The Bengal Famine of 1943: A Man-Made Catastrophe
Between 1943 and 1944, around three million people starved to death in the Indian province of Bengal, then under British rule. Bengal had not run out of food. The rice was in the region, or could have reached it. What killed three million people was a chain of decisions taken by men in London who had the power to stop the dying and chose, again and again, not to.
Not a famine of nature
For a long time these deaths were filed away as a natural disaster, the kind of thing that simply happened in India. The evidence does not support that. In 2019 a team of researchers led by Vimal Mishra at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar reconstructed the soil-moisture conditions of Bengal in 1943 and found something that set this famine apart from every other Indian famine between 1870 and 2016. There was no drought. Rainfall that year was above normal. Their conclusion was blunt: the other famines followed the failure of the monsoon, but the famine of 1943 followed the failure of policy.
The economist Amartya Sen, a child in Bengal when it happened, reached the same verdict by a different road. He showed that the province had about as much rice available in 1943 as in 1941, a year with no famine at all. People did not die because the food was gone. They died because war inflation and government buying drove the price of rice beyond what a landless labourer or a fisherman could pay, and because no one with power chose to close the gap.
Who actually died
The dying did not fall evenly. It fell on the rural poor, the cultivators and sharecroppers and day labourers and fishermen of the Bengal countryside, and it fell with particular weight on the Muslim peasantry of the east, in the districts that would one day become Bangladesh. These were the people furthest from the war economy that London was busy protecting, the people whose lives counted for least in the ledgers kept in Whitehall. Calcutta, where the war industries and the people who mattered to the war effort lived, stayed fed. A short train ride away, families were eating weeds and the dead were lying in the lanes. The Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, reported to London that corpses were rotting in the streets of Calcutta.
The decisions in London
The Bengal government, the viceroy Linlithgow, the commander-in-chief Auchinleck and Amery himself sent request after request to London for emergency grain. Churchill's War Cabinet turned them down. Offers of relief from Canada and the United States were declined. Wheat from Australia was shipped past a starving India to build stockpiles for Europe and for British troops who were already well supplied. India was not even allowed to spend its own sterling reserves, or use its own ships, to buy food for its own people. While Bengal starved, Britain went on drawing rice out of India for use elsewhere. The historian Madhusree Mukerjee, working through the wartime transport records, set out in detail how grain that could have saved lives was deliberately moved in the wrong direction. The former diplomat Shashi Tharoor put the charge in plain words: food was taken from the hungry and handed to the already fed.
The mind behind the policy
The contempt was not hidden, and it was written down at the time. In the diaries of Leo Amery, the man who had to carry London's decisions to India, Churchill's response to the famine survives in his own words. Told that Indians were dying, the Prime Minister asked why, if things were so bad, Gandhi had not yet died. He blamed the catastrophe on Indians "breeding like rabbits." Of the people he ruled he told Amery, "I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion." Amery, himself no radical, found the outbursts so extreme that he once told Churchill he could see little to separate that attitude from Hitler's. The man Britain remembers as the conscience of a civilisation looked at three million of his own subjects starving and reached for a joke about Gandhi.
A debt that has never been paid
No British government has ever formally apologised for Bengal. In British public memory Churchill is still, for the most part, the hero of 1940, and the three million dead of 1943 are a footnote that rarely troubles the statue. For the descendants of the people who died, and for anyone willing to read the documents, the two cannot be held apart. The same empire, the same war, the same Prime Minister: a man who could stand against fascism in Europe while presiding over mass death in Bengal, and see no contradiction in it at all.
This print is part of the Riwayah Azadi collection, which records the human cost of empire. You can view the print.
The famine was one episode in a longer story of empire. For the wider arc, see what Azadi was.