ABSTRACT
India's liberation from the colonial rule was marked by a widespread food crisis. Literature and art became the means through which to represent the historical or contemporary socio-ecological and food crisis, to fight the everyday impacts of capitalism, class, gender, and caste, and to emotionally connect with a vast and impoverished population suffering the injunctions of starvation. This chapter shows through a close reading of Kamala Markandaya’s novel, Nectar in a Sieve how postcolonial authors felt, imagined, and rendered the immediate cases of hunger and death under “capitalist world-ecology” in late-colonial and postcolonial India and forewarned the young independent nation of its massive but fundamental duty of feeding the subject population. Migrant labour was key to the birth of industrial capitalism, which also shaped, what Ramachandra Guha calls, the production of “ecological refugees,” in which capitalism and neo-colonialism have turned landless labourers into eternal refugees and migrants.
