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Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

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Long before LPG queues, here’s how Indian kingdoms dealt with hoarding and famine

From Kautilya’s Arthashastra to Mughal policies and British non-intervention, India’s response to supply shocks has long been defined by the role of the state.

With Iran’s grip on the Strait of Hormuz still tight, the Union Ministry of Petroleum issued a Natural Gas Control Order on 9 March under the Essential Commodities Act, prioritising households and hospitals. Long queues, however, still formed at distribution centres across the country, while restaurants warned of distress and possible shutdowns.

Indian society and the state have a long history of grappling with supply shocks, especially before the advent of modern agricultural technologies and regulatory frameworks. From Kautilya’s Arthashastra to British-era princely states, India has had to deal with almost every variation of hoarding during a crisis.

For premodern states, shocks to the food supply were much more of a concern than fuel shortages. In the earliest surviving text of Indian statecraft, the Arthashastra, kings were envisioned as directly correcting the supply. They were, according to Kautilya, supposed to “gather a stockpile of foodstuffs and then grant favours: work on forts or irrigation projects in exchange for foodstuffs; or distribution of foodstuffs…” (Book 4, Chapter 3, Verse 17.)

Two inscriptions from the 3rd–2nd centuries BCE suggest that local officials took stockpiling seriously. The Sohgaura copper plate in Uttar Pradesh’s Gorakhpur declares, “The order of the Mahamatas (possibly Mauryan officials) of Shravasti: These two storehouses… of fodder and wheat… are used in urgent need: not to be taken away.” Far to the east, but probably in the same period An edict found in Mahasthangarh, Bangladesh, records an official order to a granary custodian: The local residents, struggling after a flood, were permitted to withdraw both paddy and copper coins from the district storehouses.

Not all early Indian states were bureaucratised enough to attempt such relief measures. Several centuries after the Arthashastra, the Pallava and Chola kings of present-day northern Tamil Nadu struggled with famine. These states were multi-centric, relying on alliances with religious and mercantile power brokers. As such, there’s little inscriptional evidence of them correcting supply-side shocks. Buddhist hagiographies claim that esoteric masters like Amoghavajra were asked to........

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