Starvation as geopolitical tool has travelled through time. Literature shows oppressors knew what they were doing

The spectre of the imminent famine in Gaza orchestrated by Israel harks back to the 1943 famine in Bengal, which, as has now been proven by science, was possible only because of the exploits of the British. 

Studies on soil moisture and rainfall on the year of the famine that claimed some three million lives and analysis of the British policies of agricultural disruption, food diversion from starving populations to feed their soldiers as well as rice and boat denial during the Second World War, have turned on its head the simplistic theory that famines are purely a result of production failure or ‘overpopulation’ peddled by the west.

In the book Hungry Bengal on the 1943 Bengal famine, historian Janam Mukherjee illustrated how colonial rule can lead to widespread human suffering and serve as a form of oppression. The argument converges with Nobel laureate Amartya Sen’s theoretical framework that established famines to be fundamentally about the failure to distribute food to those in need due to a variety of human-made factors. 

But the British understanding of the deadly outcome of unequal distribution of resources existed since at least a couple of centuries before the British rule began in India. In the early modern period, through its own experience of starvation, deaths and sociopolitical turmoil in the difficult years of the 1590s marked by concentration of wealth and coinciding with the Little Ice Age and consecutive years of drought. 

The dearth of this period has been visually depicted in a recently released ingenious and acutely sensitive graphic anthology on famines in early modern England and pre-colonial India. 

Famine Tales published by the Jadavpur University Press in 2023 presents episodes of drought and food crisis in the two geographically distant but historically intertwined regions through patachitra (scroll paintings) and comics. The folk artists and visual storytellers scoured through official records, novels, plays, poems and personal journals from the period to tell the stories of dearth in an accessible and intelligent way.

A chapter in the book by the chitrakars (poet-scroll painter) of Naya Pingla in Bengal’s Midnapore district and comic artist Trinankur Banerjee, illuminates the scarcity that had affected England during the late Elizabethan period — the years that are also captured in the plays of William Shakespeare.

Literature is among the only records, other than anonymous parish registers of deaths and grain price indices, of the British famine of the 1590s — the worst in Renaissance England. 

“The comic / visual / patachitra forms work very well since that is one of the few ways human suffering in such historical tragedies can be chronicled. These happened away from cameras, were not recorded by contemporaries, but are important for posterity,” Banerjee told Down To Earth.

In Famine Tales, his comic A Vagrant’s Dream follows a tired Robyn who has walked to London from his drought-hit village in search of work and has ended up in the audience of a theatre where a play on the concentration of wealth in England is being staged. The lead character of the play is Sir John Falstaff, who appeared as a conceited knight in Shakespeare’s Henry plays and whose ignorance about his country’s economy is at the same time hilarious and infuriating.

Through Falstaff’s ludicrous actions and eventual fate, Banerjee reimagines the uprising against inequality and exploitation knocking on the doors of the clueless ruling class. “In my graphic story, the text of the ‘play’ was largely been adapted from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1 and 2, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Coriolanus, and Sir Hugh Platt’s Sundrie new and Artificiall remedies against Famine (1596). All of these are contemporary sources that refer to the dearth in one way or another,” he shared. 

The themes of scarcity, drought and famines are woven into early modern literary consciousness, showed Ayesha Mukherjee’s book Penury into Plenty: Dearth and the Making of Knowledge in Early Modern England. 

She uses a wide range of literary sources to describe and analyse the perception of famine in England, such as Robert Allott’s compilation of poetic works of noted authors called England’s Parnassus (1600).  

“The personified figures of Famine and Dearth in Englands Parnassus had the physiological symptoms of ‘famine edema’, a condition where fat and muscle were ‘consumed’ to feed the vital interior organs, leading to loss of hair, greying skin, dental decay, swelling limbs or stomach, and general lassitude,” she wrote, adding imagery from the poems:

Dearth yawned wide “with lothsome stinking breath”: she had “hollow eyes”, “meger cheekes and chinne”, “sharpe leane bones” that pierced her “sable skinne”, and one might plainly spy her empty bowels “Cleane through the wrinckles of her withered hide”.

The physical appearance of these fictional characters bears a stark resemblance to the famine-stricken people from rural Bengal who, centuries later, would travel door-to-door in the city begging for a little rice starch.

Then, Thomas Dekker’s works like The Rauens Almanacke (1609) cited by Mukherjee offered a satirical take on the response to famine, blending prophecy with critique of social and professional groups, demonstrating how famine was both a material and a rhetorical tool in the literary and social fabric of the time.

Banerjee offers a glimpse into why even the most oblique literary references may be valuable in trying to understand famines in this period. “Since dearth was not something that was yet looked at as a preventable disaster, no proper documentation existed. Natural disasters, in fact, would also be seen as divine retribution for some moral lack. Hugh Platt’s book was, probably, one of the first attempts at addressing the issue. However, his book on famine starts with linking it to god as well. Also, life-expectancy at this time was maybe 30, making these additional deaths not remarkably unusual.”

In Pericles, Shakespeare vividly imagines the city of Tarsus, initially depicted in a state of abundance, where the act of eating is taken for granted due to the plentiful supply of food. However, this scene of prosperity quickly deteriorates into one of dire scarcity, where the city’s inhabitants, once gorging themselves, are now desperate for bread, to the extent that mothers would consume the children they nurse, and starvation becomes a pervasive threat​​.

This sheds light on the early modern perception of famine not just as a physical but also as a moral and ethical challenge. 

“In the case of the 1590s famines in England, while parish registers and grain prices indices can tell one half of the story, the actual human condition can only be understood, I believe, from literature,” said Banerjee. 

During his research for his chapter in Famine Tales, Banerjee understood that people may not have wanted to remember crises like the 1590s famines in the way they actually were. “Since they would connect dearth more with divine wrath, something that cannot be addressed humanly, the usual recourse would be through supplication to god. In literature, these would probably come as moral advice, or as personifications, such as in the case of Falstaff in Shakespeare’s Henry plays, where this character is a symbol of different corruptions that lead to scarcity.” 

Finally, the works of Sir Hugh Platt, a 16th century writer on agriculture, exemplifies the central thought of Mukherjee’s Penury to Plenty — the notion that the period’s responses to dearth were not merely reactions to crisis but part of a broader commitment to managing resources and generating knowledge.

Mukherjee’s analysis situates Platt’s contributions within the broader intellectual and cultural milieu of early modern England, where debates on nature, God’s providence, and human responsibility were vigorously engaged. Platt’s pragmatic approach to dealing with famine emerges as a significant counterpoint to purely providential explanations of dearth, proposing instead a model where divine favour and human action are not mutually exclusive but are seen as complementary forces in the stewardship of the earth’s resources.

But by the 19th century, when Britain’s colonies were reeling from similar situations of famines, made worse by their exploitative strategies, their dearth perception suffered a sea change. When England, and other European colonisers, looked at the gains made from economic exploitation of other countries, they now wanted to assert that famine was the work of humans, rather than God’s. They attributed scarcity to the ‘inferiority’ of native populations in lands they have plundered. The centuries-old wisdom of alleviating famines was erased from the memory of the British rulers.

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