The Bengal Famine of 1943: A Detailed Account

The Bengal Famine of 1943 killed perhaps three million people in the space of eighteen months, and it did so in a province of British India that had a functioning provincial government, a substantial food surplus on paper, and a government in London that knew what was happening. The argument of this article is that the famine was a man-made catastrophe, that the man-made element was the consequence of decisions taken in Calcutta, Delhi, and London, and that the refusal of the British government, and of Winston Churchill in particular, to acknowledge the scale of the disaster is the moment when the moral authority of the British Raj finally collapsed. Madhusree Mukerjee’s Churchill’s Secret War (2010) made the case most thoroughly; the case is now generally accepted.

The Causes

The proximate cause of the famine was the Japanese invasion of Burma in the spring of 1942 and the loss of the Burmese rice that Bengal had been importing. The underlying cause was a series of decisions by the British Indian government and the Government of Bengal that turned a food crisis into a famine. The “denial policy” of the autumn of 1942 — the destruction of rice stocks and the confiscation of boats in the coastal areas of Bengal to prevent them from falling into Japanese hands — destroyed the food reserves and the fishing economy of the rural delta. The decision to requisition rice for the military and for the urban populations of Calcutta and the industrial centres left the rural population without food and without the means of buying it. The continuation of rice exports from Bengal to other parts of India, and to the Middle East, through the first half of 1943 was the decision that most directly produced the death toll.

A cyclone hit the Bengal coast in October 1942, destroying the aman rice crop that was then in the ground and killing perhaps 14,000 people. A smallpox epidemic in the early months of 1943 killed many more. The natural disasters compounded the crisis, but they did not produce it. The rural population of Bengal had survived bad cyclones, and the loss of the Burmese rice imports had been anticipated. What turned a difficult year into a catastrophe was the British Indian government’s failure to act on the warnings that the Bengal government and the Viceroy’s Council had been receiving since the autumn of 1942. The Famine Inquiry Commission of 1944–1945, established by the British Indian government and chaired by the wood-pulp magnate Sir John Woodhead, attributed the famine primarily to administrative failure. The judgement, delivered by an inquiry that the British themselves had set up, was the most damning official verdict on the British Indian government of the entire twentieth century.

The Course of the Famine

The famine began in the rural districts of eastern Bengal in late 1942 and intensified through the spring and summer of 1943. The rural poor, deprived of both food and the means to buy it, died in their villages in numbers that the official record has never been able to count. The most striking feature of the famine was the migration: tens of thousands of rural Bengalis made their way to Calcutta, and the death toll in the streets and pavements of the city was the most visible part of the catastrophe. The Calcutta Corporation’s director of relief, B. K. Sen, described the famine as “one of the greatest disasters that has befallen any people under British rule,” and Sen’s report to the Corporation in August 1943 was the most detailed contemporary account.

The death toll has been the subject of demographic work. The careful estimate of the demographer Tim Dyson, in A Population History of India (2018), is between 2.5 and 3 million deaths in Bengal in the period 1942–1944 attributable to the famine. The estimate includes deaths from disease — cholera, malaria, and smallpox — that were the consequence of malnutrition, and the estimate does not include the deaths from malaria in the rest of India that were a partial consequence of the disruption of the quinine supply. The official figure of 1.5 million deaths, which the British Indian government maintained until 1944, has not been taken seriously by historians since the 1980s.

The British Response

The British response to the famine was inadequate by any standard. Lord Linlithgow, the viceroy until October 1943, treated the famine as a secondary concern, and the Government of India in Delhi was more interested in the war effort than in the deaths in Bengal. The Bengal government, under Governor John Herbert, was paralysed by the administrative failure that the Woodhead Commission later identified. The most damning element of the British response was the decision, in the first half of 1943, to continue the export of rice from Bengal to other parts of India and to the Middle East. The rice was exported, in significant part, to feed British military personnel, and the decision was taken in the knowledge that the rural population of Bengal was starving.

