ROMANS had their vomitoriums that allowed them to consume enormous quantities of food and drink without worrying too much about cholesterol or what the slaves ate that night.
A remote Indian equivalent I have known was the institution of the Chaubeys of Mathura, the portly temple priests with Falstaffian girths. Their job in this fabled city of Lord Krishna was to eat kilos of sweets the devotees offered daily and charge them for the duty. The only way anyone could carry on like this was to follow the Romans. They would tickle their throats, throw up what they ate and sit down again for the next course. The Chaubeys accepted this core principle and continued to thrive despite their taxing profession.
Messrs George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice would now have us believe that the 300m-plus Indian middle class is consuming just as much food or more albeit for secular reasons such as having more money to spend. The duo claim that together with the growing consumption of food in China the Indian phenomenon is causing worldwide food shortages.
The suggestion is difficult to digest for several reasons not the least for the fact that overeating is indicative of a medical condition not wealth. On the other hand, if the Bush-Rice thesis is right the Indian middle classes can at least rejoice that their time has come as the future empire with all its trappings and should start building vomitoriums in their homes and restaurants àla the Roman elite. The flip side should worry them however.
Can they ignore the plight of the remaining 700m Indians in this era of global food shortages and who are not quite yet the Roman slaves of yore? And shouldn’t this question be more urgently posed to the American pulpit than listening to their pointless fulminations on the ill effects of food shortages?
World Food Programme director Josette Sheeran has described the food crisis as ‘a silent tsunami’. This is not a modern phenomenon although the reasons behind it have been culled from history and reshaped to serve the new empire. Nature and man, often in tandem, cause food shortages. There is evidence of grain hoarders being active in Athens as early as 386 BC.
What caused them to commit the crime is disputed. Some scholars argue that food shortages that year were caused by Sparta blockading one of the grain sources of Athens. Another argued that the supply shock was the result of the rumour of such a blockade. Rumour-based surge for hoarding has a deep-rooted history in India as elsewhere. But it is the current role of Wall Street in the hoarding of grains that the Bush-Rice duo would do well to explain to the world.
A Bloomberg report two weeks ago calculated that the Street’s commodity-index funds controlled a record 4.51bn bushels of corn, wheat and soybeans, equal to half the amount held in US silos on March 1. The report says that the holdings had jumped nearly 30 per cent in the past year because investors bought grain contracts as an alternative to low-yield stocks or bonds. The buying led both crop prices and volatility to records and boosted the cost for growers and processors ‘to manage risk’.
Correspondingly, investments in grain and livestock futures had more than doubled to about $65bn from $25bn in November, says Bloomberg. We can get the true picture from the fact that the US Department of Agriculture valued the 2007 harvest at a record $92.5bn.
The food shortages and spiralling costs have naturally sparked protests and riots in countries including Haiti, Indonesia, Mexico and Egypt. In Delhi too the opposition BJP held a rally with placards that warned of rivers of blood if prices were not controlled. This is what the hoarders are doing.
But why are they hoarding so much food that the world needs? Rice, corn, soybean and wheat prices have climbed to record levels this year. This is partly because of droughts in Australia, a freeze in Kansas and increased demand for corn to make ethanol.
That’s what Messrs Bush and Rice should be looking into if they mean to solve the problems. But are they here to solve problems or to revel in them? What leads a sane person to thrive in someone else’s misery?
There is a fascinating book that I read often. It’s called Feeding the Baniya, an inquiry by British historian David Hardiman into the lives of ‘peasants and usurers in western India’ in the colonial period. Baniya is a catchall term for a trader, moneylender, hoarder and usurer. He was the archetypal villain in early Indian cinema and acquired the nickname of Sukhi Lala after a similar character in the magnum opus of the 1950s, ‘Mother India’.
Of course, in places like Gujarat equally avaricious Muslim Bohra traders among others have challenged the monopoly of the Hindu baniya, according to several colonial records.
Somewhat unwittingly but in a partial explanation of why so many news agencies and TV channels today are essentially vendors of ‘the market-moving story’, Hardiman makes astute observations he has gleaned from colonial records. The baniyas paid messengers to bring them news of any event, which might affect business confidence and prices.
In Maharashtra, for instance, leading bankers knew through their own messengers that the Maratha army had been defeated at Panipat even before the Peshwa was informed. In the Shekhawati region of Rajasthan, baniyas had a system of flashing messages about prices between distant hills, known as chilka ka dak. By day a mirror was used, and by night flashes of gunpowder. Speculation frequently passed into straightforward gambling.
In Marwar it was common for baniyas to take bets on the rainfall. Plates and vessels were left on the roof, and adjudicators determined the extent to which it had rained by counting the number of drops on a plate or by weighing the water in the vessel.
In the words of a district officer in 1885, Hardiman quotes from Gujarat’s Panchamahal district: “All his (the baniya’s) wealth consists in hoards of grain; and it is difficult to find ready cash in his house; owing to difficulty in communication, there is not much export. I have visited several such granaries and was surprised to see the quantity of grain stored up in the big and good houses which otherwise would have made splendid dwellings.” That in a nutshell would be a less circuitous way to see the past, present and future(s) of food shortages!
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
jawednaqvi@gmail.com