Churchill Was Responsible For the 1943 Bengal Famine
When racism determined who could eat and who could be left to starve
Growing up in Bangladesh, I went to an “English medium” school.
In my Bengali lessons at school, I learnt about the famous Bangladeshi artist, Zaynul Abedin. Among his many famous works of art are sketches that depict the horrors of the Bengal famine in 1943.
As a child I looked at the drawings of starved, skeletal human bodies lying on the street amid crows and dogs but did not quite understand the severity of the disaster.
Around the same time in school, I also read about Churchill in my history lessons. I learnt that he was a hero for having defeated the Nazis in World War II.
These were disconnected lessons about historical figures and events which did not have much direct relevance to me, nor any interconnection between themselves.
The dots only started to connect relatively recently as mainstream accounts of Churchill’s life and his perceived greatness started being challenged.
One of the dark historical chapters that he has drawn criticism for is the Bengal famine of 1943. The disconnected historical figures and events turned out to be not all that disconnected.
The first thing that struck me when I came across Churchill’s alleged culpability for the Bengal famine was the extent to which the effects of colonialism linger on in our education system.
As a Bengali whose nation was the victim of that terrible famine, I was taught at a school in Bangladesh that Churchill was a hero.
I am not saying he should have been portrayed as a villain, either. But by making WWII the sole criterion for judging him as a historical figure, we, students, were made to view history through the eyes of the coloniser.
Was Churchill responsible for the Bengal famine?
This question is important not because we want to debate Churchill’s greatness (or the lack thereof) as if his reputation should matter to us.
But exploring Churchill’s connection to the famine is important as it is but one example of how colonialism dehumanised its subjects.
And, from the defence put forward for him by his present-day admirers, we see how these racial standards that allow certain lives to matter over others continue to operate today.
There is plenty of material available on this topic. Therefore, I will not go into every single detail about the famine — such as the Japanese takeover of Burma; the cyclone of 1942; wartime inflation; hoarding by both speculators and the Government of India; continuing grain exports from India even as imports dwindled; and Britain’s scorched earth policy that allowed for the destruction of rice stock and boats that the livelihood of thousands depended on.
I will confine myself to certain decisions of Churchill’s War Cabinet that will help us understand how racism determined who was fed and who was left to starve.
For a quick overview of the famine and how Churchill’s policies contributed to it, one can refer to this Guardian article.
A crucial point to note in that article is that “London was denying urgent requests from India’s viceroy for more than 1m tonnes of emergency wheat supplies in 1942–43.”
The article further mentions:
Churchill has been quoted as blaming the famine on the fact Indians were “breeding like rabbits,” and asking how, if the shortages were so bad, Mahatma Gandhi was still alive.
As can be seen from some of Churchill’s infamous comments regarding the famine, he believed the famine was due to the fault of the Indians.
Even if that were the case, the British government had a duty to take effective steps to prevent or at least alleviate it. One of those measures should have been bringing in additional stocks of food.
Even award-winning Indian economist Amartya Sen, who wrote in his book Poverty and Famines that there was not an actual food shortage, but rather a problem of “exchange entitlements” rendering food unaffordable for the poor, asserted that “no matter how a famine is caused, methods of breaking it call for a large supply of food in the public distribution system.”
This is where Churchill’s government totally failed.
And the bigger problem is that this failure was deliberate. Therefore, contrary to the defence put forward by Churchill’s supporters, Churchill’s racist remarks were not merely unintended words of no consequence.
Rather, those were crude articulations of a racial logic that starved the Bengalis in their millions.
Learning lessons from WWI, Britain was very well aware that food was going to be a critical factor in WWII.
Therefore, the British government had been planning the sourcing and distribution of food during wartime well before the war started.
Churchill wanted the British population to be well-fed, even during wartime. In 1940, he vetoed a plan to feed the nation a ‘basal’ diet.
According to Churchill:
The way to lose the war is to try to force the British public into a diet of milk, oatmeal, potatoes etc. washed down on gala occasions with a little lime juice.
During the war, despite the damage caused by German U-boats to British shipping, Britain was able to maintain a healthy stockpile of food by diverting Indian registered ships from the Indian Ocean to serve Britain’s import program in the Atlantic.
Ships serving in the Indian Ocean ended up being cut down by a staggering 60%. The British people remained well fed. The only problem was the lack of variety.
However, for other parts of the world reliant on ships sailing in the Indian Ocean, the story was quite different. As writer and journalist Madhusree Mukerjee mentions in her book, Churchill’s Secret War:
Several British possessions bordering the Indian Ocean, such as Kenya, Tanganyika, and British Somaliland, suffered famine that year. Historians attribute the calamities to a combination of drought, wartime inflation, acquisition of grain for the armed forces, and hoarding by Indian traders.
That all the famines, including the one in Bengal, occurred in 1943 suggests, however, that the shipping cut also played a role. “In the Indian Ocean area the burden of paying for victory, shifted from place to place to ease the weight, finally came to rest,” summarized Behrens.
If Britain was initially worried about the availability of ships, by the summer of 1943, Britain had access to such an excess number of ships that “not enough cargo could be found to fill them.”
As Mukerjee writes:
If ever during the war a window had opened for saving lives in Bengal — at no discernible cost to the war effort — this was it.
However, the War Cabinet had other plans — continuing to add to UK’s stockpile of food and creating a second stockpile for the Mediterranean region in preparation for the liberation of the Balkans.
