Feminizing Famine, Imperial Critique: Pandita Ramabai's Famine Essays
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Abstract
On the occasion of the recurrent famines that devastated India at the end of the nineteenth century, the Indian "feminist" and social reformer Pandita Ramabai wrote two essays that chronicle and interweave her experiences as a very young woman during the famines of 1873-77 with representations of her relief work on behalf of female famine victims in 1896-97 and 1900-01 in the Central Provinces and in Kedgaon, near Poona. 1 While the Famine Commission reports (in 1867, 1880, 1898 and 190 I) and journalistic treatments of the famines were widely available, Pandita Ramabai's "unofficial" accounts are unusual, for they represent famine from an indigenous perspective, from one who was herself a famine survivor? Her English essays, "Famine Experiences" (1897) and "To the Friends ofMukti School and Mission" (1900), in addition to various letters and autobiographical pieces, are remarkable and important documents about late nineteenthcentury famine in India. Rather than portraying famine only as a biological disaster, these texts contribute to a deeper understanding of famine as a social and political one. They do so by representing the manifold failures of British famine relief policy as it affected Indians generally, but especially Hindu women including high-caste widows, dovetailing with Ramabai's lifelong activism on their behalf. Although it was highly unusual for a widow (even a very educated one) to engage in public discussions of any kind during this period, for Ramabai to address the consequences of imperial famine relief policy on women was virtually unprecedented. By foregrounding famine's unequally felt effects within afflicted communities, these texts both complicate and "feminize" the experience of famine. 5 They make visible at a time of crisis an often overlooked, albeit incredibly significant, aspect of women's lives-their access to food and their food security. As do her writings on the condition of high-caste Hindu women, especially widows,