Английская Википедия:Bengal famine of 1943
Шаблон:Short description Шаблон:Good article Шаблон:Pp-pc Шаблон:Use British English Шаблон:Use dmy dates Шаблон:Infobox famine
The Bengal famine of 1943 was an anthropogenic famine in the Bengal province of British India (present-day Bangladesh, West Bengal and eastern India) during World War II. An estimated 0.8–3.8 million people died,Шаблон:Efn-ua in the Bengal region (present-day Bangladesh and West Bengal), from starvation, malaria and other diseases aggravated by malnutrition, population displacement, unsanitary conditions 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, 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 perШаблон:Nbspcapita 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 (a "scorched earth" response to the occupation). 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, as a result of disease, after the food security crisis had abated.
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,Шаблон:Sfn a rapidly growing population, stagnant agricultural productivity, increased social stratification, and alienation of the peasant class from their landholdings.Шаблон:Sfn 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.Шаблон:SfnШаблон:Sfn Millions were vulnerable to starvation.Шаблон:Sfn
The Government of India's Famine Inquiry Commission reportШаблон:Nbsp(1945) described Bengal as a "land of rice growers and rice eaters".Шаблон:Efn-ua Rice dominated the agricultural output of the province, accounting for nearly 88% of its arable land useШаблон:Sfn and 75% of its crops.Шаблон:Efn-ua Overall, Bengal produced one third of India's rice – more than any other single province.Шаблон:Sfn Rice accounted for 75–85% of daily food consumption,Шаблон:Sfn with fish being the second major food source,Шаблон:SfnШаблон:Sfn supplemented by small amounts of wheat.Шаблон:Efn-ua
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.Шаблон:Sfnm Crucially, the (debated) shortfall in rice production in 1942 occurred during the all-important aman harvest.Шаблон:Sfn
Rice yield per acre had been stagnant since the beginning of the twentieth century;Шаблон:Sfn coupled with a rising population, this created pressures that were a leading factor in the famine.Шаблон:SfnШаблон:Sfn Bengal had a population of about 60 millionШаблон:SfnШаблон:Sfn in an area of 77,442 square miles, according to a 1941 census.Шаблон:SfnШаблон:Efn-ua Declining mortality rates, induced in part by the pre-1943 success of the British Raj in famine reductionШаблон:SfnШаблон:Sfn 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%.Шаблон:SfnШаблон:Efn-ua The economy was almost solely agrarian,Шаблон:SfnШаблон:Sfn but agricultural productivity was among the lowest in the world.Шаблон:Sfn Agricultural technology was undeveloped, access to credit was limited and expensive, and any potential for government aid was hampered by political and financial constraints.Шаблон:Sfn 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.Шаблон:SfnШаблон:Sfn The combination of these factors caused stubbornly low agricultural productivity.Шаблон:SfnШаблон:SfnШаблон:Sfn
Prior to about 1920, the food demands of Bengal's growing population could be met in part by cultivating unused scrub lands.Шаблон:Sfn No later than the first quarter of the twentieth century, Bengal began to experience an acute shortage of such land,Шаблон:SfnШаблон:Sfn leading to a chronic and growing shortage of rice.Шаблон:Sfn 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.Шаблон:Sfn 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.Шаблон:Sfn 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."Шаблон:Sfn These conditions left a large proportion of the population continually on the brink of malnutrition or even starvation.Шаблон:Sfn
Land-grabbing
Шаблон:See also 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.Шаблон:SfnmШаблон:Sfnm The British Indian system of land tenure, particularly in Bengal,Шаблон:Sfn 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.Шаблон:Sfn Zamindar and jotedar landowners were protected by law and custom,Шаблон:Sfn 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.Шаблон:SfnmШаблон:Efn-ua 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.Шаблон:Sfnm
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 lendersШаблон:Sfn to purchase basic necessities during lean months between harvests.Шаблон:Sfnm 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".Шаблон:Sfn Moreover, if a labourer did not possess goods recoverable as cash, such as seed or cattle for ploughing, he would go into debt.Шаблон:Sfn Particularly during poor crops, smallholders fell into cycles of debt, often eventually forfeiting land to creditors.Шаблон:Sfnm
Small landholders and sharecroppers acquired debts swollen by usurious rates of interest.Шаблон:SfnmШаблон:Efn-ua 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.Шаблон:Sfn 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.Шаблон:Sfnm
Such exploitation, exacerbated by Muslim inheritance practices that divided land among multiple siblings,Шаблон:Sfnm widened inequalities in land ownership.Шаблон:Sfnm At the time, millions of Bengali agriculturalists held little or no land.Шаблон:Efn-ua 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.Шаблон:Sfnm
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.Шаблон:Sfnm Roads were generally scarce and in poor condition,Шаблон:Sfnm and Bengal's extensive railway system was employed largely for military purposes until the very late stages of the crisis.Шаблон:Sfnm
The development of railways in Bengal in the 1890s disrupted natural drainage and divided the region into innumerable poorly drained "compartments".Шаблон:Sfn 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.Шаблон:Sfnm
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.Шаблон:Sfn 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;Шаблон:Sfnm malaria epidemics lasted a month longer in the central and western areas with slower drainage.Шаблон:Sfn
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.Шаблон:Sfn Tank and river water was susceptible to contamination by cholera; with tube wells being much safer.Шаблон:Sfn However, as many as one-third of the existing wells in wartime Bengal were in disrepair.Шаблон:Sfn
Pre-famine shocks and distress
Throughout 1942 and early 1943, military and political events combined with natural disasters and plant disease to place widespread stress on Bengal's economy.Шаблон:Sfn While Bengal's food needs rose from increased military presence and an influx of refugees from Burma,Шаблон:Sfn its ability to obtain rice and other grains was restricted by inter-provincial trade barriers.Шаблон:Sfn
Japanese invasion of Burma
Шаблон:Main Шаблон:Stack The Japanese campaign for Burma set off an exodus of more than half of the one million Indians from Burma for India.Шаблон:Sfn 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.Шаблон:Sfn On 26 April 1942, all Allied forces were ordered to retreat from Burma into India.Шаблон:Sfn Military transport and other supplies were dedicated to military use, and unavailable for use by the refugees.Шаблон:Sfn By mid May 1942, the monsoon rains became heavy in the Manipur hills, further inhibiting civilian movement.Шаблон:Sfn
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".Шаблон:Sfn The influx of refugees created several conditions that may have contributed to the famine. Their arrival created an increased demand for food,Шаблон:Sfn clothing and medical aid, further straining the resources of the province.Шаблон:Sfn The poor hygienic conditions of their forced journey sparked official fears of a public health risk due to epidemics caused by social disruption.Шаблон:Sfn Finally, their distraught state after their strugglesШаблон:Sfn 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.Шаблон:Sfn
By April 1942, Japanese warships and aircraft had sunk approximately 100,000 tons of merchant shipping in the Bay of Bengal.Шаблон:Sfn According to General Archibald Wavell, Commander-in-Chief of the army in India, both the War Office in London and the commander of the British Eastern Fleet acknowledged that the fleet was powerless to mount serious opposition to Japanese naval attacks on Ceylon, southern or eastern India, or on shipping in the Bay of Bengal.Шаблон:Sfn For decades, rail transport had been integral to successful efforts by the Raj to forestall famine in India.Шаблон:Sfn However, Japanese raids put additional strain on railways, which also endured flooding in the Brahmaputra, a malaria epidemic, and the Quit India movement targeting road and rail communication.Шаблон:Sfn Throughout this period, transportation of civil supplies was compromised by the railways' increased military obligations, and the dismantling of tracks carried out in areas of eastern Bengal in 1942 to hamper a potential Japanese invasion.Шаблон:Sfn
The fall of Rangoon in March 1942 cut off the import of Burmese rice into India and Ceylon.Шаблон:Sfn Due in part to increases in local populations, prices for rice were already 69% higher in September 1941 than in August 1939.Шаблон:Sfn The loss of Burmese imports led to further increased demand on the rice-producing regions.Шаблон:Sfn This, according to the Famine Commission, was in a market in which the "progress of the war made sellers who could afford to wait reluctant to sell".Шаблон:Sfn The loss of imports from Burma provoked an aggressive scramble for rice across India, which sparked a dramatic and unprecedented surge in demand-pull price inflation in Bengal and other rice producing regions of India. Across India and particularly in Bengal, this caused a "derangement" of the rice markets.Шаблон:Sfn Particularly in Bengal, the price effect of the loss of Burmese rice was vastly disproportionate to the relatively modest size of the loss in terms of total consumption.Шаблон:Sfnm Despite this, Bengal continued to export rice to CeylonШаблон:Efn-ua for months afterwards, even as the beginning of a food crisis began to become apparent.Шаблон:Efn-ua All this, together with transport problems created by the government's "boat denial" policy, were the direct causes of inter-provincial trade barriers on the movement of food grains,Шаблон:Sfn and contributed to a series of failed government policies that further exacerbated the food crisis.Шаблон:Sfn
