The Aesthetics of Starvation: Empire, Ethics, and the Colonial Imagination of the Madras Famine, 1876–1878

This article reinterprets the Madras famine (1876–1878) not merely as an environmental catastrophe but also as a profound moral and aesthetic crisis of empire. It argues that British governance transformed hunger into a spectacle of imperial rationality; everywhere the suffering body became a position of bureaucratic management, moral justification, and epistemic erasure. Drawing upon famine reports, relief codes, missionary accounts, and vernacular testimonies, the study situates the famine within the intertwined histories of political economy and colonial imagination. By analysing the rhetoric of scarcity, statistical enumeration, and visual representation, it reveals how empire aestheticised deprivation to legitimise economic orthodoxy and moral superiority. The famine consequently emerges as a critical juncture in the making of colonial biopolitics, where ethics, governance, and vision converged to naturalise mass death. This interdisciplinary inquiry combines archival research with postcolonial and environmental critique to illuminate how imperial power produced, rationalised, and remembered starvation in late Victorian India.