8/22/2023 0 Comments Silo city barch![]() Aware of the strain on India to manage an ancillary supply route of wheat, the US gifted India a number of prefabricated storage structures, two of which were iconic silos made of galvanized iron. The shiploads of wheat arriving at the ports of Bombay and Calcutta distorted networks of movement and storage forcing India to move grain from urban ports to temporary points of storage in the countryside before it could be redistributed into cities, rather than the other way around. ![]() The United States, facing gluts in its agricultural sector, instituted Public Law 480, a Food for Peace program that doubled aid budgets for use as a tool of diplomacy in their Cold War arsenal enabling them to influence the third world against the second. This characteristic of the market to dissemble itself so as to dissimulate a scarcity, even when grain was present, worried the state and they fixated upon buffer stocks that they hoped could prevent false shortages.Įarly attempts to create this buffer stock failed, as the indigent country struggled to meet production targets, supplementing shortages with American grain. The failure of the World War 2-focused government to control distortions in the marketplace led to the famine in which between one and four million people are estimated to have died. A robust buffer stock, they believed, could prevent the kind of crisis that decimated the Bengali countryside during that time, where rice-hoarding saw prices spiral, causing peasants to lose what Amartya Sen famously called “exchange entitlements,” that is, the capacity to exchange their labor for rice. The government’s obsession with storage had its roots in the Bengal Famine of 1943. Wheat from the present addressed unforeseen shortages in the future, while current markets could be insulated from foreseeable future gluts. In India the silo became infrastructure, a system whose material form allowed for exchange, not just across space, but also across time. The silo acted as a quantitative architecture: a calculable infrastructure deployed against the incalculability of weather and hoarding, absorbing surpluses and augmenting shortages to manipulate the market in wheat. This post looks at storage infrastructure’s biopolitical nature, where the Indian state hoped to manage the life of wheat, to hold it in stasis-pausing its cycle of growth through technological and chemical control-so as to correct for errors in a possibly unstable future wheat market. Image from Mendelsohn’s “Amerika”: 82 Photographs. Erik Mendelsohn’s captioned images of grain elevators from his book, “Amerika” first published in 1924. Thus, silos formed crucial nodes in the management and distribution infrastructure of the state in the years after independence. In the decades following that country’s independence, storage came to be necessary to maintain a buffer stock – a quantity of wheat in reserve that would allow it to correct imbalances in the market price of the grain. But since the US gifted India its first silo, this infrastructural figure of storage has had a different legacy in India’s political economy of wheat. The silo was a manifestation of industrial scales of grain storage. ![]() As a figure of the American capacity to innovate, the American grain silo offered European architects a model for how industrial form could influence architectural thought, finding ground in the dictum: form follows function. European modernists saw it as a formal and structural response to the United States’ growing outputs of grain across the nineteenth century. The American grain elevator – a specific kind of silo – holds a singular place in the history of architectural modernism. This post underscores how the seemingly straightforward and yet iconic American silo evolved into a different kind of storage infrastructure when it encountered India’s histories and geographies of wheat. By Ateya Khorakiwala, Harvard University §
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