NOTES

Bengal Famine of 1943

An Appraisal of the Famine
Inquiry Commission
Madhusree Mukerjee

Comparing the secret transcripts

of the hearings of the Famine
Commission that went into
the reasons for Bengals 1943
famine with its published report
reveals serious omissions and
obfuscations. These call into
question scholars reliance on the
commissions published figures
of the availability of rice in the
famine year.

Madhusree Mukerjee (lopchu@madhusree.

com) is a writer, science journalist, and former
physicist. She is the author of Churchills Secret
War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of
India during World War II (New York: Basic
Books, 2010).
Economic & Political Weekly

EPW

march 15, 2014

n October 1943, when Field Marshal

Archibald Wavell arrived in India to
assume the post of viceroy from
Linlithgow, he faced a vociferous demand
from Indian politicians for an inquiry
into the ongoing famine in Bengal.
Leopold Amery, the secretary of state for
India, advised against yielding to such a
demand, however My own view was
and is that enquiry now would be disastrous and that enquiry at future date is
undesirable (Mansergh IV: 463). When
it turned out that these voices would not
be quieted, Amery suggested deflecting
the inquiry into a Malthusian direction
a broad study that would do no harm
even if pursued now, prospect of investigation by one or two experts into relation between growth of population and
available supplies of foodgrains (ibid:
468). That is, Amery suggested linking
the famine with food supply, not because
he believed that was the real story, but
as a purely political exercise designed to
lead the discussion away from inflammatory matters such as inflationary
financing of Indias war effort. Privately,
Amery opined that the famine occurred
because India had been forced to provide excessive resources toward the
Allied prosecution of the second world
war (ibid: 445).
Using Thomas Robert Malthus, and by
extension food shortages, to explain
away famines was routine in colonial
India. The inquiry commissions instituted
after major late-Victorian famines invariably blamed natural calamity, along
with the propensity of Indians to breed
excessively. Rangasami has shown, however, that district administrators evinced
a comprehensive view of how famines
came about. They knew, for instance, that
tax collection could itself precipitate
vol xlIX no 11

famine, and that crop failure alone

could not be expected to develop into a
famine unless speculative forces became
active. If they worried about short harvests, it was because of possible revenue
shortfalls rather than concerns about
famine. Altogether, she notes, administrators were far from being in thrall
to the food availability decline (FAD)
hypothesis described by Amartya Sen
the concept that famines are caused by a
FAD (Rangasami 1985).
The Famine Commissions were, however, another matter altogether. These
were designed to exonerate the administration from any blame for the famines;
and by attributing famines to the stinginess of nature, the FAD view fitted nicely
in this design, in the words of Osmani
(1993). He agrees with Rangasami that
British officials had developed a view of
famines that was remarkably similar to
the entitlement approach later introduced
by Sen (that is, the idea that famines result
when many people lose the ability to access food, or their entitlement to food).
Tauger points out, moreover, that such a
holistic approach to famine is also evident
in the classic works on colonial economics
by William Digby (1901), Dadabhai Naoroji
(1996 (1901)), and Romesh Chunder Dutt
(1989 (1902 and 1904)) (Tauger; private
communication). There is thus unmistakable evidence of the existence, one might
even say pervasiveness, of entitlementbased thinking in the earlier literature
on Indian famines, summarises Osmani
(1993). Nonetheless, in official reports
the FAD approach prevailed as a defence
against embarrassment, given that
famines had begun to recur at an unprecedented frequency just after the
rule of India had passed over from the
East India Company to the Crown. The
Malthusian theory came handy (ibid).
Given this history, it is scarcely surprising that the Famine Commission set
up in 1944 concluded, Shortage in the
supply of rice in 1943 was one of the basic
causes of the famine (Woodhead 1945:
103). The commission claimed, however,
a shortage of only three weeks requirement of rice, a quantity too small to have
caused alarm. In particular, it stated that
71

NOTES

the shortage of current supply was a

little more serious during 1943 than in
1936 and 1928, but less serious than in
1941 (ibid: 211) exactly the comparison
that Sen would later make in his famous
paper on the Bengal famine.
Nanavati Papers
On what basis did the Famine Commission
claim that the rice shortage was too
small to have been predictive of famine?
For an answer, it is instructive to review
the Nanavati Papers, the unpublished
transcripts of the secret hearings of the
Famine Commission. These are highly
revealing of the bodys underlying motivations. Members of the commission
were reportedly ordered to destroy their
copies of these transcripts, but fortunately
Justice Nanavati did not comply his set,
or at least parts of it, are to be found in
the National Archives of India in New
Delhi.1 Along with other sources, the
Nanavati Papers demonstrate that the
Famine Commissions best efforts were
directed not towards explaining the
famine, but towards obscuring the role
played by His Majestys government in
precipitating and aggravating the famine.
It is in this context that the commissions
figures on Bengals rice harvest need to
be appraised.
Throughout the first half of 1943,
the Bengal administration had publicly
claimed that there was enough grain to
ward off famine to keep up public
morale, deter hoarding, and rationalise its
ongoing appropriation of food for the war
effort in India and abroad. As early as
August 1942, Bengals then chief minister,
A K Fazlul Huq, had warned of approaching famine because of the governments
scorched-earth policy in eastern and
coastal Bengal, but he was deposed by the
governor, John Herbert, for his refusal to
toe the line on this and other issues (Huq
1944: 15-16). A subsequent food minister
for Bengal, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy,
also believed famine to be approaching,
but was obliged by the essentially British
senior administration to announce that
Bengal faced no shortages (Nanavati IV:
1013). Prominent British civil servants
were pressed into publicly preaching
sufficiency. However, at one of several
press conferences held by the Bengal
72

administration to persuade newspapermen that there wasnt or soon wouldnt

be any real shortage, Ian Stephens, the
editor of The Statesman (and himself a
former public relations officer for the
government of India), observed two
unhappy but not dishonest men working to a brief they didnt believe in
(1966: 176-79). A senior official of the
agriculture department, who was entrusted with distributing limited relief
after the cyclone in October 1942, explained to the Famine Commission why
the operations could not be extended to
provide famine relief to all of Bengal, as
per the famine manual.
A large famine relief organisation could
not however be set up without great deal of
publicity. This publicity could not very well
be done when propaganda was being made
that there was no fear of serious shortage
for keeping up the morale of the people
(Nanavati IV: 1154).

