Adopted by the Assam Government’, 12 July 1952, Food—Basic Plan—BP.II/1085(36)/50, National Archives of India.

97 United Kingdom High Commissioner, New Delhi, ‘Extract from Opdom #26 for the Period 23–30 June 1949’, 30 June 1949, IOR/L/E/8/7237, British Library.

98 ‘Letter to Jairamdas Daulatram’, SWJN, vol. 13, 82–83.

99 ‘Letter to B.C. Roy, 13 July 1950’, SWJN, vol. 14, 218.

100 The question of standardizing diets and recipes across regions, however, was never entertained seriously by the state: from the earliest nutritional research, it was clear that there was too much in the way of entrenched cultural preferences to even attempt such a project. In 1968, a government committee attempted to assess the possibility of standardizing recipes and nutritional values in government-run canteens nation-wide. But by this period, the primary concern was one of nutritional standardization. ‘There is a big chance,’ one committee member wrote, ‘of the weight, size, and composition of the recipe for a samosa varying between the article sold at Etawah and that sold at Ghaziabad. But a doughnut purchased at Boston differs very little in size and composition from the one purchased at Baltimore.’ Report of the Sub-Committee on Standardizing Dietary Patterns, and Menus to Be Served in Restaurants and Other Eating Establishments of the National Nutrition Advisory Committee (New Delhi: Ministry of Health, Family Planning, Works, Housing, and Urban Development, Government of India, 1968), 44.

101 Gould, ‘From Subjects to Citizens?’.

102 Chandra, Jag Parvesh, Miss a Meal Movement: An Experiment in Voluntary Errors and National Co-Operation (New Delhi: Constitution House, 1949)Google Scholar. Chandra would later become Delhi's chief minister.

103 ‘Miss a Meal a Week: Leader's Appeal’, Indian Express, 12 September 1949.

104 ‘Miss a Meal Movement: Dr. Prasad's Support’, Sunday Indian Express, 4 November 1949; ‘Miss a Meal a Week: Health Minister's Call’, Indian Express, 11 November 1949.

105 Governor of East Punjab, ‘Letter to Jag Parvesh Chandra’, 21 December 1949, Jag Parvesh Chandra / Subject Files / 2, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library; ‘Bombay Premier Sets an Example’, Sunday Indian Express, 21 December 1949; Prafulla Chandra Sen, ‘Letter to Jag Parvesh Chandra’, 18 November 1949, Jag Parvesh Chandra / Subject Files / 2, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.

106 ‘Making Citizens Food-Conscious’, Times of India, 23 November 1949. Elsewhere, the pledge involved a promise to miss Friday lunch, ‘leave my plate clean of leavings’, and return extra ration cards to the ration depot. B. P. Pathak, ‘Letter to Jag Parvesh Chandra’, 16 December 1949, Jag Parvesh Chandra / Subject Files / 2, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. The choice of Friday as a preferred fast day appears to have been influenced by Gandhi's assassination on a Friday four years prior. ‘Miss a Meal Movement Explained’, Sunday Indian Express, 26 December 1949.

107 ‘Miss a Meal Per Week’, Times of India, 6 November 1949. The movement also inspired a number of poems, essays, and other creative ventures designed at garnering support. One Lucknow resident composed a short doggerel on the movement:

Men sacrifice in times of need,
In every way have shown this deed
Stop a meal in a fortnight please.
Save your Country, roll your sleeve.
Make in daily meal this sure,
Eat less rice or rice no more.
Ask your people waste no food.
Love your Country love your food.

S. Asghar Ali, ‘Letter to B.G. Kher’, 21 December 1949, Jag Parvesh Chandra / Subject Files / 2, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.

108 Jag Parvesh Chandra, ‘Untitled Speech Delivered at Hyderabad’, 1949, Jag Parvesh Chandra / Subject Files / 2, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.

109 ‘Letter to Jag Parvesh Chandra’, 6 January 1950, Jag Parvesh Chandra / Subject Files / 2, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.

110 Nityanand Kanungo, ‘Letter to Jag Parvesh Chandra’, 16 November 1949, Jag Parvesh Chandra / Subject Files / 2, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.

111 ‘Broadcast to the Nation, New Delhi, 1 May 1951 [AIR Tapes, NMML]’, in SWJN, vol. 16.1, 39–42.

112 ‘Letter to Food Secretary, Ministry of Food, New Delhi, 2 May 1951 [File No. 31(125)/51-PMS]’, in SWJN, vol. 16.1, 43–44.

113 ‘Banana Roots as Human Food and Assessment of Their Nutritive Value’, 25 June 1949, Rajputana Agency / Political / Food / P-183, National Archives of India.

114 ‘Exploration of Possibility of Utilizing Dates from Iraq to Rations in Scarcity Areas in Order to Avoid Famine’, 9 February 1949, Food—Basic Plan—BP-201(96)/49, National Archives of India. The proposal appears to have only been accepted in 1951, when dates were distributed in ration packages in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar; see ‘Dates Given Away in Bihar’, Aaj, 12 February 1951; ‘Distribution of Dates’, Aaj, 15 February 1951.

115 Choudhary, Valmiki (ed.), ‘Letter from Shri Ram to Rajendra Prasad, 20 May 1949’, in Dr. Rajendra Prasad: Correspondence and Select Documents, vol. 11 (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1988), 69Google Scholar. Later, Shri Ram would pressure Prasad into planting banana shrubs and sweet potato vines at his Delhi residence. Choudhary, Valmiki (ed.), ‘Letter from Shri Ram to Rajendra Prasad, 17 September 1949’, in Dr. Rajendra Prasad: Correspondence and Select Documents, vol. 11 (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1988), 160Google Scholar.

116 No copies of the final report appear to exist in print; a resumé is ‘Summary of Conclusions of the Subsidiary Food Production Committee (1950)’, in Reports of the Estimates Committee 1960–61 (New Delhi: Lok Sabha Secretariat, 1961), 70–72.

117 ‘Bombay Weekly Political Report No. 21/49 for the Period 23 to 29 May 1949’, May 1949, IOR/L/E/8/7230, British Library.

118 Rajagopalachari, C., ‘The Food Problem [All-India Radio, 6 July 1949]’, in Speeches of C. Rajagopalachari, Governor-General of India. June 1948–January 1950 (New Delhi: Superintendent, Governor-General's Press, 1950), 251Google Scholar.

119 ‘Letter from the Ministry of Food, 1949: Subsidiary Food Production Committee, Shri Ram, Vice Chairman—Sent to Food and Agriculture Ministers of All Provinces / States’, 1949, Agriculture—Rationing—RP-1084(14)/54, National Archives of India

120 ‘Banana Roots as Human Food and Assessment of Their Nutritive Value’.

121 ‘Subsidiary Foods’ Output’, Times of India, 29 December 1949; ‘Concurrence of the Central Govt. to the Withdrawal of Food Austerity Measures Adopted by Kutch Govt. 1950’, July 1950, Agriculture—Rationing—RP 1085/26/50, National Archives of India. Indians’ putatively unchangeable preference for rice over any other grain worried administrators of international aid, as well. During the shortages of 1950–1951, American representatives fretted over Indians’ apparent unwillingness to change their diets during times of crisis. In one of his dispatches as the Indian supervisory officer of the Economic Cooperation Administration, Frank R. J. Gerard wrote that ‘In Madras and Travancore-Cochin, there is much concern and complaint over the shortage of rice. This situation cannot be greatly relieved as there is a general shortage of rice throughout India. The maximum quantity of rice is being imported from the rice-producing countries of Asia but additional imports (say from USA) would cost more than the Government of India can afford to pay. With the limited funds at their disposal they must use them to procure the greatest possible quantity of food. Rice is too costly.’ Frank R. J. Gerard, ‘End-Use Report No. 2’, 5 September 1951, RG 469/UD 1234/Box 1/End Use and General Reports, United States National Archives.

