Author Archives: Benjamin Siegel

About Benjamin Siegel

Benjamin Siegel is assistant professor of South Asian history at Boston University, with particular interests in the politics, economy, and culture of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. His forthcoming book Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India, interrogates the ways in which problems of food and scarcity structured India's politics, society, and national aspirations in the years between the Bengal Famine and the Green Revolution.

Asian Drama Revisited

Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, 3 vols. Gunnar Myrdal New York: Pantheon, 1968 In early 1969, the bureaucrats roaming the halls of New Delhi’s Central Secretariat building were consumed by a mounting unease. The turn of the year had seen a spate of violence in villages across India: in Thanjavur, in the nation’s south, a group of Dalit farm workers had been massacred by high-caste landlords, upset by the campaign for higher wages in the wake of bumper rice crops. In Continue reading → Continue reading →