Nutritional Colonization in British India

Photograph of Bengali Famine by Sunil Janah

Famine was a mainstay of British rule in India, sandwiched by horrific famines in Bengal in 1770 and 1943. In the past, many scholars have debated the causes of these famines, but what is now receiving more attention is the role that famine played in the birth of modern humanitarianism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For instance, one of the world’s most recognizable charities today, Oxfam, got its start as the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief. Concurrent with the rise of humanitarianism, European and American scientists in the latter half of the nineteenth century began defining the parameters of nutrition as we know it today. In 1896 at Wesleyan University, Wilbur Atwater placed a graduate student in a massive calorimeter and measured the heat expenditure as the student ate precise quantities of food, exercised, and performed mental activities. Thus, the unit of the calorie was born. In 1913, Elmer McCollum and Marguerite Davis discovered the first vitamin, Vitamin A. Scientists would go on to discover other vitamins and come to terms with deficiency diseases during the interwar period. Armed with a way to quantify food’s relationship to health, governments set about integrating nutrition science into agriculture, public health, and foreign policy.

The histories of humanitarianism and nutrition intersect at the site of famine. Because of a series of particularly devastating famines in British India in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Government of India began employing the nascent science of nutrition to combat famine mortality. In a recent book on government feeding in the British empire, historian Nadja Durbach discusses the Government of India’s turn to child feeding in the 1890s as an economic investment. She argues that this epitomized colonial biopolitics, in which the state conceived of its colonial subjects in terms of future labor power: “The feeding of children at kitchens established on the public works allowed the colonial state both to marshal a humanitarian discourse and to construct this form of gratuitous relief as an investment in empire rather than as a drain on its coffers or a disruption to the principle that able-bodied men were solely responsible for the upkeep of their dependents.” Here, famine relief could be discursively constructed as an economic investment, as well as a humanitarian one.

My own research attempts to link the British empire’s experience in India with the growing international interest in nutrition in the interwar period. This led me to a fascinating document, a 1939 report that analyzes nutrition in Britain’s various colonies. On April 18, 1936, Joseph Henry Thomas, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, issued a circular letter calling for colonial administrators in Britain’s empire to begin collecting dietary and nutritional information regarding their colonial subjects. In response to the letter, the Prime Minister formed a Committee of the Economic Advisory Council, consisting of seventeen academics, economists, health advisors, and colonial officials. The committee, known as the Committee on Nutrition in the Colonial Empire (CNCE), answered the call of the circular letter by publishing a two-part report in July 1939 detailing the extent of imperial knowledge concerning nutrition as well as the results of peremptory field surveys on nutrition and diet in the colonies.

Here, I want to examine a section of the report which brings to mind Durbach’s arguments concerning famine, government feeding, and labor productivity in late nineteenth-century India. The eleventh chapter of the 1939 report, “The Nutrition of Paid Labourers,” is devoted to the difficulties that poor nutrition poses for government and private employers in British Africa. Following the lead of Sunil Amrith and Patricia Clavin, who have argued that the League of Nations Health Organization’s turn to nutrition in the 1930s was motivated by a desire to escape the Great Depression, I argue that the CNCE’s 1939 report was keenly attuned to economic development as a means of enriching empire. My interpretation clashes with existing historiography on the report, such as James Vernon’s argument that the report represents outdated ideas concerning the universality of nutrition science. Rather, just as the Government of India realized in the 1890s, the CNCE saw the potential the science of nutrition had for increasing labor productivity and enriching colonial enterprises. Even with the looming end of formal empire, increasing labor productivity would be critical for the success of neocolonial capital.