122 ‘Achieving Self-Sufficiency in Food by 1951: Mysore Research Body's Proposals’, Times of India, 1 July 1950.

123 Husain, ‘Food Problem of India (1946, Bangalore)’, 569.

124 Ramamurty, Sonti Venkata, Looking Across Fifty Years (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1964), 117Google Scholar. Ramamurty had served on the 1946 mission to the Combined Food Board in Washington DC, where he petitioned for increased grain donations to India.

125 ‘Difficulty in Ending Food Imports: Sir Sonti Ramamurti Urges Attention to Non-Cereals’, Times of India, 16 May 1949.

126 Ramamurty, Looking Across Fifty Years, 149.

127 Choudhary, Valmiki (ed.), ‘Notes on Mysore Tour’, in Dr. Rajendra Prasad: Correspondence and Select Documents, vol. Presidency Period (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1984), 198–200Google Scholar.

128 Bawa, B. S., ‘From a Deficit to a Surplus State’, The Punjab Farmer III, no. 2 (June 1951): 58Google Scholar.

129 ‘Synthetic Rice and Curds’, Times of India, 7 October 1952.

130 Subramanyam, V., ‘Planning for Food Emergency’, in Food and Population and Development of Food Industries in India (Mysore: Central Food Technological Research Institute, 1952), 133Google Scholar. The CFTRI's efforts gained the attention of observers overseas; ‘Two Other Artificial Products: Synthetic Rice and Milk’, in Indian Horizons, vol. 1 (New Delhi: Indian Council for Cultural Relations, 1952), 340–41. V. Subrahmanyan and M. Swaminathan—the father of India's ‘Green Revolution’—published an optimistic early report in Nature, touting the promise that artificial rice held to obviate India's food problem. Subramanyam, V. et al., ‘Rice Substitutes’, Nature 174 (1954): 199–201CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

131 Natarajan, Balasubrahmanya, Food and Agriculture in Madras State (Madras: Director of Information and Publicity, Government of Madras, 1951), 125–27Google Scholar.

132 ‘Centre to Open Research Units in Villages’, Times of India, 29 May 1953.

133 E. Ikkanda Warrier, 13 November 1970, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.

134 In 1957 Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to the Director of India's Council of Scientific and Industrial Research to ask what had happened to the project. Informed that no production was taking place, Nehru testily brought up the issue of the project's seeming failure several days later with Food and Agriculture Minister A. P. Jain. The last mention of the artificial rice project seems to have come in 1960, when administrators in Kerala constituted a propaganda team to promote it before an unceremonious disbanding in 1960. ‘Letter to M.S. Thacker [28 May 1957]’, SWJN, vol. 38, 112; ‘Letter to A.P. Jain, 2 June 1957’, SWJN, vol. 38, 115; Administration Report of the Civil Supplies Department for the Year 1961–62 (Trivandrum: Kerala Civil Supplies Department, 1962), 14.

135 The CFTRI nonetheless played an important role in the development of India's modern food processing and preservation industries. In 1951, a government work looked expectantly to the CFTRI for its projects for ‘the processing of coarse grain to render it acceptable to rice eaters. . .and new and improved methods of processing pulses without affecting their nutritive value’. Yet over the next several decades, the Institute's work was dedicated to more mundane matters of canning, preservation, and the prevention of adulteration. Progress of Science (New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1951); Abstracts of CFTRI Papers (Mysore: Central Food Technological Research Institute, 1966).

