10 ms·

India's food shortage filled American libraries

92 points by yannis 2y ago

aadarsh13 2y ago
as a UChicago student can confirm that this was incredibly shocking when I first saw it… the expanse of the collection is really unmatched and crazy
mwachs 2y ago
This is just a fascinating outcome of some public policy.
causality0 2y ago
[flagged]
- throwup238 2y ago
  I wouldn’t go so far as to call him a shitbird (with all respect to Mr Lahey) but it seems to be a moot point given that these collections can be digitized and indexed, opening them up to far more people than a few hundred thousand physical copies would have, especially for researchers who need to search vast collections. Indian universities (and the American ones with the collections) should fund a full digitization program. It’s not like the collections are closed to researchers and all of the money for the purchases went right back to the Indian economy.
  - solalf 2y ago
    I believe the term is appropriate. Not only would the books have mostly disappeared due to local conditions, they can indeed be, and often are, digitized. Instead, we have a professor who seems to feel obligated to gaslight the US and portray it as “colonialist” even in the face of incredible outcomes of public policy. Millions of Indians escaped starvation thanks to this policy and an astounding body of knowledge survived and was consequently studied, helping elevate Indian culture in academic circles. But no matter, this created “knowledge gaps”.
    - duskwuff 2y ago
      The conclusion that this "created knowledge gaps" seems particularly inapt. If American universities had not purchased these particular books, they would have most likely been lost just like the rest of their respective print runs. The "knowledge gap" would have been even worse, as no one at all would have had access to those books.
      - solalf 2y ago
        Also mind you, this is coming from an academic. Yet there’s no proof being brought to the argument that this gap does exist and they’re not saying “may or might”, they’re making what appears to be a purely ideological statement.
        duskwuff 2y ago
        There's certainly a hypothetical universe where American universities didn't buy these books, and they were instead acquired by Indian libraries which managed to preserve them. But that isn't our universe, and there's no clear means by which the US could brought it about.
    - fuzztester 2y ago
      >Instead, we have a professor who seems to feel obligated to gaslight the US and portray it as “colonialist” even in the face of incredible outcomes of public policy. I'm not talking about this particular case right now, although I may comment separately about it a little later, but the US did have a colonial past. See: European_colonization_of_the_Americas: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_colonization_of_the_Americas https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_colonization_of_the... From that article, the 7th or so paragraph, highlighting is mine: >Violent conflicts arose during the beginning of this period as indigenous peoples fought to preserve their territorial integrity from increasing European colonizers and from hostile indigenous neighbors who were equipped with Eurasian technology. Conflict between the various European empires and the indigenous peoples was a leading dynamic in the Americas into the 1800s, although some parts of the continent gained their independence from Europe by then, countries such as the United States continued to fight against Native Americans and practiced settler colonialism. The United States for example practiced a settler colonial policy of Manifest Destiny and the Trail of Tears. And links from that paragraph: Settler_colonialism: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settler_colonialism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settler_colonialism The graphic after the first paragraph there (labelled "Graphic depicting the loss of Native American land to U.S. settlers in the 19th century"), is, well, graphic. See all that blue area disappearing? Manifest destiny: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny Trail of Tears: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears Also see: Banana republic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic Also see: Philippines: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippines https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippines Under the History section there, see this sub-section: Spanish and American colonial rule (1565–1934). A link from there: Philippine–American War: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine%E2%80%93American_War https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine%E2%80%93American_...
- solalf 2y ago
  From their bio: “My dissertation was a linguistic and cultural examination of disability as portrayed in Medieval Icelandic genre of the Sagas and Þættir of Icelanders.” If they weren’t a professor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, you’d think this was straight out of Portlandia.
  - bawolff 2y ago
    What's so weird about that? Studying how a specific ancient culture potrayed and felt about disability seems like a reasonable thing to study. Sure, maybe its not as immediately useful as say science, but if you are going to study ancient cultures, analyzing the writings they left behind is one of the main ways to do it.
    - JSteph22 2y ago
      If it's not immediately useful, at what point in the future will it become useful? Probably never.
      - dpig_ 2y ago
        What kind of an anemic society do you want to live in, that everyone should only be an expert on capital-P Profitable subjects?
        bpodgursky 2y ago
        It's not that it's unprofitable. It's that it's un-interesting. It's not interesting now, and will never be interesting. It was selected as a topic because it hit the right buzzwords, and nobody will ever read it out of genuine interest. Nobody will re-think their worldview from the conclusions. We live in a massive universe, in the most exciting time in human history. There are a thousand times more topics to research than there will ever be people or time to do so. To pick a pointless dissertation topic in this open, vast universe of potential is a profound waste of human potential. It's sad.