1942–1945: Military build-up, inflation, and displacement
The fall of Burma brought Bengal close to the war front; its impact fell more strongly on Bengal than elsewhere in India.Шаблон:Sfn Major urban areas, especially Calcutta, drew increasing numbers of workers into military industries and troops from many nations. Unskilled labourers from Bengal and nearby provinces were employed by military contractors, particularly for the construction of American and British airfields.Шаблон:Sfn Hundreds of thousands of American, British, Indian, and Chinese troops arrived in the province,Шаблон:Sfn straining domestic supplies and leading to scarcities across wide ranges of daily necessities.Шаблон:Sfnm The general inflationary pressures of a war-time economy caused prices to rise rapidly across the entire spectrum of goods and services.Шаблон:Sfn Economist Utsa Patnaik writes of John Maynard Keynes's deliberately inflationary policies, designed to reduce the consumption of the poor and move resources away from India's general population to finance war spending, leading to price increases that dramatically diminished people's consumption of food.Шаблон:Sfn The rise in prices was "not disturbing" until 1941, when it became more alarming.Шаблон:Sfn Then in early 1943, the rate of inflation for foodgrains in particular took an unprecedented upward turn.Шаблон:Sfn
Nearly the full output of India's cloth, wool, leather and silk industries were sold to the military.Шаблон:Sfn In the system that the British Government used to procure goods through the Government of India, industries were left in private ownership rather than facing outright requisitioning of their productive capacity. Firms were required to sell goods to the military on credit and at fixed, low prices.Шаблон:Sfn However, firms were left free to charge any price they desired in their domestic market for whatever they had left over. In the case of the textiles industries that supplied cloth for the uniforms of the British military, for example, they charged a very high price in domestic markets.Шаблон:Sfn By the end of 1942, cloth prices had more than tripled from their pre-war levels; they had more than quadrupled by mid-1943.Шаблон:Sfn Much of the goods left over for civilian use were purchased by speculators.Шаблон:Sfn As a result, "civilian consumption of cotton goods fell by more than 23% from the peace time level by 1943/44".Шаблон:Sfn The hardships that were felt by the rural population through a severe "cloth famine" were alleviated when military forces began distributing relief supplies between October 1942 and April 1943.Шаблон:Sfn
Шаблон:Stack The method of credit financing was tailored to UK wartime needs. Britain agreed to pay for defence expenditures above the amount that India had paid in peacetime (adjusted for inflation). However, their purchases were made entirely on credit accumulated in the Bank of England and not redeemable until after the war. At the same time, the Bank of India was permitted to treat those credits as assets against which it could print currency up to two and a half times more than the total debt incurred. India's money printing presses then began running overtime, printing the currency that paid for all these massive expenditures. The tremendous rise in nominal money supply coupled with a scarcity of consumption goods spurred monetary inflation, reaching its peak in 1944–45.Шаблон:Sfnm The accompanying rise in incomes and purchasing power fell disproportionately into the hands of industries in Calcutta (in particular, munitions industries).Шаблон:Sfn
Military build-up caused massive displacement of Bengalis from their homes. Farmland purchased for airstrip and camp construction is "estimated to have driven between 30,000 and 36,000 families (about 150,000 to 180,000 persons) off their land", according to the historian Paul Greenough. They were paid for the land, but they had lost their employment.Шаблон:Sfn The urgent need for housing for the immense influx of workers and soldiers from 1942 onward created further problems. Military barracks were scattered around Calcutta.Шаблон:Sfn The Famine Commission report of 1945 stated that the owners had been paid for these homes, but "there is little doubt that the members of many of these families became famine victims in 1943".Шаблон:Sfn
March 1942: Denial policies
Anticipating a Japanese invasion of British India via the eastern border of Bengal, the British military launched a pre-emptive, two-pronged scorched-earth initiative in eastern and coastal Bengal. Its goal was to deny the expected invaders access to food supplies, transport and other resources.Шаблон:Efn-ua
First, a "denial of rice" policy was carried out in three southern districts along the coast of the Bay of Bengal – Bakarganj (or Barisal), Midnapore and Khulna – that were expected to have surpluses of rice. John Herbert, the governor of Bengal, issued an urgentШаблон:Sfnm directive in late March 1942 immediately requiring stocks of paddy (unmilled rice) deemed surplus, and other food items, to be removed or destroyed in these districts.Шаблон:Sfnm Official figures for the amounts impounded were relatively small and would have contributed only modestly to local scarcities.Шаблон:Sfnm However, evidence that fraudulent, corrupt and coercive practices by the purchasing agents removed far more rice than officially recorded, not only from designated districts, but also in unauthorised areas, suggests a greater impact.Шаблон:Sfnm Far more damaging were the policy's disturbing impact on regional market relationships and contribution to a sense of public alarm.Шаблон:Sfnm Disruption of deeply intertwined relationships of trust and trade credit created an immediate freeze in informal lending. This credit freeze greatly restricted the flow of rice into trade.Шаблон:Sfn
The second prong, a "boat denial" policy, was designed to deny Bengali transport to any invading Japanese army. It applied to districts readily accessible via the Bay of Bengal and the larger rivers that flow into it. Implemented on 1 May after an initial registration period,Шаблон:Sfnm the policy authorised the Army to confiscate, relocate or destroy any boats large enough to carry more than ten people, and allowed them to requisition other means of transport such as bicycles, bullock carts, and elephants.Шаблон:Sfnm Under this policy, the Army confiscated approximately 45,000 rural boats,Шаблон:Sfn severely disrupting river-borne movement of labour, supplies and food, and compromising the livelihoods of boatmen and fishermen.Шаблон:Sfnm Leonard G. Pinnell, a British civil servant who headed the Bengal government's Department of Civil Supplies, told the Famine Commission that the policy "completely broke the economy of the fishing class".Шаблон:Sfn Transport was generally unavailable to carry seed and equipment to distant fields or rice to the market hubs.Шаблон:Sfnm Artisans and other groups who relied on boat transport to carry goods to market were offered no recompense; neither were rice growers nor the network of migratory labourers.Шаблон:Sfn The large-scale removal or destruction of rural boats caused a near-complete breakdown of the existing transport and administration infrastructure and market system for movement of rice paddy.Шаблон:Sfnm No steps were taken to provide for the maintenance or repair of the confiscated boats,Шаблон:Sfn and many fishermen were unable to return to their trade.Шаблон:Sfn The Army took no steps to distribute food rations to make up for the interruption of supplies.Шаблон:Sfn
These policies had important political ramifications. The Indian National Congress, among other groups, staged protests denouncing the denial policies for placing draconian burdens on Bengali peasants; these were part of a nationalist sentiment and outpouring that later peaked in the "Quit India" movement.Шаблон:Sfnm The policies' wider impact – the extent to which they compounded or even caused the famine to occur one year later – has been the subject of much discussion.Шаблон:Sfnm
Provincial trade barriers
Many Indian provinces and princely states imposed inter-provincial trade barriers from mid-1942, preventing trade in domestic rice. Anxiety and soaring rice prices, triggered by the fall of Burma,Шаблон:Sfn were one underlying reason for the trade barriers. Trade imbalances brought on by price controls were another.Шаблон:Sfn The power to restrict inter-provincial trade was given to provincial governments in November 1941 under the Defence of India Act, 1939.Шаблон:Efn-ua Provincial governments began setting up trade barriers that prevented the flow of foodgrains (especially rice) and other goods between provinces. These barriers reflected a desire to see that local populations were well fed, thus forestalling local emergencies.Шаблон:Sfn
In January 1942, Punjab banned exports of wheat;Шаблон:SfnmШаблон:Efn-ua this increased the perception of food insecurity and led the enclave of wheat-eaters in Greater Calcutta to increase their demand for rice precisely when an impending rice shortage was feared.Шаблон:Sfn The Central Provinces prohibited the export of foodgrains outside the province two months later.Шаблон:Sfn Madras banned rice exports in June,Шаблон:Sfn followed by export bans in Bengal and its neighbouring provinces of Bihar and Orissa that July.Шаблон:Sfnm