According to Secretary of State for India Leopold Amery, “India’s need is absolutely urgent and immediate” – more than the need, at the moment, for stockpiling food for the Balkans:
Relief for the Balkans, badly needed as it is, cannot be delivered in any quantities for many months to come for the simple reason that the enemy still control the situation. As for depleting our stocks here to danger point, that is a pretty remote consideration, especially now that we have got so effective a whiphand over the U-boats.
The core argument for Churchill’s defenders is really that Churchill was prioritising the war effort.
Given all the challenges the Allies were facing during the summer of 1943, historian Arthur Herman asks how likely was it that Churchill would respond to the news of the Bengal famine “as anything more than an unwelcome distraction?”
This was what prioritisation of the war effort looked like — having a surplus amount of food for Europe in case the reserves were needed in the distant future, while starving the hungry Bengalis who were in immediate and urgent need of food.
On top of that, food export from India continued even as the famine raged across Bengal and was only halted quite late in the year.
In his book Famines in Bengal 1770–1943, Indian author and journalist Kali Charan Ghosh presents the below tables to demonstrate that India “became poorer by 360,622 tons from her own stock, out of which rice and paddy accounted for 258,684 tons.”
This was not the first time, Bengal suffered famine under British colonialism. There had been six more before it and often British policies had contributed to worsening the situation.
The first famine occurred in 1770 when an estimated 1.2 million Bengalis starved to death.
There were, of course, natural causes involved. But it was the oppressive policies of the East India Company that severely exacerbated the effects of the famine.
Historian William Dalrymple writes in his insightful book The Anarchy:
[T]he Company administration as a whole did not engage in any famine relief works. Nor did it make seed or credit available to the vulnerable, or assist cultivators with materials to begin planting their next harvest, even though the government had ample cash reserves to do so.
Instead, anxious to maintain their revenues at a time of low production and high military expenditure, the Company, in one of the greatest failures of corporate responsibility in history, rigorously enforced tax collection and in some cases even increased revenue assessments by 10 per cent.
The Company even set up gibbets to publicly hang anyone who resisted paying taxes.
As a result, the Company was able to maintain tax revenues at the usual level, and the share price reached its peak even as Bengal was being ravaged by famine.
Despite one in five Bengalis dying of starvation, Company shareholders in London “celebrated by voting themselves an unprecedented 12.5 per cent dividend.”
Knowing that there had been a history of famines in Bengal, and in India in general, and that Britain had played an utterly deplorable role in looking after its own interests while letting millions die, a leader like Churchill, had he truly intended to help the starving Bengalis, would have made enough preparations, or at least responded favourably to repeated requests for food from India, to ensure the devastating effects of the famine were minimised if not totally averted.
As Amartya Sen explains, starvation related deaths reached their peak in what he categorises as the second phase of the famine between May and November 1943.
Yet, on 4th August 1943, when the War Cabinet discussed the possibility of importing grains to India, there was no clear decision but just a mere suggestion to send “not more than 50,000 tonnes” of wheat as a “token shipment” and up to 100,000 tonnes of barley from Iraq, which according to Viceroy Linlithgow “will go nowhere in meeting our essential demands.”
It is also cited in Churchill’s defence that by January 1944, eighty thousand tonnes of wheat were shipped to Bengal.
As Mukerjee puts it in context, it was eighty thousand tonnes of wheat to India, not enough to feed the Indian army, in contrast to the four million tonnes of wheat grain and flour imported into Britain in 1943.
But setting aside the above discussion for a moment, let us reflect on what the famine — an unwelcome distraction for Churchill according to Arthur Herman’s chosen expression — meant for the starving Bengalis. The below are but a few of many such cases as cited by Ghosh:
The Associated Press reported from Dhaka on 1st October 1943 that the
unclaimed dead body of a Hindu boy of about 12 years partly devoured by jackals and vultures was found yesterday morning lying in front of the Government Grain Shop near Chashara Police Outpost at Narayanganj. It is suspected that the boy was molested by jackals and vultures in the preceding night when he was in a precarious condition owing to starvation.
On 25th October, the Associated Press further reported the below about a “famished fisherman”, who was reduced to “bone and skin”:
[A] portion of his body had been devoured by jackals. His life was not still extinct. It is believed that when the jackals attacked him at night he was too weak to resist or to cry for help. The man died shortly after.
Relief worker Sister Dolores of the St. Francis Xavier’s Convent reported the below on 15th
[S]ome days ago they found a woman groaning by the roadside and on approaching she discovered to her astonishment that she had lost both of her eyes. There were two gaping wounds in her two eye-sockets, which were full of maggots. She was too weak to offer any resistance.
The fact that Britain, led by Churchill, denied food to a people who were not just starving, but were reduced to being meals for ravenous animals, can only mean one thing — their lives meant nothing to Churchill and his War Cabinet.
We can bring up wartime priorities all we want, but we need to ask ourselves why was securing food for Britain, and Europe in general, more of a priority than India when Bengal was being racked by a devastating famine?
Why were the Bengalis dying of hunger a mere unwelcome distraction while keeping British and European populations well fed figured as top priorities during wartime decision making?
The answer is simple.
European lives were worth more than Bengali lives to Churchill. And he was not very discrete about it either, as evidenced by his racist comments about Indians.
Today, those who invoke the same excuse of wartime priorities to justify Churchill’s inaction towards Bengal, knowingly or unknowingly, endorse the same racial standard that values some lives over others.