- raincole 2y ago
  Shitbird is some strong word, but yeah that is a very weird take. If anything, a food shortage is a much more urgent problem than a book shortage.
- throwawaysleep 2y ago
  Yeah, as that program was the only reason a lot of these books survived. Manuscripts were specifically excluded, so the reason copies don’t survive in India was that they literally let them all rot. Eliminating this program would just have meant global knowledge gaps.
- thisislife2 2y ago
  Not really. But I understand your outrage as you only have partial information - the western media often has a tendency to whitewash their foreign policy to show themselves as "benevolent" to poor and developing nations, when in fact most of it seeks to take advantage of weaker nations. In all this "tit for tat" convoluted policies, like the PL-480 for India, it is easy to miss the fact that the US, one of the wealthiest nation in the world even in the 50's and 60's, was asking India, then an impoverished nation, to pay for the wheat they supplied to it. > A key event took place in 1943 that extended India’s food shortage until the early 1950s. In 1943, Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered foodgrains meant for eastern parts of the country to be diverted to the British troops engaged in World War II. It resulted in a man-made famine in Bengal and the deaths of millions of people ... India signed a long-term Public Law (PL) 480 agreement to get food aid under Government agricultural trade development assistance, with the US in 1954. The agreement was signed a few more times before the US ended it in the late 1960s as Lal Bahadur Shastri and then Indira Gandhi were not willing to make policy changes, especially to allow privatisation of the industrial sector, in return for food aid. > > ... Food aid under PL480 not only drew flak but some critics pointed out that the wheat sent to India was “fit enough only for pigs!”. It was termed as a great insult that was to linger for long in people’s memory. Despite repeated pleas, the US gave only “a small quantity of rice” to India. (How India overcame food emergency, attained self-sufficiency (August 2022) - https://web.archive.org/web/20240616192936/https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/india-at-75/overcoming-food-emergencies-through-imports-from-us-via-pl480/article65753881.ece https://web.archive.org/web/20240616192936/https://www.thehi... ). > Now, the US wants India to export its wheat to other parts of the world amidst rising prices due to the Ukraine war whereas India is avoiding falling into the wheat trap all over again ... In 1954, then US President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched the Public Law 480 (PL-480) ... It was an initiative to offload all the excess wheat that the US had cultivated with price support. The US also started using it as a tool of diplomacy, because when another nation is dependent on you for its food, you can easily compel it into submission ... It was however realised by India in the mid-1960s that American food supplies came with strings attached and were being used as a means of diplomatic interference. At one point, the US even came close to rejecting wheat shipments to India, which threatened to push the country to the brink of famine. > > ... Six decades after the PL-480 controversy broke out between the two countries, India and the US find themselves at a crossroads over the staple commodity all over again. This time around, India imposed restrictions on its wheat exports ... India has restricted exports in the background of a persistent heatwave and lack of rain compelling officials to lower wheat output estimates ... However, the US, Germany and other G-7 countries have been critical of India’s stance. They are arguing that the restrictions on wheat exports could worsen the current food crisis in the world. Asking India to export wheat on the terms and conditions set by the Western world for its own advantage is more of a condescending attempt to tell the country that it somehow owes the sole responsibility to relax the soaring global prices. The richer nations, therefore, want India to do most of the heavy lifting ... This is in sharp contrast to Washington’s own track record. Remember, the US could have left India in a severe food crisis in the 1960s had New Delhi not managed to augment agricultural production within time. At that time, the US was motivated by its self-interest and India’s refusal to take sides between the USSR and the US. Today, India isn’t abandoning its moral responsibility, yet the US is sermonising it over wheat exports. (Ghost of PL-480 Returns as India Avoids the Wheat Trap All Over Again (May 2022) - https://web.archive.org/web/20220525074511/https://www.news18.com/news/opinion/ghost-of-pl-480-returns-as-india-avoids-the-wheat-trap-all-over-again-5227951.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220525074511/https://www.news1... ) The only kind thing I have to say about the PL-480 or the "food for peace" program is that the American politicians taught us Indians a very valuable lesson - the need to become self-reliant to stave off exploitation. (Ironically, when it comes to people to people relationship, ordinary Indians and Americans really hit it off and work well together - for e.g. India's space, nuclear and even agricultural programs owes a lot to American scientists and thinkers. But this still hasn't translated to a close political relationships because Indian and American politicians just don't see eye to eye).
- deleted 2y ago
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- leosanchez 2y ago
  > but Michelson-Ambelang calls it a "colonial archive" Didn't FDR pressure Churchill to give India independence ? It would make sense if the archive is in Briton.
- seltzered_ 2y ago
  "and saved Indians from starving to death with 340 million metric tons of food aid" No, theres more complexity to the story. Do some research on what caused famine in India and how there's more questions around Churchill and WW2 influences. Start with https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/29/asia/churchill-bengal-famine-intl-scli-gbr/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/29/asia/churchill-bengal-fam... (Churchill’s policies to blame for millions of Indian famine deaths, study says) , which IIRC references https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2018GL081477 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2018... (Drought and Famine in India, 1870–2016) Also watch the documentary "Bengal Tigers": https://youtube.com/watch?v=T31MFNLJKJw https://youtube.com/watch?v=T31MFNLJKJw
