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Janam Mukherjee, Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire
Hurst & Co: London 2015, £30, hardback
329 pp 978 1 849 04431 8

John Newsinger

THE FAMISHED RAJ

The Bengal Famine of 1943–44, a man-made catastrophe that in total caused

the deaths of perhaps five million people, was described by the incoming
British Viceroy Archibald Wavell as threatening ‘incalculable’ damage to the
Empire’s reputation. It was, he said, ‘one of the greatest disasters that has
befallen any people under British rule.’ Wavell was right about the scale
of the disaster. But so effectively has the episode been written out of the
histories of the Second World War and the Raj that it can scarcely be said
to have damaged Britannia’s reputation. In the prestigious Oxford History
of the British Empire: The Twentieth Century, a volume that surely sits on the
shelves of every university library in the English-speaking world, the Famine
goes unmentioned. In Max Hastings’s 600-page study of Churchill during
the Second World War, Finest Years, it gets barely a paragraph, while Boris
Johnson’s cod biography, The Churchill Factor, does not touch on it at all.
Jonathan Schneer’s study of Churchill’s War Cabinet, Ministers at War, omits
any mention of the discussions the Famine occasioned in the War Cabinet.
David Faber’s recent Speaking for England, a political biography of Leo Amery
and his sons, says not a word about the Famine, even though its subject was
Secretary of State for India at the time.
None of Clement Attlee’s biographies, including Robert Crowcroft’s
recent Attlee’s War: World War II and the Making of a Labour Leader, men-
tion that millions died of starvation in Bengal while he was Deputy Prime
Minister in Churchill’s war-time coalition. Historians of the Labour Party
routinely occlude its complicity in the crimes of Empire, often simply by
neglecting to cover Imperial policy; but the deletion of the Bengal Famine
from the record is still remarkable. It is altogether missing from the

new left review 96 nov dec 2015 149

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discussion of Attlee’s Labour Party in Nicholas Owen’s The British Left and
India: Metropolitan Anti-Imperialism 1885–1947. Even Peter Clarke’s recent
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biography of Stafford Cripps, the quondam Labour mp dispatched to India

by Churchill in 1942 to cut a deal with Gandhi and Nehru, fails to acknowl-
edge the Famine. Clearly these serial omissions are not simply the result
of poor scholarship—there are too many good historians complicit in the
suppression for it to be a matter of individual failings. Rather, they are
manifestations of a particularly tenacious imperial discourse, which serious
scholarship of the period should challenge head-on.
Meanwhile much Indian historiography of the Bengal Famine has its own
blind spots. Amartya Sen’s Poverty and Famines (1981)—which argues that
rising prices, rather than shortages of rice, were the chief cause of starvation
in Bengal—points to the absence of a functioning democracy as a facilitating
condition for famines, but has nothing to say about specific political agents.
Similarly the journalist Madhusree Mukerjee’s Churchill’s Secret War (2011),
while rightly damning of the racist response from Churchill and others to
the catastrophe and of their effective sabotage of relief efforts, makes no
attempt to connect the Famine to the broader inequalities of Indian society,
and breathes not a word of criticism against the nationalist leadership.
A great merit of Janam Mukherjee’s Hungry Bengal is that he aims
to challenge both of these traditions. A Toronto-based Bengali-American
researcher whose father had lived through the 1940s in Calcutta,
Mukherjee’s stated purpose is to investigate ‘the tightly wrought structures
of influence and indifference’ that gave birth to the famine, and ‘to unfold
the dialectics of influence and power’, from the local to the global, that
defined its trajectory. As far as he is concerned, the ‘guilt of empire’—the
fact that the orders ‘leading directly to the famine, came down from the War
Cabinet in London, under pressure from Winston Churchill’ and that ‘a
healthy chunk of blame can be placed at the door of the Secretary of State for
India, the viceroy in New Delhi and other high officials’—is beyond denial.
But the decisions and actions of lesser officials, both British and Indian,
made their own contribution to the unfolding catastrophe. These men often
displayed ‘the same contempt’ as Churchill himself. In addition to ‘imperial
impunity and colonial indifference’, the story of the Famine must also be
understood as that of ‘the enrichment of Indian industrialists’—Gandhi’s
great friend and benefactor G. D. Birla among them—who enthusiastically
supported stripping the countryside of rice in order to feed their factory
workers. Their pursuit of profit, Mukherjee insists, played a non-negligible
role in the mass starvation, yet this dimension has been largely absent from
most historiography of the Famine—in part, he suggests, due to an empha-
sis on the explanatory power of ‘culture’, coupled with a convenient neglect
of political economy.
 newsinger: Bengal 151

More generally, historians of India have focused on the nationalist

struggle and the path to Partition and Independence, relegating World

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War Two and the Bengal Famine to footnotes. But, Mukherjee asks, can
the social-political consequences of so many million deaths really be mar-
ginal to the larger history of a nation in the making? In particular, he traces
the social fissures running from the Famine to the communal riots that
engulfed Calcutta in 1946, heralding the vaster Hindu–Muslim slaugh-
ters of Partition. The hatreds of 1946 emerged from cumulative tensions,
he argues, compounded by the War, but brought to a head by the Famine.
Mukherjee is alive to the contradictions of class, caste and communal poli-
tics in pre-Independence India. The system of colonial ‘self-government’
instituted from 1935, in response to the nationalist agitation, saw provincial
assemblies and chief ministers elected by extended suffrage in 1937, under
the continued dominion of the British viceroy and his provincial governors.
War sharpened the tensions between rulers and ruled. After Viceroy Victor
Hope, the Marquess of Linlithgow, declared war against Germany in 1939
on India’s behalf, the Congress provincial governments resigned in protest
at his lack of consultation with them and began a ‘non-cooperation’ pol-
icy. British policy tilted to the Muslim League, which offered at least tepid
support for the war effort. In rural Bengal, a hotbed of anti-imperial senti-
ment, nationalist posters proclaimed: ‘The British Empire Is on the Verge of
Annihilation. Don’t Be a Recruited Soldier!’ With Japan’s lightning conquest
of British-ruled Burma in the spring of 1942, the restless mega-colony found
itself at the forefront of an inter-imperialist war, waged within the larger
configurations of World War Two.
Bengal was now the frontline of Allied South Asia, with Calcutta its main
industrial centre. A province of over 60 million inhabitants, 90 per cent of
whom lived dispersed in some 90,000 villages—many only reachable by boat
along 20,000 miles of waterways, often winding through thick jungle—it
had already experienced considerable hardship during the Great Depression;
there was widespread hunger in the countryside. The British response to the
fall of Burma would sharply exacerbate it. Fearing the Japanese Army would
soon be sweeping into eastern India, the War Cabinet in London imposed a
scorched-earth policy, known as ‘denial’, which involved stripping Bengal’s
coastal districts of ‘surplus’ rice supplies and seizing local transport in order
to prevent it falling into the hands of the invading forces. War-time mobi-
lization lent ‘authoritarian resolve’ to the predatory dynamics of colonial
rule, Mukherjee argues: the British Governor of Bengal, Sir John Herbert,
sidelined the elected provincial government under Fazlul Huq, a genial anti-
communalist populist whose slogan in the 1937 elections was ‘Lentils and
Rice!’, and appointed an English official, L. G. Pinnell, to implement Denial
at top speed. Pinnell approached a well-known supporter of Jinnah’s Muslim
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League, the rice merchant M. A. Ispahani, offering his company 2 million

rupees to carry out the operation. The predictable ‘hue and cry’ from the
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other parties prompted Pinnell to appoint four more Denial agents on a

party-communalist basis, for ‘balance’—leading, Mukherjee says, to even
more chaos and corruption. In April 1942 Pinnell called for a levy of 123,000
tons of ‘surplus’ rice; stocks were seized by force where farmers resisted;
compensation payments drove up prices across the board. In May 1942
Pinnell turned to boats: 43,000 vessels were destroyed or confiscated over
the next few months, crippling the ‘essential riverine transport infrastruc-
ture’ upon which millions of the poorest Bengalis depended; boat owners
were compensated, but not those who leased them for their livelihoods;
potters and fishermen were left destitute. At the same time, as Mukherjee
points out, rice was still being exported from Bengal: 45,000 tons in January
1942 rising to 66,000 tons in April.
It was at this point that the refugees from Burma arrived. The Japanese
victory saw some 600,000 Indian workers fleeing the country, at least
80,000 dying on the 600-mile march to the Bengal border. While the
British Imperial government did its best to look after Europeans fleeing
the Japanese advance, the Indians, men, women and children, were left to
fend for themselves. The survivors increased the demand for rice in Bengal
at precisely the time when Denial was stripping stocks bare. Adding to
the indigent were thousands of peasant families evicted wholesale by the
British authorities for purposes of military expediency: 36,000 people from
Diamond Harbour, 70,000 from Noakhali and so on. Many of these depor-
tees were left particularly vulnerable and would be among the first to perish
with the onset of mass starvation.
Mukherjee offers illuminating insight into the Denial policy’s role in
shaping the dynamics of the 1942 Quit India crisis. Responding to the
widespread anti-Denial protests, a Congress resolution of 10 July 1942
called for full compensation for any loss of landed property or boats, which
should not be surrendered until compensation was settled. From London,
the War Cabinet declared that the ‘denial resolution’—moderate enough—
amounted to treason. Leo Amery, Churchill’s Secretary of State for India,
urged Linlithgow to adopt harsher measures with Gandhi and the Congress
leadership rather than ‘merely punish the wretched villager who refuses to
hand over his boat or his bullock cart’. The arrest of Gandhi, Nehru and the
provincial Congress leaders—once again, with the support of Attlee—would
come the following month, after the famous 8 August resolution, which
called for immediate independence, and Gandhi’s ‘Quit India’ speech, invit-
ing the masses to join an open, albeit non-violent struggle against British
imperialism. But Mukherjee demonstrates that the War Cabinet took the 10
July resolution more seriously. In fact, the mass agitation took on a much
 newsinger: Bengal 153