Winston Churchill’s role has been the subject of the most intense historical controversy. The most famous statement is his exchange with Leo Amery, the Secretary of State for India, in October 1944. Amery had written in his diary that Churchill, on being told of the scale of the famine, had asked “why Gandhi hadn’t died yet.” The remark has been the centre of a debate that has run for forty years, and Mukerjee’s Churchill’s Secret War produced the most thorough indictment: that Churchill had been told repeatedly of the scale of the disaster, that he had refused to authorise the diversion of Australian and Canadian wheat to India on the grounds that the Indians were breeding like rabbits, and that his attitude was a consequence of a racism that he had exhibited throughout his career. The recent work of Alex von Tunzelmann in Indian Summer (2007) and of Yasmin Khan in The Great Partition (2007) has been more measured, but the consensus that Churchill’s conduct of the famine was, in the words of Khan, “a moral crime of the most serious kind” is now widely held.

The British response improved after the appointment of Lord Wavell as the new viceroy in October 1943. Wavell, who had been the Supreme Allied Commander in the China-Burma-India theatre, was less hidebound than his predecessor, and he began a more vigorous response that reduced the death toll significantly in the following months. The improvement, however, came after the worst was over, and the famine had, by the autumn of 1943, killed perhaps two million of its eventual three million victims.

The Political Consequences

The political consequences of the Bengal Famine were substantial and long-lasting. The famine was a major element in the Indian nationalist critique of British rule, and the post-war Congress government in Bengal, in office from 1946 to 1947, was elected on a platform of food policy reform. The famine was also a major element in the international critique of British rule, and the post-war Labour government in London had to deal with the embarrassment of a famine that had occurred in a British province and had been allowed to happen by a British government.

The most direct political consequence was the post-war reassessment of British rule in India. The Woodhead Commission’s report, published in 1945, was the most substantial official indictment of the British Indian government of the twentieth century, and the report was read carefully by the Attlee government when it was making the decision to withdraw. The famine was not the only cause of the British decision to leave India in 1947, but the famine was the most morally compelling argument for withdrawal, and the moral argument was, in the end, the most effective. C. A. Bayly and Tim Harper, in Forgotten Wars (2007), have argued that the Bengal Famine was the moment when the British lost the moral authority to govern India. The argument is correct.

The Famine in the Longer View

The Bengal Famine of 1943 was the last great famine of British India, and it was the worst. The death toll was lower than the 1876–1878 Great Famine, which killed perhaps 5.5 to 12 million people, but the 1943 famine occurred in a province that had a working government, a substantial bureaucracy, and a government in London that knew what was happening. The famine of 1943 is, for that reason, the more damning of the two. David Arnold’s The New Cambridge History of India: Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India (2000) and the work of the climate historian Vinita Damodaran have situated the 1943 famine in the longer history of Indian famines and the political economy of British rule.

The most politically important legacy of the famine is the consensus, in Indian public opinion and in much of the international historiography, that the British Indian government was directly responsible for the deaths of perhaps three million people in 1943. The consensus is not unanimous. The work of the economic historian Cormac Ó Gráda, in Famine: A Short History (2009), has been more cautious, treating the famine as a consequence of the interaction of natural disasters, war, and policy failures. The most recent work, however, has moved back towards the more critical view. The Bengal Famine of 1943 is now treated, in the work of Khan, Mukerjee, von Tunzelmann, and most of the new generation of Indian historians, as the central moral fact of the British Raj.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the Bengal Famine has been transformed since the 1990s. The older tradition, of which the work of the Famine Inquiry Commission of 1944–1945 and the British official historians is representative, treated the famine as a consequence of the war and of the failure of the Bengal government. The post-independence Indian historiography, of which the work of the Indian economic historian and the contributors to the Indian government’s own subsequent surveys is representative, was more critical of the British role. The most recent generation of historians — Mukerjee, Khan, von Tunzelmann, Dyson, and the contributors to the Oxford History of the British Empire — has produced a more integrated picture in which the war, the natural disasters, the British policy of “denial,” the rice export policy, the Churchill government’s failure to respond, and the failure of the Bengal government are all treated as elements in a single catastrophe. The current debate is over the question of proportion: how much of the death toll was the consequence of the war, how much of the British policy failures, and how much of the natural disasters. The answer, on the best current evidence, is that the British policy failures were the most consequential of the three.

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