  - hellgas00 2y ago
    The CNN article references the Bengal famine of 1943, specifically prioritizing food delivery to military personnel during WW2. The Food for Peace Act of came into effect in 1954.
    - seltzered_ 2y ago
      Fair point, but I wonder how much that event led to international support that mightve been well intentioned but also with potential issues, thinking more in the context of the Green Revolution (Norman borlaug documentary https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/man-who-tried-to-feed-the-world/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/man-who-tr... ) and critiques of it ( see 'The Globalization of Wheat' https://upittpress.org/books/9780822947349/ https://upittpress.org/books/9780822947349/ )
  - fakedang 2y ago
    Churchill's famine is a different story altogether from the famines stated in the article though. Churchill's famines were directly a result of food exports to the rest of the Commonwealth while India starved. On the contrary, these famines mentioned in the article were often the usual in India at the time. While the Northern plains are very fertile, there is also a strong "luck" element that depends on the timing of rains and the monsoon season. Getting them wrong was often the reason for a large number of famines across the country. The southern part of India is largely mountain plateau and jungle and agriculturally poor, hence they often relied on imports from the north. What really changed the equation for India was the Green Revolution, which happened because the first PM, Jawaharlal Nehru (a figure the current govt loves to denigrate and pin all their faults on), invited Norman Borlaug to replicate his Mexican success story for India.
ggm 2y ago
Books are printed in quantities of more than one. I concede a fair amount of material might be the last copy extant, but isn't there an element of post-hoc rationalisation this impoverished stocks of Indian books?
- sandy_coyote 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - RobRivera 2y ago
    I swear if this begins to be a form of ad hominum attack on the interwebs I am going to table flip
    - ggm 2y ago
      I'm used to it. Those flinging the accusations probably need to be reminded false positive rates in essay gpt detector systems are above 40% Beep beep boop boop this wasn't written by an LLM.
- RobRivera 2y ago
  I don't see any claims of negative ramifications being made
  - ggm 2y ago
    >Todd Michelson-Ambelang, librarian for South Asian studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, wonders if vast collections from the region in US and other Western libraries took away literary resources from the Indian sub-continent. and >Mr Michelson-Ambelang told the BBC that the removal of books from South Asia through programmes like PL-480 "creates knowledge gaps", as researchers from there often need to travel to the West to access these resources. and > It is unclear whether all the books acquired by US universities from India at that time are still available there. According to Maya Dodd, of India's FLAME University, many books now unavailable in India can be found in the University of Chicago's library collections, all marked with the stamp saying "PL-480". Although a charitable reading is they aren't available because of decay.
vijaybritto 2y ago
So if they digitally scan the books and publish on the internet for free then there wouldn't be any knowledge gap. These purpose of a library is fulfilled after that in my opinion
- mrlongroots 2y ago
  Yes, that is sensible. While India has a moral claim to these artifacts, it will take another decade or two of growth before there is adequate bureaucratic bandwidth to provision the necessary infra needed to maintain them at home. Until then, the status quo works.
  - jopsen 2y ago
    > While India has a moral claim to these artifacts Does it really? It sounds like many of these books were purchased while they were still in print. If anything shouldn't buying books/media this way be good for publishing industry in India at the time? (Arguably, a small impact if any)
Izkata 2y ago
Title is missing a "How" at the beginning. Without that it doesn't make any sense - I was wondering why people were expecting food in libraries.
navigate8310 2y ago
I've always argued that antiquated books, sculptures and paintings should not be repatriated back to India due to lack of preservation ecosystem and culture. Just look at the historic sites (barring a very few popular ones), they are either literally pissed on upon or become a poster board for election campaigns.
- rafram 2y ago
  Antique manuscripts were (as the article says!) explicitly not part of this program due to Indian antiquities laws. Big [citation needed] for pretty much all of that, but it isn’t even relevant to the article being discussed.
  - travisjungroth 2y ago
    It’s entirely relevant. The last paragraph of the article makes the same claim about the state of the libraries. From another part: > Mr Michelson-Ambelang told the BBC that the removal of books from South Asia through programmes like PL-480 "creates knowledge gaps", as researchers from there often need to travel to the West to access these resources. The knowledge gap is that America has the books and India doesn’t. If the books had stayed in India, I think that would have closed the knowledge gap because nobody would have them. They would have been lost just like the other copies of the books.
    - rafram 2y ago
      Again, this article has absolutely nothing to do with antiquities.
      - travisjungroth 2y ago
        They said “antiquated books”. Wikipedia suggests that’s more than 100 years old. The program is more than 60 years old. I’m sure some of the million-plus books that were sent over are antiquated by now, if they weren’t already. The restriction was only on manuscripts.
- 2y ago
zerop 2y ago
How people are unearthing knowledge from ancient libraries using Claude https://x.com/PrintedPathways/status/1865637416637231406 https://x.com/PrintedPathways/status/1865637416637231406