The Famine Inquiry Commission of 1945 characterised this "critical and potentially most dangerous stage" as a key policy failure. As one deponent to the Commission put it: "Every province, every district, every [administrative division] in the east of India had become a food republic unto itself. The trade machinery for the distribution of food [between provinces] throughout the east of India was slowly strangled, and by the spring of 1943 was dead."Шаблон:Sfn Bengal was unable to import domestic rice; this policy helped transform market failures and food shortage into famine and widespread death.Шаблон:Sfnm
Mid-1942: Prioritised distribution
The loss of Burma reinforced the strategic importance of Calcutta as the hub of heavy industry and the main supplier of armaments and textiles for the entire Asian theatre.Шаблон:Sfn To support its wartime mobilisation, the British Indian Government categorised the population into socioeconomic groups of "priority" and "non-priority" classes, according to their relative importance to the war effort.Шаблон:Sfn Members of the "priority" classes were largely composed of bhadraloks, who were upper-class or bourgeois middle-class, socially mobile, educated, urban, and sympathetic to Western values and modernisation. Protecting their interests was a major concern of both private and public relief efforts.Шаблон:Sfnm This placed the rural poor in direct competition for scarce basic supplies with workers in public agencies, war-related industries, and in some cases even politically well-connected middle-class agriculturalists.Шаблон:Sfn
As food prices rose and the signs of famine became apparent from July 1942,Шаблон:Sfnm the Bengal Chamber of Commerce (composed mainly of British-owned firms)Шаблон:Sfn devised a Foodstuffs Scheme to provide preferential distribution of goods and services to workers in high-priority war industries, to prevent them from leaving their positions. The scheme was approved by Government of Bengal.Шаблон:Sfn Rice was directed away from the starving rural districts to workers in industries considered vital to the military effort – particularly in the area around Greater Calcutta.Шаблон:Sfn Workers in prioritised sectorsШаблон:Sndprivate and government wartime industries, military and civilian construction, paper and textile mills, engineering firms, the Indian Railways, coal mining, and government workers of various levelsШаблон:Sfnm – were given significant advantages and benefits. Essential workers received subsidised food,Шаблон:Sfn and were frequently paid in part in weekly allotments of rice sufficient to feed their immediate families, further protecting them from inflation.Шаблон:Sfnm Essential workers also benefited from ration cards, a network of "cheap shops" which provided essential supplies at discounted rates, and direct, preferential allocation of supplies such as water, medical care, and antimalarial supplies. They also received subsidised food, free transportation, access to superior housing, regular wages and even "mobile cinema units catering to recreational needs".Шаблон:Sfn By December of that year, the total number of individuals covered (workers and their families) was approximately a million.Шаблон:Sfnm Medical care was directed to the priority groupsШаблон:Sndparticularly the military. Public and private medical staff at all levels were transferred to military duty, while medical supplies were monopolised.Шаблон:Sfn
Rural labourers and civilians not members of these groups received severely reduced access to food and medical care, generally available only to those who migrated to selected population centres.Шаблон:Sfn Otherwise, according to medical historian Sanjoy Bhattacharya, "vast areas of rural eastern India were denied any lasting state-sponsored distributive schemes".Шаблон:Sfn For this reason, the policy of prioritised distribution is sometimes discussed as one cause of the famine.Шаблон:Sfn
Civil unrest
Шаблон:Main Шаблон:Stack The war escalated resentment and fear of the Raj among rural agriculturalists and business and industrial leaders in Greater Calcutta.Шаблон:Sfn The unfavourable military situation of the Allies after the fall of Burma led the US and China to urge the UK to enlist India's full cooperation in the war by negotiating a peaceful transfer of political power to an elected Indian body; this goal was also supported by the Labour Party in Britain. Winston Churchill, the British prime minister, responded to the new pressure through the Cripps' mission, broaching the post-war possibility of an autonomous political status for India in exchange for its full military support, but negotiations collapsed in early April 1942.Шаблон:Sfn
On 8 August 1942, the Indian National Congress launched the Quit India movement as a nationwide display of nonviolent resistance.Шаблон:Sfn The British authorities reacted by imprisoning the Congress leaders.Шаблон:Sfn Without its leadership, the movement changed its character and took to sabotaging factories, bridges, telegraph and railway lines, and other government property,Шаблон:Sfn thereby threatening the British Raj's war enterprise.Шаблон:Sfn The British acted forcefully to suppress the movement, taking around 66,000 in custody (of whom just over 19,000 were still convicted under civil law or detained under the Defence of India Act in early 1944). More than 2,500 Indians were shot when police fired upon protesters, many of whom were killed.Шаблон:Sfn In Bengal, the movement was strongest in the Tamluk and Contai subdivisions of Midnapore district,Шаблон:Sfn where rural discontent was well-established and deep.Шаблон:SfnmШаблон:Efn-ua In Tamluk, by April 1942 the government had destroyed some 18,000 boats in pursuit of its denial policy, while war-related inflation further alienated the rural population, who became eager volunteers when local Congress recruiters proposed open rebellion.Шаблон:Sfn
The violence during the "Quit India" movement was internationally condemned, and hardened some sectors of British opinion against India;Шаблон:Sfn The historians Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper believe it reduced the British War Cabinet's willingness to provide famine aid at a time when supplies were also needed for the war effort.Шаблон:Sfn In several ways the political and social disorder and distrust that were the effects and after-effects of rebellion and civil unrest placed political, logistical, and infrastructural constraints on the Government of India that contributed to later famine-driven woes.Шаблон:Sfnm
1942–1943: Price chaos
Throughout April 1942, British and Indian refugees fled Burma, many through Bengal, as the cessation of Burmese imports continued to drive up rice prices. In June, the Bengal government established price controls for rice, and on 1 July fixed prices at a level considerably lower than the prevailing market price. The principal result of the fixed low price was to make sellers reluctant to sell; stocks disappeared, either on to the black market or into storage.Шаблон:Sfn The government then let it be known that the price control law would not be enforced except in the most egregious cases of war profiteering.Шаблон:Sfnm This easing of restrictions plus the ban on exports created about four months of relative price stability.Шаблон:Sfnm In mid-October, though, south-west Bengal was struck by a series of natural disasters that destabilised prices again,Шаблон:Sfn causing another rushed scramble for rice, greatly to the benefit of the Calcutta black market.Шаблон:Sfn Between December 1942 and March 1943 the government made several attempts to "break the Calcutta market" by bringing in rice supplies from various districts around the province; however, these attempts to drive down prices by increasing supply were unsuccessful.Шаблон:Sfn
On 11 March 1943, the provincial government rescinded its price controls,Шаблон:Sfn resulting in dramatic rises in the price of rice, due in part to soaring levels of speculation.Шаблон:Sfn The period of inflation between March and May 1943 was especially intense;Шаблон:Sfn May was the month of the first reports of death by starvation in Bengal.Шаблон:Sfnm The government attempted to re-establish public confidence by insisting that the crisis was being caused almost solely by speculation and hoarding,Шаблон:Sfn but their propaganda failed to dispel the widespread belief that there was a shortage of rice.Шаблон:Sfnm The provincial government never formally declared a state of famine, even though its Famine Code would have mandated a sizable increase in aid. In the early stages of the famine, the rationale for this was that the provincial government was expecting aid from the Government of India. It felt then its duty lay in maintaining confidence through propaganda that asserted that there was no shortage. After it became clear that aid from central government was not forthcoming, the provincial government felt they simply did not have the amount of food supplies that a declaration of famine would require them to distribute, while distributing more money might make inflation worse.Шаблон:Sfnm
When inter-provincial trade barriers were abolished on 18 May, prices temporarily fell in Calcutta, but soared in the neighbouring provinces of Bihar and Orissa when traders rushed to purchase stocks.Шаблон:Sfn The provincial government's attempts to locate and seize any hoarded stocks failed to find significant hoarding.Шаблон:Sfn In Bengal, prices were soon five to six times higher than they had been before April 1942.Шаблон:Sfn Free trade was abandoned in July 1943,Шаблон:Sfn and price controls were reinstated in August.Шаблон:Sfn Despite this, there were unofficial reports of rice being sold in late 1943 at roughly eight to ten times the prices of late 1942.Шаблон:Sfnm Purchasing agents were sent out by the government to obtain rice, but their attempts largely failed. Prices remained high, and the black market was not brought under control.Шаблон:Sfn
October 1942: Natural disasters
