VDR Fok-I Polymorphism in the Population of Kerala, India

Joseph, Joe; Adithi, K P; Joseph, Anu Yamuna

doi:10.14260/jemds/2017/1232

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 17 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…150 This accelerated a migratory trend from Travancore to Malabar that began in the late 1920s as a consequence of the declining availability of cultivable land. 151 Migrants were primarily Syrian Christians who often had access to that combination of material resources, skills, and social networks that Joya Chatterji has called 'mobility capital'. 152 Having sold their land in Travancore, they attempted to bring mainly tapioca or rice under cultivation, depending on where they migrated to.…”

Section: Unequal Suffering: Dislocation Disease and Deathmentioning

confidence: 99%

A forgotten famine of ’43? Travancore’s muffled ‘cry of distress’

Balasubramanian

2023

Mod. Asian Stud.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Mass disease and starvation in the princely state of Travancore during the Second World War claimed some 90,000 lives. However, this episode has never received much prominence, especially when compared to the simultaneous crisis in Bengal. It is, in many ways, forgotten. Instead, Travancore’s wartime food management apparatus appears in some accounts as a success story. How did this happen? Integration into the world economy, the reordering of a rigid social structure, and popular political pressures on an autocratic princely regime created a unique set of conditions that left Travancore vulnerable to food scarcity and conflict during the Second World War. A particularly draconian princely regime that suppressed civil liberties prevented the gravity of the situation from being understood. This culminated in vastly unequal suffering and disease-related deaths. But the story is not merely one of despair. The Indian communists took advantage of war conditions to bring together agricultural and factory labourers and contribute to improving the food situation in this ‘People’s War’, while mainstream nationalists sought to obstruct the war effort and have the British ‘quit’ India. Wartime activities would shape the unique post-colonial politics of what became the state of Kerala in 1956. Intervening at the intersection of the historiographies of food and the princely states, this article adds a regional perspective to the nation-centric social history of the Second World War in South Asia. Hunger was a constitutive experience of this period across various parts of India, but the post-colonial political legacies of war could be regionally distinct.

show abstract

Section: Unequal Suffering: Dislocation Disease and Deathmentioning

confidence: 99%