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.

‘This is that rare book that is historically rooted and complex, yet strikingly contemporary. The issues of hunger and malnutrition continue to be on the agenda of policy makers and society at large in twenty-first-century India. Siegel gives this a complex history and background. Imperial administrators and nationalists, concerned social activists and scholars saw this in different, often contradictory ways. Yet the multiple lenses for viewing hunger, dearth, and public action in the middle of the last century can help with insights into our own times. This is a fine book, one not to be missed.'

Mahesh Rangarajan - Ashoka University, India

‘Hungry Nation is an elegantly written, compellingly argued, account of the central role played by food and famine in the making of modern India. Through careful archival research spanning different decades since the Great Bengal Famine, Benjamin Robert Siegel takes us further than anyone before him in understanding this important issue. Scholars in a variety of disciplines, including history, anthropology, sociology, geography, political science, public policy, and public health will find much to admire and debate in these pages.'

Akhil Gupta - University of California, Los Angeles

‘Both entirely innovative in its approach to politics, and cunning in its summation of the complexity of the transition to postcoloniality, Hungry Nation will find a wide audience amongst scholars of South Asia, late empire, Cold War history, food studies, and environmental history. The value of his intervention is in Siegel's ability to use a deep, thorough reading of specific policy to illuminate a meta-conception of one of the key postcolonial challenges of the era: the responsibility of government to its citizens in the intimate, visceral experience of the sustenance of life through the relationship between food and body.'

Rachel Berger - Concordia University, Montreal

'Siegel’s book stands out among other works for its rich visual archive of Indian agrarian life … this book should be widely read and debated by scholars interested in the twentieth-century history of postcolonial state making, agrarian transformation, and the politics of transnational developmental expertise.'

Debjani Bhattacharyya Source: Environmental History

‘Hungry Nation is an important compilation of empirical material on the evolution of food and agriculture policy within newly independent India … it also represents a significant conceptual contribution, likely to stimulate further lines of scholarly inquiry in studies of India, both historical and contemporary.’

Trent Brown Source: Asian Studies Review

‘In the course of this fine book, Siegel refers to a range of disciplines, including agricultural, economic, political, and environmental history … Scholars, advanced students, and general readers interested in the first three decades of the development of modern India will gain much from this valuable volume.’

Michael H. Fisher Source: The Journal of Interdisciplinary History

‘Siegel’s excellent research throws up facts that have traditionally escaped readers, whose preoccupation has largely been with the politics which underscored the departure of the British and the division of the country along communal lines.’

Syed Badrul Ahsan Source: Asian Affairs