Bengal was affected by a series of natural disasters late in 1942. The winter rice crop was afflicted by a severe outbreak of fungal brown spot disease, while, on 16–17 October a cyclone and three storm surges ravaged croplands, destroyed houses and killing thousands, at the same time dispersing high levels of fungal spores across the region and increasing the spread of the crop disease.Шаблон:Sfn The fungus reduced the crop yield even more than the cyclone.Шаблон:Sfnm After describing the horrific conditions he had witnessed, the mycologist S.Y.Шаблон:NbspPadmanabhan wrote that the outbreak was similar in impact to the potato blight that caused the Irish Great Famine: "Though administrative failures were immediately responsible for this human suffering, the principal cause of the short crop production of 1942 was the [plant] epidemic ... nothing as devastating ... has been recorded in plant pathological literature".Шаблон:Sfn
The Bengal cyclone came through the Bay of Bengal, landing on the coastal areas of Midnapore and 24 Parganas.Шаблон:Sfn It killed 14,500 people and 190,000 cattle, whilst rice paddy stocks in the hands of cultivators, consumers, and dealers were destroyed.Шаблон:Sfn It also created local atmospheric conditions that contributed to an increased incidence of malaria.Шаблон:Sfn The three storm surges which followed the cyclone destroyed the seawalls of Midnapore and flooded large areas of Contai and Tamluk.Шаблон:Sfn Waves swept an area of Шаблон:Convert, floods affected Шаблон:Convert, and wind and torrential rain damaged Шаблон:Convert. For nearly 2.5 million Bengalis, the accumulative damage of the cyclone and storm surges to homes, crops and livelihoods was catastrophic:Шаблон:Sfn
Шаблон:Blockquote The cyclone, floods, plant disease, and warm, humid weather reinforced each other and combined to have a substantial impact on the aman rice crop of 1942.Шаблон:Sfn Their impact was felt in other aspects as well, as in some districts the cyclone was responsible for an increased incidence of malaria, with deadly effect.Шаблон:Sfn
October 1942: Unreliable crop forecasts
At about the same time, official forecasts of crop yields predicted a significant shortfall.Шаблон:Sfnm However, crop statistics of the time were scant and unreliable.Шаблон:Sfnm Administrators and statisticians had known for decades that India's agricultural production statistics were completely inadequateШаблон:Sfn and "not merely guesses, but frequently demonstrably absurd guesses".Шаблон:Sfn There was little or no internal bureaucracy for creating and maintaining such reports, and the low-ranking police officers or village officials charged with gathering local statistics were often poorly supplied with maps and other necessary information, poorly educated, and poorly motivated to be accurate.Шаблон:Sfn The Bengal Government thus did not act on these predictions,Шаблон:Sfn doubting their accuracy and observing that forecasts had predicted a shortfall several times in previous years, while no significant problems had occurred.Шаблон:Sfn
Air raids on Calcutta
The Famine Inquiry Commission's 1945 report singled out the first Japanese air raids on Calcutta in December 1942 as a causation.Шаблон:Sfn The attacks, largely unchallenged by Allied defences,Шаблон:Sfn continued throughout the week,Шаблон:Sfn triggering an exodus of thousands from the city.Шаблон:Sfnm As evacuees travelled to the countryside, food-grain dealers closed their shops.Шаблон:Sfn To ensure that workers in the prioritised industries in Calcutta would be fed,Шаблон:Sfn the authorities seized rice stocks from wholesale dealers, breaking any trust the rice traders had in the government.Шаблон:Sfn "From that moment", the 1945 report stated, "the ordinary trade machinery could not be relied upon to feed Calcutta. The [food security] crisis had begun".Шаблон:Sfn
1942–1943: Shortfall and carryover
Whether the famine resulted from crop shortfall or failure of land distribution has been much debated.Шаблон:Sfnm According to Amartya Sen: "The ... [rice paddy] supply for 1943 was only about 5% lower than the average of the preceding five years. It was, in fact, 13% higher than in 1941, and there was, of course, no famine in 1941."Шаблон:Sfnm The Famine Inquiry Commission report concluded that the overall deficit in rice in Bengal in 1943, taking into account an estimate of the amount of carryover of rice from the previous harvest,Шаблон:Efn-ua was about three weeks' supply. In any circumstances, this was a significant shortfall requiring a considerable amount of food relief, but not a deficit large enough to create widespread deaths by starvation.Шаблон:Sfn According to this view, the famine "was not a crisis of food availability, but of the [unequal] distribution of food and income".Шаблон:Sfn There has been very considerable debate about the amount of carryover available for use at the onset of the famine.Шаблон:Sfnm
Several contemporary experts cite evidence of a much larger shortfall.Шаблон:Sfn Commission member Wallace Aykroyd argued in 1974 that there had been a 25% shortfall in the harvest of the winter of 1942,Шаблон:Sfn while Шаблон:Nowrap, responsible to the Government of Bengal from August 1942 to April 1943 for managing food supplies, estimated the crop loss at 20%, with disease accounting for more of the loss than the cyclone; other government sources privately admitted the shortfall was 2 million tons.Шаблон:Sfn The economist George Blyn argues that with the cyclone and floods of October and the loss of imports from Burma, the 1942 Bengal rice harvest had been reduced by one-third.Шаблон:Sfn
1942–1944: Refusal of imports
Beginning as early as December 1942, high-ranking government officials and military officers (including John Herbert, the Governor of Bengal; Viceroy Linlithgow; Leo Amery the Secretary of State for India; General Claude Auchinleck, Commander-in-Chief of British forces in India,Шаблон:Sfn and Admiral Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Commander of South-East AsiaШаблон:Sfn) began requesting food imports for India through government and military channels, but for months these requests were either rejected or reduced to a fraction of the original amount by Churchill's War Cabinet.Шаблон:Sfn The colony was also not permitted to spend its own sterling reserves, or even use its own ships, to import food.Шаблон:Sfn Although Viceroy Linlithgow appealed for imports from mid-December 1942, he did so on the understanding that the military would be given preference over civilians.Шаблон:Efn-ua The Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, was on one side of a cycle of requests for food aid and subsequent refusals from the British War Cabinet that continued through 1943 and into 1944.Шаблон:Sfn Amery did not mention worsening conditions in the countryside, stressing that Calcutta's industries must be fed or its workers would return to the countryside. Rather than meeting this request, the UK promised a relatively small amount of wheat that was specifically intended for western India (that is, not for Bengal) in exchange for an increase in rice exports from Bengal to Ceylon.Шаблон:Efn-ua
The tone of Linlithgow's warnings to Amery grew increasingly serious over the first half of 1943, as did Amery's requests to the War Cabinet; on 4Шаблон:NbspAugust 1943 Amery noted the spread of famine, and specifically stressed the effect upon Calcutta and the potential effect on the morale of European troops. The cabinet again offered only a relatively small amount, explicitly referring to it as a token shipment.Шаблон:Sfnm The explanation generally offered for the refusals included insufficient shipping,Шаблон:Sfnm particularly in light of Allied plans to invade Normandy.Шаблон:Sfn The Cabinet also refused offers of food shipments from several different nations.Шаблон:Sfnm When such shipments did begin to increase modestly in late 1943, the transport and storage facilities were understaffed and inadequate.Шаблон:Sfn When Viscount Archibald Wavell replaced Linlithgow as Viceroy in the latter half of 1943, he too began a series of exasperated demands to the War Cabinet for very large quantities of grain.Шаблон:Sfn His requests were again repeatedly denied, causing him to decry the current crisis as "one of the greatest disasters that has befallen any people under British rule, and [the] damage to our reputation both among Indians and foreigners in India is incalculable".Шаблон:Sfn Churchill wrote to Franklin D. Roosevelt at the end of April 1944 asking for aid from the United States in shipping wheat in from Australia, but Roosevelt replied apologetically on 1 June that he was "unable on military grounds to consent to the diversion of shipping".[1]
Experts' disagreement over political issues can be found in differing explanations of the War Cabinet's refusal to allocate funds to import grain. Lizzie Collingham holds the massive global dislocations of supplies caused by World War II virtually guaranteed that hunger would occur somewhere in the world, yet Churchill's animosity and perhaps racism toward Indians decided the exact location where famine would fall.Шаблон:Sfn Similarly, Madhusree Mukerjee makes a stark accusation: "The War Cabinet's shipping assignments made in August 1943, shortly after Amery had pleaded for famine relief, show Australian wheat flour travelling to Ceylon, the Middle East, and Southern Africa – everywhere in the Indian Ocean but to India. Those assignments show a will to punish."Шаблон:Sfn In contrast, Mark Tauger strikes a more supportive stance: "In the Indian Ocean alone from January 1942 to May 1943, the Axis powers sank 230 British and Allied merchant ships totalling 873,000 tons, in other words, a substantial boat every other day. British hesitation to allocate shipping concerned not only potential diversion of shipping from other war-related needs but also the prospect of losing the shipping to attacks without actually [bringing help to] India at all."Шаблон:Sfn Peter Bowbrick elaborates further on the British government's delay in shipping food, stating that Linlithgow's request for food shipments in December 1942 was half-hearted and that it was made on the assumption that Bengal already had a food surplus but that it was being hoarded, which is why it was ignored by the British metropolitan government. Further delays after April 1943 stemmed from the refusal to divert ships away from the preparations for Operation Overlord, whose failure would have been disastrous for the world and whose success was as a result prioritised above aid to India.[2] Historian James Holland writes that the reluctance of Churchill to divert shipping to India stemmed from his moral calculus concluding that potentially hindering crucial Allied military campaigns in Sicily and Italy and delaying preparations for Operation Overlord by diverting merchant ships to India was too great a risk to undertake; Holland further noted that "ships could not be diverted from the far side of the Atlantic, for example, at the drop of a hat."Шаблон:Sfn