more radical form with the Congress leadership in prison: ‘Disruptions of

transport, communication lines and factory operations’ began immediately

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in the cities, soon followed in the countryside, ‘with peasants participating
in open rebellion in large numbers—railway tracks were cut, telegraph poles
were downed, goods-sheds were looted and police stations ransacked.’ On
15 August Linlithgow authorized the military to machine-gun protesters
from the air. The revolt was put down with at least 10,000 dead and over
90,000 imprisoned. Villages were burned down or subjected to collective
fines, prisoners were publicly flogged; the repression had the full support of
Churchill’s Labour ministers. Linlithgow described it to Churchill as ‘by far
the most serious rebellion since that of 1857, the gravity and extent of which
we have so far concealed from the world for reasons of military security.’
Military security depended, too, on keeping up the rate of Calcutta’s
industrial production—pro-Congress Marwari capitalists, Birla prominent
among them, had led their own workers out on strike at textile mills and
steel plants across the city. By August 1942, Mukherjee writes, with rice
stocks low and prices soaring, the British authorities ‘began worrying in
earnest about feeding labour in war-production factories’. Pinnell began
paying over the market rate to purchase large-scale supplies. At the same
time, the colonial government urged Bengali manufacturers, whose profits
were soaring from the war-production boom, to build up their own stocks
of rice. Purchases of foodstuff could be written off against corporate taxes.
The Bengal Chamber of Commerce led the way, snapping up rice and paddy
stocks; its member firms stepped up their own bulk purchases. The result
was to drive prices far above the reach of poor Bengalis—the cost of rice
rose 65 per cent in the six weeks between 7 July and 21 August 1942—while
increasing panic-buying and black-market speculation. As Mukherjee puts
it, ‘the starvation season was about to begin’. Further calamity struck in
October when the densely populated district of Midnapore, one of the cen-
tres of resistance during the Quit India revolt, was hit by a cyclone that left
thousands dead and over 2 million homeless and destitute. By December
1942 there were reports of famine conditions in the rural districts, not least
in storm-devastated Midnapore. Linlithgow blamed the farmers, whom he
accused of hoarding rice.
By January 1943 Calcutta was filling up with half-clad beggars, ‘pestering
hard-working citizens with their plaintive grumblings’, as The Statesman,
Calcutta’s leading organ, reported. War-time inflation had driven up the
price of cotton, too, and many could afford to cover themselves with no more
than a rag. In February Gandhi, still in prison, began a hunger strike in
protest against ‘what is going on in the country, including the privations
of the poor millions owing to the universal scarcity stalking the land’. The
War Cabinet, without any Labour dissent, resolved to let him die, despite
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concerns that this would provoke renewed revolt. A request for food imports
from Linlithgow was discussed for ten minutes and rejected. In the event
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Gandhi survived his fast, which was called off after three weeks, occasioning
considerable derision from both Churchill and Amery. He was to remain a
prisoner for another fourteen months. Meanwhile in Calcutta the British
governor was manoeuvring to get rid of the elected Chief Minister, Huq,
who had demanded an inquiry on the brutal suppression of the Quit India
movement in Midnapore. By April 1943 Herbert had his way: an unelected
Muslim League provincial government was installed, under Chief Minister
Khwaja Nazimuddin. This gave another toxic, communal twist to food
politics in Bengal: the Muslim League would be accused of channelling
provincial government supplies to its own community—the Ispahanis were
once more put in charge—while Congress-leaning industrialists, traders
and storekeepers gave priority to Hindus.
By the summer, the daily deaths from starvation in Calcutta were
impossible to ignore, even if the suffering in rural districts went largely
unnoticed. On 16 and 17 August 1943, officially 120 bodies were collected
from the streets. The government prohibited reporting of the famine, but
Ian Stephens, editor of The Statesman, got round the regulations by publish-
ing a photo-spread: in a single afternoon, a team of photographers ‘collected
a shocking dossier of famine pictures, some so horrifying that the editor
himself found them “utterly unpublishable”.’ The Statesman published
a similar photo-spread the following week under the headline, ‘All-India
Disgrace’. But as Stephens pointed out, the situation was far worse in the
rural areas. Indeed, many of the dead on the streets were people who had
fled the countryside in the hope of finding relief in the city. There were some
150,000 destitute refugees living on the streets of Calcutta. The authorities
responded by forcibly rounding up the homeless and incarcerating them
in repatriation camps, where they starved more slowly, in horrific condi-
tions, on a ration of 800 calories a day. Meanwhile, as Mukherjee writes,
‘the poor were on the move by the millions, trudging through the monsoon
rains, now half-naked, falling by the wayside and dying, or straggling into
urban areas to beg for food.’ The public health system was ‘in shambles:
under-organized, understaffed and lacking in basic supplies’. Bengal’s offi-
cial surgeon-general would describe the famished as ‘mere skin and bone,
dehydrated, with dry furred tongues, sores on lips, staring eyes’.
In October 1943, Linlithgow, whose attitude towards the mass starvation
had been to ignore it as far as possible, was replaced as viceroy by a military
figure, Archibald Wavell, whose imperial cursus included the suppression
of the Arab Revolt in Palestine and humiliating defeat in Malaya, Singapore
and Burma; an official report noted, ‘The average Indian regards [the
appointment] as the prelude to martial law’. In fact, after touring Calcutta
 newsinger: Bengal 155

