Architectural Epistemologies at Famine Relief Camps, India ca. 1890

What architectural technologies were deployed in response to colonial famine? A history of food is, at its most radical, a history of the production of poverty as a systematic condition and an institutional discourse. This paper seeks to locate famine and starvation, not as a colonial event of economic neglect, but rather a central methodology of extracting labor knowledge from the bodies of colonial subjects.

Focusing on the two famines that took place in quick succession in colonial Punjab in 1896 and 1899, this paper looks at two types of documents: the Punjab Famine Code and the Famine Commission Reports. Both documents outline how famine camps and relief works were deployed to manage populations affected by food scarcity. The famine camp and the relief work are two architectural embodiments of famine epistemology. Both typologies claimed to be humanitarian interventions towards famine relief but were instead, this paper argues, methods of extracting knowledge from the bodies of rural laborers. Knowledge such as: how little grain did a person need to survive? What minimum quantity of grain enabled a person to still labor? How bad did starvations conditions need to be before a landowner worked alongside a peasant? In this way, the Revenue Department used architectural technologies to produce a racialized, gendered, and caste-based epistemology of famine.

This paper aims to argue that architectural thought on minimum space and famine thought on minimum sustenance share an infernal history that manifests in relief works where technologies of policing rural poor were perfected.

Ateya Khorakiwala is a historian of modernity in its colonial and postcolonial guises in South Asia and of the aesthetics and materiality of its postcolonial infrastructure and ecological and political landscapes.

This event is sponsored by the Joan Goldstein Spiro '54 Fund and the Department of Art History and Architectural Studies.