ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the social implications of food production and distribution in India by presenting dichotomies of the colonial and the postcolonial, the rural and the urban, the moral and the political, and deprivation and hoarding. It considers the dramatization of food scarcity, specifically wheat, in adaptations of Premchand's story and Janam's street performances, as a marker of national pride and shame respectively. Street theatre highlights some of these contradictions whereby wheat deprivation and its excess are both untenable as fixed markers of national shame and pride respectively. The Green Revolution, in India begins with innovative agricultural practices such as new varieties of seeds, increased use of fertilizers, and chemical pesticides, and proceeds to declare that these practices paved the way to food self-sufficiency. Having introduced the issue of food consumption through costume and dialogue, the play uses exchanges between the madari and the jumoora to introduce the issue of public distribution of food, epitomized in the ubiquitous 'ration card'.