deleted 2y ago
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tempytempytemp 2y ago
The lack of respect for books in India is ridiculous. Very few use libraries, and forget temperature/humidity control: most feel no shame in mishandling books they borrow. The availability and care shown to books, new and old, in the US is very commendable. Our prime minister and most citizens love to brag about "ancient culture" and "proud history", but preservation of our own history and public record was and is done much better by the British and Americans. It's truly nauseating.
- FullGarden_S 2y ago
  >Our prime minister and most citizens love to brag about "ancient culture" and "proud history" Yes. I think so too. The bragging is mostly patriotism and it wouldn't be a wonder if the same patriotism made them wish they could erase or forget their own embarrassing past two centuries of history. Most of the historic records before that point were totally destroyed or lost so feeling proud of what's left and moving on is not bad but seriously not prioritizing preservation is really ignorant.
  - anon291 2y ago
    > their own embarrassing past two centuries of history. I think part of the problem is exactly this. We don't say Spain should be embarrassed at the Muslim conquest, yet we're expected to say India should be 'ashamed' (for what?) for their past two centuries? History just is... We should stop assigning emotional value to it. The issue here is twofold. Firstly, India is not unique in this pursuit. China also has taken charge of constructing its own history, and sometimes it's at odds with Western thinking. Often time, the oral / traditional accounts are found to be true. Secondly, the West also falls into magical thinking. For example, right here, you are parroting the idea that Indian heterodoxy over their own history is misguided. However, it has a clear historical basis in the fact that Britain tried to expropriate most of its history. I don't mean taking various artifacts. I mean that, for many years, Western historians pushed the idea that the Indus Valley Civilization inhabitants were not related to modern Indians. They couldn't deal with the fact that Indians may have had one of the oldest, largest, and richest ancient civilizations. Of course history has proved them wrong.... Harappan genes are well represented in the Indian subcontinent. So, sure, we can make all kinds of claims about Indian historians inflating their own history (I would agree), but to then say that Western historians don't is just wrong... Remember, Nazi Germany's racial policy is the direct result of a ridiculously flawed and fantastical understanding of Indian history by Western historians. Like it or not, the Nazis were western too (and besides, plenty of non-German historians agreed with them... we just like to forget about that). Finally, we cannot ignore the impact of Nazism here. Even today, it is difficult to talk about Aryans without conjuring up images of genocidal Germans. Research has to be qualified and disclaimed so that people don't take the objective historical record and try to justify more atrocities. For example, going back to the IVC. European historians were insistent that the Aryans civilized India, and many insisted that the IVC was Aryan, and not really 'Indian'. Again, the evidence is very clear that the Harappans have no steppe ancestry. But again, we have an example of the very sort of behavior you accuse india of, except by British historians.
aaron695 2y ago
[dead]
n4r9 2y ago
> India was one of the largest recipients of this food aid, particularly during the 1950s and 1960s when it faced severe food shortages. Slightly tangential, but does anyone know why India faced such shortages in the 50s and 60s? I found an article on the subject [0] but it seems to come down to little more than mild crop yield variation combined with market speculation. This is a period of India's history that I find particularly interesting by way of comparison with China's "Great Famine". The latter is often put forward as a strong condemnation of communist economics, for example in the "Black Book of Communism". But in Chomsky's article response "Counting the bodies" (which I cannot seem to find a link for) he points out that India's per capita excess mortality rate over roughly this period is in fact greater than China's. I'm neither an authoritarian communist or a big fan of Chomsky's, but I would love to find reliable sources on this topic to come to my own conclusions. [0] https://www.economicsdiscussion.net/india/food-problem/food-problem-in-india-with-measures/21604#google_vignette https://www.economicsdiscussion.net/india/food-problem/food-...
- anon291 2y ago
  India and China both had socialist systems at the time, so using India as some kind of foil to China's communism is not going to work. People confuse democracy with the free market. It's not. India up until the 90s had a tightly regulated economy that rivaled China's economic control.
  - n4r9 2y ago
    By all accounts I've read, describing India as "socialist" in the 1950s is not quite right. You only need look at the article I linked to see that a big reason for people going hungry was because couldn't afford the rising food prices. The prices being determined by purchasing power and market forces. And there was a functioning parliamentary democracy. At best you could say it was a mixed economy where the ruling party had some socialist economic policies. But you could say that about many modern European countries. So I still think the comparison with China is interesting.
    - anon291 2y ago
amriksohata 2y ago
There are almost no recorded famines in India before Mughal or British rule, or after British rule either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_major_famines_in_India_during_British_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_major_famines_in_I...
- amriksohata 2y ago
  India was a bastion of food, crop and spice growth however incoming invaders did not have the knowledge of agriculture in the same way local indians did (british named it indore method etc)
- rayiner 2y ago
  Incorrect. Cyclical famines were common in India; records of famines go back to 500 BC: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-021-00219-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-021-00219-1.

92 points by yannis 2y ago

as a UChicago student can confirm that this was incredibly shocking when I first saw it… the expanse of the collection is really unmatched and crazy

mwachs 2y ago

This is just a fascinating outcome of some public policy.

causality0 2y ago

[flagged]

throwup238 2y ago
I wouldn’t go so far as to call him a shitbird (with all respect to Mr Lahey) but it seems to be a moot point given that these collections can be digitized and indexed, opening them up to far more people than a few hundred thousand physical copies would have, especially for researchers who need to search vast collections. Indian universities (and the American ones with the collections) should fund a full digitization program. It’s not like the collections are closed to researchers and all of the money for the purchases went right back to the Indian economy.
- solalf 2y ago
  I believe the term is appropriate. Not only would the books have mostly disappeared due to local conditions, they can indeed be, and often are, digitized. Instead, we have a professor who seems to feel obligated to gaslight the US and portray it as “colonialist” even in the face of incredible outcomes of public policy. Millions of Indians escaped starvation thanks to this policy and an astounding body of knowledge survived and was consequently studied, helping elevate Indian culture in academic circles. But no matter, this created “knowledge gaps”.
  - duskwuff 2y ago
    The conclusion that this "created knowledge gaps" seems particularly inapt. If American universities had not purchased these particular books, they would have most likely been lost just like the rest of their respective print runs. The "knowledge gap" would have been even worse, as no one at all would have had access to those books.
    - solalf 2y ago
      Also mind you, this is coming from an academic. Yet there’s no proof being brought to the argument that this gap does exist and they’re not saying “may or might”, they’re making what appears to be a purely ideological statement.
      - duskwuff 2y ago
        There's certainly a hypothetical universe where American universities didn't buy these books, and they were instead acquired by Indian libraries which managed to preserve them. But that isn't our universe, and there's no clear means by which the US could brought it about.
  - fuzztester 2y ago
    >Instead, we have a professor who seems to feel obligated to gaslight the US and portray it as “colonialist” even in the face of incredible outcomes of public policy. I'm not talking about this particular case right now, although I may comment separately about it a little later, but the US did have a colonial past. See: European_colonization_of_the_Americas: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_colonization_of_the_Americas https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_colonization_of_the... From that article, the 7th or so paragraph, highlighting is mine: >Violent conflicts arose during the beginning of this period as indigenous peoples fought to preserve their territorial integrity from increasing European colonizers and from hostile indigenous neighbors who were equipped with Eurasian technology. Conflict between the various European empires and the indigenous peoples was a leading dynamic in the Americas into the 1800s, although some parts of the continent gained their independence from Europe by then, countries such as the United States continued to fight against Native Americans and practiced settler colonialism. The United States for example practiced a settler colonial policy of Manifest Destiny and the Trail of Tears. And links from that paragraph: Settler_colonialism: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settler_colonialism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settler_colonialism The graphic after the first paragraph there (labelled "Graphic depicting the loss of Native American land to U.S. settlers in the 19th century"), is, well, graphic. See all that blue area disappearing? Manifest destiny: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny Trail of Tears: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears Also see: Banana republic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic Also see: Philippines: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippines https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippines Under the History section there, see this sub-section: Spanish and American colonial rule (1565–1934). A link from there: Philippine–American War: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine%E2%80%93American_War https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine%E2%80%93American_...
solalf 2y ago
From their bio: “My dissertation was a linguistic and cultural examination of disability as portrayed in Medieval Icelandic genre of the Sagas and Þættir of Icelanders.” If they weren’t a professor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, you’d think this was straight out of Portlandia.
- bawolff 2y ago
  What's so weird about that? Studying how a specific ancient culture potrayed and felt about disability seems like a reasonable thing to study. Sure, maybe its not as immediately useful as say science, but if you are going to study ancient cultures, analyzing the writings they left behind is one of the main ways to do it.
  - JSteph22 2y ago
    If it's not immediately useful, at what point in the future will it become useful? Probably never.
    - dpig_ 2y ago
      What kind of an anemic society do you want to live in, that everyone should only be an expert on capital-P Profitable subjects?
      - bpodgursky 2y ago
        It's not that it's unprofitable. It's that it's un-interesting. It's not interesting now, and will never be interesting. It was selected as a topic because it hit the right buzzwords, and nobody will ever read it out of genuine interest. Nobody will re-think their worldview from the conclusions. We live in a massive universe, in the most exciting time in human history. There are a thousand times more topics to research than there will ever be people or time to do so. To pick a pointless dissertation topic in this open, vast universe of potential is a profound waste of human potential. It's sad.
raincole 2y ago
Shitbird is some strong word, but yeah that is a very weird take. If anything, a food shortage is a much more urgent problem than a book shortage.
throwawaysleep 2y ago
Yeah, as that program was the only reason a lot of these books survived. Manuscripts were specifically excluded, so the reason copies don’t survive in India was that they literally let them all rot. Eliminating this program would just have meant global knowledge gaps.
thisislife2 2y ago
