The Opposite Of Plenty
Text and photographs by Sharanya Deepak
The arid landscape of Marwar, Rajasthan
When Devi Devasi first saw the plane that brought supplies during a great spell of hunger, she was afraid that it would come shuttling down on her small head. She recounted the day to me on a warm July afternoon in her village, and drew an accurate silhouette of a plane with a stick on the mud floor where we sat.
“It was so big, have you seen one up close?” she asked me. “And we were so hungry. Hunger makes a man smaller than he already is.”
Devi’s village is outside Jodhpur, one of the largest cities in Rajasthan, and is part of what comprises the erstwhile kingdom of Marwar. Devi is in her late 60s and one of three siblings who were raised without a mother. In 1970, when the plane visited, she was barely ten years old. Like many with the same last name, Devi is a member of the Rabari community. Rabaris—also referred to as Raikas—are traditional nomadic-pastoralists that herd camels, sheep or goats, and move across Rajasthan and other parts of India’s northwest through the year. The famine caused by the drought killed all edible food, but also fodder for the animals.
“So, even if we were fed, our animals were not,” Devi said. “Even today, if they don’t eat, it feels like we have not eaten. Without them, what purpose do we have?”
The drought and famine of 1969-70 was one of the more severe in Rajasthan’s recent past, and like during many similar events in the state’s history, aid did not reach hungry villagers. Families abandoned their smallest children, and hundreds left on foot in search of a plate of food. Devi recounted that in the 1970s, her family had little or no land to sow for food, so relying on stored grain was not possible. The only way out was to beg.
“One baniya seth gave us ‘moong ka paani’ — the water which dal was boiled in — to drink,” she said.
Rajasthan’s landscape is marked by plants such as this local species of aloe vera
They also ate tree barks, and some ghee that was miraculously left over in a small jar. For water, they dug with their hands near ponds. All that was available was sterilised and consumed. The government plane, though gigantic, brought little relief to the village.
“Some sugar, and lots of ‘gehun,’ or wheat,” Devi said.
But the wheat was mostly inedible. Even so, she cooked what was available into “kaccha-pakka” or half-cooked rotis for siblings on a small fire. Devi remembers several other famines and droughts since 1970. She would move to another village after she was married, but scarcity persisted in her life. For most families of rural Rajasthan, and particularly those of marginalised castes, famine is knitted into the everyday. It descends with a sudden tremble in time.
“Famine sticks to Marwar like flies to mawa barfis [sweets made of milk solids],” Devi said, turning to metaphor to lighten the weighty memories she retold.
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While the nature of famines in Rajasthan differs between provinces and climates, the word for them, “akal,” inspires similar ruefulness. Akal, pronounced “kaal’”means both drought and famine in local dialects, which indicates the interwoven nature of the two phenomena in Rajasthan. Akal is of four types: annakal, a famine of grains; jalakal, a famine of water; trinakal, a famine of fodder and trikal, the most severe — a drought of all things — when food, water and animal feed all disappear. Akals occur most commonly due to the lack of rainfall, or an excess of it — even today, a majority of Rajasthan’s agriculture is fed by monsoon rain. Since the 17th century, there have been various documented and undocumented famines in Rajasthan’s history, which once consisted of several princely states. When they occurred, colonial officials and ruling royals relegated these tragedies to peripheries, and left people unattended, their suffering unaddressed.
Before the 19th century, there were a few, scattered mentions of scarcity. One can find scant mentions in surveys and travelogues of British officers, such as the journal Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan by colonel James Todd. In his annals, Todd wrote about the year 1765, and how “the ministers of religion forgot their duties. All was lost in hunger, fruit, flowers, every vegetable thing. Even trees were stripped of their bark to appease the craving of hunger. Man ate man.”
By the 19th century, however, hunger and starvation had increased manifold in India.
“The frequency and intensity of famines surpassed those of the entire past,” notes a report on 19th century famines, published by the All India Federation of Organisation for Democratic Rights in 1988. The most devastating trikal of the 19th century occurred towards its end. This was the “Chhapanniya Akal” of 1898-1900, a famine named after the Bikrami (or Hindu calendar) year “Chhapan” or 2056, when it occurred. The famine was so dire that it swept throughout India’s northwest, and in Rajasthan, it brought illness and hunger like never before.