Famine, disease, and the death toll
An estimated 0.8–3.8 millionШаблон:Efn-ua Bengalis died, out of a population of 60.3 million. According to Irish historian Cormac Ó Gráda "the scholarly consensus is about 2.1 million".Шаблон:Efn-ua
Contemporary mortality statistics were to some degree under-recorded, particularly for the rural areas, where data collecting and reporting was rudimentary even in normal times. Thus, many of those who died or migrated were unreported.Шаблон:Sfn The principal causes of death also changed as the famine progressed in two waves.Шаблон:Sfn
Early on, conditions drifted towards famine at different rates in different Bengal districts. The Government of India dated the beginning of the Bengal food crisis from the air raids on Calcutta in December 1942,Шаблон:Sfn blaming the acceleration to full-scale famine by May 1943 on the effects of price decontrol.Шаблон:Sfn However, in some districts the food crisis had begun as early as mid-1942.Шаблон:Sfn The earliest indications were somewhat obscured, since rural poor were able to draw upon various survival strategies for a few months.Шаблон:Sfn After December 1942 reports from various commissioners and district officers began to cite a "sudden and alarming" inflation, nearly doubling the price of rice; this was followed in January by reports of distress caused by serious food supply problems.Шаблон:Sfn In May 1943, six districts – Rangpur, Mymensingh, Bakarganj, Chittagong, Noakhali and Tipperah – were the first to report deaths by starvation. Chittagong and Noakhali, both "boat denial" districts in the Ganges Delta (or Sundarbans Delta) area, were the hardest hit.Шаблон:Sfnm In this first wave – from May to October 1943 – starvation was the principal cause of excess mortality (that is, those attributable to the famine, over and above the normal death rates), filling the emergency hospitals in Calcutta and accounting for the majority of deaths in some districts.Шаблон:Sfn According to the Famine Inquiry Commission report, many victims on the streets and in the hospitals were so emaciated that they resembled "living skeletons".Шаблон:Sfn While some districts of Bengal were relatively less affected throughout the crisis,Шаблон:Sfn no demographic or geographic group was completely immune to increased mortality rates caused by disease – but deaths from starvation were confined to the rural poor.Шаблон:Sfn
Deaths by starvation had peaked by November 1943.Шаблон:Sfn Disease began its sharp upward turn around October 1943 and overtook starvation as the most common cause of death around December.Шаблон:Sfn Disease-related mortality then continued to take its toll through early-to-mid 1944.Шаблон:Sfn Among diseases, malaria was the biggest killer.Шаблон:Sfn From July 1943 to June 1944, the monthly death toll from malaria averaged 125% above rates from the previous five years, reaching 203% above average in December 1943.Шаблон:Sfn Malaria parasites were found in nearly 52% of blood samples examined at Calcutta hospitals during the peak period, November–December 1944.Шаблон:Sfn Statistics for malaria deaths are almost certainly inaccurate, since the symptoms often resemble those of other fatal fevers, but there is little doubt that it was the main killer.Шаблон:Sfn Other famine-related deaths resulted from dysentery and diarrhoea, typically through consumption of poor-quality food or deterioration of the digestive system caused by malnutrition.Шаблон:Sfn Cholera is a waterborne disease associated with social disruption, poor sanitation, contaminated water, crowded living conditions (as in refugee camps), and a wandering population – problems brought on after the October cyclone and flooding and then continuing through the crisis.Шаблон:Sfnm The epidemic of smallpox largely resulted from a result of lack of vaccinations and the inability to quarantine patients, caused by general social disruption.Шаблон:Sfn According to social demographer Arup Maharatna, statistics for smallpox and cholera are probably more reliable than those for malaria, since their symptoms are more easily recognisable.Шаблон:Sfn
The mortality statistics present a confused picture of the distribution of deaths among age and gender groups. Although very young children and the elderly are usually more susceptible to the effects of starvation and disease, overall in Bengal it was adults and older children who suffered the highest proportional mortality rises.Шаблон:Sfn However, this picture was inverted in some urban areas, perhaps because the cities attracted large numbers of very young and very old migrants.Шаблон:Sfn In general, males suffered generally higher death rates than females,Шаблон:Sfn although the rate of female infant death was higher than for males, perhaps reflecting a discriminatory bias.Шаблон:Sfn A relatively lower death rate for females of child-bearing age may have reflected a reduction in fertility, brought on by malnutrition, which in turn reduced maternal deaths.Шаблон:Sfn
Regional differences in mortality rates were influenced by the effects of migration,Шаблон:Sfn and of natural disasters.Шаблон:Sfn In general, excess mortality was higher in the east (followed by west, centre, and north of Bengal in that order),Шаблон:Sfn even though the relative shortfall in the rice crop was worst in the western districts of Bengal.Шаблон:Sfn Eastern districts were relatively densely populated,Шаблон:SfnШаблон:Failed verification were closest to the Burma war zone, and normally ran grain deficits in pre-famine times.Шаблон:Sfnm These districts also were subject to the boat denial policy, and had a relatively high proportion of jute production instead of rice.Шаблон:Sfn Workers in the east were more likely to receive monetary wages than payment in kind with a portion of the harvest, a common practice in the western districts.Шаблон:SfnШаблон:Sfn When prices rose sharply, their wages failed to follow suit;Шаблон:Sfnm this drop in real wages left them less able to purchase food.Шаблон:Sfnm The following table, derived from Arup Maharatna (1992), shows trends in excess mortality for 1943–44 as compared to prior non-famine years. Death rate is total number of deaths in a year (mid-year population) from all causes, per 1000.Шаблон:Sfn All death rates are with respect to the population in 1941.Шаблон:Sfn Percentages for 1943–44 are of excess deaths (that is, those attributable to the famine, over and above the normal incidence)Шаблон:Efn-ua as compared to rates from 1937 to 1941.
| Cause of death | Pre-famine 1937–41 |
1943 | 1944 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rate | Rate | % | Rate | % | ||
| Cholera | 0.73 | 3.60 | 23.88 | 0.82 | 0.99 | |
| Smallpox | 0.21 | 0.37 | 1.30 | 2.34 | 23.69 | |
| Fever | 6.14 | 7.56 | 11.83 | 6.22 | 0.91 | |
| Malaria | 6.29 | 11.46 | 43.06 | 12.71 | 71.41 | |
| Dysentery/diarrhoea | 0.88 | 1.58 | 5.83 | 1.08 | 2.27 | |
| All other | 5.21 | 7.2 | 14.11 | 5.57 | 0.74 | |
| All causes | 19.46 | 31.77 | 100.00 | 28.75 | 100.00 | |
Overall, the table shows the dominance of malaria as the cause of death throughout the famine, accounting for roughly 43%Шаблон:Efn-ua of the excess deaths in 1943 and 71% in 1944. Cholera was a major source of famine-caused deaths in 1943 (24%) but dropped to a negligible percentage (1%) the next year. Smallpox deaths were almost a mirror image: they made up a small percentage of excess deaths in 1943 (1%) but jumped in 1944 (24%). Finally, the sharp jump in the death rate from "All other" causes in 1943 is almost certainly due to deaths from pure starvation, which were negligible in 1944.Шаблон:Sfn
Though excess mortality due to malarial deaths peaked in December 1943, rates remained high throughout the following year.Шаблон:Sfn Scarce supplies of quinine (the most common malaria medication) were very frequently diverted to the black market.Шаблон:Sfn Advanced anti-malarial drugs such as mepacrine (Atabrine) were distributed almost solely to the military and to "priority classes"; DDT (then relatively new and considered "miraculous") and pyrethrum were sprayed only around military installations. Paris Green was used as an insecticide in some other areas.Шаблон:Sfn This unequal distribution of anti-malarial measures may explain a lower incidence of malarial deaths in population centres, where the greatest cause of death was "all other" (probably migrants dying from starvation).Шаблон:Sfn
Deaths from dysentery and diarrhoea peaked in December 1943, the same month as for malaria.Шаблон:Sfn Cholera deaths peaked in October 1943 but receded dramatically in the following year, brought under control by a vaccination program overseen by military medical workers.Шаблон:Sfnm A similar smallpox vaccine campaign started later and was pursued less effectively;Шаблон:Sfn smallpox deaths peaked in April 1944.Шаблон:Sfn "Starvation" was generally not listed as a cause of death at the time; many deaths by starvation may have been listed under the "all other" category.Шаблон:Sfn Here the death rates, rather than per cents, reveal the peak in 1943.
The two waves – starvation and disease – also interacted and amplified one another, increasing the excess mortality.Шаблон:Sfnm Widespread starvation and malnutrition first compromised immune systems, and reduced resistance to disease led to death by opportunistic infections.Шаблон:Sfn Second, the social disruption and dismal conditions caused by a cascading breakdown of social systems brought mass migration, overcrowding, poor sanitation, poor water quality and waste disposal, increased vermin, and unburied dead. All of these factors are closely associated with the increased spread of infectious disease.Шаблон:Sfn
Social disruption
Despite the organised and sometimes violent civil unrest immediately before the famine,Шаблон:Efn-ua there was no organised rioting when the famine took hold.Шаблон:Sfn However, the crisis overwhelmed the provision of health care and key supplies: food relief and medical rehabilitation were supplied too late, whilst medical facilities across the province were utterly insufficient for the task at hand.Шаблон:Sfn A long-standing system of rural patronage, in which peasants relied on large landowners to supply subsistence in times of crisis, collapsed as patrons exhausted their own resources and abandoned the peasants.Шаблон:Sfn
Families also disintegrated, with cases of abandonment, child-selling, prostitution, and sexual exploitation.Шаблон:Sfnm Lines of small children begging stretched for miles outside cities; at night, children could be heard "crying bitterly and coughing terribly ... in the pouring monsoon rain ... stark naked, homeless, motherless, fatherless and friendless. Their sole possession was an empty tin".Шаблон:Sfn A schoolteacher in Mahisadal witnessed "children picking and eating undigested grains out of a beggar's diarrheal discharge".Шаблон:Sfn Author Freda Bedi wrote that it was "not just the problem of rice and the availability of rice. It was the problem of society in fragments".Шаблон:Sfn
Population displacement
The famine fell hardest on the rural poor. As the distress continued, families adopted increasingly desperate means for survival. First, they reduced their food intake and began to sell jewellery, ornaments, and smaller items of personal property. As expenses for food or burials became more urgent, the items sold became larger and less replaceable. Eventually, families disintegrated; men sold their small farms and left home to look for work or to join the army, and women and children became homeless migrants,Шаблон:Sfnm often travelling to Calcutta or another large city in search of organised relief:Шаблон:Sfnm
In Calcutta, evidence of the famine was "... mainly in the form of masses of rural destitutes trekking into the city and dying on the streets".Шаблон:Sfn Estimates of the number of the sick who flocked to Calcutta ranged between 100,000 and 150,000.Шаблон:Sfnm Once they left their rural villages in search of food, their outlook for survival was grim: "Many died by the roadside – witness the skulls and bones which were to be seen there in the months following the famine."Шаблон:Sfn
Sanitation and undisposed dead
The disruption of core elements of society brought a catastrophic breakdown of sanitary conditions and hygiene standards.Шаблон:Sfn Large-scale migration resulted in the abandonment of the facilities and sale of the utensils necessary for washing clothes or preparation of food.Шаблон:Sfnm Many people drank contaminated rainwater from streets and open spaces where others had urinated or defecated.Шаблон:Sfn Particularly in the early months of the crisis, conditions did not improve for those under medical care:
The desperate condition of the healthcare did not improve appreciably until the army, under Viscount Wavell, took over the provision of relief supplies in October 1943. At that time medical resourcesШаблон:Sfn were made far more available.Шаблон:Sfn
Disposal of corpses soon became a problem for the government and the public, as numbers overwhelmed cremation houses, burial grounds, and those collecting and disposing of the dead. Corpses lay scattered throughout the pavements and streets of Calcutta. In only two days of August 1943, at least 120 were removed from public thoroughfares.Шаблон:Sfn In the countryside bodies were often disposed of in rivers and water supplies.Шаблон:Sfnm As one survivor explained, "We couldn't bury them or anything. No one had the strength to perform rites. People would tie a rope around the necks and drag them over to a ditch."Шаблон:Sfn Corpses were also left to rot and putrefy in open spaces. The bodies were picked over by vultures and dragged away by jackals. Sometimes this happened while the victim was still living.Шаблон:Sfn The sight of corpses beside canals, ravaged by dogs and jackals, was common; during a seven-mile boat ride in Midnapore in November 1943, a journalist counted at least five hundred such sets of skeletal remains.Шаблон:Sfn The weekly newspaper Biplabi commented in November 1943 on the levels of putrefaction, contamination, and vermin infestation:
By the summer of 1943, many districts of Bengal, especially in the countryside, had taken on the look of "a vast charnel house".Шаблон:Sfn
Cloth famine
As a further consequence of the crisis, a "cloth famine" left the poorest in Bengal clothed in scraps or naked through the winter.Шаблон:SfnШаблон:Sfn The British military consumed nearly all the textiles produced in India by purchasing Indian-made boots, parachutes, uniforms, blankets, and other goods at heavily discounted rates.Шаблон:Sfn India produced 600,000 miles of cotton fabric during the war, from which it made two million parachutes and 415 million items of military clothing.Шаблон:Sfn It exported 177 million yards of cotton in 1938–1939 and 819 million in 1942–1943.Шаблон:Sfn The country's production of silk, wool and leather was also used up by the military.Шаблон:Sfn
The small proportion of material left over was purchased by speculators for sale to civilians, subject to similarly steep inflation;Шаблон:Sfn in May 1943 prices were 425% higher than in August 1939.Шаблон:Sfn With the supply of cloth crowded out by commitments to Britain and price levels affected by profiteering, those not among the "priority classes" faced increasingly dire scarcity. Swami Sambudhanand, President of the Ramakrishna Mission in Bombay, stated in July 1943:
Many women "took to staying inside a room all day long, emerging only when it was [their] turn to wear the single fragment of cloth shared with female relatives".Шаблон:Sfn
Exploitation of women and children
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.Шаблон:Sfnm The sexual exploitation of poor, rural, lower-caste and tribal women by the jotedars had been difficult to escape even before the crisis.Шаблон:Sfn 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.Шаблон:Sfn Tarakchandra Das suggests that a large proportion of the girls aged 15 and younger who migrated to Calcutta during the famine disappeared into brothels;Шаблон:Sfn in late 1943, entire boatloads of girls for sale were reported in ports of East Bengal.Шаблон:Sfn Girls were also prostituted to soldiers, with boys acting as pimps.Шаблон:Sfn Families sent their young girls to wealthy landowners overnight in exchange for very small amounts of money or rice,Шаблон:Sfn 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.Шаблон:Sfnm Women who had been sexually exploited could not later expect any social acceptance or a return to their home or family.Шаблон:Sfn Bina Agarwal writes that such women became permanent Шаблон:Not a typo in a society that highly values female chastity, rejected by both their birth family and husband's family.Шаблон:Sfn
An unknown number of children, some tens of thousands, were orphaned.Шаблон:Sfn Many others were abandoned, sometimes by the roadside or at orphanages,Шаблон:Sfn or sold for as much as two maunds (one maund was roughly equal to Шаблон:Convert),Шаблон:Sfn or as little as one seer (Шаблон:Convert)Шаблон:Sfn 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".Шаблон:Sfn They were also purchased by sexual predators. Altogether, according to Greenough, the victimisation and exploitation of these women and children was an immense social cost of the famine.Шаблон:Sfnm
Relief efforts
Aside from the relatively prompt but inadequate provision of humanitarian aid for the cyclone-stricken areas around Midnapore beginning in October 1942,Шаблон:Sfn the response of both the Bengal Provincial Government and the Government of India was slow.Шаблон:Sfnm A "non-trivial" yet "pitifully inadequate" amount of aid began to be distributed from private charitable organisationsШаблон:Sfn in the early months of 1943 and increased through time, mainly in Calcutta but to a limited extent in the countryside.Шаблон:Sfn In April, more government relief began to flow to the outlying areas, but these efforts were restricted in scope and largely misdirected,Шаблон:Sfn with most of the cash and grain supplies flowing to the relatively wealthy landowners and urban middle-class (and typically Hindu) bhadraloks.Шаблон:Sfnm This initial period of relief included three forms of aid:Шаблон:Sfn agricultural loans (cash for the purchase of paddy seed, plough cattle, and maintenance expenses),Шаблон:Sfn grain given as gratuitous relief, and "test works" that offered food and perhaps a small amount of money in exchange for strenuous work. The "test" aspect arose because there was an assumption that if relatively large numbers of people took the offer, that indicated that famine conditions were prevalent.Шаблон:Sfn Agricultural loans offered no assistance to the large numbers of rural poor who had little or no land.Шаблон:Sfn Grain relief was divided between cheap grain shops and the open market, with far more going to the markets. Supplying grain to the markets was intended to lower grain prices,Шаблон:Sfn but in practice gave little help to the rural poor, instead placing them into direct purchasing competition with wealthier Bengalis at greatly inflated prices.Шаблон:Sfn Thus from the beginning of the crisis until around August 1943, private charity was the principal form of relief available to the very poor.Шаблон:Sfn
According to Paul Greenough, the Provincial Government of Bengal delayed its relief efforts primarily because they had no idea how to deal with a provincial rice market crippled by the interaction of man-made shocks,Шаблон:Sfn as opposed to the far more familiar case of localised shortage due to natural disaster. Moreover, the urban middle-class were their overriding concern, not the rural poor. They were also expecting the Government of India to rescue Bengal by bringing food in from outside the province (350,000 tons had been promised but not delivered). And finally, they had long stood by a public propaganda campaign declaring "sufficiency" in Bengal's rice supply, and were afraid that speaking of scarcity rather than sufficiency would lead to increased hoarding and speculation.Шаблон:Sfn
There was also rampant corruption and nepotism in the distribution of government aid; often as much as half of the goods disappeared into the black market or into the hands of friends or relatives.Шаблон:Sfnm Despite a long-established and detailed Famine Code that would have triggered a sizable increase in aid, and a statement privately circulated by the government in June 1943 that a state of famine might need to be formally declared,Шаблон:Sfn this declaration never happened.Шаблон:Sfnm
