MS, the man

M.S. Swaminathan's biography is an intimate portrait of the man who fed India

- BY SHUBHANGI SHAH

Despite having very different triggers, the Bengal famine of 1943 and the migrants' crisis of 2020 bear striking similarities. Both dealt a crushing blow to the poor, led to mass displacement, exposed the indifference of authorities, and resulted in unimaginable human suffering. It was the Bengal famine that spurred Monkombu Sambasivan Swaminathan to become a plant geneticist. Two decades later, and after having almost run out of food on more occasions than one, India witnessed a one-of-a-kind Green Revolution, with M.S. Swaminathan as its architect. It transformed the country's very fate "from that of a begging bowl to a bread basket," writes Priyambada Jayakumar in MS Swaminathan: The Man Who Fed India. The biography was launched around his birth centenary on August 7.

"He was a man who loved taking up new technology. The reason why the 2020 Covid lockdown spurred him as my subject was because I caught a tweet by him on the migrants' crisis, on humanity walking helplessly with their lives on their backs," Jayakumar tells THE WEEK. And as she writes in her author's note: "Meanwhile, a totally different epidemic of hunger was quietly unfolding everywhere—for in India, no wages equalled no food."

It isn't that no books have been written about Swaminathan. But they are "dreadfully dry with dry agricultural facts on wheat in them. Who's interested? Bring the man behind it. That's what the book intends to do," says Jayakumar.

From Gandhi to Marcos