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1 results

  • 3 - Famine, Cooked Food, and the Starving Child

  • Nadja Durbach, University of Utah
  • Book:
    Many Mouths
    Published online:
    27 March 2020
    Print publication:
    26 March 2020, pp 81-113

  • Summary

    Chapter 3 examines the provision of cooked food as famine relief in late nineteeth-century India. Famine relief was undertaken at the local level by officials who interpreted policies and managed the balance between cost saving and lifesaving in different ways. But by the 1890s, there was widespread consensus that government “kitchens” should provide aid in the form of cooked food to children, as many local officials claimed that they were victims of parental neglect. Feeding the “field labourers of the future,” rather than expecting them to be sustained out of their parents’ relief wages, was a way to maximize the future utility of these “units.” For by the end of the nineteenth century, imperial revenue production and saving colonial subjects from starvation were no longer seen to be in tension with each other rather they were intimately linked projects. This chapter demonstrates that the provision of cooked food was a central element of famine relief precisely because it was part of late-Victorian attempts to reconcile humanitarianism and the ongoing economic development of the British Empire.