Hunger and Thirst: Crises at Varying Thresholds of Life

An Anthropology of Living and Dying in the Contemporary World (eds.) Veena Das & Clara Han Bhrigupati Singh

 Hunger and Thirst: Crises at Varying Thresholds of Life

“In the past few decades the interest in hunger artists has declined considerably.” Franz Kafka, A Hunger Artist (1922) ‘The political drama over the 20 “starvation deaths” in the last two months among the Sahariya tribes

of Rajasthan is dying… “It took the death of my sons for people to wake up. I think the good times

will last for at least a few months”, says Noori Lal in his spartan hut in Brahmpura village, 350 km

south of Jaipur. And slowly, everyone in Brahmpura is coming to believe that a death is good. “It

gets us immediate attention, we get food, money. Otherwise, who cares?”...’

Indian Express Tuesday, September 28, 2004

 Hunger can take different forms. Voluntary hunger can be a form of self-fashioning, as

aesthetic or ascetic striving. Alternatively, in disorders such as anorexia nervosa, the line

between voluntary and involuntary hunger, between self-creation and self-destruction may

become blurred, as several authors have showni. Fasting may be a private act but it can also

take public, political forms, a theme I previously approached in relation to a gifted hunger

artist, Gandhi (Singh 2010; see also Alter 2000). In this essay I want to take up another,

familiar sense of hunger, as a collective crisis of food, manifest in events such as famines and

in less eventful forms such as endemic scarcity. In what ways does hunger become an event

or a non-event? What might it mean to retain an interest in uneventful forms of hunger?

In the pages ahead I briefly review the anthropological literature on the everyday life

of hunger, in famine, drought and endemic scarcity. Then, drawing on my ethnographic

fieldwork in rural central India, I discuss a slow-moving crisis of food and water that subsists

and intensifies long after newsworthy narratives of culpability and horror seem to be over.

The anthropology of living and dying, as I see it, differs from the news precisely in that the

calamities it reports are not dramatic but endemic. I will end by asking what this relationship

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between food and water, that moves us beyond a straightforward conception of hunger as a

lack of food, may teach us about our conceptions of life, and living and dying.

A Brief History of Hunger

Kafka’s story of the waning popularity of the hunger artist suggests a provocative

question: can there be a viewing public for hunger, and that too one that loses interest? In

Hunger: A Modern History (2007) James Vernon argues that the possibility that the hunger of

near or distant others can be an object of sympathy and institutional intervention is a

relatively recent phenomena, dating roughly to the mid-nineteenth century, with the

emergence of a particular modern sensibility. Focusing on imperial Britain, Vernon describes

two ways of perceiving hunger that had to recede (or partially recede), for hunger to emerge

as an object of sympathy. The first was a theological sense of hunger as divine punishment.

The second, a secularized variant of this view, was the Malthusian sense, the dominant view

in the early nineteenth century, according to Vernon, of hunger as providing a natural basis

for moral order, in forcing the indigent to work and preventing overpopulation (2007: 17).

This “dismal science of political economy” (2007:18), as Vernon calls it, inspired the 1834

New Poor Law, which curbed poor relief and led to the creation of British workhouses. In

tandem with the political opposition to the New Poor Law, what most forcefully enabled the

emergence of hunger as a humanitarian subject, according to Vernon, was a new type of

news reporting centered on the workhouses. As Vernon puts it: “Hunger first became news

in the 1840s.” (2007: 14). It was the “personal stories about helpless starving children, the

anguish of a mother unable to make ends meet to feed her family, or even, later, the plight of

the industrious but unemployed workingman – [that] helped establish the moral innocence

of the hungry as victims of forces beyond their control.” (2007: 18). How did this emerging

mode of perception relate to hunger in the colonies?

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In “Famine in the Landscape: Imagining Hunger in South Asian History, 1860-

1990”, Darren Zook emphasizes the centrality of hunger to the early Indian nationalist

imagination. The best-known text in this genre is Dadabhai Naoroji’s Poverty and Un-British

Rule in India (1901). As is well known to students of South Asian history, while Naoroji was

one of the founders of the Indian National Congress, at this stage elite nationalist thought

was not necessarily anti-colonial. Naoroji’s text is exhortation to the British to follow

principles of liberal government, “to care for the people of India, to save them from famine,

and to ease them out of poverty.” (2000: 119). Spurred by a sequence of famines in various

Indian states between 1860-1877, and by debates in Britain and in India (that also predate

Naoroji’s text) on the form that British rule ought to take, colonial authorities sought to

codify administrative responses to food crises through the Indian Famine Codes. Scholars

studying colonial famine codes, such as Sanjay Sharma (2001), Stephen Devereux (2007) and

Alex de Waal (1997) have pointed out how these codes were premised on a tension between

offering and withholding aid, if the level of suffering was not perceived to be high enough.

Famine Codes set out three levels of food stress – ‘near scarcity’, ‘scarcity’, and

‘famine’ (Devereux 2007: 31). Relief was offered only if the level of ‘famine’ was reached,

measured by a sharp rise in food prices (at least 40% above the ‘normal price’), increased

migration, and most importantly, by death (2007: 31). As the Punjab Famine Code stated:

“Imminence of death is the sole criterion for declaration of a famine.” (2007: 31). The

opening excerpt above from the Indian Express, tells us that this tension, of a death bringing

“good times” in terms of welfare provisions, very much remains alive in contemporary India.

Let us understand the stakes of this difference between the eventfulness of famine and un-

eventfulness of endemic scarcity more clearly. If we take the case of India, the general

consensus is that there has been no large-scale famine in postcolonial India (Dreze & Sen

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1990: 16). This is in some ways a “monumental achievement”, as even a critical scholar like

Alex de Waal has called it (de Waal 2007: 7). At the same time, the tension between famine

and scarcity is not a minor issue, as de Waal points out, drawing on the work of the

economists Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen (de Waal 1997: 12). As Dreze and Sen famously

argued in Hunger and Public Action (1989), no major famine has ever occurred in an

independent and democratic country with a free press, since particular forms of reportage,

public outrage and oppositional politics, often keep state institutions alert about noticeably

high levels of mortality. The issue becomes more complex, as Kafka’s story suggests, when

the viewing public loses interest.

As Dreze and Sen further argue in their argument on public action: “Starvation

deaths and extreme deprivation are newsworthy in a way that the quiet persistence of regular

hunger and non-extreme deprivation are not…” (1989: 212). The largest recorded famine in

world history, Dreze and Sen tell us, is the famine of 1958-61 in China that occurred during

the Great Leap Forward, where nearly 30 million people died. This famine, Dreze and Sen

argue, was the result of faulty governmental policies that went unreported or underreported

for nearly three years. Democracies seem to be relatively successful in preventing such

“newsworthy” disasters. And yet, as Dreze and Sen argue, the extra mortality in India from

regular deprivation in “normal” times vastly overshadows the death toll of disasters: “Every

eight years or so more people die in India because of its higher regular death rate than died

in China in the gigantic famine of 1958-61” (Dreze & Sen 1989: 212). In this light we return

to Kafka’s picture of the disinterested public, to ask: what might it mean to retain an interest

after the spectacle is over? In other words, how might we engage the everyday life of

hunger? Anthropology makes a claim on the everyday and the quotidian. So we might ask if

there is an anthropology of hunger.

