Food and welfare in India, c. 1900–1950

In 2001, the People's Union for Civil Liberties submitted a writ petition to the Supreme Court of India on the “right to food.” The petitioner was a voluntary human rights organization; the initial respondents were the Government of India, the Food Corporation of India, and six state governments. The petition opens with three pointed questions posed to the court: * A. Does the right to life mean that people who are starving and who are too poor to buy food grains ought to be given food grains free of cost by the State from the surplus stock lying with the State, particularly when it is reported that a large part of it is lying unused and rotting? * B. Does not the right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution of India include the right to food? * C. Does not the right to food, which has been upheld by the Honourable Court, imply that the state has a duty to provide food especially in situations of drought, to people who are drought affected and are not in a position to purchase food

Migration and diaspora in modern Asia

Book synopsis: Migration is at the heart of Asian history. For centuries migrants have tracked the routes and seas of their ancestors – merchants, pilgrims, soldiers, and sailors – along the Silk Road and across the Indian Ocean and the China Sea. Over the last 150 years, however, migration within Asia and beyond has been greater than at any other time in history. Sunil S. Amrith's engaging and deeply informative book crosses a vast terrain, from the Middle East to India and China, tracing the history of modern migration against the background of empires, their dissolution, and the onset of modernity. Animated by the voices of Asian migrants, it tells the stories of those forced to flee from war and revolution, and those who left their homes and their families in search of a better life. These stories of Asian diasporas can be joyful or poignant, but they all speak of an engagement with new landscapes and new peoples. Migration has been central to making Asian societies as complex and diverse as they are today

Crossing the Bay of Bengal: the furies of nature and the fortunes of migrants

Book synopsis: The Indian Ocean was global long before the Atlantic, and today the countries bordering the Bay of Bengal—India, Bangladesh, Burma, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Malaysia—are home to one in four people on Earth. Crossing the Bay of Bengal places this region at the heart of world history for the first time. Integrating human and environmental history, and mining a wealth of sources, Sunil Amrith gives a revelatory and stirring new account of the Bay and those who have inhabited it. For centuries the Bay of Bengal served as a maritime highway between India and China, and then as a battleground for European empires, all while being shaped by the monsoons and by human migration. Imperial powers in the nineteenth century, abetted by the force of capital and the power of steam, reconfigured the Bay in their quest for coffee, rice, and rubber. Millions of Indian migrants crossed the sea, bound by debt or spurred by drought, and filled with ambition. Booming port cities like Singapore and Penang became the most culturally diverse societies of their time. By the 1930s, however, economic, political, and environmental pressures began to erode the Bay’s centuries-old patterns of interconnection. Today, rising waters leave the Bay of Bengal’s shores especially vulnerable to climate change, at the same time that its location makes it central to struggles over Asia’s future. Amrith’s evocative and compelling narrative of the region’s pasts offers insights critical to understanding and confronting the many challenges facing Asia in the decades ahead

Health and sovereignty in the new Asia: visions of development

The article discusses the shift in attitudes toward economic development in countries under colonialism to altered visions of modernization by the 1960's of the so-called "tropical" Asian countries. The failure of many Asian modernization efforts is traced to unrealistic expectations of governmental technologies and applied power to manage high birth, death, and disease rates, and the attempts to control them. In particular, the author concludes that both growing Asian urban centers and the borderlands between nations are least amenable to governmental economic intervention

Political culture of health in India: a historical perspective

This paper provides a historical perspective on the political culture of public health in India. It examines the genesis of the state’s commitment to provide for the health of the people, but argues that in that original commitment lay numerous contradictions and fractures that help to explain the state’s relative ineffectiveness in the field of public health. It argues that the nationalist movement’s initial commitment to the state provision of welfare arose from a complex combination of motives – a concern with democracy and equity as well as concerns about the “quality” and “quantity” of population. The depth of ambition for public health was unmatched by infrastructure and resources; as a result, the state relied heavily on narrowly targeted, techno-centric programmes assisted by foreign aid. The paper also examines the malaria eradication programme as a case study which reveals the limitations and weaknesses of that approach; the ultimate failure of malaria eradication left a huge dent in the state’s commitment to public health

Asian internationalism: Bandung's echo in a colonial metropolis

This paper argues that two conflicting discourses of internationalism stood in uneasy counterpoint and contention in the Asian arena of the 1950s, reflected in the legacies of the Bandung conference. The first drew on a language of global citizenship and rights. The second saw the international system as a source of strength and support for state sovereignty, and state-directed programmes of national development. The remainder of the paper uses the case of late-colonial Singapore to examine the intersection of these two discourses of internationalism. An Asian internationalism, which spanned to include Africa over the course of the 1950s, became one of a stock of narratives that made Singapore's 'everyday cosmopolitanism' possible, in the worlds of the hawkers, the dockworkers and the agriculturalists. The political aspirations of these groups were sacrificed, ultimately, to the goal of disciplined national development, supported by an international order that had closed in to defend the interests of state power