The Bengal famine of 1943 was a famine during World War II in the Bengal Province and Orissa Province of British India. An estimated 800,000–3.8 million people died, in the Bengal region (present-day Bangladesh and West Bengal), from starvation, malaria and other diseases aggravated by malnutrition, population displacement, unsanitary conditions, poor British wartime policies, and lack of health care. Millions were impoverished as the crisis overwhelmed large segments of the economy and catastrophically disrupted the social fabric. Eventually, families disintegrated; men sold their small farms and left home to look for work or to join the British Indian Army, and women and children became homeless migrants, often travelling to Calcutta or other large cities in search of organised relief.
Bengal's economy had been predominantly agrarian at that time, with between half and three-quarters of the rural poor subsisting in a "semi-starved condition". Stagnant agricultural productivity and a stable land base were unable to cope with a rapidly increasing population, resulting in both long-term decline in per capita availability of rice and growing numbers of the land-poor and landless labourers. A high proportion laboured beneath a chronic and spiralling cycle of debt that ended in debt bondage and the loss of their landholdings due to land grabbing.
The financing of military escalation led to wartime inflation. Many workers received monetary wages rather than payment in kind with a portion of the harvest. When prices rose sharply, their wages failed to follow suit; this drop in real wages left them less able to purchase food. During the Japanese occupation of Burma, many rice imports were lost as the region's market supplies and transport systems were disrupted by British "denial policies" for rice and boats (by some critiques considered a "scorched earth" response to the occupation). The British also implemented inflation policies during the war aimed at making more resources available for Allied troops. These policies, along with other economic measures, created the "forced transferences of purchasing power" to the military from ordinary people, reducing their food consumption. The Bengal Chamber of Commerce (composed mainly of British-owned firms), with the approval of the Government of Bengal, devised a Foodstuffs Scheme to provide preferential distribution of goods and services to workers in high-priority roles such as armed forces, war industries, civil servants and other "priority classes", to prevent them from leaving their positions. These factors were compounded by restricted access to grain: domestic sources were constrained by emergency inter-provincial trade barriers, while aid from Churchill's war cabinet was limited, ostensibly due to a wartime shortage of shipping. More proximate causes included large-scale natural disasters in south-western Bengal (a cyclone, tidal waves and flooding, and rice crop disease). The relative impact of each of these factors on the death toll is a matter of debate.
The provincial government never formally declared a state of famine, and its humanitarian aid was ineffective through the worst months of the crisis. It attempted to fix the price of rice paddy through price controls which resulted in a black market which encouraged sellers to withhold stocks, leading to hyperinflation from speculation and hoarding after controls were abandoned. Aid increased significantly when the British Indian Army took control of funding in October 1943, but effective relief arrived after a record rice harvest that December. Deaths from starvation declined, yet over half the famine-related deaths occurred in 1944 after the food security crisis had abated, as a result of disease. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill has been criticised for his role in the famine, with critics arguing that his war priorities and the refusal to divert food supplies to Bengal significantly worsened the situation.
Background
From the late 19th century through the Great Depression, social and economic forces exerted a harmful impact on the structure of Bengal's income distribution and the ability of its agricultural sector to sustain the populace. These processes included increasing household debt, a rapidly growing population, stagnant agricultural productivity, increased social stratification, and alienation of the peasant class from their landholdings. The interaction of these left clearly defined social and economic groups mired in poverty and indebtedness, unable to cope with economic shocks or maintain their access to food beyond the near term. In 1942 and 1943, in the immediate and central context of the Second World War, the shocks Bengalis faced were numerous, complex and sometimes sudden. Millions were vulnerable to starvation.
The Government of India's Famine Inquiry Commission report (1945) described Bengal as a "land of rice growers and rice eaters". Rice dominated the agricultural output of the province, accounting for nearly 88% of its arable land use and 75% of its crops. Overall, Bengal produced one third of India's rice – more than any other single province. Rice accounted for 75–85% of daily food consumption, with fish being the second major food source, supplemented by small amounts of wheat.
