Readers Write In #770: The Bengal Famine of 1943-44

Jeeva P

“Famine seems to be the last, the most dreadful resource of nature. The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.”

This was Thomas Malthus, an economist and a scholar of the 18^th century who was later known for his famous Malthusian theory of population. The theory went on to explain how population of any species that exceed a particular threshold even if they witness a temporary increase on their numbers for the time being, soon tend to get restored back to their old levels automatically, due to lack of simultaneous and corresponding appreciation in the resources that feed those increased numbers. The newly born ones fail to find sufficient food for survival most of which need to be obtained from Nature. This was Nature’s trick, it was later remarked by scholars of the subsequent generations, of preserving itself against any single species gaining an upper hand in the overall food chain thereby restoring the much-needed equilibrium for the planet to sustain itself.

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I used to ask my father right from my childhood on why Indians despite having suffered terribly under the British Raj for so many decades hadn’t made any substantial progress towards demanding better living conditions under the British for so long or towards chasing them away from the sub-continent once and for all. My father having been born only a decade after the British had left India didn’t have any direct living experience under colonial rule. He often used to quote my grandfather in response, “The Britishers are clean people. They are higher than us not only in stature but also in matters of justice and principle”. Apparently, my not-so-well-read grandfather had a very positive opinion about the colonialists which was to an extent very widespread among our populace until Gandhi’s entry into Indian politics changed things drastically. Most Indians believed in the ‘inherent benevolence’ of the British rulers and hadn’t nationalist propaganda that made the crucial connections between India’s increasing poverty and Britain’s exploitative colonial agenda spread after Gandhi’s arrival in India like wildfire, India wouldn’t probably have raised a finger against its European oppressor at all. My grandfather, my father used to say, loathed the very ideas of Independence and self-rule and didn’t trust the abilities of the natives to administer large and culturally diverse regions that made our sprawling subcontinent. 

Strangely, even now I see a lot of Indians frustrated with today’s politics, the selfishness of India’s political class, their lack of principle and knowledge, all of which dovetail easily into their fascination with the charm and ‘efficiency’ of their yesteryear white-skinned rulers who gave them the telegraph, the modern schooling system, the railways and of course, finally, the most important of them all I find to be – the Elections.

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Madhusree Mukerjee’s book Churchill’s Secret War deals with the Bengal famine that started in 1943 and lasted almost till the end of 1944. The famine was probably one of India’s worst among those that happened during the British Raj and took close to 3 to 5 million lives (the famine was the core of Satyajit Ray’s 1973 classic Ashani Sanket). Mukerjee draws her sources from official communications that happened between India’s then Viceroy Wavell and the feted British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill, the Secretary of State to India, Leopold Amery and the War Cabinet discussions that happened in London during the famine. She also explains events that happened in India during the same time – the Quit India Movement, Subhas Chandra Bose’s parallel struggle for Independence and British attempts to undermine and nail him, abrupt changes in his fortunes, India’s military contribution for Britain’s war against the Axis Powers, etc. and how they all ended up influencing the famine. Mukerjee spends a lot of pages detailing the causes for the famine and thankfully instead of taking a narrow, jingoistic view, she infuses as many nuances as possible into the narrative. 

The famine was triggered first of all due to a cyclone that led to enormous crop destruction across Bengal in 1943. Next came Britain’s shortage of ships which led His Majesty’s Government to borrow some from the United States. As the scale of crop failure appeared to be massive, whatever that was left of the harvest was acquired by speculators, landowners and merchants who were keen on either hoarding them up or selling it to Britain for exorbitant prices. As news of the famine slowly reached the Viceroy’s ears, telegrams that flew between Delhi and London show Wavell’s unwavering commitment to seek relief for the starving masses of Bengal.

On the other hand, Churchill was busy accumulating food supplies for Great Britain, its soon-to-be possessions on the Balkans following the war from all across the globe primarily from India, then from Australia and Africa. As months passed on, Amery and Wavell kept informing Churchill of the grave situation in Bengal but the prime minister appears to have been obsessed with managing the war, co-ordinating shipments accordingly across various theatres of the war where Britain was engaged in fighting. When news of the famine reached the media, even American President Roosevelt seems to have expressed concern to Churchill during the various Allied Summits that happened during the course of the war.

Stories of mothers dropping their children into lakes, rivers and ponds, leaving them near hospitals for someone to take care of the little ones, women turning into prostitutes after having exhausted all means of feeding themselves and their children abound in Mukerjee’s narrative. As explained by Jeyamohan, a person can die due to starvation only if he doesn’t eat absolutely anything for a consecutive stretch of fifteen days. The body due to lack of nutrition first feeds upon the accumulated flesh in the system turning the excess fat into energy which gradually leads to a horrible emaciation of the torso and subsequently other parts. Bengalis fed upon grasses, insects, herbs and whatever that was consumable and only after exhausting all other options gave themselves away to slow and excruciating deaths.

Mukerjee details how thousands and thousands of Indian soldiers were trained on the other hand into fighting for the Allied Powers and terms their role in saving the Middle East from the Axis aggression as extremely crucial. But despite the willingness of Indians to fight for their oppressor, their heroic contribution at Burma and Singapore, Churchill was reluctant to acknowledge it and remained unconcerned about the fate of their starving brethren at Bengal. 

Churchill always considered Indians beneath his ‘Nordic’ birth and kept telling politicians and reporters of how much it was costing the United Kingdom to keep Indians safe from the travails of the bloody war. Churchill considered Indians as scheming and traitorous and his acolytes were happy to quote Malthusian theories to justify food shortages in India. Churchill always believed strongly that Indians multiplied like rabbits and that it was pretty natural for them to die by thousands. But Mukerjee points out that India’s annual agricultural harvest always used to exceed the local demand and that it was Great Britain that had very insufficient agricultural output to feed its population. By Malthusian logic, had Britain not occupied India, there was no reason for Indians to die in such big numbers despite having a large local population to feed. 

Another accusation that Mukerjee throws at Churchill is his absolute nonchalance when it came to protecting Indian territories from Japanese aggression. Churchill wanted the best soldiers from both Britain and India to fight at the Middle East and Africa while a bunch of very poorly fed and trained Indian soldiers were left to defend India’s eastern boundaries. This led to Britain adopting Scorched Earth techniques that involved burning not only valuable property and assets but also precious agricultural crop especially those that grew in Bengal that were immediately vulnerable to the ‘inexorable’ Japanese armies. 

Despite multiple telegrams from Delhi requesting for grain, Churchill was consciously unwilling to help. He reasoned that Britain’s local demand for grain would soon return to pre-war levels after heavy wartime rationing since America’s entry into the war would naturally hasten its conclusion. Wavell in many of his communications did not approve of Britain’s estimates for grain demand for their spuriousness and Mukerjee explains how overblown and exaggerated these figures were. Going by some calculations, His Majesty’s Government had stockpiled almost seven times the annual grain demand for the entire British population especially during the famine years in Bengal.

Scores of people died on Bengal’s streets, feeding jackals, crows and vultures and news and photographs of the same reached international media. Canada and the United States were ready to offer help and Churchill seems to have turned them down for various reasons. The United States had lent its ships to Britain to be used for the war and Churchill’s officials were afraid that the diversion of the same for relief purposes to India might prompt America’s decision to reduce their numbers or withdraw them.

Mukerjee quotes a lot of statements made by Churchill not only on his inveterate hatred for Indians but also on his curious reluctance to part away from Indian territories. He strongly believed that India should be part of the British Empire and that Gandhi’s insistence on self-rule amounted to treason. He kept reiterating on many forums that Britain had pledged its life to save Indians from the war and despite mounting evidence that pointed to how Bengalis fed British civilians and soldiers by dying in scores due to the man-made famine, he kept pointing out that it was India’s duty to stay faithful to its possessor for eternity.

Mukerjee also points out to epidemics such as malaria that followed the famine and how it ravaged the land of the very few survivors. By the end of 1944, Bengalis had grown so poor losing all their money to buying whatever food that was available that the meagre cloth they had possessed had grown older and completely unusable. When winter set in, they lacked enough cloth to cover their already famished and shrivelled bodies that trembled in the cold and women were nowhere to be seen in Bengal during daylight. Brothers and fathers gave whatever cloth they possessed for women to cover their bodies and they came out only during night time to make sure they weren’t seen by others. Mukerjee contrasts this with India’s annual cotton output in the 1940s that after spinning and weaving could have been sufficient to gird the Earth twenty-four times over. A large portion of India’s cotton output was sent to Britain to make army uniforms and parachutes for the British armed forces to fight during the war.

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Despite these many accusations on Churchill’s government, Mukerjee doesn’t lay the blame for the famine squarely on the shoulders of the stocky British prime minister. She attributes British indifference to Indian lives not only to the racism of the rulers but also to one crucial factor that made all the difference to India’s fortunes post-Independence where famines and food shortages almost shrank to zero – Elections. Since Churchill and his government’s fate were tied to the ballot, the Government of the United Kingdom was forced to be accountable to its people. Churchill was excessively worried about inflation due to rising grain demand that could occur at the end of the war in Britain and made extensive preparations to meet the challenge so as to remain in the good books of the voters despite leading them so illustriously during the war. 

Despite so many flaws in India’s polity and socio-economic relations post-Independence, our rulers have made their best efforts to prevent crippling food shortages no matter how adversely the monsoons have affected agricultural output year on year. It is one thing to complain about the current Indian establishment and completely another to feel ‘nostalgic’ about the British years. India given the much smaller population then, seems to have lost at least 30 to 40 million people to more than seven famines during the British Raj. It is very much imperative that we learn about these tragic histories, the political compulsions and forces that underpinned them so as to take a balanced, informed view. 

Even today, we see forces that are keen on reducing the number of elections that are held in India properly at the end of every term. Mukerjee at the end of the book highlights the importance of accountability that every populace must demand from its political class at all times and how it had been the most important thing that protected British citizens from facing the same fortunes as those of the Indians. No matter whatever we lose and how flawed its verdicts are, I always tell myself to hold on to that creaky cuboid made of brass or metal, the ballot. It is the only one that kept my father alive for so many years protecting him from starvation and epidemics. 

‘Ballot is my birthright and I shall have it!’