incognito with his wife, Wavell ordered the military to help with relief, com-
mitting a full division to the effort. Food exports from Bengal were banned

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at last, and eventually rationing was introduced in Calcutta, although the
countryside ‘remained un-rationed and starved’. Though Mukherjee con-
cedes that Wavell’s actions saved lives, given the scale of the catastrophe, his
efforts were ‘far too little and far too late’. The victims continued to mount:
by the end of the year, the death toll from hunger, disease and exposure was
already well over 3 million.
Wavell did his best to convince London of the necessity for large-scale
imports of food grains, enlisting the support of the Commander-in-Chief
of the Indian Army, Claude Auchinleck, and the Chiefs of Staff in London.
The government was warned that the crisis was jeopardizing the war effort
against Japan. Amery gave them his support, remarking that the sight of
starving Indians was causing ‘distress to the European troops’. The War
Cabinet was unmoved, with Churchill observing that the starvation of
‘anyhow under-fed Bengalis’ was less serious than that of ‘sturdy Greeks’.
According to Amery, writing in his journal, ‘Winston so dislikes India
and all to do with it that he can see nothing but waste of shipping space’.
Wavell’s intervention appeared to have stabilized the situation in Calcutta
by the end of the year, but mass starvation continued in the countryside.
As winter drew on, the predicament of the rural poor was worsened by the
chronic cloth shortages, so that many died not only homeless and starving
but literally naked. For propaganda purposes though, the Famine was sup-
posedly under control. The War Cabinet was still resisting Wavell’s requests
for food imports. It was in February 1944 that Wavell warned London that
the Empire’s reputation was being damaged, informing Amery that food
imports were ‘a matter of life and death for hundreds of thousands of
Indians’ and that ‘our good name in the world for justice and kindness may
be irretrievably ruined’. To no effect: the first half of 1944 saw an increase
in the death rates, as epidemics took hold on a weakened population; deaths
from malaria would peak that November.
In Calcutta, ‘the urban poor lived on the absolute margins of life and
death’, in stark contrast with the increased profits that Indian industrialists
were making. In December 1944 the new governor of Bengal, the Australian
politician Richard Casey, recorded his horror at the living conditions he
encountered on a tour of Calcutta’s slums: ‘Human beings cannot let other
human beings exist under these conditions.’ Perhaps another 2 million peo-
ple had died of hunger, disease and exposure during the course of 1944. The
situation remained serious in 1945, when the failure of the monsoon rains
brought fears of another famine. At the start of January 1946, Wavell warned
Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, the Attlee government’s Secretary of State for
India, that the food situation was once again critical. Pethick-Lawrence
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acknowledged that ‘India’s need is unquestionable’, but made clear that