Not really. But I understand your outrage as you only have partial information - the western media often has a tendency to whitewash their foreign policy to show themselves as "benevolent" to poor and developing nations, when in fact most of it seeks to take advantage of weaker nations. In all this "tit for tat" convoluted policies, like the PL-480 for India, it is easy to miss the fact that the US, one of the wealthiest nation in the world even in the 50's and 60's, was asking India, then an impoverished nation, to pay for the wheat they supplied to it. > A key event took place in 1943 that extended India’s food shortage until the early 1950s. In 1943, Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered foodgrains meant for eastern parts of the country to be diverted to the British troops engaged in World War II. It resulted in a man-made famine in Bengal and the deaths of millions of people ... India signed a long-term Public Law (PL) 480 agreement to get food aid under Government agricultural trade development assistance, with the US in 1954. The agreement was signed a few more times before the US ended it in the late 1960s as Lal Bahadur Shastri and then Indira Gandhi were not willing to make policy changes, especially to allow privatisation of the industrial sector, in return for food aid. > > ... Food aid under PL480 not only drew flak but some critics pointed out that the wheat sent to India was “fit enough only for pigs!”. It was termed as a great insult that was to linger for long in people’s memory. Despite repeated pleas, the US gave only “a small quantity of rice” to India. (How India overcame food emergency, attained self-sufficiency (August 2022) - https://web.archive.org/web/20240616192936/https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/india-at-75/overcoming-food-emergencies-through-imports-from-us-via-pl480/article65753881.ece https://web.archive.org/web/20240616192936/https://www.thehi... ). > Now, the US wants India to export its wheat to other parts of the world amidst rising prices due to the Ukraine war whereas India is avoiding falling into the wheat trap all over again ... In 1954, then US President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched the Public Law 480 (PL-480) ... It was an initiative to offload all the excess wheat that the US had cultivated with price support. The US also started using it as a tool of diplomacy, because when another nation is dependent on you for its food, you can easily compel it into submission ... It was however realised by India in the mid-1960s that American food supplies came with strings attached and were being used as a means of diplomatic interference. At one point, the US even came close to rejecting wheat shipments to India, which threatened to push the country to the brink of famine. > > ... Six decades after the PL-480 controversy broke out between the two countries, India and the US find themselves at a crossroads over the staple commodity all over again. This time around, India imposed restrictions on its wheat exports ... India has restricted exports in the background of a persistent heatwave and lack of rain compelling officials to lower wheat output estimates ... However, the US, Germany and other G-7 countries have been critical of India’s stance. They are arguing that the restrictions on wheat exports could worsen the current food crisis in the world. Asking India to export wheat on the terms and conditions set by the Western world for its own advantage is more of a condescending attempt to tell the country that it somehow owes the sole responsibility to relax the soaring global prices. The richer nations, therefore, want India to do most of the heavy lifting ... This is in sharp contrast to Washington’s own track record. Remember, the US could have left India in a severe food crisis in the 1960s had New Delhi not managed to augment agricultural production within time. At that time, the US was motivated by its self-interest and India’s refusal to take sides between the USSR and the US. Today, India isn’t abandoning its moral responsibility, yet the US is sermonising it over wheat exports. (Ghost of PL-480 Returns as India Avoids the Wheat Trap All Over Again (May 2022) - https://web.archive.org/web/20220525074511/https://www.news18.com/news/opinion/ghost-of-pl-480-returns-as-india-avoids-the-wheat-trap-all-over-again-5227951.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220525074511/https://www.news1... ) The only kind thing I have to say about the PL-480 or the "food for peace" program is that the American politicians taught us Indians a very valuable lesson - the need to become self-reliant to stave off exploitation. (Ironically, when it comes to people to people relationship, ordinary Indians and Americans really hit it off and work well together - for e.g. India's space, nuclear and even agricultural programs owes a lot to American scientists and thinkers. But this still hasn't translated to a close political relationships because Indian and American politicians just don't see eye to eye).
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leosanchez 2y ago
> but Michelson-Ambelang calls it a "colonial archive" Didn't FDR pressure Churchill to give India independence ? It would make sense if the archive is in Briton.
seltzered_ 2y ago
"and saved Indians from starving to death with 340 million metric tons of food aid" No, theres more complexity to the story. Do some research on what caused famine in India and how there's more questions around Churchill and WW2 influences. Start with https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/29/asia/churchill-bengal-famine-intl-scli-gbr/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/29/asia/churchill-bengal-fam... (Churchill’s policies to blame for millions of Indian famine deaths, study says) , which IIRC references https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2018GL081477 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2018... (Drought and Famine in India, 1870–2016) Also watch the documentary "Bengal Tigers": https://youtube.com/watch?v=T31MFNLJKJw https://youtube.com/watch?v=T31MFNLJKJw
- hellgas00 2y ago
  The CNN article references the Bengal famine of 1943, specifically prioritizing food delivery to military personnel during WW2. The Food for Peace Act of came into effect in 1954.
  - seltzered_ 2y ago
    Fair point, but I wonder how much that event led to international support that mightve been well intentioned but also with potential issues, thinking more in the context of the Green Revolution (Norman borlaug documentary https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/man-who-tried-to-feed-the-world/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/man-who-tr... ) and critiques of it ( see 'The Globalization of Wheat' https://upittpress.org/books/9780822947349/ https://upittpress.org/books/9780822947349/ )
- fakedang 2y ago
  Churchill's famine is a different story altogether from the famines stated in the article though. Churchill's famines were directly a result of food exports to the rest of the Commonwealth while India starved. On the contrary, these famines mentioned in the article were often the usual in India at the time. While the Northern plains are very fertile, there is also a strong "luck" element that depends on the timing of rains and the monsoon season. Getting them wrong was often the reason for a large number of famines across the country. The southern part of India is largely mountain plateau and jungle and agriculturally poor, hence they often relied on imports from the north. What really changed the equation for India was the Green Revolution, which happened because the first PM, Jawaharlal Nehru (a figure the current govt loves to denigrate and pin all their faults on), invited Norman Borlaug to replicate his Mexican success story for India.

ggm 2y ago

Books are printed in quantities of more than one. I concede a fair amount of material might be the last copy extant, but isn't there an element of post-hoc rationalisation this impoverished stocks of Indian books?

sandy_coyote 2y ago
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- RobRivera 2y ago
  I swear if this begins to be a form of ad hominum attack on the interwebs I am going to table flip
  - ggm 2y ago
    I'm used to it. Those flinging the accusations probably need to be reminded false positive rates in essay gpt detector systems are above 40% Beep beep boop boop this wasn't written by an LLM.
RobRivera 2y ago
I don't see any claims of negative ramifications being made
- ggm 2y ago
  >Todd Michelson-Ambelang, librarian for South Asian studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, wonders if vast collections from the region in US and other Western libraries took away literary resources from the Indian sub-continent. and >Mr Michelson-Ambelang told the BBC that the removal of books from South Asia through programmes like PL-480 "creates knowledge gaps", as researchers from there often need to travel to the West to access these resources. and > It is unclear whether all the books acquired by US universities from India at that time are still available there. According to Maya Dodd, of India's FLAME University, many books now unavailable in India can be found in the University of Chicago's library collections, all marked with the stamp saying "PL-480". Although a charitable reading is they aren't available because of decay.

vijaybritto 2y ago

So if they digitally scan the books and publish on the internet for free then there wouldn't be any knowledge gap. These purpose of a library is fulfilled after that in my opinion

mrlongroots 2y ago
Yes, that is sensible. While India has a moral claim to these artifacts, it will take another decade or two of growth before there is adequate bureaucratic bandwidth to provision the necessary infra needed to maintain them at home. Until then, the status quo works.
- jopsen 2y ago
  > While India has a moral claim to these artifacts Does it really? It sounds like many of these books were purchased while they were still in print. If anything shouldn't buying books/media this way be good for publishing industry in India at the time? (Arguably, a small impact if any)

Izkata 2y ago

Title is missing a "How" at the beginning. Without that it doesn't make any sense - I was wondering why people were expecting food in libraries.

navigate8310 2y ago

I've always argued that antiquated books, sculptures and paintings should not be repatriated back to India due to lack of preservation ecosystem and culture. Just look at the historic sites (barring a very few popular ones), they are either literally pissed on upon or become a poster board for election campaigns.

rafram 2y ago
Antique manuscripts were (as the article says!) explicitly not part of this program due to Indian antiquities laws. Big [citation needed] for pretty much all of that, but it isn’t even relevant to the article being discussed.
- travisjungroth 2y ago
  It’s entirely relevant. The last paragraph of the article makes the same claim about the state of the libraries. From another part: > Mr Michelson-Ambelang told the BBC that the removal of books from South Asia through programmes like PL-480 "creates knowledge gaps", as researchers from there often need to travel to the West to access these resources. The knowledge gap is that America has the books and India doesn’t. If the books had stayed in India, I think that would have closed the knowledge gap because nobody would have them. They would have been lost just like the other copies of the books.
  - rafram 2y ago
    Again, this article has absolutely nothing to do with antiquities.
    - travisjungroth 2y ago
      They said “antiquated books”. Wikipedia suggests that’s more than 100 years old. The program is more than 60 years old. I’m sure some of the million-plus books that were sent over are antiquated by now, if they weren’t already. The restriction was only on manuscripts.
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zerop 2y ago

How people are unearthing knowledge from ancient libraries using Claude https://x.com/PrintedPathways/status/1865637416637231406 https://x.com/PrintedPathways/status/1865637416637231406

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tempytempytemp 2y ago

The lack of respect for books in India is ridiculous. Very few use libraries, and forget temperature/humidity control: most feel no shame in mishandling books they borrow. The availability and care shown to books, new and old, in the US is very commendable. Our prime minister and most citizens love to brag about "ancient culture" and "proud history", but preservation of our own history and public record was and is done much better by the British and Americans. It's truly nauseating.

