The
Bengal famine of 1943 is one amongst the several famines that occurred in British administered
BengalBengal , is a historical and geographical region in the northeast region of the Indian Subcontinent...
. It is estimated that around 3 million people died from
starvationStarvation is a severe reduction in vitamin, nutrient, and energy intake. It is the most extreme form of malnutrition. In humans, prolonged starvation can cause permanent organ damage, and eventually death...
and
malnutritionMalnutrition is the insufficient, excessive or imbalanced consumption of nutrients.A number of different nutrition disorders may arise, depending on which nutrients are under or overabundant in the diet....
during the period.
Possible Causes
The
United KingdomThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe. It is an island country, spanning an archipelago including Great Britain, the northeastern part of Ireland, and many small islands...
had suffered a disastrous defeat at
SingaporeThe Battle of Singapore was fought in the South-East Asian theatre of World War II when the Empire of Japan invaded the Allied stronghold of Singapore. Singapore was the major British military base in South East Asia and nicknamed the "Gibraltar of the East"...
in 1942 against the
Japanese militaryThe Imperial Japanese Army , or literally Army of the Empire of Greater Japan was the official ground based armed force of Imperial Japan from 1867 to 1945...
, which then proceeded to capture Burma from the British in the same year. Burma was the world's largest exporter of rice in the inter-war period, the British having encouraged production by Burmese smallholders, which resulted in a virtual monoculture in the
Irrawaddy DeltaThe Irrawaddy Delta or Ayeyarwady Delta lies in the Irrawaddy Division, the lowest expanse of land in Burma that fans out from the limit of tidal influence at Myan Aung to the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea, 290 km to the south at the mouth of the Ayeyarwady River...
and Arakan. By 1940 15% of India's rice overall came from Burma, whilst in Bengal the proportion was slightly higher given the province's proximity to Burma.
It seems unlikely, however, that these imports can have amounted to more than 20% of Bengal's consumption, and this alone is insufficient to account for the famine, although it ensured that there were fewer reserves to fall back on. British authorities feared a subsequent Japanese invasion of British India proper by way of Bengal (see
British RajThe British Raj was the British colonial rule in the Indian subcontinent between 1858 and 1947; it can also refer to the period of dominion, and even the region under the rule...
), and emergency measures were introduced to stockpile food for British soldiers and prevent access to supplies by the Japanese in case of an invasion.
A "scorched earth" policy was implemented in the
ChittagongChittagong is Bangladesh's main seaport and its second-largest city. The capital of the eponymous district and division, it is situated in the southeastern portion of the country, and was built on the banks of the Karnaphuli River, which ends nearby, in the Bay of Bengal. The city has a...
region, nearest the Burmese border. In particular, the Army confiscated many boats (and motor vehicles, carts and even elephants), fearing that the Japanese would commandeer them to speed an advance into India. The inhabitants used the boats for fishing, and the Army failed to distribute rations to replace the fish.
Large amounts of rice continued to be exported to the Middle East to feed British and Indian troops there and locally recruited labour corps, and to Ceylon, which had been heavily dependent on Burmese rice before the war, and where large military establishments were being created as it was feared that the Japanese might invade the island.
On 16 October 1942 the whole east coast of Bengal and
OrissaOrissa , is a state of India, located on the east coast of India, by the Bay of Bengal. It is the modern name of ancient republican nation of Kalinga, which was invaded by the Indian Emperor Ashoka in 261 BC, that led to a turning point in the Emperor's life when deeply saddened by the bloodshed...
was hit by a cyclone. A huge area of rice cultivation up to forty miles inland was flooded, causing the autumn crop in these areas to fail. This meant that the peasantry had to eat their surplus, and the seed that should have been planted in the winter of 1942-3 had been consumed by the time the hot weather began in May 1943. This was exacerbated by exports of food and appropriation of arable land.
