Bengal famine of 1943

In 1943 and 1944, famine and the epidemics that followed it killed somewhere between about 800,000 and 3.8 million people in Bengal, then a province of British India; neighbouring Orissa was also affected. The economic historian Cormac Ó Gráda describes about 2.1 million deaths as the scholarly consensus. The catastrophe grew out of long-standing rural poverty combined with wartime shocks, natural disasters and failures of policy, and how much weight each deserves is still argued over.

Bengal was overwhelmingly agricultural and depended on rice. According to the 1941 census it had about 60.3 million people, up from 42.1 million in 1901, while rice yields per acre had barely changed for decades. Many smallholders were trapped in debt to wealthier peasants and moneylenders and lost their land piece by piece. Landless agricultural labourers, who bought their food with wages, were the group that suffered most.

The Japanese conquest of Burma brought the Second World War to Bengal's border. The fall of Rangoon in March 1942 cut off imports of Burmese rice, and at least 500,000 refugees reached India from Burma. Expecting an invasion by the Empire of Japan, the authorities in March 1942 began "denial" measures, removing or destroying rice stocks considered surplus in coastal districts and taking away boats, which damaged local trade and credit. Military spending drove up prices faster than wages, provinces restricted the movement of grain, and on 16 and 17 October 1942 a cyclone and storm surges struck the coast, killing 14,500 people. A fungal disease, brown spot, also cut the winter rice harvest.

Rice prices nearly doubled after December 1942. In May 1943 six districts reported the first deaths from starvation, and destitute villagers streamed into Calcutta in search of relief. Starvation deaths peaked in November 1943; disease, above all malaria, but also cholera, smallpox and dysentery, overtook starvation as the main killer around December. More than half of all famine-related deaths came in 1944, after the food shortage itself had eased. The provincial government never formally declared a famine, and its relief was limited and often misdirected. Help increased when the new viceroy, Archibald Wavell, brought in the army in late 1943, and a record rice harvest in December finally brought prices down.

From December 1942 senior officials in India requested food imports, but for many months the War Cabinet of Winston Churchill refused or sharply reduced these requests, generally citing a shortage of shipping, later made worse by preparations for the Normandy landings. Wavell called the famine one of the greatest disasters to befall any people under British rule. Historians disagree about the cabinet's motives. Lizzie Collingham argues that the war made hunger likely somewhere, but that Churchill's hostility towards Indians helped decide where it fell, and the journalist Madhusree Mukerjee sees in the shipping decisions "a will to punish". Mark Tauger stresses the heavy losses of Allied merchant ships in the Indian Ocean, and Tirthankar Roy calls the racism explanation naive, placing more blame on rivalries and misinformation within the provincial government and noting little evidence that Churchill's personal views shaped cabinet policy.

The economist Amartya Sen described it as an "entitlements" famine: in his view Bengal had enough food, but inflation, speculation and panic hoarding priced the poor out of the market. Most scholars broadly follow this framework, although some, such as Tauger, argue that the crop failure was larger than once thought. Ó Gráda gives more weight to the shortfall and emphasises a lack of political will under wartime priorities. The official Famine Inquiry Commission of 1945, chaired by Sir John Woodhead, estimated about 1.5 million deaths and largely cleared the British government of major blame.

Our 1938 map shows Bengal as part of British India, and the 1945 map shows the region within India. The region is now divided between Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal.