How Did India Become a Food-Exporting Country? | The Bible in India | Vishal Mangalwadi

How Did India Become a Food-Exporting Country?

Welcome to this series on The Bible and The Making of Modern India. My name is Vishal Mangalwadi. From 1976 – 1994, I served the poor in north India, most of whom were subsistence farmers. Because of my experience on the front line, a political party invited me to write the approach paper for reforming India’s agricultural policy that was keeping the peasants poor. Later I also served as an honorary professor in an Agriculture university. in this session I will discuss how the Bible transformed a land of perennial food shortage and frequent famines into a food exporting country.

The Bible changed Indian agriculture and economy because one its core teachings is that food scarcity is a consequence of the human “Fall” into sin, but God wants to forgive His children and bless them with abundant life on earth and eternal life in heaven. To accomplish His purposes, God sent His servants with a mission to emancipate India from chronic food shortages. We will look at some of the characters who played a lead role in this gigantic mission.

I grew up in in the city of Allahabad, now called Prayagraj, not too far from Pandit Nehru’s home, Anand Bhawan, where leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi met to lead the independence movement. Nehruji wrote The Discovery of India before Independence. Allahabad was founded by the Mughal emperor Akbar in 1575. It became one of Hinduism’s holiest cities because two great rivers, Ganga and Yamuna merge there. Every day, hundreds of Hindus come to their Confluence called Sangam, usually to to immerse the ashes of their deceased loved ones. During winter, a month-long festival, Magh Mela, draws tens of millions to the Sangam. They take a dip in the holy waters to wash away their sins. They are drawn by a myth that a drop of the Nectar of Life fell in the Sangam when the gods cheated the demons and flew away with the whole bowl of the Nectar. Gods and demons had been produced it by churning the ocean together. They toiled as a team because it was agreed that they will share the fruit of their labour — the Nectar of Life. At the last minute, however, the gods fled with the Life, leaving the demons as the toiling masses.

Once in 12 years, this annual festival becomes Kumbh Mela. It is the largest human gathering in the world. In 2019-Kumbh, about 240 million pilgrims came seeking salvation, the after-effect of that drop of Nectar.

These hundreds of millions are India’s lower castes, the “common man.” Their gathering attracts hundreds of thousands of poor — beggars, lepers, widows and orphans. They come seeking alms for temporary relief from poverty, disease and helplessness.

Every resourceful Hindu — learned philosopher, sage, guru, aristocrat, ruler or merchant — also comes to the Sangam, at least once in his or her lifetime. . . And yet, not one of them ever built an Institution to change the plight of the poor — the toiling and starving common man.

The mission to change the future of the poor was taken up by an American philosopher-missionary, Sam Higginbottom. In 1910, he built the Allahabad Agriculture Institute on the banks of the river Yamuna, within walking distance of the Sangam. His goal was to transform agriculture and also the worldview that had condemned the toiling masses a “Backward” That worldview kept the “wise” away from toil and the plight of the poor.

Higginbottom strove to change India’s work-ethic – the elite’s contempt for working with their hands. Mahatma Gandhi who first met Sam Higginbottom at the inauguration of the Banaras Hindu University in 1916, embraced that mission to change the Hindu work-ethic to change India’s economy. He required his high caste followers, including the Nehrus, to spin the wheel for making the thread used for weaving clothes. A spinning wheel is still displayed in Anand Bhawan, Nehru’s ancestral home between the University and the Sangam.

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