State Failure and Human Miseries- A Study With Special Focus on Famines In British Malabar

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Preface This monograph deals with a discarded piece of history relating to British Malabar, a region that presently constitutes mainly the districts in the northern and central parts of Kerala. I stumbled upon this theme by sheer accident, while reading a statement in Jawaharlal Nehru's Discovery of India (1946): "Famine came, ghastly, staggering, (and) horrible beyond words. In Malabar, in Bijapur, in Orissa, and, above all, in the rich and fertile province of Bengal, men and women and little children die in their thousands daily for lack of food." The reference was about the 1943 famine, which researchers across the world characterize as the Great Bengal Famine and, according to them, the only famine that British India witnessed during the first half of the twentieth century. The 1943 famine in Bengal and its after-effects were minutely investigated by several social scientists, including such eminent scholars like Mahalanobis and Amartya Sen, and are still being subjected to newer spheres of scrutiny. There are also research studies on the history of famines in Orissa. However, this or any other famine that repeatedly stalked Malabar for centuries is intriguingly absent in the numerous historical discourses available for the region.

**Contents and Sample Pages**