there would be no increase of food imports. Instead, he recommended
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that the food ration in the cities should be cut, to make existing supplies go
further. In these conditions, with Independence now on the horizon, the
attempts by rivalrous Indian politicians to blame the catastrophe on their
party opponents—especially the Muslim League, which had presided over
the worst of the Famine—fell on fertile ground.
Nevertheless, communal divisions were not all-encompassing. Mukherjee
points to the unified mass protests of November 1945 and February 1946,
against the trials of Indian National Army soldiers taken prisoner in Burma
by the returning British troops: Muslim League, Congress and Communist
flags were tied together in a gesture of political unity—‘testimony to a sense
of solidarity with which the population of Calcutta understood their highly
uncertain collective fate’. But political leaders ‘continued to channel the
anxieties and frustrations of the masses into a more sectarian mould.’ On
16 May 1946, the Attlee government’s Cabinet Mission to India published
its proposal for a united, independent India with wide-ranging regional
autonomy, to preclude the formation of a separate Muslim state of Pakistan.
The Congress leadership at first agreed, but soon began to back away on
the grounds that the Muslim League would be over-represented. On 10 July,
Nehru rejected the plan unequivocally. The Muslim League called a ‘direct-
action day’ four weeks later to agitate for the achievement of Pakistan.
Mukherjee’s great achievement in Hungry Bengal is to show how star-
vation provided an essential underpinning for the outbreak of communal
violence in Calcutta in August 1946. The hartal, or general strike, called by
the Muslim League on 16 August divided the city along lines already hard-
ened by the dehumanizing effects of the Famine. Groups of Muslims on
their way to the rally at the Maidan, Calcutta’s central park, attacked shops
that had not closed for the hartal; armed Hindus tried to block their route.
The upshot was ‘five days of largely unrestrained murder, looting, arson,
mutilation, torture and dislocation’ that left much of the city in ruins. At least
5,000 were killed, although Mukherjee believes the real figure is almost cer-
tainly higher. On 28 August it was reported that there were 189,015 people
displaced by the violence being sheltered in relief camps, but as he points
out, the total figure of the displaced was much higher: many fled the city
altogether—110,000 by train and unknown numbers on foot—while thou-
sands more took shelter with friends and relatives. He estimates that some
10 per cent of the city’s population had been displaced by the violence. At
least the new governor of Bengal, Sir Frederick Burrows, was able to take
comfort in the fact that the riots were ‘communal and not—repeat not—in
any way anti-British’.
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The riots took place at a time of renewed starvation, a society already

worn down, brutalized by years of hunger, finally unravelling. While the

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occasion was the Muslim League hartal, the cause was ‘very specific and
identifiable tensions’ in the city. It was a ‘localized battle for the control of
city blocks, alleyways, and neighbourhoods’. Wavell’s introduction of ration-
ing in 1944 meant that who ‘belonged’ in the city, and who did not, became a
life-and-death question: not belonging meant repatriation to the un-rationed
countryside. In August 1946, as Mukherjee puts it, ‘that decision was taken
into unofficial hands’. Sporadic violence continued even after the city had
been occupied by 45,000 troops and the rioting had officially come to an end,
with people still being driven from their homes and sometimes murdered.
The Calcutta riots would be a prelude to the much greater conflagration that
accompanied Partition and the foundation of Pakistan.
Mukherjee’s account makes absolutely clear that, in order to protect the
Raj from a Japanese threat that never materialized, the British state sacri-
ficed the lives of some five million people, the War Cabinet maintaining an
attitude of callous indifference. In Churchill’s particular case, indifference
was strongly tinged with racism. Even Amery, on one occasion, was driven
to remark that he couldn’t see ‘much difference between his outlook and
Hitler’s’. As Mukherjee insists, the Bengal Famine was no natural disaster
but rather ‘the direct product of colonial and war-time ideologies and calcu-
lations which knowingly exposed the poor of Bengal to annihilation through
deprivation’—‘a grievous crime was committed in broad daylight’, one that
is still unacknowledged. The British were far from alone in perpetrating this
crime, as we have seen. Indian elites and political leaders were both accesso-
ries and beneficiaries, largely unmoved by the suffering in the countryside.
Here, Mukherjee highlights a crucial silence in Indian historiography. These
classes still rule India—and Pakistan—today. Mukherjee describes travel-
ling the Bengali countryside while doing his research: ‘Hunger seemed still
everywhere—haunting the shadows, moaning in dingy corners, written
on the faces of young children on street corners, gnawing at the spines of
middle-aged sweepers, and silently ravaging the collective consciousness of
society at large’. More generally:

The profound and pervasive links between war, famine and riot are tortured
and complex, but they are also manifest. They are, moreover, far from uncom-
mon. Wherever there is civil war, ethnic violence, communal riots, or any
other type of horizontal violence—particularly in the global South—look for
the hunger that preceded it, and it is more often than not very easily found.