However, noted economist and Nobel Laureate
Amartya SenAmartya Kumar Sen CH , is an Indian Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics-winning economist, and Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University. He is also a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge...
holds the view that there was no overall shortage of rice in Bengal in 1943: availability was actually slightly higher than in 1941, when there was no famine. It was partly this which conditioned the sluggish official response to the disaster, as there had been no serious crop failures and hence the famine was unexpected. Its root causes, Sen argues, lay in
rumours of shortage which caused hoarding, and rapid price inflation caused by war-time demands which made rice stocks an excellent investment (prices had already doubled over the previous year). In Sen's interpretation, while landowning peasants who actually grew rice and those employed in defence-related industries in urban areas and at the docks saw their wages rise, this led to a disastrous shift in the
exchange entitlements of groups such as landless labourers, fishermen, barbers, paddy huskers and other groups who found the real value of their wages had been slashed by two-thirds since 1940. Quite simply, although Bengal had enough rice and other grains to feed itself, millions of people were suddenly too poor to buy it.
The Response
The Bengal government reacted to the crisis lazily and incompetently, refusing to stop the export of food from Bengal.
Bayly and Harper claim that in contrast to the incompetence of the civil service, the British military commanders and the British military in general performed as best as it could to combat the famine, providing food to the suffering and organising relief. During the course of the famine the government organised roughly 110,000,000 free meals which proved too small to cope with the disaster.
Winston ChurchillSir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill KG, OM, CH, TD, FRS, PC was a British politician known chiefly for his leadership of the United Kingdom during World War II. He served as Prime Minister from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955. A noted statesman and orator, Churchill was also an officer...
was the Prime Minister of the time, his involvement in the disaster and indeed his knowledge of it remains a mystery. When in response to an urgent request by the Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, and Wavell to release food stocks for India, Churchill responded with a telegram to Wavell asking, if food was so scarce, "why
GandhiMohandas Karamchand Gandhi was the pre-eminent political and spiritual leader of India during the Indian independence movement...
hadn’t died yet." Initially during the famine he was more concerned with the civilians of Greece (who were also suffering from a famine) compared with the Bengalis. In the end Churchill did ask for US assistance, writing to Roosevelt that he was "no longer justified in not asking for aid" but the American response was negative.
The Bengal Government failed to prevent rice exports, and made little attempt to import surpluses from elsewhere in India, or to buy up stocks from speculators to redistribute to the starving. Overall, as Sen shows, the authorities failed to understand that the famine was not caused by an overall food shortage, and that the distribution of food was not just a matter of railway capacity, but of providing free famine relief on a massive scale: "The Raj was, in fact, fairly right in its estimation of overall food availability, but disastrously wrong in its theory of Famines". The famine ended when the government in London agreed to import 1,000,000 tons of grain to Bengal, reducing food prices.
Famines and democracies
Citing the Bengal Famine and other examples from the world, Amartya Sen argues that famines do not occur in functioning democracies. Nobel Laureate
Kenneth ArrowKenneth Joseph Arrow is an American economist and joint winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics with John Hicks in 1972. To date, he is the youngest person to receive this award, at 51....
provides a discussion of this argument.
http://www.finance.commerce.ubc.ca/~bhatta/BookReview/arrow_on_sen's_poverty_and_famine.html It should be noted that between 1950 and 1984, as the
Green RevolutionGreen Revolution refers to the transformation of agriculture that began in 1945. One significant factor in this revolution was the Mexican government's request to establish an agricultural research station to develop more varieties of wheat that could be used to feed the rapidly growing population...
transformed agriculture around the globe, world grain production increased by 250%.
The Bengal Famine may be placed in the context of previous famines in
MughalThe Mughal Empire was an Islamic and Persianate imperial power of the Indian subcontinent which began in 1526, invaded and ruled most of Hindustan by the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and ended in the mid-19th century...
and British India.