By the end of the 19th century, it was clear that famines were not simply a matter of natural intervention. It became transparent that famines occurred due to the poverty of farmers, which was fortified through exploitative tax measures and labour laws imposed by Rajput kings and the British colonial state. The kings, moreover, were more interested in appeasing the British rather than instating relief for their subjects, scattered through unforgiving terrains. Consider that in the year 1900, priority was given to recruiting soldiers for the British army from Marwar and Mewar—an opportunity seized by young men looking to escape hunger—rather than feeding famished citizens, or reducing widespread disease.
Of the famines in Rajasthan, records show that hunger remains a constant in marginalised castes of both Hindus and Muslims. While landowning Brahmins, Rajputs and other dominant castes experienced periodic difficulty. For example, by the 20th century, handpumps and tube wells were dug in villages during droughts, but these were established in the vicinity of influential and powerful groups, keeping clean drinking water out of the access of the poor.
In his 1981 treatise, Poverty and Famines, economist Amartya Sen famously wrote that starvation is “not the characteristic of there not being enough food to eat, but of some people not having enough food to eat.” The paper provides a bleak and telling analysis of the Indian subcontinent’s history, which always was—and remains—steeped in regularised, cyclical hunger. Like in other parts of the subcontinent, famines in Rajasthan were a result of price rise, caste-based extortion and hierarchical, top-down neglect.
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Durgaram Devarsi with his dog Vinod
Like Devi’s memories, famines or akals lived or experienced through the stories of elders remain in the minds of many people of rural Rajasthan. Durgaram Devarsi also recounted several famines during his lifetime, small and big periods of scarcity which he estimates are around “15 or 16 in all.” He shares a last name with Devi, and like her, belongs to the Raika community. Durgaram’s parents herded camels and moved across desert pastures. But when he was a teenager, Durgaram abandoned his hereditary occupation to work in a shop in Borunda, outside Jodhpur, also in Marwar.
“It seemed like the right thing to do at the time,” he said, explaining that he switched many jobs as he grew up. Today, he works in a museum outside Jodhpur, where in his mid 70s, he is the caretaker.
“These days, I always have some money to buy food,” he said. “But not earlier, when I was a little boy. Akal came and went all the time. It was a part of our life.”
In her book, Nomadic Narratives: A History of Mobility and Identity in the Great Indian Desert, the historian Dr. Tanuja Kothiyal observes about Marwar: “In this dry arid region, agriculture was rather precarious, dependent on rains and deft management of water resources. This inculcated a certain sense of preparedness and acceptance that scarcities, droughts and famines were just around the corner and could afflict any time.”
Durgaram iterated this in his own way. “Do you know the saying?” he asked. “Every three years there is drought, and every seven there is famine in Marwar.”
Durgaram also remembered the famine of 1970, when what he calls “lal jowar” or red millets came as relief to Borunda from the ruling “Indira Gandhi sarkaar” or the Congress government of the time.
“It was not all fresh, however,” he said. “But we ate it. Lots of people got ill from it. It is not our staple food, our staple food is bajra.”
Grains like jowar or pearl millet are the staple foods of Rajasthan
Since Borunda is in Marwar, it is part of what oral historian Komal Kothari termed the “bajra zone.” In his work, which spanned five decades until 2002, Kothari classified Rajasthan not according to its more rigid, constructed borders of tehsils and districts, but on the basis of agricultural zones that followed three kinds of millets — bajra (pearl millet), makka (maize) and jowar (sorghum). Kothari saw the imperial categorisation of Rajasthan’s landscape useful only to regimes and conquerors. He dismissed them as arbitrary and dictatorial, and instead formed categories that synced with staple crops and food.
According to Kothari, this would give a better idea of the lives, fears, daily habits and household rituals of the families that lived in each region. Kothari’s categorisation makes sense to Durgaram and Devi – both of them spoke repeatedly about how without bajra, their lands do not breathe, their stomachs do not fill. No amount of state-sponsored wheat and foraged food can account for the lack of their beloved staple grain.