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The Anthropology of Hunger

Anthropologists of hunger, such as Kirsten Hastrup (1993) lament the paucity of

writings in this field, which Hastrup suggests has to do with the anthropological emphasis on

well-functioning social systems and structures, rather than on suffering (1993: 727). Nancy

Scheper-Hughes puts the issue more polemically, arguing that anthropology has been

complicit in a “denial of the plain fact of hunger as a lived experience” (1992: 132). That

said there is a discontinuous trail of anthropological engagements with hunger, some

signposts of which we might glean, even from Scheper-Hughes’s own book, among other

summaries.ii For several anthropologists of food, Audrey Richards’s 1939 study of the Bantu

and Bemba tribes of northern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) is the starting point for the

anthropology of hunger. Working with botanists, nutritionists and biochemists, Richards

examined women’s increasing under-nutrition, as the men were drawn away from seasonal

tasks and from earlier forms of agricultural labor to employment in British-owned mines

(Messer 1984: 208). Richards also demonstrated how kinship obligations and culturally

prescribed rules of sharing could break down in times of dearth (Messer 1984: 209).

For Scheper-Hughes, even more than Richards, it is Colin Turnbull’s book, The

Mountain People (1972) that “broke the taboo of silence against hunger in anthropology”

(1992: 132), with his chilling account of a drought in Uganda, and the collapse of all social

norms of care and reciprocity among the Ik tribe, former hunters and gatherers forced to

resettle as agriculturalists after the establishment of the Kidepo National Park in colonial

Uganda. Turnbull describes how Ik individuals fought for their lone survival, against all

competitors including their own parents and children (1992: 132). According to Scheper-

Hughes, Turnbull’s ethnography was discredited by Africanist colleagues, as having

exaggerated the situation, although for Scheper-Hughes it continues to have strong

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resonances with her own ethnography and with accounts of other societies in calamity

including Europe during times of extreme deprivation (1992: 133).

Approaching such contexts of deprivation, we might notice two related trajectories

in the anthropology of hunger. The first, as with Richards and Turnbull above, describes the

breakdown of social relations, including at times, at the intra-household level, during periods

of scarcityiii. This is not only a cultural peculiarity found by Africanist ethnographers. In

India, Paul Greenhough (1982) analyzes the Bengal famine of 1943-44, described by many

analysts as the last large-scale famine in India. Here, colonial culpability was particularly

strong and perceived as such by the nationalist movement, since, partly because of wartime

pressures on the British, Famine Code norms were ignored and “the famine was simply not

declared” (Dreze & Sen 1990: 16). In this context Greenhough asks how household

decisions were made on who would get to eat in a situation of scarcity. Through mortality

data and archival work, Greenhough finds that the nutrition of men was perceived as the

moral priority, in order to secure the survival of the lineage and society, which led to the

conscious deprivation of women, children, and the old. (1982: 271). Further, Greenhough

produces evidence to show that as the situation worsened, many adult males attempted to

save themselves by deserting their families.

In contrast to social breakdown, a different but related trajectory within the

anthropology of hunger analyzes coping strategies in times of scarcity, even in the absence of

effective governmental presence. In his review of hunger related literature, Jeremy Swift for

instance conceptualizes two types of coping strategies, aside from reduced consumption,

which he calls horizontal (reciprocal) redistribution, and vertical (patronage/moral economy)

forms of security mechanisms (1993: 5). As Swift argues, forms of customary collective

coping, particularly “vertical” arrangements often decline with the intensification of state

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power and commercial agriculture. In his study of the decline of moral economy

arrangements in Western Rajasthan, N.S. Jodha argues that such decline is often spoken of

paradoxically particularly by lower castes and tribes, as a condition of increased insecurity,

but also of increased freedom from caste hierarchies.

One further animating tension might also be located within the anthropology of

hunger, between political economy and subjectivity. In recent anthropology perhaps the

most comprehensive overview of political economy approaches to the anthropology of

hunger is offered by Johan Pottier’s Anthropology of Food: the Social Dynamics of Food Security

(1999). Pottier focuses on a range of themes including intra-household allocation of scarce

resources, gender inequality, risk management, effects of the Green Revolution, rural class

polarization, local agricultural knowledge, loss of genetic diversity, and effective famine

intervention (Mintz & Du Bois 2002: 106). However, the initial lament from Hastrup and

Scheper-Hughes was not, or not primarily for more comprehensive details on the political

economy of hunger. It was regarding what Hastrup calls the “emotional imagination” or the

“lived experience” of hunger (1993: 731. Different, for instance, from Pottier’s approach,

Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (1992)

remains perhaps the most significant attempt to extend questions of political economy into

the realm of subjective, embodied experience. Scheper-Hughes combines the “hard facts” of

hunger in the Brazilian northeast, with descriptions of forms of delirium and moods specific

to hunger, the facial expressions and agonies (“agonia da morte”) of hunger deaths, the long-

term emotional effects of living with deprivation, the sexual frenzies that propagate cycles of

birth and death, and other affective dimensions of material scarcity. Majestic as this

ethnography is, the overriding affect of horror alerts us to a question shared by journalists of

the 1840s with those who continue to report on hunger today, a problem that Kakfa’s

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hunger artist alerted us to: will the public remain interested if the spectacle is not so

spectacular? What does it mean to retain an interest in hunger when it is neither newsworthy

and nor spectacularly horrifying? I was faced with this question in my own fieldwork. Let me

outline the contours of the particular calamity I entered, drawing on which I want to add a

thought to the anthropology of hunger, somewhat different from those summarized so far.

Briefly Newsworthy

In a recent book, Ash in the Belly: India’s Unfinished Battle Against Hunger (2012) Harsh

Mander points out that even as India is touted as an emerging power, said to have overcome

large-scale famine, it is also home to 42 percent of the world’s underweight children (Mander

2012: 19). And further, if starvation were to be defined as a daily intake of less than 1600

kilocalories, described by nutritionists as the minimum requirement to keep the human body

functioning, then 17 percent of Indians grapple with starvation as an element of daily living.

(Mander 2012: 21). When starvation appears in the news nowadays though, the term is often

contested. As Mander puts it:

The pattern is monotonously, soullessly uniform: sensational media reports, agitations by local

activists, angry denials by government officials suggesting illness or natural ageing to have caused the

deaths, and attacks on the government for its failures by a usually slothful political opposition. The

dust rapidly settles, as the desperate forgotten survivors of the dead, sometimes without any living

adult earning member, struggle to somehow continue to live.

