I ask whether, counterintuitively, this alternative history can be read as “decolonisation in praxis” vis-à-vis Hindu caste oppression. Through an annual commemoration, Dalits frame these rulers as oppressors, while portraying the British as liberators. Another strand of this history is the 1818 Battle of Koregaon, in which a Mahar battalion, fighting on behalf of the British, defeated the forces of the local high-caste Hindu rulers. As a cornerstone of its self-respect, this community embraces an “alternative history” in which its members cast themselves as the original inhabitants of an ancient Buddhist India, subjugated through the imposition of caste Hinduism by Aryan invaders from an unclearly-defined West.

My argument is rooted in ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Mumbai among a community of Mahars, a Dalit (formerly “untouchable”) caste that converted to Buddhism en masse in 1956. This paper is premised on the possibility of an internal colonisation within India, a country famously colonised by Britain. But the British government criticised him and dropped his policies during the drought of 1943, leading to countless fatalities.Ĭolonialism, and hence decolonisation, is usually associated with European expansion overseas. During the 1873-'74 famine, the Bengal lieutenant governor, Richard Temple, saved many lives by importing and distributing food.

So, authorities removed boats (the region's lifeline), and the police destroyed and seized rice stocks. Mr Churchill also pushed a scorched earth policy-which went by the sinister name of Denial Policy-in coastal Bengal, where the colonisers feared the Japanese would land. As imports dropped, prices shot up, and hoarders made a killing.

Churchill turned down fervent pleas to export food to India, citing a shortage of ships-this when shiploads of Australian wheat, for example, would pass by India to be stored for future consumption in Europe. This would have kept nearly 400,000 people alive for an entire year. India exported more than 70,000 tonnes of rice between January and July 1943, even as the famine set in. Bengal famine resulted from food scarcity caused by large-scale exports of food from India for use in the war theatres and consumption in Britain.

An era of darkness