Hungry Bengal

Hungry Bengal

Author: Janam Mukherjee

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 0190209887

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Examines the interconnected events including World War II, India's struggle for independence, and a period of acute scarcity that lead to mass starvation in colonial Bengal.


Hungry Bengal

Hungry Bengal

Author: Janam Mukherjee

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015-10-15

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 0190613068

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The years leading up to the independence and accompanying partition of India mark a tumultuous period in the history of Bengal. Representing both a major front in the Indian struggle against colonial rule, as well as a crucial Allied outpost in the British/American war against Japan, Bengal stood at the crossroads of complex and contentious structural forces - both domestic and international - which, taken together, defined an era of political uncertainty, social turmoil and collective violence. While for the British the overarching priority was to save the empire from imminent collapse at any cost, for the majority of the Indian population the 1940s were years of acute scarcity, violent dislocation and enduring calamity. In particular there are three major crises that shaped the social, economic and political context of pre-partition Bengal: the Second World War, the Bengal famine of 1943, and the Calcutta riots of 1946. Hungry Bengal examines these intricately interconnected events, foregrounding the political economy of war and famine in order to analyse the complex nexus of hunger, war and civil violence in colonial Bengal at the twilight of British rule.


Hungry Nation

Hungry Nation

Author: Benjamin Robert Siegel

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-04-26

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 1108695051

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This ambitious and engaging new account of independent India's struggle to overcome famine and malnutrition in the twentieth century traces Indian nation-building through the voices of politicians, planners, and citizens. Siegel explains the historical origins of contemporary India's hunger and malnutrition epidemic, showing how food and sustenance moved to the center of nationalist thought in the final years of colonial rule. Independent India's politicians made promises of sustenance and then qualified them by asking citizens to share the burden of feeding a new and hungry state. Foregrounding debates over land, markets, and new technologies, Hungry Nation interrogates how citizens and politicians contested the meanings of nation-building and citizenship through food, and how these contestations receded in the wake of the Green Revolution. Drawing upon meticulous archival research, this is the story of how Indians challenged meanings of welfare and citizenship across class, caste, region, and gender in a new nation-state.


The Hungry Tide

The Hungry Tide

Author: Amitav Ghosh

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2014-03-04

Total Pages: 443

ISBN-13: 0547525206

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Three lives collide on an island off India: “An engrossing tale of caste and culture… introduces readers to a little-known world.”—Entertainment Weekly Off the easternmost coast of India, in the Bay of Bengal, lies the immense labyrinth of tiny islands known as the Sundarbans. For settlers here, life is extremely precarious. Attacks by tigers are common. Unrest and eviction are constant threats. At any moment, tidal floods may rise and surge over the land, leaving devastation in their wake. In this place of vengeful beauty, the lives of three people collide. Piya Roy is a marine biologist, of Indian descent but stubbornly American, in search of a rare, endangered river dolphin. Her journey begins with a disaster when she is thrown from a boat into crocodile-infested waters. Rescue comes in the form of a young, illiterate fisherman, Fokir. Although they have no language between them, they are powerfully drawn to each other, sharing an uncanny instinct for the ways of the sea. Piya engages Fokir to help with her research and finds a translator in Kanai Dutt, a businessman from Delhi whose idealistic aunt and uncle are longtime settlers in the Sundarbans. As the three launch into the elaborate backwaters, they are drawn unawares into the hidden undercurrents of this isolated world, where political turmoil exacts a personal toll as powerful as the ravaging tide. From the national bestselling author of Gun Island, The Hungry Tide was a winner of the Crossword Book Prize and a finalist for the Kiriyama Prize. “A great swirl of political, social, and environmental issues, presented through a story that’s full of romance, suspense, and poetry.”—The Washington Post “Masterful.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)


Three Famines

Three Famines

Author: Thomas Keneally

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Published: 2011-08-30

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 1610390660

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Famine may be triggered by nature but its outcome arises from politics and ideology. In Three Famines, award-winning author Thomas Keneally uncovers the troubling truth -- that sustained widespread hunger is historically the outcome of government neglect and individual venality. Through the lens of three of the most disastrous famines in modern history -- the potato famine in Ireland, the famine in Bengal in 1943, and the string of famines that plagued Ethiopia in the 1970s and 1980s -- Keneally shows how ideology, mindsets of governments, racial preconceptions, and administrative incompetence were, ultimately, more lethal than the initiating blights or crop failures. In this compelling narrative, Keneally recounts the histories of these events while vividly evoking the terrible cost of famine at the level of the individual who starves and the nation that withers.


Blood Island

Blood Island

Author: Deep Halder

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2019-05-25

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 9353025885

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'When the house of history is on fire, journalists are often the first-responders, pulling victims away from the flames. Deep Halder is one of them.' - Amitava KumarIn 1978, around 1.5 lakh Hindu refugees, mostly belonging to the lower castes, settled in Marichjhapi an island in the Sundarbans, in West Bengal. By May 1979, the island was cleared of all refugees by Jyoti Basu's Left Front government. Most of the refugees were sent back to the central India camps they came from, but there were many deaths: of diseases, malnutrition resulting from an economic blockade, as well as from violence unleashed by the police on the orders of the government. Some of the refugees who survived Marichjhapi say the number of those who lost their lives could be as high as 10,000, while the-then government officials maintain that there were less than ten victims.How does an entire island population disappear? How does one unearth the truth and the details of one of the worst atrocities of post-Independent India? Journalist Deep Halder reconstructs the buried history of the 1979 massacres through his interviews with survivors, erstwhile reporters, government officials and activists with a rare combination of courage, conscientiousness and empathy.


Churchill's Secret War

Churchill's Secret War

Author: Madhusree Mukerjee

Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited

Published: 2018-03-21

Total Pages: 371

ISBN-13: 935305009X

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Winston Churchill has been venerated as a resolute statesman and one of the great political minds of the last century. But, as Madhusree Mukerjee reveals in this groundbreaking historical investigation, his deep-seated bias against Indians precipitated one of the world's greatest man-made disasters -- the Bengal Famine of 1943 -- resulting in the deaths of over four million Indians. Combining meticulous research with a vivid narrative, Churchill's Secret War places this overlooked tragedy into the larger context of World War II, India's freedom struggle and Churchill's legacy.


Hunger and Holocaust: Three Trembling Famine of Colonial Bengal

Hunger and Holocaust: Three Trembling Famine of Colonial Bengal

Author: Souren Bhattacharya

Publisher: Clever Fox Publishing

Published:

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13:

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The bliss of colonial rule transformed a once prosperous Bengal into a state of pauperization. Recurrent Famine became a unique characteristic under the good governance of British rule. From 1765 to 1947 the country had witnessed numerous famines which perished more than 60 million Indians. among these Bengal witnessed three deadly famines which perished around 17 million people. Who was responsible for this destitution? Who was to blame? It was not an act of God, it was Imperial Holocaust or British Colonial Holocaust.


Grandma and the Great Gourd

Grandma and the Great Gourd

Author:

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2013-03-05

Total Pages: 34

ISBN-13: 1596433787

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On her way to visit her daughter on the other side of the jungle, Grandma encounters a hungry fox, bear, and tiger, and although she convinces them to wait for her return trip, she still must find a way to outwit them all.