Empire of Hunger: Representing Famine, Land, and Labor in Colonial India

FAIN: FT-285617-22

Liza Oliver
Wellesley College (Wellesley, MA 02481-8203)

Research and writing leading to a book on the role that documentary photographs taken during episodes of famine in 19th-century India played in furthering the policies of the colonial government and in shaping popular opinion.

This book project considers how photographs constituted the policies and ideologies of economic liberalism, colonial humanitarianism, and their fraught convergence around the many famines that ravaged colonial India in the second half of the nineteenth century. These images reveal how colonial governance sought to respond to newfound conceptions of famine and hunger as a state responsibility even as it encouraged policies that greatly exacerbated the causes and effects of famine. Indeed, photography created, aided, and abetted the circulation of moral sentimentality toward famine victims through the very images intended to visually propagate and institutionalize the Raj’s extractive colonial policies. This study unites, for the first time, visual studies with environmental studies and the economic history of colonial India to shed light on the very paradox of Raj colonial humanitarianism, which sought to stave off famine by reifying many of the very policies that sustained it.