(Mander 2012: 175)

One such controversy began in 2002, in the sub-districts of Shahabad and Kishanganj, in the

Baran district of Rajasthan. In early 2002 all 32 districts of Rajasthan were declared drought-

affected. In October 2002, after reading sporadic reports in the Hindi news media about

starvation deaths, a five-member team from the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL,

Rajasthan) visited Shahabad. The team reported eighteen starvation deaths among the

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Sahariyas, a “Primitive Tribal Group” (a subcategory within “Scheduled Tribes”) in

Shahabad and Kishanganj. The PUCL team sent a letter to the Chief Minister of Rajasthan

demanding intensified government intervention in the area. PUCL also filed a Public Interest

Litigation in the Supreme Court of India claiming state negligence as regards famine relief:

“The country’s food stocks reached unprecedented levels while hunger intensified in

drought-affected areas and elsewhere.” (Right to Food 2002b: 1). This litigation was joined

by NGOs across six Indian states, describing food security situations comparable to

Shahabad and Kishanganj, even in non-drought affected areas, beginning the national Right

to Food campaign (Khera & Burra 2003). A flurry of news reports followed on the Sahariyas

in the English-language press, including an article in the New York Times “India’s Poor Starve

as Wheat Rots”, said to be a major embarrassment for the Indian government. A political

controversy flared up between rival parties, the Congress in power at the Rajasthan state

government level and the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), the central government at the time,

over the respective misuse of funds.

How does a crisis end? In November 2002, a Disaster Response Manager from the

global NGO Doctors without Borders assessed eight villages in Shahabad and Kishanganj,

detecting “pockets of malnutrition” (Quinn 2003: 2). Following a reassessment three months

later, the End of Mission Report tells us that the crisis is now over: “It can be presumed that

the huge influx of relief programs undertaken through Government bodies has effectively

reduced the prevalence of malnutrition. […]” (Quinn 2003: 8). Journalists continued to

trickle in for a while to keep track of deaths in the area and to write about rural poverty.

Anthropologists usually enter a space of disaster long after the “drama” is over. I first heard

about Shahabad and the Sahariyas just as their share of newsworthy excitement was ending,

at a presentation by the Right to Food campaign at the World Social Forum in 2004. I slowly

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covered the few degrees of separation to a potential host in Shahabad, through members of

the PUCL team who had visited the area in 2002, who introduced me to their hosts, now

mine, an NGO called Sankalp, almost wholly locally staffed, led by a couple, Moti and

Charu, from the nearby city of Kota. Starting from early 2006, I lived in Shahabad, a

subdistrict of 236 villages, for the next year and a half.

Writing After a Disaster

Endemic scarcity is hard to engage without returning to more ordinary

anthropological preoccupations such as the social structure of an area. To briefly describe

the demographic composition of Shahabad: the Sahariyas constitute 34% of the population

(Government of India 2001: 44), along with the Kiraads (a cultivator caste – 30%) and the

Ahirs (a pastoralist caste – 10%), both governmentally classified as Other Backward Castes

(OBCs), to whom previous generations of Sahariyas served as bonded laborers, a type of

labor relation involving inter-generational servitude and indebtedness. Other groups of high

and low status also compose the social fabric of Shahabad including the Chamars (10%),

Bhil Scheduled Tribes (8%), and other Hindu castes in smaller numbers including Baniya-

traders, Brahmins, Namdev-tailors, Teli-oilpressers, and others.

Colonial and postcolonial governments have attempted to pass legislations banning

bonded laboriv, leading neighboring groups such as the Sahariyas and the cultivator Kiraads

to periodically renegotiate their transactional relations, usually to more temporary, seasonal

arrangements. Alongside agricultural labor, the more longstanding occupation with which

the Sahariyas are “traditionally” associated, is the gathering and trading of forest produce, a

life option which has waned after the drastic decline of forest cover in Shahabad in recent

decades, a decline that most people in the area date to as recently as the 1990sv. At present

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most Sahariya families earn their livelihood through agricultural labor. Others cultivate small

landholdings assigned to them by the state as part of land reform movementsvi.

By the time I began living in Shahabad, the drought was a somewhat more contested

memory. While there was no unified “insider’s” perspective, there was a kind of shared

irritation or embarrassment about the term starvation death (bhookmari). Chanda, a Brahmin,

next in command at my host NGO Sankalp after Moti and Charu, told me early on in my

fieldwork: “In today’s day and age no one really dies of starvation.” I had asked him about

his village of Mundiar, which appeared in many news reports as a site of such deaths. “That

was just a political stew (khichdi), cooked up. Our area got defamed.” Many in Shahabad

disputed the term “starvation”. I asked Moti about this: “The debate is whether it was

malnutrition (kuposhan), which it certainly was, or whether it was starvation (bhookhmari)vii.

People don’t like the term starvation because it hurts their self-respect. What can’t be

disputed is that everyone faced difficulties at the time.”

There was no dispute that there had indeed been a period of heightened scarcity,

measurable, for instance, by the staggering numbers of people employed in famine relief

work in 2002viii. What was the history of scarcity in this area? No one in Shahabad, no matter

whom and how often I asked could remember a comparable situation in living memory. The

Kota State archives record a severe famine in 1897 that extended to 1899, although the

attitude to governmental relief seems to have been quite different. British colonial records of

Shahabad express surprise at the seeming reserve of the Sahariyas during the famine of 1897,

“There are some who are actually in distress but feel ashamed to mention it. Sehar caste [at

the time, the Sahariyas were one among other “castes” – jatis], suffer much. They have not

eaten grain since a month and live on Bel fruit and Jungali (wild) grass. Relief works may be

started.’ (KSA 1897: 7) A colonial official reviewing these relief works expresses his

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disappointment at low turnouts, which he blames on “the irritating conduct of petty officials

in keeping back part of the wages of the poor. In their bitter resentment against the Munshis

(accountants), the people lose sight of the paternal kindness and care of the government.”

(KSA 1900: 7) As a result, people “often leave the relief works and return to their villages to

die, as their only way of protesting against oppression…” (KSA 1900:7).

From oral accounts though I could conjecture what the alternative coping strategies

might have been in such times. Even though this region had not known large-scale famines,

the Sahariyas were no strangers to scarcity, which until relatively recently was almost an

annual, seasonal ritual. I came to know these temporalities of scarcity through a slightly

different line of questioning. I had been asking older Sahariya men how they became

enmeshed in bonded relations, particularly at a time when (until the 1990s, some said), forest

produce was relatively plentiful. My initial conjecture was that like Turnbull’s Ik tribe above,

the hardships were caused by the Sahariyas being made to move away (through

governmental coercions and incentives) from shifting to settled cultivation. In Shahabad

shifting cultivation continued till the 1970s.

Most older Sahariyas though did not paint an idealized picture of shifting cultivation,

instead describing how labor intensive it was, and how the grain yields would often be less

than the needs of a family, particularly during the monsoon months which even today

remain difficult, if one maps seasonal work cycles and the maximum possible number of

agricultural labor days in a year. As Dhojiaji Sahariya, my occasional host in the village of

Khushalpura in Shahabad, put it: “In earlier times, during the barsaat (monsoon) months,

bhookh padti (“hunger would strike”). Dhojiaji was in his mid-sixties. He had been a haali

(bonded laborer) in his youth before receiving a plot of land from the government, which he

now cultivated. “In those months, people would enter into difficult arrangements to fend for

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their families. I have worked day and night for five months a year to earn Rs.100. If I missed

even a day, I would have to pay four day’s wages, or the equivalent share of grain.” As with

Jodha’s villagers in western Rajasthan, Sahariyas in Shahabad also spoke with relief about not

having to depend on such “vertical” arrangements, much preferring instead to join

government famine relief works.

The other option, if we can call it that, during times of scarcity, were what colonial

authorities call “wild” or “distress” foods. People in Shahabad enjoyed describing “wild”

vegetables to me, as if to challenge my ideas of what constitutes food. “There was one called

totam ki bhaji (a root vegetable preparation). If you eat it raw your tongue will bleed. You

have to boil it for hours. Or chandi jadi (a fat root vegetable), that has to be left in flowing

water for a day. There were many others, phang, chireta (leafy vegetables often found near

wells that may be eaten even ordinarily in poorer households) but you have to know how to

prepare them and then be able to eat and digest it.’ix During the drought period in 2002-03,

part of the starvation deaths controversy was the charge by activists and journalists that

Sahariyas were consuming distress foods such as sama, a “wild grass.” Further outrage

resulted when local government officers described this as a “traditional” part of Sahariya

diets. Sama is indeed a longstanding food but its consumption was and is a sign of food

insecurity. The measure of such signs of distress is not necessarily dictated by governmental

fiat, but nor is it entirely at odds with what one could find in official documents. Botanically

sama would be classified as “small millet” (E.crusgalli) or a “wild cereal”, one among other

edible millets (Seetharam et al 1986: 25). Locally however, the difference between consuming

Sama and other millets is a difference of kind, a kind of social death, since sama grows as a

weed among other crops. As such, sama is classified as ghaas (edible grass) as distinct from

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other “larger” millets such as Jwar (great millet) and Bajra (pearl millet), which are cultivated

as crops, and thereby count as grain, anna.

Taken together, in considering the possibilities of survival during times of scarcity in

Shahabad, we arrive at a dismal roster: bonded labor, famine relief works, and distress foods.

No one seemed to add “horizontal” possibilities of mutual assistance to this list. “Koi kisi ka

nahin hai saab” (No one belongs to anyone at times like these), was the general refrain. At the

same time, the experience of hunger in Shahabad was not described in terms of social

breakdown and the abandonment of the vulnerable, as with Richards, Turnbull and

Greenhough’s accounts above, in no small part because of the security measures instituted

by the state and by the presence of a watchful media and political opposition. Also, people’s

memories of receiving such governmental assistance were not necessarily cast in terms of a

self-evident “entitlement”. Nor was the act of receiving remembered as a form of abjection

and dependency. I gradually began to appreciate the fluctuating vitalities that may appear

even in zones of precarity. For instance, the drought in Shahabad had generated its own

unpredictable gains and losses. A few local leaders had also emerged in this period.

The most vivid accounts I received of this period were from one such leader, Kalli

Sahariya, a former bonded laborer, who had joined my hosts Sankalp during the drought,

and gained an impressive local reputation by the time of my fieldwork. Many Sankalp

colleagues told me how Kalli’s chavi (reputation) was established, when she organized a major

dharna (rally) at a police station close to her village during the drought, when a drunken man

from the numerically and economically dominant OBCs beat up a relative of hers. The

OBCs were and continue to be the dominant cultivators in the area and the primary

employers of the Sahariyas. As the story goes:

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“The Nagar (OBC) wanted to be included in the “muster roll” (labor payment record) for the

drought relief work so he could be paid although he hadn’t done a day of work. Even they (the

OBCs) were in difficulty at that time. He thought he could just bully the Sahariya meth (labor in-

charge) and got violent when he was refused. The police always side with the Nagars. A complaint

was filed but they released him in a few days. Kalli organized a massive rally in front of the police

station. People from about 150-200 villages participated in a nine-day protest. The Nagar man was

finally arrested and charged.”

With Kalli I came to sense that the vulnerabilities of those dear to her had spurred

her to explore new regions of strength. Her own memory of the drought was of a kind of

purposeful intensity that she and others around her had felt at the time. She had never

worked for an NGO or any institution before that and knew no other form of life, other

than agricultural labor. She first joined Sankalp as a temporary replacement for a relative.

B: In the first drought year, you had just started working for Sankalp?

K: I joined once before but I left because I was felt udaasi (sadness) at having to leave my family and

keep traveling to other villages.

B: So then why did you rejoin?

K: During the drought we (her husband, whom I also came to know) and I once fought to the death

(lad mareya). [Laughs]

B: What was the fight about?

K: He was ill. I said why aren’t you getting treated? What are you saving the money for? “Don’t ever

talk about money”, he snapped, and slapped me twice. I was so angry I didn’t eat for three days.

[Laughs] So then in anger I left to work with Bhenji (Charu, at Sankalp). This was during the

drought.

This was a particularly intense time to join Sankalp. This time around rather than sadness

Kalli felt something else:

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K: Charu bhenji sent me to many villages to pick up muddas (issues), to make sangathans (women’s

groups), to see what (relief) work had started in different villages. So I went from village to village

with others. Some villages had relief work, so we found those villages in which there wasn’t any

work. There was no fasal katai (harvest) that year, so there no demand for labor. There was no water

in the tube-wells. Not even one field had crops. We went to make presentations all over, in Delhi,

Jaipur, Hyderabad, lots of places far away. We said we are not asking for free food, we are asking for

work. Many people came, Sonia Gandhi, the Chief Minister. The government had to listen. I came

on TV many times! (Laughs). Then I joined the ADM (a district government officer), going from

village to village to see the relief work.

This period of intensity brought forth capacities that might otherwise have remained

latent in Kalli - her ability to bring people together, to fight and make demands on those

who wield institutional power, many of the qualities that her colleagues in Sankalp came to

admire, and which continue at present, as she heads a Human Rights center in Baran.

Governmental and nongovernmental relief initiatives are often criticized as palliative

measures that ignore longer-term issues of scarcity and inequality. In this instance though,

through the time of my fieldwork and after, a host of longer-term measures seemed to be

emerging. Inhabiting life in Shahabad after the newsworthy disaster, I found that another

common postmortem contention, particularly on the part of neighboring middle and upper

castes, was that the akaal (drought) had turned into a sukaal (a period of grace) for the

Sahariyas. Before 2002 only 25% of Sahariya families had official Below Poverty Line (BPL)

status. As a result of the starvation deaths controversy, all Sahariya families had been

declared BPL, which entitled them to 35kg of government subsidized wheat every month, to

be bought from the local Public Distribution Service shop, at the rate of Rs.2/kg. Large

budgetary allocations were announced for new development programs. Scores of new

NGOs had mushroomed in the area. The precise number of NGOs now serving Shahabad

  17  

and Kishanganj was disputed, but the most popular figure was 217. Most of them are just

“shops for profit”, people added. That said, not all such measures were an eyewash.