There are three seasonal rice crops in Bengal. By far the most important is the winter crop of aman rice. Sown in May and June and harvested in November and December, it produces about 70% of the total annual crop. Crucially, the (debated) shortfall in rice production in 1942 occurred during the all-important aman harvest.
Rice yield per acre had been stagnant since the beginning of the twentieth century; coupled with a rising population, this created pressures that were a leading factor in the famine. Bengal had a population of about 60 million in an area of 77,442 square miles, according to a 1941 census. Declining mortality rates, induced in part by the pre-1943 success of the British Raj in famine reduction caused its population to increase by 43% between 1901 and 1941 – from 42.1 million to 60.3 million. Over the same period India's population as a whole increased by 37%. The economy was almost solely agrarian, but agricultural productivity was among the lowest in the world. Agricultural technology was undeveloped, access to credit was limited and expensive, and any potential for government aid was hampered by political and financial constraints. Land quality and fertility had been deteriorating in Bengal and other regions of India, but the loss was especially severe here. Agricultural expansion required deforestation and land reclamation. These activities damaged the natural drainage courses, silting up rivers and the channels that fed them, leaving them and their fertile deltas moribund. The combination of these factors caused stubbornly low agricultural productivity.
Prior to about 1920, the food demands of Bengal's growing population could be met in part by cultivating unused scrub lands. No later than the first quarter of the twentieth century, Bengal began to experience an acute shortage of such land, leading to a chronic and growing shortage of rice. Its inability to keep pace with rapid population growth changed it from a net exporter of foodgrains to a net importer. Imports were a small portion of the total available food crops, however, and did little to alleviate problems of food supply. Bengali doctor and chemist Chunilal Bose, a professor in Calcutta's medical college, estimated in 1930 that both the ingredients and the small total amount of food in the Bengali diet made it among the least nutritious in India and the world, and greatly harmful to the physical health of the populace. Economic historian Cormac Ó Gráda writes, "Bengal's rice output in normal years was barely enough for bare-bones subsistence ... the province's margin over subsistence on the eve of the famine was slender." These conditions left a large proportion of the population continually on the brink of malnutrition or even starvation.
Land-grabbing
Structural changes in the credit market and land transfer rights pushed Bengal into recurring danger of famine and dictated which economic groups would suffer greatest hardship. The British Indian system of land tenure, particularly in Bengal, was very complex, with rights unequally divided among three diverse economic and social groups: traditional absentee large landowners or zamindars; the upper-tier "wealthy peasant" jotedars; and, at the lower socioeconomic level, the ryot (peasant) smallholders and dwarfholders, bargadars (sharecroppers), and agricultural labourers. Zamindar and jotedar landowners were protected by law and custom, but those who cultivated the soil, with small or no landholdings, suffered persistent and increasing losses of land rights and welfare. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the power and influence of the landowners fell and that of the jotedars rose. Particularly in less developed regions, jotedars gained power as grain or jute traders and, more importantly, by making loans to sharecroppers, agricultural labourers and ryots. They gained power over their tenants using a combination of debt bondage through the transfer of debts and mortgages, and parcel-by-parcel land-grabbing.
Land-grabbing usually took place via informal credit markets. Many financial entities had disappeared during the Great Depression; peasants with small landholdings generally had to resort to informal local lenders to purchase basic necessities during lean months between harvests. As influential Bengali businessman M. A. Ispahani testified, "...the Bengal cultivator, [even] before the war, had three months of feasting, five months of subsistence diet and four months of starvation". Moreover, if a labourer did not possess goods recoverable as cash, such as seed or cattle for ploughing, he would go into debt. Particularly during poor crops, smallholders fell into cycles of debt, often eventually forfeiting land to creditors.
