Publication

This paper examines the concepts, mechanisms and practices that underpinned humanitarian action in South Asia in the 19th and 20th centuries. The author informs her discussion by 1) reviewing British colonial era responses to famines in the region, such as those of the 1870s and the Bengal famine of 1943; and 2) looking at the evolution of relief aid in independent India, with a focus on the responses to the displacement of people that followed the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 and the refugee influx that accompanied the Bangladesh war in 1971.