Deccan Famine of 1630-32The Deccan Famine of 1630–1632 occurred in the Deccan region of Central India. By 1632, some 2,000,000 Indians died. The famine was the result of three consecutive staple crop failures, leading to intense hunger, disease, and displacement in the region. This remains one of the most devastating...
killed 2,000,000 (there was a corresponding famine in northwestern China, eventually causing the
Ming dynastyThe Ming Dynasty , or Empire of the Great Ming , was the ruling dynasty of China from 1368 to 1644, following the collapse of the Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty. The Ming, "one of the greatest eras of orderly government and social stability in human history," was the last dynasty in China ruled by ethnic...
to collapse in 1644). During the British rule in India there were approximately 25 major famines spread through states such as
Tamil NaduTamil Nadu is one of the 28 states of India. Its capital and largest city is Chennai . Tamil Nadu lies in the southernmost part of the Indian Peninsula and is bordered by Puducherry , Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh...
in
South IndiaSouth India, also known as the Dravida in the Indian anthem, is the area encompassing India's states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu as well as the union territories of Lakshadweep and Pondicherry, occupying 19.31% of area...
,
BiharBihar is a state in eastern India. Bihar is the 12th largest state in terms of geographical size at 38,202 sq mi , and 3rd largest by population. Close to 85 percent of the population lives in villages...
in the north, and Bengal in the east; altogether, between 30 and 40 million Indians were the victims of famines in the latter half of the 19th century (Bhatia 1985).
Though malnutrition and hunger remain widespread in India, there have been no famines since the end of the British rule in 1947 and the establishment of a democratic government. There has been a recurrent threat of
famineThe Bangladesh famine of 1974 refers to a period of mass starvation beginning in March 1974 and ending in about December of the same year. The famine is considered the worst in recent years; it was characterised by massive flooding along the Brahmaputra river as well as high mortality.-Overview of...
in Bangladesh
http://banglapedia.search.com.bd/HT/F_0015.htmhttp://southasia.oneworld.net/article/view/72150/1/, which unlike India has spent a considerable period of its existence under military rule.
"Food Availability Decline" or "Man Made"
| Year |
Rice production
(in million of tons) |
| 1938 |
8.474 |
| 1939 |
7.922 |
| 1940 |
8.223 |
| 1941 |
6.768 |
| 1942 |
9.296 |
| 1943 |
7.628 |
Severe food shortages were worsened by
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including all great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, with the British administration of India exporting foods to Allied soldiers. The shortage of rice forced rice
pricePrice in economics and business is the result of an exchange and from that trade we assign a numerical monetary value to a good, service or asset. If Alice trades Bob 4 apples for an orange, the price of an orange is 4 apples. Inversely, the price of an apple is 1/4 oranges.Price is only part of...
s up, and wartime
inflationIn economics, inflation is a rise in the general level of prices of goods and services in an economy over a period of time.When the price level rises, each unit of currency buys fewer goods and services; consequently, inflation is also an erosion in the purchasing power of money – a loss of real...
compounded the problem.
The civil administration did not intervene to control the price of rice, and so the price of rice exceeded the means of ordinary people. People migrated to the cities to find food and employment; finding neither, they starved.
Amartya Sen has cast doubt on the idea that the rice shortage was due to a fall in production. He quotes official records for rice production in Bengal in the years leading up to 1943 as reported in the table to the right.
The 1943 yield, while low, was not in itself outside the normal spectrum of recorded variation, and other factors beyond simple crop failure may thus be invoked as a causal mechanism.
Diseased rice vs. Total Rice Yield
It has been argued that the famine was primarily due to an epidemic of brown spot disease
Cochliobolus miyabeanusCochliobolus miyabeanus is a fungus that causes brown spot disease in rice. This disease was the causal agent of the Bengal famine of 1943.It was used by the USA as a biological weapon in Japan during World War 2.-Sources:...
(formerly
Helminthosporium oryzae), affecting the crop. This argument, based on data collected by S. Y. Padmanabhan, has been developed by the historian Mark Tauger.