Since government relief efforts were initially limited at best, a large and diverse number of private groups and voluntary workers attempted to meet the alarming needs caused by deprivation.Шаблон:Sfn Communists, socialists, wealthy merchants, women's groups, private citizens from distant Karachi and Indian expatriates from as far away as east Africa aided in relief efforts or sent donations of money, food and cloth.Шаблон:Sfn Markedly diverse political groups, including pro-war allies of the Raj and anti-war nationalists, each set up separate relief funds or aid groups.Шаблон:Sfnm Though the efforts of these diverse groups were sometimes marred by Hindu and Muslim communalism, with bitter accusations and counter-accusations of unfair treatment and favouritism,Шаблон:Sfn collectively they provided substantial aid.Шаблон:Sfn
Grain began to flow to buyers in Calcutta after the inter-provincial trade barriers were abolished in May 1943,Шаблон:Sfn but on 17 July a flood of the Damodar River in Midnapore breached major rail lines, severely hampering import by rail.Шаблон:Sfn As the depth and scope of the famine became unmistakable, the Provincial Government began setting up gruel kitchens in August 1943; the gruel, which often provided barely a survival-level caloric intake,Шаблон:Sfn was sometimes unfit for consumption – decayed or contaminated with dirt and filler.Шаблон:Sfnm Unfamiliar and indigestible grains were often substituted for rice, causing intestinal distress that frequently resulted in death among the weakest. Nevertheless, food distributed from government gruel kitchens immediately became the main source of aid for the rural poor.Шаблон:Sfn
The rails had been repaired in August and pressure from the Government of India brought substantial supplies into Calcutta during September,Шаблон:Sfn Linlithgow's final month as Viceroy. However, a second problem emerged: the Civil Supplies Department of Bengal was undermanned and under-equipped to distribute the supplies, and the resulting transportation bottleneck left very large piles of grain accumulating in the open air in several locations, including Calcutta's Botanical Garden.Шаблон:Sfnm Field Marshal Archibald Wavell replaced Linlithgow that October, within two weeks he had requested military support for the transport and distribution of crucial supplies. This assistance was delivered promptly, including "a full division of... 15,000 [British] soldiers...military lorries and the Royal Air Force" and distribution to even the most distant rural areas began on a large scale.Шаблон:Sfnm In particular, grain was imported from the Punjab, and medical resourcesШаблон:Sfn were made far more available.Шаблон:Sfnm Rank-and-file soldiers, who had sometimes fed the destitute from their rations (defying orders not to do so),Шаблон:Sfn were held in esteem by Bengalis for the efficiency of their work in distributing relief.Шаблон:Sfn That December, the "largest [rice] paddy crop ever seen" in Bengal was harvested. According to Greenough, large amounts of land previously used for other crops had been switched to rice production. The price of rice began to fall.Шаблон:Sfn Survivors of the famine and epidemics gathered the harvest themselves,Шаблон:Sfn though in some villages there were no survivors capable of doing the work.Шаблон:Sfn Wavell went on to make several other key policy steps, including promising that aid from other provinces would continue to feed the Bengal countryside, setting up a minimum rations scheme,Шаблон:Sfn and (after considerable effort) prevailing upon Great Britain to increase international imports.Шаблон:Sfn He has been widely praised for his decisive and effective response to the crisis.Шаблон:Sfnm All official food relief work ended in December 1943 and January 1944.Шаблон:SfnШаблон:SfnmШаблон:SfnmШаблон:Sfn
Economic and political effects
The famine's aftermath greatly accelerated pre-existing socioeconomic processes leading to poverty and income inequality,Шаблон:Sfn severely disrupted important elements of Bengal's economy and social fabric, and ruined millions of families.Шаблон:Sfnm The crisis overwhelmed and impoverished large segments of the economy. A key source of impoverishment was the widespread coping strategy of selling assets, including land. In 1943 alone in one village in east Bengal, for example, 54 out of a total of 168 families sold all or part of their landholdings; among these, 39 (or very nearly 3 out of 4) did so as a coping strategy in reaction to the scarcity of food.Шаблон:Sfn As the famine wore on across Bengal, nearly 1.6 million families – roughly one-quarter of all landholders – sold or mortgaged their paddy lands in whole or in part. Some did so to profit from skyrocketing prices, but many others were trying to save themselves from crisis-driven distress. A total of 260,000 families sold all their landholdings outright, thus falling from the status of landholders to that of labourers.Шаблон:Sfn The table below illustrates that land transfers increased significantly in each of four successive years. When compared to the base period of 1940–41, the 1941–42 increase was 504%, 1942–43 was 665%, 1943–44 was 1,057% and the increase of 1944–45 compared to 1940–41 was 872%:
| 1940–41 | 1941–42 | 1942–43 | 1943–44 | 1944–45 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 141,000 | 711,000 | 938,000 | 1,491,000 | 1,230,000 |
This fall into lower income groups happened across a number of occupations. In absolute numbers, the hardest hit by post-famine impoverishment were women and landless agricultural labourers. In relative terms, those engaged in rural trade, fishing and transport (boatmen and bullock cart drivers) suffered the most.Шаблон:Sfn In absolute numbers, agricultural labourers faced the highest rates of destitution and mortality.Шаблон:Sfn
The "panicky responses" of the colonial state as it controlled the distribution of medical and food supplies in the wake of the fall of Burma had profound political consequences. "It was soon obvious to the bureaucrats in New Delhi and the provinces, as well as the GHQ (India)," wrote Sanjoy Bhattacharya, "that the disruption caused by these short-term policies – and the political capital being made out of their effects – would necessarily lead to a situation where major constitutional concessions, leading to the dissolution of the Raj, would be unavoidable."Шаблон:Sfn Similarly, nationwide opposition to the boat denial policy, as typified by Mahatma Gandhi's vehement editorials, helped strengthen the Indian independence movement. The denial of boats alarmed the public; the resulting dispute was one point that helped to shape the "Quit India" movement of 1942 and harden the War Cabinet's response. An Indian National Congress (INC) resolution sharply decrying the destruction of boats and seizure of homes was considered treasonous by Churchill's War Cabinet, and was instrumental in the later arrest of the INC's top leadership.Шаблон:Sfn Public thought in India, shaped by impulses such as media coverage and charity efforts, converged into a set of closely related conclusions: the famine had been a national injustice, preventing any recurrence was a national imperative, and the human tragedy left in its wake was as Jawaharlal Nehru said "...the final judgment on British rule in India".Шаблон:Sfn According to historian Benjamin R. Siegel:
Media coverage and other depictions
Calcutta's two leading English-language newspapers were The Statesman (at the time British-owned)Шаблон:Sfnm and Amrita Bazar Patrika (edited by independence campaigner Tushar Kanti Ghosh).Шаблон:Sfn In the early months of the famine, the government applied pressure on newspapers to "calm public fears about the food supply"Шаблон:Sfn and follow the official stance that there was no rice shortage. This effort had some success; The Statesman published editorials asserting that the famine was due solely to speculation and hoarding, while "berating local traders and producers, and praising ministerial efforts".Шаблон:SfnШаблон:Efn-ua News of the famine was also subject to strict war-time censorship – even use of the word "famine" was prohibitedШаблон:Sfn – leading The Statesman later to remark that the UK government "seems virtually to have withheld from the British public knowledge that there was famine in Bengal at all".Шаблон:Sfn
Beginning in mid-July 1943 and more so in August, however, these two newspapers began publishing detailed and increasingly critical accounts of the depth and scope of the famine, its impact on society, and the nature of British, Hindu, and Muslim political responses.Шаблон:Sfn A turning point in news coverage came on 22 August 1943, when the editor of The Statesman, Ian Stephens, solicited and published a series of graphic photos of the victims. These made world headlinesШаблон:Sfn and marked the beginning of domestic and international consciousness of the famine.Шаблон:Sfnm The next morning, "in Delhi second-hand copies of the paper were selling at several times the news-stand price,"Шаблон:Sfn and soon "in Washington the State Department circulated them among policy makers".Шаблон:Sfn In Britain, The Guardian called the situation "horrible beyond description".Шаблон:Sfn The images had a profound effect and marked "for many, the beginning of the end of colonial rule".Шаблон:Sfn Stephens' decision to publish them and to adopt a defiant editorial stance won accolades from many (including the Famine Inquiry Commission),Шаблон:Sfnm and has been described as "a singular act of journalistic courage without which many more lives would have surely been lost".Шаблон:Sfn The publication of the images, along with Stephens' editorials, not only helped to bring the famine to an end by driving the British government to supply adequate relief to the victims,Шаблон:Sfnm but also inspired Amartya Sen's influential contention that the presence of a free press prevents famines in democratic countries.Шаблон:Sfn The photographs also spurred Amrita Bazar Patrika and the Indian Communist Party's organ, People's War, to publish similar images; the latter would make photographer Sunil Janah famous.Шаблон:Sfn Women journalists who covered the famine included Freda Bedi reporting for Lahore's The Tribune,Шаблон:Sfn and Vasudha Chakravarti and Kalyani Bhattacharjee, who wrote from a nationalist perspective.Шаблон:Sfn
The famine has been portrayed in novels, films and art. The novel Ashani Sanket by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay is a fictional account of a young doctor and his wife in rural Bengal during the famine. It was adapted into a film of the same name (Distant Thunder) by director Satyajit Ray in 1973. The film is listed in The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made.Шаблон:Sfn Also well-known are the novel So Many Hungers! (1947) by Bhabani Bhattacharya and the 1980 film Akaler Shandhaney by Mrinal Sen. Ella Sen's collection of stories based on reality, Darkening Days: Being a Narrative of Famine-Stricken Bengal recounts horrific events from a woman's point of view.Шаблон:Sfn
A contemporary sketchbook of iconic scenes of famine victims, Hungry Bengal: a tour through Midnapur District in November, 1943 by Chittaprosad, was immediately banned by the British and 5,000 copies were seized and destroyed.Шаблон:Sfn One copy was hidden by Chittaprosad's family and is now in the possession of the Delhi Art Gallery.Шаблон:Sfn Another artist famed for his sketches of the famine was Zainul Abedin.Шаблон:Sfn
Historiography
Controversy about the causes of the famine has continued in the decades since. Attempting to determine culpability, research and analysis has covered complex issues such as the impacts of natural forces, market failures, failed policies or even malfeasance by governmental institutions, and war profiteering or other unscrupulous acts by private business. The questionable accuracy of much of the available contemporary statistical and anecdotal data is a complicating factor,Шаблон:Sfn as is the fact that the analyses and their conclusions are political and politicised.Шаблон:Sfnm
