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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ADVANCED RESEARCH IN COMMERCE, MANAGEMENT & SOCIAL SCIENCE (IJARCMSS) [ Vol. 9 | No. 2 (I) | April - June, 2026 ]

Entitlement Failure and Moral Economy: A Comparative History of Marginalised Communities Across Economic Crises in India, 1880–2020

Dr. Vrishti Kanojia

This paper develops a comparative historical framework for understanding how entitlement failure — in Amartya Sen's sense of the collapse of exchange entitlements — interacts with E.P. Thompson's concept of the moral economy to produce catastrophic vulnerability among marginalised occupational communities in India. Drawing on four moments of acute economic crisis — colonial North Indian famines (1880–1920), the Bengal Famine of 1943, the demonetisation of 2016, and the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020 — the paper argues that across these structurally distinct events, it is the same subaltern communities — barbers, fishermen, artisans, casual labourers, and informal workers — who bear the sharpest burden of entitlement collapse. The paper further contends that such collapse is never merely economic: it simultaneously ruptures the moral architecture of reciprocal obligation that sustains survival for these communities. By bringing Sen and Thompson into dialogue, and by grounding the analysis in subaltern historiography, the paper offers a new lens for understanding structural vulnerability in India across the colonial and postcolonial longue durée.

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