Small landholders and sharecroppers acquired debts swollen by usurious rates of interest. Any poor harvest exacted a heavy toll; the accumulation of consumer debt, seasonal loans and crisis loans began a cycle of spiralling, perpetual indebtedness. It was then relatively easy for the jotedars to use litigation to force debtors to sell all or part of their landholdings at a low price or forfeit them at auction. Debtors then became landless or land-poor sharecroppers and labourers, usually working the same fields they had once owned. The accumulation of household debt to a single, local, informal creditor bound the debtor almost inescapably to the creditor/landlord; it became nearly impossible to settle the debt after a good harvest and simply walk away. In this way, the jotedars effectively dominated and impoverished the lowest tier of economic classes in several districts of Bengal.
Such exploitation, exacerbated by Muslim inheritance practices that divided land among multiple siblings, widened inequalities in land ownership. At the time, millions of Bengali agriculturalists held little or no land. In absolute terms, the social group which suffered by far the most of every form of impoverishment and death during the Bengal famine of 1943 were the landless agricultural labourers.
Transport
Water provided the main source of transport during rainy seasons, and throughout the year in areas such as the vast delta of the coastal southeastern Sundarbans. River transport was integral to Bengal's economy, an irreplaceable factor in the production and distribution of rice. Roads were generally scarce and in poor condition, and Bengal's extensive railway system was employed largely for military purposes until the very late stages of the crisis.
The development of railways in Bengal in the 1890s disrupted natural drainage and divided the region into innumerable poorly drained "compartments". Rail indirectly brought about excessive silting, which increased flooding and created stagnant water areas, damaging crop production and sometimes contributing to a partial shift away from the productive aman rice cultivar towards less productive cultivars, and also created a more hospitable environment for water-borne diseases such as cholera and malaria.
Soil and water supply
East Bengal and west Bengal have different soils. The sandy soil of the east, and the lighter sedimentary earth of the Sundarbans, tended to drain more rapidly after the monsoon season than the laterite or heavy clay regions of western Bengal. Soil exhaustion necessitated that large tracts in western and central Bengal be left fallow; eastern Bengal had far fewer uncultivated fields. The annual flooding of these fallow fields created a breeding place for malaria-carrying mosquitoes; malaria epidemics lasted a month longer in the central and western areas with slower drainage.
Rural areas lacked access to safe water supplies. Water came primarily from large earthen tanks, rivers and tube wells. In the dry season, partially drained tanks became a further breeding area for malaria-vector mosquitoes. Tank and river water was susceptible to contamination by cholera; with tube wells being much safer. However, as many as one-third of the existing wells in wartime Bengal were in disrepair.
Pre-famine shocks and distress
Throughout 1942 and early 1943, military and political events combined with natural disasters and plant disease began to place widespread stress on Bengal's economy. While Bengal's food needs rose from increased military presence and an influx of refugees from Burma, its ability to obtain rice and other grains was restricted by inter-provincial trade barriers.
Japanese invasion of Burma
The Japanese campaign for Burma set off an exodus of more than half of the one million Indians from Burma for India. The flow began after the bombing of Rangoon (1941–1942), and for months thereafter desperate people poured across the borders, escaping into India through Bengal and Assam. On 26 April 1942, all Allied forces were ordered to retreat from Burma into India. Military transport and other supplies were dedicated to military use, and unavailable for use by the refugees. By mid May 1942, the monsoon rains became heavy in the Manipur hills, further inhibiting civilian movement.
The number of refugees who successfully reached India totalled at least 500,000; tens of thousands died along the way. In later months, 70 to 80% of these refugees were afflicted with diseases such as dysentery, smallpox, malaria, or cholera, with 30% "desperately so". The influx of refugees created several conditions that may have contributed to the famine. Their arrival created an increased demand for food, clothing and medical aid, further straining the resources of the province. The poor hygienic conditions of their forced journey sparked official fears of a public health risk due to epidemics caused by social disruption. Finally, their distraught state after their struggles bred foreboding, uncertainty, and panic amongst the populace of Bengal; this aggravated panic buying and hoarding that may have contributed to the onset of the famine.