136 On the intersections of nationalism and domesticity in colonial India, see Hancock, Mary, ‘Gendering the Modern: Women and Home Science in British India’, in Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities, Burton, Antoinette M. (London: Routledge, 1999), 148–60Google Scholar; Hancock, Mary, ‘Home Science and the Nationalization of Domesticity in Colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies 35, no. 4 (2001): 871–903CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Walsh, Judith E., Domesticity in Colonial India: What Women Learned When Men Gave Them Advice (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004)Google Scholar. More broadly, see Ghosh, Durba, ‘Gender and Colonialism: Expansion or Marginalization?’, The Historical Journal 47, no. 3 (1 September 2004): 737–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sarkar, Tanika, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation, Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001)Google Scholar. On the complex interplay of women's organizations and the ‘politics of consumption’ beyond India, see the analysis in Hilton, Matthew, ‘The Female Consumer and the Politics of Consumption in Twentieth-Century Britain’, The Historical Journal 45, no. 1 (2002): 103–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The intersections of female politics and food control policies is dealt with elegantly in the American context in Bentley, Amy, Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998)Google Scholar; as well as in the German context in Davis, Belinda J., Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000)Google Scholar. For an exemplary treatment of women and home economics in China's nationalist era, see Schneider, Helen M., Keeping the Nation's House: Domestic Management and the Making of Modern China (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

137 Needham, Mabel A., Domestic Science for High Schools in India (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1929)Google Scholar.

138 Aykroyd, Notes on Food and Nutrition Policy in India; Indian National Congress and Shah, K. T., Woman's Role in Planned Economy, Report of the Sub-Committee (Bombay: Vora & Co., 1947)Google Scholar.

139 Geraldine Hancock Forbes, Women in Modern India, New Cambridge History of India, V.2, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 210–11.

140 Nehru, Rameshwari, Gandhi Is My Star: Speeches & Writings (Patna: Pustakbhandar, 1950)Google Scholar.

141 Jawaharlal Nehru nonetheless complained in 1936 that the AIWC was ‘superficial’ since it did nothing to examine the ‘root causes’ of the social issues it championed. Forbes, Women in Modern India, 81.

142 All India Women's Conference Cultural Section, Education of Women in Modern India (Anudh: Anudh Publishing Trust, 1946).

143 ‘Food’, Bulletin of Indian Women's Movement, July 1946.

144 ‘Resolutions Passed at the Meeting of the Standing Committee of the AIWC at Bombay, August 1949’, Roshni, September 1949.

145 Kitty Shiva Rao, ‘Grow More and Eat Wisely’, Roshni, September 1949.

146 ‘Housewives Can Help Change Food Habits’, Times of India, 9 September 1949.

147 ‘Carry on with Food You Get: Pandit Nehru's Call to Women’, Times of India, 20 September 1950.

148 ‘Popularising Subsidiary Foods: Women to Carry on Propaganda’, Times of India, 30 July 1949.

149 ‘Subsidiary Foods Education’, Roshni, November 1949.

150 Ministry of Food, Government of India, ‘All India Women's Council for Supplementary Foods: Measures for Increased Production and Consumption’, 5 August 1950, IOR/L/E/88/8698, British Library.

151 ‘Supplementary Food: Exhibition in Delhi’, Times of India, 4 December 1950. See also Prasad, Rajendra, ‘The Food Problem’ (Translation of speech delivered in Hindi at the opening of the Food Exhibition at the Town Hall, Delhi, on 1 December 1950), in Grover, Verinder, Political Thinkers of Modern India, Volume 23: Dr. Rajendra Prasad (New Delhi: Deep & Deep Publications, 1993), 488–90Google Scholar.

152 Vyas, A. R., ‘Annapoorna: India's Democratic Restaurants’, March of India IV, no. 2 (December 1951), 29–31Google Scholar; All India Women's Food Council, Annapurna Recipes of Supplementary Foods, 2 vols. (New Delhi: All India Women's Food Council, 1951). On cookbooks in India, see Appadurai, ‘How to Make a National Cuisine’; and Berger, ‘Between Digestion and Desire’.

153 The Fourth Annual Meeting of the All India Women's Food Council, West Bengal Branch, 1954–55 (Calcutta, 1955). The Council began to shift its objectives throughout the 1950s, distributing seeds for kitchen gardening, and working to establish a catering college in Bombay with FAO funding. By 1958, the Council had fallen into a bitter squabble with the Central government over the restaurant's tax status; the restaurant hobbled on until its shuttering a decade later. ‘Sales Tax on Annapoorna’, 1958, Home—Judicial—II—26758, National Archives of India.

