History of Sorts

The 1943 Bengal Famine, also known as the Great Bengal Famine, was a catastrophic event that resulted in the deaths of an estimated 2 to 3 million people in the Bengal province of British India. This famine was one of the most devastating famines in the region’s history and had profound social, economic, and political repercussions.

The 1943 Bengal Famine, also known as the Great Bengal Famine, was a catastrophic event that resulted in the deaths of an estimated 2 to 3 million people in the Bengal province of British India. This famine was one of the most devastating famines in the region’s history and had profound social, economic, and political repercussions. Here are some key points about the famine:

The famine occurred during World War II, which significantly disrupted food supply chains. The Japanese occupation of Burma (modern-day Myanmar) in 1942 cut off rice imports to Bengal, exacerbating food shortages. A devastating cyclone and accompanying tidal waves in October 1942, followed by flooding, destroyed large quantities of crops, further reducing food availability.

The British colonial government’s policies, including wartime grain requisitioning and prioritizing food supplies for the military and urban centers over rural areas, aggravated the situation. Additionally, there was a lack of adequate response to the emerging crisis.

Churchill didn’t help either, saying things like” I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” must have created an anti-Indian sentiment among the British.

Hoarding and speculation by traders and landowners led to significant price increases for rice and other staples, making food unaffordable for many people.

It is estimated that between 2 to 3 million people died due to starvation, malnutrition, and diseases exacerbated by the famine. The famine caused widespread economic disruption, including the collapse of agrarian communities and increased poverty.

It led to significant social upheaval, including mass migrations, breakdowns in social order, and increased instances of beggary and theft as people struggled to survive. Diseases such as malaria, cholera, and smallpox spread rapidly among the weakened population, contributing to the high death toll.

The British colonial government was initially slow to respond to the famine, partly because it did not recognize the severity of the crisis and partly because of wartime priorities. Eventually, relief measures were implemented, including the distribution of relief food, the opening of feeding centers, and the establishment of work programs. However, these measures were often inadequate and poorly coordinated.

Some international aid was provided, but it was limited by wartime restrictions and logistical challenges.

The famine significantly contributed to the growing anti-colonial sentiment in India. It highlighted the failures of British colonial policies and administration, fueling the Indian independence movement.

Post-independence, the Indian government focused on agricultural reforms and food security, including initiatives like the Green Revolution, to prevent future famines.

The 1943 Bengal Famine remains a significant event in Indian history and is often cited in discussions about colonial exploitation and the responsibilities of governing powers during crises.

Bijoykrishna Tripathi, who is not sure of his exact age, but his voter card says he is 112. is one of the last people to remember the famine.

“Many people sold their boys and girls for a little rice. Many wives and young women ran off, hand-in-hand with men they knew or didn’t know.”

Burma, which bordered Bengal, was invaded by Japan early in the year 1942, and rice imports from that country stopped abruptly.

Bengal now found itself near the front line, and Calcutta became host to hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers and workers in wartime industries, increasing the demand for rice.

Wartime inflation was rife, putting the price of rice out of reach for millions who were already struggling.

Meanwhile, British fears that the Japanese would attempt to invade East India prompted a “denial” policy—this involved confiscating surplus rice and boats from towns and villages in the Bengal Delta. The aim was to deny food supplies and transport to any advancing force, but it disrupted the already fragile local economy and caused prices to rise further. Rice was hoarded for food security but often for profit.

To cap it all, the devastating cyclone of October 1942 destroyed many rice crops, with crop disease ruining much of the rest.

The Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen argued in 1981 that there should still have been enough supplies to feed the region and that the mass deaths came about as a combination of wartime inflation, speculative buying, and panic hoarding, which together pushed the price of food out of the reach of poor Bengalis. More recent studies, including those by the journalist Madhushree Mukerjee, have argued the famine was exacerbated by the decisions of Winston Churchill’s wartime cabinet in London.

Mukherjee has presented evidence that the cabinet was repeatedly warned that the exhaustive use of Indian resources for the war effort could result in famine, but it opted to continue exporting rice from India to elsewhere in the empire.

One of the classic effects of famine is that it intensifies the exploitation of women; the sale of women and girls, for example, tends to increase. The sexual exploitation of poor, rural, lower-caste, and tribal women by the tears (landlords) had been difficult to escape even before the crisis. In the wake of the cyclone and later famine, many women lost or sold all their possessions and lost a male guardian due to abandonment or death. Those who migrated to Calcutta frequently had only begging or prostitution available as strategies for survival; often, regular meals were the only payment. Anthropologist Tarak Chandra Das suggests that a large proportion of the girls aged 15 and younger who migrated to Calcutta during the famine disappeared into brothels; in late 1943, entire boatloads of girls for sale were reported in ports of East Bengal. Girls were also prostituted to soldiers, with boys acting as pimps. Families sent their young girls to wealthy landowners overnight in exchange for minimal amounts of money or rice or sold them outright into prostitution; girls were sometimes enticed with sweet treats and kidnapped by pimps. Very often, these girls lived in constant fear of injury or death, but the brothels were their sole means of survival, or they were unable to escape. Women who had been sexually exploited could not later expect any social acceptance or a return to their home or family. Bina Agarwal writes that such women became permanent outcasts in a society that highly values female chastity, rejected by both their birth family and their husband’s family.

An unknown number of children, some tens of thousands, were orphaned. Many others were abandoned, sometimes by the roadside or at orphanages, or sold for as much as two maunds (one maund was roughly equal to 37 kilograms (82 lb)) or as little as one seer (1 kilogram (2.2 lb)) of unhusked rice, or for trifling amounts of cash. Sometimes, they were purchased as household servants, where they would “grow up as little better than domestic slaves.” They were also purchased by sexual predators. Altogether, according to Historian Greenough, the victimization and exploitation of these women and children was an immense social cost of the famine.

Mukherjee and others also point to Britain’s “denial policy” in the region, in which vast supplies of rice and thousands of boats were confiscated from coastal areas of Bengal in order to deny resources to the Japanese army in case of a future invasion.

If it was a tragedy or genocide, I leave it up to you to decide.

Sources

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-68311520

https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/masani-bengal-famine/

https://academic.oup.com/book/32827/chapter-abstract/275134605?redirectedFrom=fulltext

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9735018/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/winston-churchill-policies-contributed-to-1943-bengal-famine-study