On to the report. The Committee decries the fact that in many places in Britain’s colonial empire wages are insufficient to provide a nutritious diet unless multiple family members are working. They frame this as bad for business: “Much labour in tropical countries is notoriously inefficient at present and there is striking evidence of the extent to which this is due to malnutrition.” After reviewing feeding experiments undertaken by governments and private employers in the Belgian Congo, Northern Rhodesia, South Africa, Kenya, Zanzibar, Tanganyika, and Uganda, the Committee concludes that employers and governments should invest in feeding their employees: “We regard it as almost certain that in Africa, quite apart from humanitarian considerations, any money spent on bringing the food consumed by the labourer up to an adequate well-balanced ration will be money well spent from the immediate point of view of the employer.” The rest of the chapter is devoted to determining the best method for employers to feed their employees.

To encourage private employers to feed their laborers well, the Committee suggests that the governments of British Africa should “lead the way by providing a well-balanced diet for all their labourers.” One large debate on this front was whether employers should give cooked or uncooked food to laborers. The report comes down on the side of giving cooked food, because “Men without the help of their womenfolk are seldom likely to make the best use of the rations given out to them for them to cook themselves” and because “It is also possible to include unpopular items of nutritional value, such as germinated beans, and to ensure that the food is really eaten by the employee and not sold by him, in which case, of course, the employer derives no benefit.” If employers do not normally supply their laborers with food, the Committee suggests that they can provide plots of land so that employees can grow their own nutritious food.

In much of this discussion, the Committee posits labor power as alienated from laborers’ bodies as well as their identities as human beings. For instance, “It cannot be sufficiently emphasised that while a diet of little or nothing but cereals may keep body and soul together, it cannot suffice for full efficiency.” Here, body and soul are conceived of as a unity that can be maintained through a cereal diet, but the full efficiency of labor power stands apart from body and soul and may only be attained through the modern science of nutrition (i.e., a diet high in animal proteins and milk). Later in the report, an even odder reference is made to labor in a section on employers providing meals, maternity and infant welfare, and other social services: “Expenditure for such purposes may not at once prove remunerative, but the work is of considerable social significance, and makes for a contented and permanently established labour supply of better physique.” Tellingly, the report stresses the physical and material aspects of how such measures will boost labor productivity rather than their socio-cultural benefits. The influence of the interwar eugenics movement is clear.

These discussions of labor and labor supply seem to contradict the notion elsewhere in this chapter that the employer should view the laborer as much more than a source of labor power: “the less the labourer is regarded as merely a person who works for so many hours a day and receives a wage for it and the more the employer makes it his business to care for the social welfare of his employee, the more satisfactory are the results.” The Committee also expresses that it does not want colonial employees to be eternally dependent on their employers, and that through education they can be prompted to choose nutritious diets. This uneasy tension between seeing laborers as merely an extension of their labor power and as human beings with their own thoughts and desires mirrors Durbach’s argument regarding the feeding of Indian children. The British Empire can make economically beneficial decisions for a colony while also couching them in humanitarian terms. This is possible because the British control the labor power of the colonized. The Committee suggests that nutrition for laborers is an instance “where the interests of finance and humanity coincide,” yet there is something more sinister at work here.

The Rotary Club relief committee at a free kitchen in Kolkata in 1943. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images.

Specifically, the state claims a certain power over the labor of the colonized worker. With the advent of nutrition science, nutrition becomes a realm subject to technocratic achievement. Colonial diets are denigrated as “unscientific” or “irrational,” and they are made to conform to metropolitan diets heavy in meat or dairy. In this way, the British state can enter the domestic realm of colonized peoples in Africa, just as Durbach described it doing in India. In the CNCE report, the British state enters the domestic realm by cooking food for government employees as well as encouraging private employers to do the same. In the absence of women, food must be cooked properly, otherwise male laborers will eat raw or undercooked grains and receive no nutritional benefit. The state and the private employer thus take on the role of women in their absence, colonizing the family as well as the body. This is part of the larger process in which empire gives way to the demands of neocolonial capital, which continues to dominate and dictate the lives of the world’s workers.

Devin Creed is a PhD student in the history department at Duke University. He specializes in modern South Asia, the British empire, and the history of capitalism. He spent the 2019–2020 school year as a Fulbright-Nehru student researcher in New Delhi, India.