In the
riceRice is the seed of a monocot plant Oryza sativa, of the grass family . As a cereal grain, it is the most important staple food for a large part of the world's human population, especially in East, South, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and the West Indies...
growing season of 1942, weather conditions were exactly right to encourage an epidemic of the rice disease brown spot following a cyclone and flooding. The outbreak of the disease caused a variation in the 1942 crop ranging from a 236.6% gain to a 90% crop loss in Bankura and Chinsurah according to Padmanabhan.
Tauger argues that Sen's analysis based economic entitlement overlooks the role of food shortage. Tauger argues that the yield in 1942 was low (based on Padmanabhan's data) causing a serious food shortage in Bengal and was the most important cause of the famine. Others dispute this argument, primarily based on the fact that Padmanabhan's data is yield per acre for different varieties, and from this data it is impossible to estimate total production without knowing the total area of the different varieties.
Tauger has not estimated the total production, the article by Padmanabhan only describes the crop losses in two Rice Research Stations in West Bengal, but not the total crops in Bengal. Also, if you look at the figures supplied by Padmanabham it is clear that for the most used varieties of rice, either he has no figures or very little loss ( about 6 percent). That was within the Rice Research Centres,because Padmanabhan never gave any figures what kind of rice seeds were used in 1943 in different areas. Tauger is this a very dishonest researcher.
The official famine inquiry commission reporting on the Bengal Famine of 1943 put its death toll at about 1.5 million Indians. Source : Famine Inquiry Commission, India (1945a),pp. 109-10.
Eatimates made by Prof.P.C.Mahalanobis, of the Indian Statistical Institute said, at least 5 million died directly and another 4-5 million died subsequently in famine related diseases. This information was presented in the Famine Enquiry Commission, but ignored by Amartya Sen and other pro-British writers.
Years later in 1974, W.R. Aykroyd, who was a member of the Famine inquiry commission and was primarily responsible for the estimation, conceded that the figures were an underestimate. Quote by W.R. Aykroyd "I now think it (the death toll) was an under-estimate, especially in that it took little account of roadside deaths".
Amartya Sen has recently estimated that three million may be slightly too high an estimate and that two to two and a half million fatalities may be more accurate.
The Famine in Bengali culture
Artists, novelists and film-makers have tried to capture the enormity of the famine in their works. The renowned Bengali painter
Zainul AbedinZainul Abedin was a Bangladesh painter. Like many of his contemporaries, His paintings on the Bengal famine of 1940s is probably his most characteristic work...
was one of the early documentarians of the famine, with his sketches of the dead and dying.
The novelist Bibhuti Bhusan Bandyopadhhay penned his novel
Ashani Sanket with the famine serving as both backdrop and protagonist. The novel was adapted in 1973 by
Satyajit RaySatyajit Ray was an Indian Bengali filmmaker. He is regarded as one of the greatest auteurs of 20th century cinema. Ray was born in the city of Calcutta into a Bengali family prominent in the world of arts and letters...
into an award-winning film, also titled
Ashani SanketDistant Thunder is a 1973 Bengali film by the renowned Indian director Satyajit Ray, based on the novel by the same name by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay...
, which focussed on the role of hoarding as a cause for the famine.
Mrinal SenMrinal Sen is a famous Bengali Indian filmmaker. He was born on May 14, 1923, in the town of Faridpur, now in Bangladesh. After finishing his high school there, he left home to come to Calcutta as a student and studied physics at the well-known Scottish Church College and at the...
also made a
National AwardThe National Film Award for Best Direction winners:...
winning film in 1980 about the famine, called
Akaler SandhaneAkaler Sandhane is a 1980 Indian Bengali film directed by Mrinal Sen.- Plot :On September, 1980, a film crew comes to a village to make a film about a famine, which killed five million Bengalees in 1943. It was a man made famine, a side- product of the war, and the film crew will create the...
(In Search of Famine'). Sen's other films that relate to the theme of the 1943 famine are
Baishey Sravan and
Calcutta 71Calcutta 71 was a 1972 Bengali film directed by noted Indian art film director Mrinal Sen.-Plot:The film is an indictment against violence and corruption throughout the ages...
.