Rather than being a straightforward story of neoliberalism, these were also the years

when the first glimmerings of welfare-state like provisions were being tried out in India, with

the Employment Guarantee Act, the Right to Food, and other such initiatives. With local

NGOs such as Sankalp being closely connected to wider activist circuits, a vigilant local

media, and a government apparatus on high alert, Shahabad became a kind of laboratory for

many of these welfare experiments. Educational initiatives had long been part of the state

development apparatus in Shahabad. And for those who were unlettered, a large-scale JFM

(Joint Forest Management) project was underway to “restore” the forests to forest-dwelling

tribes. Through famine relief-like labor such as digging trenches, unappealing as that sounds,

the JFM projects also aimed to provide one hundred days of employment to Sahariyas

families, as part of the Employment Guarantee Scheme, to make up for periods of scarcity in

the annual labor cycle. With all of these initiatives underway, was the crisis now well and

truly over? I gradually realized that if one thinks of food and water as interrelated then a

different kind of crisis was just beginning, below the threshold of disaster.

At various points I tried to ascertain when exactly the drought ended. Some said,

half-jokingly, that it was still going on. Others were not joking at all, and would try to explain

the extent of the water problem to me and argue how it extended far beyond a one-off

drought and famine. “Water is the No.1 problem of this area.” This was the general

consensus, among high and low castes and tribes alike. After ignoring such statements for

some months as a kind of everyday conversational lament, I began to pay more attention to

the specific shift that people in Shahabad were pointing to, which also had to do with

  18  

notions of food security and consumption, and an expanding definition of hunger, which I

now approach in the remainder of this essay.

A Slow-Moving Crisis Below the Threshold of Disaster

When did the difficulties with water begin? “Jab nadi-talaab toot gaye” (when the streams and

ponds “broke” i.e. dried up). Until recent decades Shahabad would have been described as a

relatively lush forest area. The water-related difficulties began in the last twenty years, “once

everyone began to use tube-wells and pump-sets,” it was said. At one level this is a “natural”

shift towards mechanized agriculture. What is not natural or necessary, although it may seem

so, is a seemingly minor dietary shift that I began to pay attention to in the course of

fieldwork, from millets to wheat, which is, I found, a somewhat subterranean cause at the

heart of the emerging water shortage, here and in many other parts of the world. I came to

Shahabad drawn by a newsworthy form of hunger. Living here, I became interested in a less

newsworthy, everyday anxiety around water. These phenomena, it turned out, were not

unrelated if we look to an issue that has long interested anthropologists, namely what

constitutes food. What kind of food is indicative of hunger, or of plenty?

It was common knowledge, although it came to me late, that in these parts of north

and central India, wheat, seemingly a staple and ubiquitous grain at present, was an

expensive, relatively rare and coveted food item until as recently as twenty years ago. Until a

generation earlier, everyday diet was strongly differentiated across castes in Shahabad. How

would we understand this differentiation? Scholarly writings on Hindu dietary practices have

often focused on questions of vegetarianism, transactional purity (Dumont 1980: 130) and

ascetic ideals of self-control (Khare 1992: 27). Slightly differently, I began to get interested in

contrasts that surfaced even when a dietary norm was shared by low and high castes. These

contrasts could not be arranged into hierarchies of “purity”, for instance, with vegetables.

  19  

Middle castes such as Kiraads and Ahirs ate little or no vegetables. “Their staple was lapta

and maheri (types of porridge) with curd or ghee (clarified butter), since they own so many

cows.” Vegetables were more regularly consumed by the highest castes such as Brahmins

and Baniyas and the lowest, such as Sahariyas and Chamars. Qualitative differences between

“high” and “low” caste diets were often stark, understood not in terms of purity, but

between “coarser” and “finer” tastes. “Brahmins and Baniyas eat naram (fine) vegetables like

palak (spinach), kaddu (pumpkin), and lockey (zucchini) with thin flatbreads (patli roti), not the

tickker (coarse/thick/bumpkin) bread that everyone else eats.” At the coarsest end of the

vegetable spectrum were the jungli bhaji (wild vegetables) mentioned above, some of which

are now seen as primarily “distress” foods, indicative of hunger.

In earlier generations then, lower down in the caste hierarchy, diet became “coarser.”

Then again, coarse is not natural category. What we find coarse is a matter of habits and

desires, which may also change. Until the late 1980s, the two main grain crops of Shahabad

roughly followed an upreti (upland) and talheti (lowland) division of the region. The main crop

upland, where the soil is loamy (maar) was jowar (sorghum/great millet). The main crop in the

drier lowlands was bajra (pearl millet). The different value of grains did not exactly mirror

social hierarchies. Jowar, for instance, was a staple diet for high and low castes in the uplands.

There were other hierarchies though even within households, as the anthropologists of

hunger describe above, that determined which grain one got to eat. For instance, Rajnish

Parihar, in his late thirties, from the high-status Rajput caste, described a childhood memory:

When I was a child, we only ate jowar. My village of Tejgarh is in the

uplands. My elder brother had a problem digesting jowar, so my father used

to buy a 10 kg bag of wheat for him every month. We younger ones would

feel bad, like we were poorer. Rich relatives sometimes mock you saying,

  20  

“Unke tau jaape mei bhi gehu nahin milti” (You aren’t served wheat even on their

most auspicious occasions).

For most people wheat was a festival food. Many remembered the delight of newfound

access to wheat in recent decades. Lower-caste schoolteachers joked that one of their main

attractions to government hostels as children was the fine wheat roti (flatbread) that was daily

served there. “It was like everyday was a festival! We would ask to stay in school even in the

summer holidays, so we could continue to eat there.” Millet was the coarser, everyday reality.

Statistical studies of Rajasthan in the 1960s show bajra and jowar ranked highest in terms of

regular consumption (GoR 1964: 34). In contrast, recent reports tell us that even as the per

capita production of bajra in Rajasthan has drastically declined from 80 kg in 1970–71 to 30

kg in 2001–02, a major production surplus continues because the demand for the grain has

fallen even more sharply, due to “changes in the consumption basket against coarse cereals

generally and bajra in particular” x (The Hindu 2003: 1). Policy discussions are underway to

reposition bajra as animal feed. (The Hindu 2003: 1). What we have then is the undramatic but

drastic demotion of millets and the potential expansion of the category of distress foods.

The main technological enabler of this shift in diet and cropping patterns is the

transnational Green Revolution, said to have begun in 1964–65 with the emergence of new

agricultural technologies, most famously the Mexican “dwarf wheat” high-yielding varieties

of seeds, subsequently exported to many parts of the world including India (Evenson 2004:

547). Half a century later, there are now well-established positions praising and criticizing the

Green Revolutionxi. The praise usually centers on the role of new agricultural technologies in

addressing food shortages. Following the Green Revolution, wheat productivity boomed in

India, from 663 kg yield/hectare in 1950–51 to 2,033 kg/ha in 1976, creating buffer stocks

  21  

of wheat (ICAR 1988: 2). Between 1966 and 1976, the area under wheat cultivation also rose

from 12.6 million ha to 20.1 million ha (ICAR 1976: 1).

One of the first adopters of these new technologies in Shahabad was Mangilal

Mehta, a middle caste cultivator, now in his mid-sixties, who vividly remembered the

transformation:

The first new seed was Sunehra 64 (the Mexican dwarf wheat seed Sonora 64,

translated into Hindi as Sunehra “Golden” 64). I was the first to try it in my village. I

bought the seed at a subsidy from our local agricultural extension officer. The first

time I tried it only on one bigha. I bought 15 kg seeds, 20 kg DAP (phosphorus

fertilizers), and 20 kg urea (nitrogen fertilizers). It yielded 15 mann, thrice the amount

from the previous year! I never went back to the old seeds.

Mangilal was noncommittal when I asked about the criticisms of Green Revolution

technologies that one occasionally overheard, in academic and everyday forms. “Some say

that urea hardens the ground?” I asked. “My field is still fertile,” Mangilal replied. I

continued: “Others say that fertilizers cause diseases?” “Who knows? People used to fall sick

earlier, too.” What concerned Mangilal more was an immediate threat, namely, the increasing

lack of water. Millets are almost entirely rain-fed crops. Even in an irrigated field, millets

need four or five times less water than wheat. Agricultural manuals tell us that the most

crucial input for the heightened yields from High Yielding Variety seeds is irrigation. Four to

six irrigations are needed to obtain the optimum yield from wheat (ICAR 1976: 90). In

Shahabad, this is known as the char paani (four waters) needed for wheat production. New

technologies enable intensified water extraction. The Green Revolution was accompanied by

the proliferation of water extraction technologies, mostly known by their English names, the

  22  

diesel-run “pump-set” that “pulls” water from surface sources such as ponds and rivers, and

bore-wells and tube-wells (the pataal tod kuan—a “netherworld-breaker” well), which

burrows to extract directly from the groundwater, now a staple of many urban Indian

households as well. These new technologies are decisive markers of socioeconomic divisions

in Shahabad and most of rural India. A family that owns a tube-well is considered well off.

Those at the lower-middle end will be saving up for a tube-well. Everyone else is considered

poor. Rural land prices now hinge almost entirely on the source of irrigation.

From zero in the 1960s, privately owned tube-wells in rural Rajasthan at the time of

my fieldwork had increased to 1.33 million (Birkenholtz 2005: 2). Even though it is an

aspiration for many, Shahabad has a relatively meager 712 tube-wells and 1,310 registered

pump-sets (GoR 2003: 66). The reason for the comparatively low number of tube-wells in

Shahabad is because the “netherworld-breaker” technology is relatively unsuccessful in the

talheti lowland villages, as the bedrock below the soil is popra (shale), the irregular softness of

which makes for poor groundwater extraction potential. As a result, most cultivators in the

lowlands, like Mangilal, use a pump-set if their land is close enough to an exploitable surface

source of water such as a well, pond, or river. Mangilal shares a well with his two brothers,

each of whom has installed a pump-set in the well. Their village has a hundred families, all of

whom have some form of mechanized access to water. Many in their village began to

encounter a water shortage in the early 2000s. If Mangilal and his brothers have their three

pump-sets on simultaneously, their well will run dry in five minutes. As a result, the brothers

arrived at a shared arrangement. One pump remains on for an hour, then off for two hours,

and so on. Each brother fulfills his seasonal water requirements in 4–5 days, although this is

a tense transaction, because the timing of the water input is critical for the crop. Because of

  23  

these changes in water levels, in the last few years, Mangilal has reduced his wheat cultivation

to only two of his seven bighas, using the remaining land for soybean, which requires slightly

less water. Because of the diminished water supply, his wheat yield has now waned to pre-

Green Revolution levels of wheat.

As yet, cultivators in Shahabad only describe the water situation as a samasya

(problem). Passersby from neighboring, more intensely irrigated parts of central India would

bring more worrisome accounts of water-related crises from their areas. Two itinerant fruit-

sellers arrived one night, looking for shelter in the home of a Sahariya cultivator, where I too

happened to be spending the night. They were from Shivpuri, the district immediately north

of Shahabad in Madhya Pradesh. They shared their worries:

In Shivpuri, there are bores going to 500 feet, even 1,000 feet but finding no water.

People are queuing up for a dish of water. Fights are breaking out daily. People are

leaving in large numbers for cities. The government is seizing tube-wells and forcing

owners to provide fixed periods of service to the public. The owners are fighting

back. They say that soon, new laws will be passed, and no one will have water

except for the government and rich people.

In comparison, “your Shahabad is blessed,” the fruit-sellers added.

How do we understand crisis with respect to water? Government criteria for crisis

evaluation are based on groundwater balance estimates—Ratio of Extraction/Recharge,

called E/R estimates. Environmentalists argue that E/R estimates are unreliable, since an

important factor is water quality, not just volumetric availability (VIKSAT 1993: 10). These

uncertainties notwithstanding, E/R percentages may be used to signal levels of danger as

  24  

regards groundwater extraction - below 70% (secure), 70–90% (borderline moderate to

high), 90–100% (high), and above 100% (dangerous). In the most recent study of

groundwater levels in the region, Shahabad was measured to be at the relatively secure level

of 42%. In the more “developed” neighboring sub-districts, E/R danger levels gradually

increase, Chippabarod (88.52%), Anta (99.18%), Atru (104.72%), and Baran (113.38%)

(GoR 2006: 22). While Shahabad is more secure than its immediate neighbors at present,

over the last two decades groundwater level in Shahabad has also dropped significantly from

an average of 5.9 meters in 1984 to 8.62 meters in 2005 (GoR 2006: 28).

In “Green Revolution and Desertification” (1986) Shiva and Bandhopadhyay

describe “aquifer drought” brought on by “exponential growth in water usage” (1986: 340).

In contrast, Shiva and Bandhopadhyay argue, “indigenous cropping patterns” reduced

vulnerability to drought with a low demand for water, mixed cropping and high organic

matter production (1986: 344). In Shahabad I never found cultivators exalting traditional

agriculture. Instead, the narratives of older cultivators centered on the much more intense

physical labor required in earlier times, as well as the prohibitive taxes from which they were

now thankfully exempt. And yet, most cultivators at present live with a sense of threat, and

of an ongoing and impending crisis, of increasing “desertification” even in formerly lush

areas, in addition to widespread fears regarding the rising costs of seeds and fertilizers, which

has resulted in increasingly smaller profit margins.

Environmental and socio-economic critiques occasionally have an inadequate picture

of people’s desires. For instance, somewhat differently from Shiva and Bandhopadhyay

above, we might ask: what attraction did these new technologies exert on a mass scale that

led them to be adopted? A simple answer would be the economic benefits. This is not the

  25  

end of the story though, as we see with Mangilal or any small-scale cultivator who may have

a waxing and then severely waning trajectory with these technologies. Rather than a

commonsensical idea of economic self-interest, I will emphasize a different kind of value,

somewhere between the necessity of overcoming hunger and the aspiration to eat “well”, to

do with the demotion of millets as a coarse “poor man’s” food and the rise and

redistribution of “finer” wheat. Tastes and values such as coarse and fine may seem like a

minor footnote in the agrarian dramas of the twentieth century. However, I want to suggest

that these more ephemeral values, not necessarily imposed on “indigenous” ways of life by

policy fiat or economic incentives, are also involved in these processes of desertification.