154 ‘Food Problem and the Role of Women’, SWJN, vol. 40, 276.

155 A review of recent sociological approaches to the intersections of gender, citizenship, and the welfare state is Ann Shola Orloff, ‘Gender and the Social Rights of Citizenship: The Comparative Analysis of Gender Relations and Welfare States’, American Sociological Review 58, no. 3 (1 June 1993): 303–28. See also Ciotti, Manuela, ‘“The Bourgeois Woman and the Half-Naked One”: Or the Indian Nation's Contradictions Personified’, Modern Asian Studies 44, no. 4 (2010): 785–815CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

156 Various jungle roots, yams, sago palm, and other foodstuffs, for instance, were common famine foods among the Mizos, when rats, a ‘preferred’ scarcity staple, was unavailable. Nag, Sajal, ‘Bamboo, Rats and Famines: Famine Relief and Perceptions of British Paternalism in the Mizo Hills’, in Mahesh Rangarajan and K. Sivaramakrishnan (eds), India's Environmental History: Colonialism, Modernity, and the Nation, vol. 2, 2 vols. (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2012), 389–99Google Scholar.

157 ‘You Are Slaves of Taste! Food Minister Admonishes Starving Kisans of South’, People's Age, 6 June 1948.

158 Communist Party of India, ‘The Catastrophic Food Situation and Our Tasks: People's Solution and Demand of the People [P.B. Circular (New Series) No. I, to All Party Units]’, 10 August 1950. P.C. Joshi Archives on Contemporary History.

159 Mudaliar, A. L., ‘On the Governor's Address (4 August 1950)’, in Searchlight on Council Debates: Speeches of Sir A.L. Mudaliar in the Madras Legislative Council (Bombay: Orient Longmans, 1960), 167Google Scholar.

160 Ministry of Agriculture, ‘Austerity Measures—Guest Control Order’, Agriculture—Basic Plan—86(1)/57 BP II, National Archives of India.

161 Mathai, M. O., My Days with Nehru (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1979), 18Google Scholar.

162 C. Rajagopalachari, ‘Amateurish Experiments and Imperial Food Production: An Article’, January 1952, C. Rajagopalachari/VI to XI Insts./Speeches and Writings by Him/114, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.

163 Stirling, J. F., ‘The Background to Famine’, Eastern World V, no. 12 (December 1951): 14Google Scholar.

164 A comprehensive discussion of the internal dynamics of planning is Francine Frankel, R., India's Political Economy, 1947–2004: The Gradual Revolution (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), 71–112Google Scholar.

165 Planning Commission, The First Five-Year Plan: A Draft Outline (New Delhi: Manager of Publications, Government of India Press, 1951), 67Google Scholar. For an analysis, see Frankel, India's Political Economy, 94–106.

166 In spite of passing references to subsidiary foods and the transformation of diets in the Third and Fourth Five-Year Plans, presented in 1961 and 1966, these operational documents made little reference to the sorts of transformations that Nehru and allies had once framed as national imperatives. ‘A Nutritionist's View of Third Plan’, The Hindu, 29 August 1961, 71; and Madan, G. R., India's Developing Villages (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1990), 131Google Scholar.

167 ‘Suggestions for Solving the Food Program by Shri V. Ramakrishna, ICS, Ret’d., Formerly Industrial and Development Commissioner, Government of Madras’, 1952, Agriculture—G.M.F.—10–5/52-GMF(Eng), National Archives of India.

168 Ministry of Food and Agriculture, Report of the Foodgrains Enquiry Committee, November 1957 (New Delhi: Government of India Press, 1957), 103Google Scholar.

169 ‘AICC Resolution on Food Production (1 and 2 June 1957)’, in Guha, Sunil, India's Food Problem (New Delhi: Indian National Congress, 1957), 15Google Scholar; ‘A Plea for Non-Cereal Foods’, Eastern Economist, 15 August 1958, 218.