The degree of crop shortfall in late 1942 and its impact in 1943 has dominated the historiography of the famine.Шаблон:SfnШаблон:Efn-ua The issue reflects a larger debate between two perspectives: one emphasises the importance of food availability decline (FAD) as a cause for famine, and another focuses on the failure of exchange entitlements (FEE). The FAD explanation blames famine on crop failures brought on principally by crises such as drought, flood, or man-made devastation from war.Шаблон:Sfnm The FEE account agrees that such external factors are in some cases important, but holds that famine is primarily the interaction between pre-existing "structural vulnerability" (such as poverty) and a shock event (such as war or political interference in markets) that disrupts the economic market for food. When these interact, some groups within society can become unable to purchase or acquire food even though sufficient supplies are available.Шаблон:Sfn
Both the FAD and the FEE perspectives would agree that Bengal experienced at least some grain shortage in 1943 due to the loss of imports from Burma, damage from the cyclone, and brown-spot infestation. However, the FEE analyses do not consider shortage the main factor,Шаблон:Sfn while FAD-oriented scholars such as Peter Bowbrick hold that a sharp drop in the food supply was the pivotal determining factor.Шаблон:Sfn S.Y.Шаблон:NbspPadmanabhan and later Mark Tauger, in particular, argue that the impact of brown-spot disease was vastly underestimated, both during the famine and in later analyses.Шаблон:Sfnm The signs of crop infestation by the fungus are subtle; given the social and administrative conditions at the time, local officials would very likely have overlooked them.Шаблон:Sfn
Academic consensus generally follows the FEE account,Шаблон:Citation needed as formulated by Amartya Sen,Шаблон:Sfnm in describing the Bengal famine of 1943 as an "entitlements famine". On this view, the prelude to the famine was generalised war-time inflation, and the problem was exacerbated by prioritised distribution and abortive attempts at price control,Шаблон:Sfnm but the death blow was devastating leaps in the inflation rate due to heavy speculative buying and panic-driven hoarding.Шаблон:Sfnm This in turn caused a fatal decline in the real wages of landless agricultural workers,Шаблон:Sfn transforming what should have been a local shortage into a major famine.Шаблон:Sfn
More recent analyses often stress political factors.Шаблон:Sfn Discussions of the government's role split into two broad camps: those which suggest that the government unwittingly caused or was unable to respond to the crisis,Шаблон:Sfn and those which assert that the government wilfully caused or ignored the plight of starving Indians. The former see the problem as a series of avoidable war-time policy failures and "panicky responses"Шаблон:Sfn from a government that was inept,Шаблон:Sfnm overwhelmedШаблон:Sfn and in disarray; the latter being a product of wartime priorities by the "ruling colonial elite",Шаблон:Sfn which left the poor of Bengal unprovided for, due to military considerations.Шаблон:Sfn
Sen does not deny that British misgovernment contributed to the crisis, but sees the policy failure as a complete misunderstanding of the cause of the famine. This misunderstanding led to a wholly misguided emphasis on measuring non-existent food shortages rather than addressing the very real and devastating inflation-driven imbalances in exchange entitlements.Шаблон:Sfn In stark contrast, although Cormac Ó Gráda notes that the exchange entitlements view of this famine is generally accepted,Шаблон:Sfn he lends greater weight to the importance of a crop shortfall than does Sen, and goes on to largely reject Sen's emphasis on hoarding and speculation.Шаблон:Sfnm He does not stop there but emphasises a "lack of political will" and the pressure of wartime priorities that drove the British government and the provincial government of Bengal to make fateful decisions: the "denial policies", the use of heavy shipping for war supplies rather than food, the refusal to officially declare a state of famine, and the Balkanisation of grain markets through inter-provincial trade barriers.Шаблон:Sfnm On this view, these policies were designed to serve British military goals at the expense of Indian interests,Шаблон:Sfn reflecting the War Cabinet's willingness to "supply the Army's needs and let the Indian people starve if necessary".Шаблон:Sfnm Far from being accidental, these dislocations were fully recognised beforehand as fatal for identifiable Indian groups whose economic activities did not directly, actively, or adequately advance British military goals.Шаблон:Sfn The policies may have met their intended wartime goals, but only at the cost of large-scale dislocations in the domestic economy. The British government, this argument maintains, thus bears moral responsibility for the rural deaths.Шаблон:Sfn Auriol Law-Smith's discussion of contributing causes of the famine also lays blame on the British government of India, primarily emphasising Viceroy Linlithgow's lack of political will to "infringe provincial autonomy" by using his authority to remove interprovincial barriers, which would have ensured the free movement of life-saving grain.Шаблон:Sfn Utsa Patnaik's view is that the famine occurred due to high prices which reduced food consumption of the general population. According to Patnaik, this was caused by the British government's "profit inflation" policies, which were designed to finance war spending.Шаблон:Sfn[4]
A related argument, present since the days of the famineШаблон:Sfn but expressed at length by journalist Madhusree Mukerjee, accuses key figures in the British government (particularly Prime Minister Winston Churchill)Шаблон:Sfn of genuine antipathy toward Indians and Indian independence, an antipathy arising mainly from a desire to protect imperialist power but sourced from racist attitudes towards Indian people.Шаблон:Sfn This is sometimes attributed to British anger over widespread Bengali nationalist sentiment and the perceived treachery of the violent Quit India uprising.Шаблон:Sfnm Several historians have critiqued this view,Шаблон:Sfnm with Tirthankar Roy referring to it as "naive".Шаблон:Sfn Instead, Roy attributes the delayed response to rivalry and misinformation spread about the famine within the local government, particularly by the Minister of Civil Supplies Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, who maintained there was no food shortage throughout the famine, while noting that there is little evidence of Churchill's views influencing War Cabinet policy.Шаблон:Sfn
For its part, the report of the Famine Commission (its members appointed in 1944 by the British Government of IndiaШаблон:Sfn and chaired by Sir John Woodhead, a former Indian Civil Service official in Bengal),Шаблон:Sfn absolved the British government from all major blame.Шаблон:Sfnm It acknowledge some failures in its price controls and transportation effortsШаблон:Sfn and laid additional responsibility at the feet of unavoidable fate, but reserved its broadest and most forceful finger-pointing for local politicians in the (largely Muslim)Шаблон:SfnШаблон:Failed verificationШаблон:Efn-ua provincial Government of Bengal:Шаблон:Sfn As it stated, "after considering all the circumstances, we cannot avoid the conclusion that it lay in the power of the Government of Bengal, by bold, resolute and well-conceived measures at the right time to have largely prevented the tragedy of the famine as it actually took place".Шаблон:Sfn For example, the position of the Famine Inquiry Commission with respect to charges that prioritised distribution aggravated the famine is that the Government of Bengal's lack of control over supplies was the more serious matter.Шаблон:Sfn Some sources allege that the Famine Commission deliberately declined to blame the UK or was even designed to do so;Шаблон:Sfnm however, Bowbrick defends the report's overall accuracy, stating it was undertaken without any preconceptions and twice describing it as excellent. Meanwhile, he repeatedly and rather forcefully favors its analyses over Sen's.Шаблон:Sfn British accusations that Indian officials were responsible began as early as 1943, as an editorial in The Statesman on 5 October noted disapprovingly.Шаблон:Sfn
Paul Greenough stands somewhat apart from other analysts by emphasising a pattern of victimization.Шаблон:Sfn In his account, Bengal was at base susceptible to famine because of population pressures and market inefficiencies, and these were exacerbated by a dire combination of war, political strife, and natural causes.Шаблон:SfnШаблон:Sfnm Above all else, direct blame should be laid on a series of government interventions that disrupted the wholesale rice market.Шаблон:Sfn Once the crisis began, morbidity rates were driven by a series of cultural decisions, as dependents were abandoned by their providers at every level of society: male heads of peasant households abandoned weaker family members; landholders abandoned the various forms of patronage that according to Greenough had traditionally been maintained, and the government abandoned the rural poor. These abandoned groups had been socially and politically selected for death.Шаблон:Sfnm
A final line of blaming holds that major industrialists either caused or at least significantly exacerbated the famine through speculation, war profiteering, hoarding, and corruption – "unscrupulous, heartless grain traders forcing up prices based on false rumors".Шаблон:Sfnm Working from an assumption that the Bengal famine claimed 1.5 million lives, the Famine Inquiry Commission made a "gruesome calculation" that "nearly a thousand rupees [£88 in 1944; equivalent to £Шаблон:InflationШаблон:Inflation-fn or $Шаблон:InflationШаблон:Inflation-fn in Шаблон:Inflation-year] of profits were accrued per death".Шаблон:Sfnm As the Famine Inquiry Commission put it, "a large part of the community lived in plenty while others starved ... corruption was widespread throughout the province and in many classes of society".Шаблон:Sfn
See also
Footnotes
References
Notes
Works cited
Primary sources
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Books, book chapters
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- Шаблон:Cite book An earlier and somewhat different version is available in a conference paper at UCD Centre for Economic Research (Working Paper Series). Retrieved 9 February 2016
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Articles
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Further reading
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External links
Шаблон:Commons category Шаблон:Wikiquote
- Bengal Famine materials in the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA)
- Hungry Bengal – War, Famine, Riots, and the End of Empire 1939–1946
- BBC/OU: The things we forgot to remember – The Bengal famine Шаблон:Webarchive
Шаблон:Bengal famine of 1943 Шаблон:Navboxes Шаблон:Authority control
- ↑ Шаблон:Cite web
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- ↑ Derived from Шаблон:Harvtxt
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- Страницы с нечисловыми аргументами formatnum
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- 1940s health disasters
- 1943 disasters in India
- 1943 in India
- 20th-century famines
- Bengal Presidency
- British Empire in World War II
- Famines in Bangladesh
- Famines in British India
- Famines in India
- India in World War II
- Burma campaign
- Страницы, где используется шаблон "Навигационная таблица/Телепорт"
- Страницы с телепортом
- Википедия
- Статья из Википедии
- Статья из Английской Википедии