These days, because he lives close to a city, a car comes by with food. Durgaram can purchase vegetables and grain from this small, makeshift market.
“Gaadi no intezaar hota hai ab,” he said with a laugh. Now, we wait for the cars to come with supplies. But he worried for those stranded in the far reaches of the desert. “The car comes here, but does it go far away? What about Jaisalmer? Barmer? Do the cars go there?” he said. “Do you know the saying? Famine has its feet in Bikaner, it sometimes visits Jodhpur but has its permanent abode in Jaisalmer.”
He remembered that when famine arrived, some people would leave on bullock carts, while others would go to Malwa or Madhya Pradesh to work on greener lands. The migration of Rajasthanis to work as labour in other parts of India, and instances of drought driving the region’s farmers to seek low paying urban jobs as security guards and shop assistants are prevalent even today. But Durgaram also explained another kind of mobility, that of Raikas of his mother’s generation, who were accustomed to moving to parts of the state where famine had not hit.
“Because they were not always in one spot, they could fight akal,” he said. “It provided resistance against hunger. Because they could do trade, sell handicraft, and buy food in other villages where famine had not hit.”
As he remembered the days of scarcity, he mentioned the Bhats, a community of traditional, travelling genealogists who provided some services in his village during famine. Bhats, who would travel from place to place, would also transform into transporters of food. Like roving spirits, Durgaram said, they would ask people what they needed, and if they could, bring it back.
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For the country’s elite, famines remain distant, one-off occurrences. For them, the idea of scarcity often has to do with wartime or political emergency. But in many parts of India today, rising prices, lack of subsidies and crop failure regularly create famine-like conditions. Entire regions live without proper supplies of food and nutrition, and people are still forced to leave their homes in search of greener pastures to grow food.
Modern famine in Rajasthan is not a complete absence of food, but it takes on many other forms. It is the lack of adequate harvest for farmers, the slow decline of cattle, and the sharper fall in the number of camels in the state. It is the erratic functioning of the Public Distribution System, and the Brahmanical entitlement of organisations like the Akshaya Patra foundation who deny eggs and animal protein to children, who need them the most. (For more on this, listen to Mid-day Meal, from season 1 of Bad Table Manners on Whetstone Radio). In rural Rajasthan, famine, drought and akal are not aberrations but manifest in routine, everyday ways. They present themselves in the lack of support for irrigation, the imposition of monoculture, the presence of caste-based restrictions in access to food, and the constant threat to food security for the most vulnerable in the state.
The Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdowns that followed it have only emboldened this. In 2020, a survey conducted by the Right To Food campaign and the Centre for Equity Studies disclosed that more than 62 percent of the respondents had to borrow money to eat. In the same year, according to IndiaSpend, in the tribal belt in Rajasthan’s Dungarpur district, communities suffered from hunger due to the loss of work, and witnessed reverse migration from cities to villages during the lockdowns imposed throughout the country. Across India, the disorganisation and suddenness of lockdowns instated by the Narendra Modi-led BJP government created larger problems of food access. In Rajasthan, aid was largely absent, both from the central regime and the Congress-led state government.
Like in earlier centuries, it would be too convenient to blame present-day scarcities on natural causes. Doing so would be to ignore the myriad ways in which access to food functions and malfunctions in Rajasthan. Eating in Rajasthan remains a question of the fluctuating climate, and of access and distance— both physical and social—from what is available and healthy. Even today, rural residents of the state routinely walk long distances only for a pot of water for their families. “Khaara paani” or saline water is still an unforgiving curse in these lands.
When asked if the kings provided any assistance during the difficult times of famine, Durgaram was amused.
“Of course they didn’t help,” he said. “The kings are always well fed. Have you seen their palaces? Have you seen their kitchens? They always have delicious food.” But he added generously: “Let them eat what they want. Humay kya? What has it got to do with us?”
He was resolute that the kings and villagers would never understand one another.
“Yes, we are all Rajasthani. But we are not the same”, he said. “Bas yaad rakhna. Yeh Rajasthan ka registan sirf rajaon ka nahi hai.”
“Just remember one thing. This desert of Rajasthan does not belong only to its kings.”
