Tirthankar Roy

@RoyHistory1

5 Tweets • 2023-02-21 •  See on Twitter

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The discussion on Indian famine history keeps

relapsing into a sterile debate on the mentalities of
states. Did the British care? Did indigenous states
care more? This is a useless set of questions for
research.

Mentalities of states cannot be defined. Mentalities did

not matter. And we cannot test if it mattered with
precolonial data or data on indigenous states. Only the
British in India compiled enough information. Others
did not.
End of dryland famines tells us exactly what mattered.
Knowledge mattered. Knowing that the monsoon
tropical climate made droughts high frequency and
high risk mattered. States before and the British in
mid-19th c “did not know” this nor had the capacity to
deliver a response.

That changed around 1890s. New knowledge was

embodied in the thousands of pages of documentation
on the Deccan famines unprecedented in scale and
purpose. It led to an accent on mass transport and
water projects, though not enough was delivered on
the latter.

Knowledge mattered. This isn't what Mike Davis or

Hickel et al say. This is what “I” say. To critique me,
please do not cite everybody else. Prove this thesis
wrong. Dr. Halder’s article criticizing me falls into the
old leftist trap of repeating bad statistics and
banalities.

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