A brief introduction to Hungry Nation outlines the key interventions of the monograph, while chronicling the rise of food and hunger as potent sites of grievance for Indian nationalists in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In formulating their critique of colonial rule, economic nationalists like Dadabhai Naoroji and R.C. Dutt saw in India’s recurrent famines the dramatic demonstration of India’s worsening poverty under British rule. Rejecting the ecological explanations of their colonial masters, as well as the bogey of India’s deficient or lazy peasants, these Indian thinkers intuited that the real origin of the nation’s recurrent famines lay in its peoples’ inadequate purchasing power, and an imperial administration far more eager to extract and export agricultural produce than to look after popular welfare. These critiques were mirrored in India’s vernacular press, and intertwined with a new imperial and global interest in the dynamics of population, nutrition, health and economics. By the 1920s and 1930s, however, the rise of colonial agricultural and nutritional institutions had done little to better Indian welfare, and Indian planners began to aver that only self-rule and national planning undertaken by Indians themselves could alleviate the nation’s recurrent famines and perennial malnutrition.