170 ‘Yoga and Food Habits: Speech while inaugurating the annual celebrations of Vishwayatan Yogashram, New Delhi, 17 November 1957’, SWJN, vol. 40, 251.

171 Ibid, 797.

172 ‘The Threat of Famine’, Time 86, no. 23 (3 December 1965), 52. A discussion of the symbolism of Shastri's call, and its representation in visual media, is ‘Yogendra Rastogi: Visualizing Modernity’, in Pinney, Christopher, Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India (London: Reaktion, 2004), 168–74Google Scholar.

173 ‘Congress Working Committee, New Delhi, 7 November 1965’, in Zaidi, A. M. (ed.), INC: The Glorious Tradition: Texts of the Resolutions Passed by the INC, the AICC and the CWC (New Delhi: Indian Institute of Applied Political Research, 1989), 495–97Google Scholar. The movement also enjoyed a revival in the form of new support from India's trading community, which embraced the conceit of voluntary self-regulation in food consumption as an alternative to federal and provincial legislation. See Ambalal Kilachand, ‘Letter to Mr. Dhirajlal Maganlal, President, Indian Merchants Chamber’, 28 July 1964, Indian Merchants’ Chamber, Bombay / 797 / Food Situation, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library; and Ambalal Kilachand, ‘Letter to C.L. Gheevala’, 14 August 1964, Indian Merchants’ Chamber, Bombay / 797 / Food Situation, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.

174 Kilachand, ‘Letter to C.L. Gheevala’; L. N. Birla, ‘Letter to G.L. Bansal’, 28 October 1965, Indian Merchants’ Chamber, Bombay / 800 / Food: Interim Scheme Of State Trading, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.

175 ‘Every Third Chapatti [advertisement in Save Food for Self-Sufficiency campaign]’, circa 1965–66.

176 ‘A Particular Hunger’, Time 87, no. 6 (February 1966), 44.

177 Roy, Beyond Belief, 105.

178 ‘Canara Industrial & King Syndicate, Limited [Advertisement]’, Indian Express, 7 October 1947.

179 Undoubtedly, it also harkened back to the idioms of Swadeshi nationalism, which, Manu Goswami notes, ‘radicalized and generalized the nationalist critique of colonialism on multiple, overlapping sociocultural terrains and in a deeply passionate idiom of autonomy, self-reliance, and sacrifice’. Goswami, Manu, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 243CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

180 Nehru, Jawaharlal, ‘The Growth of Violence: Speech in Reply to a Debate on Foreign Affairs in Parliament, New Delhi, 7 December 1950’, in Jawaharlal Nehru's Speeches, vol. 2, 3rd ed. (New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1963), 259–73Google Scholar.

181 Khilnani, Sunil, The Idea of India (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 41Google Scholar.

182 Kudaisya, ‘“A Mighty Adventure”’.

183 On this paradigm, see Frankel, Francine R., India's Green Revolution: Economic Gains and Political Costs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; Varshney, Ashutosh, ‘Ideas, Interest and Institutions in Policy Change: Transformation of India's Agricultural Strategy in the Mid-1960s’, Policy Sciences 22, no. 3/4 (1 January 1989): 289–323CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Benjamin Siegel, ‘Independent India of Plenty: Food, Hunger, and Nation-Building in Modern India’, Ph.D. thesis, Harvard University, 2014. A prescient contemporary account is Ladejinsky, Wolf, The Green Revolution in Bihar, the Kosi Area: A Field Trip & the Green Revolution in Punjab: A Field Trip (New York: Agricultural Development Council, 1976)Google Scholar; the official perception of these transformations is reflected in Research and Policy Division, Ministry of Home Affairs, The Causes and Nature of Current Agrarian Tensions (New Delhi: Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, 1969).

184 See Brass, Tom (ed.), New Farmers’ Movements in India (Ilford, Essex: Frank Cass, 1995)Google Scholar; Gupta, Akhil, ‘Agrarian Populism in the Development of a Modern Nation (India)’, in Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard (eds), International Development and the Social Sciences (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 320–44Google Scholar.