FullGarden_S 2y ago
>Our prime minister and most citizens love to brag about "ancient culture" and "proud history" Yes. I think so too. The bragging is mostly patriotism and it wouldn't be a wonder if the same patriotism made them wish they could erase or forget their own embarrassing past two centuries of history. Most of the historic records before that point were totally destroyed or lost so feeling proud of what's left and moving on is not bad but seriously not prioritizing preservation is really ignorant.
- anon291 2y ago
  > their own embarrassing past two centuries of history. I think part of the problem is exactly this. We don't say Spain should be embarrassed at the Muslim conquest, yet we're expected to say India should be 'ashamed' (for what?) for their past two centuries? History just is... We should stop assigning emotional value to it. The issue here is twofold. Firstly, India is not unique in this pursuit. China also has taken charge of constructing its own history, and sometimes it's at odds with Western thinking. Often time, the oral / traditional accounts are found to be true. Secondly, the West also falls into magical thinking. For example, right here, you are parroting the idea that Indian heterodoxy over their own history is misguided. However, it has a clear historical basis in the fact that Britain tried to expropriate most of its history. I don't mean taking various artifacts. I mean that, for many years, Western historians pushed the idea that the Indus Valley Civilization inhabitants were not related to modern Indians. They couldn't deal with the fact that Indians may have had one of the oldest, largest, and richest ancient civilizations. Of course history has proved them wrong.... Harappan genes are well represented in the Indian subcontinent. So, sure, we can make all kinds of claims about Indian historians inflating their own history (I would agree), but to then say that Western historians don't is just wrong... Remember, Nazi Germany's racial policy is the direct result of a ridiculously flawed and fantastical understanding of Indian history by Western historians. Like it or not, the Nazis were western too (and besides, plenty of non-German historians agreed with them... we just like to forget about that). Finally, we cannot ignore the impact of Nazism here. Even today, it is difficult to talk about Aryans without conjuring up images of genocidal Germans. Research has to be qualified and disclaimed so that people don't take the objective historical record and try to justify more atrocities. For example, going back to the IVC. European historians were insistent that the Aryans civilized India, and many insisted that the IVC was Aryan, and not really 'Indian'. Again, the evidence is very clear that the Harappans have no steppe ancestry. But again, we have an example of the very sort of behavior you accuse india of, except by British historians.

aaron695 2y ago

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n4r9 2y ago

> India was one of the largest recipients of this food aid, particularly during the 1950s and 1960s when it faced severe food shortages. Slightly tangential, but does anyone know why India faced such shortages in the 50s and 60s? I found an article on the subject [0] but it seems to come down to little more than mild crop yield variation combined with market speculation. This is a period of India's history that I find particularly interesting by way of comparison with China's "Great Famine". The latter is often put forward as a strong condemnation of communist economics, for example in the "Black Book of Communism". But in Chomsky's article response "Counting the bodies" (which I cannot seem to find a link for) he points out that India's per capita excess mortality rate over roughly this period is in fact greater than China's. I'm neither an authoritarian communist or a big fan of Chomsky's, but I would love to find reliable sources on this topic to come to my own conclusions. [0] https://www.economicsdiscussion.net/india/food-problem/food-problem-in-india-with-measures/21604#google_vignette https://www.economicsdiscussion.net/india/food-problem/food-...

anon291 2y ago
India and China both had socialist systems at the time, so using India as some kind of foil to China's communism is not going to work. People confuse democracy with the free market. It's not. India up until the 90s had a tightly regulated economy that rivaled China's economic control.
- n4r9 2y ago
  By all accounts I've read, describing India as "socialist" in the 1950s is not quite right. You only need look at the article I linked to see that a big reason for people going hungry was because couldn't afford the rising food prices. The prices being determined by purchasing power and market forces. And there was a functioning parliamentary democracy. At best you could say it was a mixed economy where the ruling party had some socialist economic policies. But you could say that about many modern European countries. So I still think the comparison with China is interesting.
  - anon291 2y ago

amriksohata 2y ago

There are almost no recorded famines in India before Mughal or British rule, or after British rule either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_major_famines_in_India_during_British_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_major_famines_in_I...

amriksohata 2y ago
India was a bastion of food, crop and spice growth however incoming invaders did not have the knowledge of agriculture in the same way local indians did (british named it indore method etc)
rayiner 2y ago
Incorrect. Cyclical famines were common in India; records of famines go back to 500 BC: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-021-00219-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-021-00219-1.