From hunter-gatherers to Bengal famine of 1943, archaeologist Dr Kurush Dalal explores political history of food

According to Dalal, humans were most healthy during the hunter-gatherer period. “You see, about 2 per cent tooth decay in hunter-gatherer societies, about 14 per cent in farming societies……we began farming not because it was a great thing to do, but because we had to.”

Dalal believes that humans would have become sedentary for the first time after the glut in food by the end of the Ice Age. As populations exploded, even this excess food would have been insufficient, and hence humans were forced to grow their own food, he points out. Over thousands of years, as agricultural practices developed and plants were modified over generations to give higher yields, eventually there would have been surplus production, he says and goes on to add that in such situations, large families could mean a larger labour force.

The archaeologist feels that with surplus food, farmers in early settlements would have been able to buy goods from others, leading to the rise of the first craftsmen. These in turn would have gravitated towards settlements where a local chief might be able to provide protection and a place to sell wares in exchange for taxes – the first market towns.

“The captive audience is all the villages around which would be denied the services……the first city state has been created. This is how the first civilisations take place, when craftspeople are gathered together in a single location and farmers come to trade,” Dalal notes. Clusters of these city states might form like the Sumerians, or massive centralised empires like the Egyptians.

Dalal further says that the effect of food in civilisations could also be seen in more modern civilisations, “In the mid-15th century, the Little Ice Age led to a great drought in Europe, and armies invaded lands which had no food…..” He says that European colonisation then grew from efforts to obtain valuable food items such as sugar and spices. But this in turn required a huge labour force. As Dalal pointed out, the politics of food led to the enslavement of half a continent.

Elaborating on the cultural and culinary differences evident within modern Karnataka, Dalal mentions that such differences could have roots dating back to thousands of years which is reflected in the divergence of food vessels used in North Kanara and South Kanara.

Another aspect is the adoption of food habits of the ruling class into cultures. Indian cuisine has absorbed potatoes, tomatoes and chillies, which were introduced by Europeans. The interrelation between food and politics is also seen in the Bengal famine, he explains, citing the instance of the Bengal famine of 1943. A fear of Japanese invasion of India during World War-II prompted the British to collect most of the available grain from Bengal and destroy their boats, resulting in the death of millions of people from Bengal in an agricultural surplus year, he says. “After all that, the Japanese were stopped at Imphal and did not take a step into Bengal. But 6 million people died for nothing, because their political masters took away their food,” Dalal concludes.