Consider again, the empowering aspect of wheat, as the food item through which

hunger is overcome. Most Sahariyas and other castes in Shahabad ate wheat only a few times

a year until even twenty years ago, for instance, bonded laborers who received a fistful of

wheat during a festival, or, as we saw with Rajnish above, even in a high-caste Rajput family

in which the younger brothers would look on jealously at their elder brother’s “richer” plate.

Now, the poor eat wheat every day. Would they (or “we”) agree to restore millets to our

diets? This depends on the value ascribed to millets, values that might be changeable. This is

not a difference between Western versus indigenous perspectives. Wheat is in no way

foreign or new to India (Evenson 2004: 548). And nor are all “traditional” millets necessarily

indigenous. Millet researchers tell us that pearl millet (bajra), “traditionally” consumed in so

many parts of India, is a relatively recent entrant into south Asia, introduced roughly six

centuries ago by migrants and invaders from West Asia (ICRISAT 1975: 23). Accepting

these tectonic movements, we might instead focus on how life (a sense of vitality and

plenitude) waxes and wanes. What may have been life giving at a certain point, say, a growth

  26  

spurt in wheat, may become life denying at a later point, in creating a water scarcity. Millets,

as we see, which sustained life for centuries, were demoted. Perhaps at a later stage, soon

enough, they may have to ascend again. The critical question is how to sense and participate

in these waxing and waning movements at a given juncture. We are at some distance from a

simple idea of hunger as a problem to be solved simply by sending food aid to the poor.

By whose logic or feeling did millets come to be demoted and classified as “coarse”

or “inferior”? Was it government policy, or local tastes, or both? British colonial archives,

particularly inquiries into “famine foods” reveal strong hierarchies and value-laden

preferences in the “objective” classification of vegetables and grain, with millets consistently

at a lower rank. For instance, one such inquiry conducted in Shahabad in the aftermath of

1899 famine, lists many of the “wild” vegetables and “small” millets consumed by Sahariyas

as unsuitable “distress foods.” The Agency Surgeon for Kota writes, “There appears to be

little doubt that the intractable diarrhea met with among famine-stricken people was to a

great extent due to the use of these articles as diet” (KSA 1902). As we saw, this concern

continues a century later in Shahabad, during the starvation deaths controversy in 2002-03,

with the argument between activists and state officials around the consumption of sama (a

wild “grass”) by Sahariyas. In the section above I argued that sama is indeed a distress food,

even in local understandings not entirely dictated by the state. That acknowledged, in light of

the decline of a range of other millets, I want to pose a slightly different question, of what

constitutes food, and of how specific foods define our status as living with lack or plenty.

In a well-known article, Amartya Sen discusses the difference between “absolute”

and “relative” poverty. Poverty, some argue, is relative to one’s milieu, one’s neighbors. In

contrast, Sen emphasizes the “irreducible absolutist core” of poverty: “If there is starvation

  27  

and hunger, then—no matter what the relative picture looks like—there clearly is poverty”

(1983: 159). The problem is that the definition of hunger itself may be up for debate. This is

not to say that hunger is wholly relative. There are for instance, recognizable distress foods

within particular dietary cultures. The problem here as I see it, arises with the gradual

expansion of the category of distress foods, through state dictates and social values. Our

habits may shift, creating a crisis out of what was formerly ordinary. Millets themselves as we

saw, are not a unified category. There are hierarchies of value among different millets such as

those between “grass” and grain above, that may lead one to be perceived as food less fit for

human consumption. These hierarchies are currently in the process of a seismic shift, with

an unprecedented and harmful ascent of wheat to the detriment of other grains. For

instance, with the proposals above to reposition bajra as animal feed, there may come a time

in the not-too-distant future when bajra too is transformed from a sign of “relative” into

“absolute” poverty, as a distress food indicative of hunger.

Is there any scientific basis to describe millets as “inferior”? The postcolonial Indian

state inherited many of the scientific values of its colonial predecessor including ideas of

nutrition. A post-independence study of Shahabad in 1961 declares that the inhabitants live

on a “forest diet,” composed primarily of “inferior millets” (GoR 1961: 23). The recent,

slightly belated scientific consensus on millets is that their “nutritional content is no less than

the fine grains and superior in certain constituent elements” (The Hindu 2004: 38). In recent

years, Indian agricultural scientists have decided to drop the labels “inferior” and “coarse”,

and are encouraging the adoption of the more positive term “nutritious cereals” (The Hindu

2004: 37). Scientists, however, recognize the critical “social” dimension of the problem—

  28  

millets are considered a “poor man’s food” and consequently there is “a shift away from

coarse cereals due to changing food preferences” (ICRISAT 1993: 94).

Examining this shift in Shahabad we see that tastes are not entirely dictated by

governmental policy. Policies in turn may express social prejudices and values. Even lower in

value than jowar and bajra were other millets that have entirely disappeared from the area,

kodo and raali (“small” millets common in various parts of Asia and Africa) (Seetharaman et

al. 1986: 25). Lower castes men would often tell me their memories of small millets from

earlier decades. “We grew it in the dhaanda (dry land). My father liked it, but I just couldn’t

eat it. It was too khiss-khissi (dry/coarse/hard to swallow).” The word khiss-khissi (coarse)

expressed a visceral revulsion that was not necessarily ideological. One may gradually learn

or unlearn a “traditional” diet.

Is it possible to eat without injuring life? The question is what kind of injury may be

preventable. When I spoke enthusiastically about re-adopting millets, I was warned by some

in Shahabad, “You’ll fall sick if you eat it every day.” they added informatively, “I can’t shit if

I eat bajra for three days in a row.” If millets are to make a return, perhaps they will have to

reemerge as a more “cultivated” taste, rearranged in hierarchy and value, and mode of

preparation. Some with more radical political tastes may scoff at such minor “lifestyle”

changes. On a larger scale, though, a sympathetic re-invitation of millets into global diets

may have more beneficial environmental and social consequences than many of the more

newsworthy revolutions of the twentieth century. Simply put, if consumed on a large enough

scale, say, by the upper and middle classes worldwide, even once every three days, millets

have the potential to gradually regenerate the water table, perhaps preventing the water wars

of the future.xii

  29  

Conclusion: the Quality of Life, at Varying Thresholds of Life

The decline of millets is not limited to Shahabad. Even a cursory glance at statistics

informs us of the number of states across India where millet consumption is waning.

Further, in China, millet area has been decreasing at the rate of 6.5% annually since 1970

(ICRISAT 1993: 99). Still further afield, we learn that the colonial officers who described

these grains as “coarse” were not speaking without a cultural memory of their own. Millets

were “the principal foods of the poorer people of ancient Rome and Europe generally,

replaced in the nineteenth century by rice, maize, and potatoes” (ICRISAT 1975: 9). In

present-day Europe and United States, millets are grown as animal feed. As a result, world

statistics for millets are often combined under feed rather than food grains (1975: 14). The

related question of water security is also quite global. In India, 85% of water use is for

agriculture (The Hindu 2004: 135). On a worldwide scale, groundwater over-pumping by

world farmers at present exceeds recharge rates by at least 160 billion cubic meters per year,

such that by 2025, 50% of the world population may face some form of water scarcity

(Birkenholtz 2005: 1). In this light it may be worthwhile to welcome some coarseness, and to

ask what kinds of values may be altered, including those of food, and the kinds of food that

come to be defined as a sign of hunger.

