The Bengal famine of 1943

This famine first came to my attention a few weeks ago, surfacing at reference 1. My summary at that time was: ‘between two and three million people died in a famine in Bengal in 1942, triggered by the conjunction of the Japanese invading the rice fields of Burma and a cyclone, but greatly aggravated by Churchill ruling that any food going had to go to the army’.

The present post is based on a reading of most of reference 2 and a look at a small part of reference 3. A sort of balance between a new Wikipedia article for the general reader and an old report commissioned by the government (of India) of the day.

The huge list of books and articles at the end of the Wikipedia article and the wealth of material turned up by Bing and Google is testimony to the depth of feeling on the subject, at least elsewhere. As is the fact that the people at reference 4, with my having shown some interest in the matter, are turning up around a paper a day. So one lesson for me is that a disaster of this magnitude should have found its way into the geography and history that I was taught at school – although in fairness to the school, our history teaching stopped at O-level at 1914. Hopefully modern curricula are better balanced.

Wikipedia article

The opening statement strikes me as a good summary: ‘The Bengal famine of 1943 ... was a major famine in the Bengal province of British India during World War II. An estimated 2.1–3 million, out of a population of 60.3 million, died of starvation, malaria, or other diseases aggravated by malnutrition, population displacement, unsanitary conditions and lack of health care. Millions were impoverished as the crisis overwhelmed large segments of the economy and catastrophically disrupted the social fabric’.

There was no one cause of the famine, but perhaps one should start with overpopulation. The population of Bengal had grown by about 40% - rather more than the rest of India – in the forty years to 1940, to around 60 million. Agricultural production, particularly of rice, had not kept up, with Bengal switching from being an exporter to an importer in 1920 or so. These imports mostly came from Burma.

The rural population of Bengal was very poor, fairly unhealthy and food was short for a lot of the time. Organisation of government services, the distribution of wealth and land tenure were all very unsatisfactory. It did not take much to push that population into famine – and they certainly took most of the damage.

The food supply situation in Bengal was bad by the middle of 1942, with some part of this being about distribution of food rather than total of food. There was then a devastating cyclone in the autumn, causing widespread and catastrophic flooding, and the rice harvest failed at the end of the year. The response was hopelessly inadequate, with deaths by starvation in the second half of 1943 being exceeded by deaths by disease in the first half of 1944, with much of this last being malaria.

The Japanese invasion of Burma had been very disruptive, not least because it put Bengal in the front line. There were many refugees from Burma in Bengal and there was much destruction of shipping in the Bay of Bengal.

The UK government, or at least the Conservative part of it, led by Winston Churchill were fighting to hold onto India. Their failure to give enough ground resulted in much unrest and worse in India, which did not help.

The UK government also seemed oddly reluctant to commit shipping to getting Australian wheat to India, as opposed to, for example, Africa. One of the reasons given was the need to preserve shipping for the invasion of Normandy in the following year.

India too was on a war footing, with lots of resources being diverted into the war effort. Not least the maintenance of large numbers of troops from the UK and the US.

Notwithstanding, many matters rested with the provincial governments, of which Bengal was one, and food supply was not organised on an all-India basis. Roughly speaking, provinces held on to what they had got and help, if any, had to come from the outside.

Government report

The copy of this report I have appears to be a scanned copy of that in the library of the President’s Secretariat. No idea which President this might be. Quite legible but, unfortunately, a non-searchable copy.

The snap above is of the humane, closing paragraphs of the first half of the report, the half about the famine itself, rather than about the disease that followed and the response. But the report as a whole has been blamed for dumping the blame on the devolved government of Bengal.

The report opens with a survey of the famines which have afflicted Bengal over the years. With the present famine being by far the worst since the terrible famine at the end of the 18th century.
It then moves onto a socio-economic survey of the country, with a table telling us that something over half the population was Muslim, although I have not (yet) found a table telling us about the religious breakdown of the deaths. Most of these deaths took place among the poor peasant farmers, the landless labourers and their families who made up the bulk of the rural population. While Calcutta, which largely escaped, included most of India’s war factories – which needed to be kept up and running. I associate now to the starving of rural Ukraine to feed the industrial cities of the Soviet Union, not many years previous. A starving now generally regarded as an atrocity.

There follows a detailed analysis of the food economy of Bengal. I imagine that this report remains an important source for information of this sort. A report which makes clear that most of the rural population of Bengal lived close to the line, even in good times, and there were plenty of signs of trouble in the two or three years before the famine struck.

While Bengal was a net importer of rice in 1941, it was a net exporter in 1942. With hindsight, this was clearly wrong.

I have yet to find any reference to tensions between the two main communities, the Muslims and the Hindus. Perhaps, at the time the report was written, the government was trying hard to play these down. Unsuccessfully, as it turned out.

Blame

My first thought was to ask what was the point of blaming people so long after the event, given that most of the causes were beyond the reach of any one individual?

That said, Viceroy Linlithgow does not appear to have been up to this job. A Scot who went to Eton, who went on to have a good First World War and then climbed up through the ranks of the Conservative Party. Having worked hard on giving India a measure of self-government before the war, he refused to give more ground during the war, probably on orders from London, that is to say Churchill, giving rise to the disruptive and sometimes violent ‘Quit India’ movement. And he then failed to give the strong, central leadership needed when disaster struck – leadership which Wavell did provide when he arrived. For Linlithgow, see reference 5.

At the time of the famine, the Bengal Government was – in the UK jargon of today – a devolved administration, like, for example, that of Scotland. An Indian government which had not been long in harness in a country rife with corruption of one sort or another, not to mention the horrors of partition to come. Maybe Linlithgow was too shy of interfering in their affairs – but one can see that he was awkwardly placed.

Churchill was wrong about giving Indians the freedom they clearly wanted. Maybe he also bore a grudge?

For me, one reasonably clear culprit is the war. If Burma had not fallen to the Japanese, there would have been no famine. Wikipedia, in its article about the casualties of the second world war at reference 6, very properly includes these 2-3 million deaths among the 20-30 million war deaths due to disease and starvation, out of a total of 70-85 million in total, perhaps 3.5% of the world’s population at the time. Of which less than half a million are attributed to the UK.

Conclusions

The range for deaths given at reference 1 seems to be about right. But the summary is not. As with so many disasters, the blame is more institutional than individual.

The opening of the Wikipedia article, quoted above, is not much longer than my summary and is a much better introduction.

But perhaps most important, we should not forget. As noted above, this famine should find its way into the curricula of our schools. At the very least, we should not forget that this dreadful thing happened on our watch – albeit towards the rather messy end of that watch.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/10/watering-india.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943.

Reference 3: The famine inquiry commission - Sir John Woodhead and others – 1945. Roughly 250 pages of report.

Reference 4: https://www.academia.edu/.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Hope,_2nd_Marquess_of_Linlithgow.

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties.