"Hear the Tale of the Famine Year": Famine Policy, Oral Traditions, and the Recalcitrant Voice of the Colonized in Nineteenth-Century India

In this essay I suggest that these two profound anxieties, coupled with a need to explain away the countless revolts against colonial rule that had occurred in India since the late eighteenth century, prompted an explosion in the collection and entextualization 2 of Indian speech in colonial documents, at the very moment in the nineteenth century when the triumph of scientific knowledge of Indian bodies had been uneasily declared. Particular varieties of Indian speech, often characterized as "the voice of the people," were inserted into colonial texts to serve as authorizing narrative, to create an illusion of consent to colonial rule, while other voices, the voices of critique or rebellion, were erased, marginalized, or criminalized. And more generally, as Sharma (2001:38) has argued, famine policy and colonial writing about famine were closely intertwined with the British need "to legitimize its authority in the eyes of its subject people and to itself."