Let us return, finally, to Kafka’s hunger artist. As spectators are we fated to merely

gawk at hunger, and then to gradually lose interest? What would it mean to sustain an

interest? And in what are we expressing an interest? Let us call this a question of the

anthropology of living and dying. In a recent paper (Singh 2012), I asked: with what

conception of life can we consider the dead as participants among the living? In response I

offered the term varying thresholds of life (2012: 392) as a conception of life that includes

  30  

ancestors, spirits, and the not yet born, who might exert conscious or unconscious pressures

and intensities on the living. As such, the non-living too may be vital, or at least participate in

life. In outlining this definition, I understood life from the monist perspective of Gilles

Deleuze as a “vast continuum of human and non-human life” (Deleuze 2001: 6). Thresholds

are strata within this continuum, and a way of signaling movements and passages between

one form of life and another. I will conclude this essay by suggesting that perhaps this

concept can be usefully re-territorialized from the domain of spirits, where I used it earlier,

to a different kind of materiality.

For example, let us use this concept to unsettle or resettle an economic term, by

asking, what is meant by the term life when economists, for instance, use the term quality of

life? Rather than “basic capabilities” (Sen & Nussbaum 1993: 31), or virtues (1993: 257), or

even “minimally adequate levels for the sustenance of life” (1993: 41), I want to suggest that

the quality of life also involves understanding the relationship between different thresholds of

life, since wellbeing is not one-dimensional. Our calorific intake, for instance, may meet the

minimum requirement of internationally standardized, quantifiable definitions of the quality

of life. And is the problem of hunger then “solved”? Not quite, since our daily bread, as we

saw, may gradually deplete the water table. In this sense crises may also occur at different

thresholds, with different speeds and temporalities. Some temporalities are newsworthy,

others less so. A step toward heightened awareness may be to remain attentive to the slow-

moving interrelation of varying thresholds of life such as we have examined here with food

and water and desire and chains of value, and the force they exert on one another. This is a

story of hunger and thirst, that effects not only the poor and the hungry, but one in which

we all continue to participate.

  31  

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The Hindu - Survey of Indian Agriculture 2004. Chennai, India. Varshney A. 1995. Democracy, Development and the Countryside: Urban-Rural Struggles in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Vaughan, Megan. "Famine analysis and family relations: 1949 in Nyasaland." Past & Present 108 (1985): 177-205. Vernon, J. 2007. Hunger: A Modern History. Harvard University Press: Cambridge MA. VIKSAT/Pacific Institute Collaborative Groundwater Project. 1993. When Good Water Becomes Scarce: Objectives and Criteria for Assessing Overdevelopment in Groundwater Resources. Ahmedabad, Gujarat.

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Endnotes

                                                                                                               i  For a wonderful summary of the anthropological literature on anorexia nervosa (including its overlap with forms of aesthetic and ascetic striving), see Eli and Ulijaszek’s entry on “Anorexia Nervosa” in Oxford Bibliographies Online: http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199766567/obo-9780199766567-0116.xml ii For good Annual Review of Anthropology summaries on food (including issues of food insecurity) see Messer (1984) and Mintz & Du Bois (2002). iii  Another instance in this genre would be Vaughan’s 1983 study of women’s memories of abandonment during a drought in Malawi in 1949, memorialized in songs and figures of speech. Drawing on these memories, Vaughan argues that in understanding hunger, divisions within the family are important as divisions within the community (1985: 202).  iv  On questions of feudal ‘bonded’ labor in India and its relation to contemporary forms of wage labor, see Prakash (1990) and Breman (2003, 2007), among others.  v  In the book emerging from this ethnography, titled Poverty and the Quest for Life, I take up competing narratives of culpability that assign blame differently to state and social actors for the decline of forest cover in Shahabad.    vi A UNDP funded study by the Government of Rajasthan in 2004 found 57% of Sahariya households to be landless (GoR 2004: 37). According to the study, at present, 88% of Sahariya households are primarily dependent on wage labor, with only 5.6% wholly self-employed agriculturalists (GoR 2004: 32). Among the laborers only 1.3% describe themselves as non-agricultural labor (GoR 2004: 34). vii During the drought, the JSA Hunger Watch Group prepared methodological ‘Guidelines for Investigating Suspected Starvation Deaths’ (JSA 2003). The guidelines are meant to address precisely the dividing line between malnutrition and starvation in terms of Body Mass Index and Calorific Intake. The post-drought debate among locals in Shahabad seemed unconcerned with these technical norms. It was more a matter of the prestige of the area. Interestingly, in the colonial archive of Shahabad I found a comparable debate in 1899. viii The number of people employed in famine relief works in Rajasthan more than doubled from four hundred thousand in 2000-01 to nearly ten hundred thousand in 2002-03 (Khera 2006: 5165). ix In her ethno-botanical study Forest Food of Tribals (2006) Ambika Nag describes over 200 variety of plants consumed by Scheduled Tribe groups in Rajasthan such as the Bhils, Damors, Garasias, Minas as well as the Sahariyas. In contrast, I found that most people in Shahabad including Sahariyas spoke about the ‘wild’ vegetables in the past tense. Even in the most extended periods of stay in the villages and Sahariya settlements of Shahabad, even those located at the periphery of forest areas, I found almost negligible interest in the gathering of existing forest-based vegetables and plants for regular consumption. This may have been in part because of the drastic depletion of forests in recent years in Shahabad, which has diminished the stock of available resources. It also has something to do with changing food preferences, which is an element of the present essay. x In post-independence India, the national average of millet consumption was 109 grams per person per day (Kodesia 1975: 16). In contrast, by 2004, millets cumulatively constitute only 8% of cereal consumption with the remaining portion covered by “fine” cereals such as rice and wheat (The Hindu 2004: 37).

xi For anthropological accounts of the Green Revolution in India see Gupta (1998), for Indonesia, see Lansing (1991). For early, celebratory accounts by Indian agricultural scientists see Kodesia (1975). For a contrasting critical account by an Indian environmentalist, see Shiva (1991). xii While I make this assertion in a somewhat open-ended Gandhian sense, there have been groups engaged in sustained, data-based advocacy for higher global and national policy priority for millets,

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         such as the All-India Coordinated Small Millets Improvement Project http://www.smallmillets.res.in/html/profile.html However, the problem, as such groups point out, is not only one of policy priority, but also a question of social values and consumer demand. In recent years, even existing Bajra (pearl millet) production, still widely produced in the arid regions of western Rajasthan, is far from being consumed, resulting in the policy proposal to reposition Bajra as animal feed (The Hindu 2003: 1).