(Not until Wavell took office as viceroy

in October 1943 was meaningful famine
relief organised in Bengal.)
Another reason for not invoking the
famine code was the inability of the
Bengal administration to access enough
rice or wheat. In truth, Herbert was well
aware that there was not enough grain
in Bengal to feed both the war effort and
the people, and was repeatedly pleading
with New Delhi for wheat.2 The Government of India in turn begged London for
wheat imports while it instructed the
Bengal government to publicly claim
sufficiency.3 Justice Henry B L Braund of
Bengals department of civil supplies
said he had been told this shortage is a
thing entirely of your own imagination
by the Government of India in March
1943. We do not believe it and you have
got to get it out of your head that Bengal
is deficit. You have got to preach that
there is sufficiency in Bengal and if you
wait you will find that there is sufficiency
in Bengal (Nanavati IV: 1013). (This
was apparently a response to a memorandum that Braund had submitted predicting famine because of food shortages.) Meanwhile, civil servant Leonard
G Pinnell was instructed to squash any
rumours of shortages by attacking and
confining on a large scale those who were
likely to be its exponents (Gupta 1997:
Part II). As this author has shown in
march 15, 2014

Churchills Secret War (2010), the original

instructions to downplay Indias food
shortage came from London. The British
war cabinet did not intend to send the
colony the wheat it needed and was
placing intense pressure on it to export
rice despite having been warned that
the harvest was short. Authorities in
London therefore encouraged downward revisions of the shortage figures.4
The Bengal administrations record of
having repeatedly and stridently claimed
sufficiency placed the Famine Commission in a bind. It was required to find that
the famine was due to food shortage, as
Amery had all but specified. At the same
time, it could not admit that the government had all along deliberately misled
the public. In consequence, it appears to
have steered the safest route possible by
both attributing the famine to food shortage and simultaneously presenting the
least available figure for the shortage the
figure Sen used. It did not publish other
estimates of the grain shortage, which
were considerably higher, and therefore
could claim that the administration had
no reason to anticipate famine.
Estimates of Aman Harvest
The Nanavati Papers, among other sources, contain estimates of the shortfall in
the aman harvest of late 1942 and early
1943 that are not mentioned in the Famine
Commissions report. Binay Ranjan Sen,
director-general of food, testified that
according to the Director of Civil Supplies, Bengal, 20% of the paddy crop was
destroyed and according to the Director
of Agriculture 30% (Nanavati II: 440).
The Bengal Provincial Kisan Sabha, a
farmers association, estimated that at
least six annas of the crop had failed,
which is 37.5% (ibid IV: 1104). Economic
historian Tauger (2003) found that a
contemporary agronomist, Padmanabhan, had used data from two agricultural
research stations to calculate that the
aman harvest was at least 50% (and possibly as much as 75%) lower than that of
the previous (bumper) year because of
pest damage. The 50% figure translates
to a 44% reduction from a normal crop.
To compare, the Famine Commissions
published report stated that, based on data
provided by the director of agriculture,
vol xlIX no 11

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NOTES

the aman crop was five million tonnes,

compared to a normal (five-year average)
yield of 6.2 million tonnes a non-trivial
shortage of 20% but an unexplained reduction from the directors own estimate
of 30% (Woodhead 1945: 213).
Note, moreover, that the published
figures were projections, not actual
measurements of the harvest, and subject to grave uncertainties, given the collapse of the rural administration in Bengal since 1941. For reasons that are not
entirely clear, thousands of village
chowkidars, who along with many other
duties were entrusted with gathering
harvest data in permanent settlement
areas such as Bengal, had not been paid
since 1941 and many of them died during
the famine (Srimanjari 1998: 41). From
February 1942 onwards, British officials
in India became fearful of a possible
Japanese attack from Burma and initiated
a withdrawal of government offices from
the coastal and eastern areas of Bengal.
It is far from clear who made the crop
estimates in these denial areas. In
others, district-level officials gauged the
area under cultivation as well as probable
yields. Tauger (2009) notes, however,
that these administrative personnel had
no expert knowledge of agriculture and
could easily have missed the subtle signs
of infestation by helminthosporium oryzae
that agronomists believe devastated the
ultimate crop.
Suspect Numbers
Contemporary observers concur that the
official figures on Bengals harvest were
highly suspect even in normal years. The
Indian Central Food Advisory Council
noted in 1944, Agricultural statistics
particularly in the permanently settled
areas are chaotic. Both area and yield
figures as recorded at present are unreliable (quoted in Tauger 2003). Anthropologist Tarakchandra Das, who dissected
the famine in an important 1949 report,
similarly quoted the land revenue commission, Bengal, The unreliability of
the Agricultural Departments figures
has been pointed out by the Royal Commission on Agriculture which described
them as mere guesses, and not infrequently demonstrably absurd guesses
and the Government of India referred to
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march 15, 2014

them as being largely conjectural (Das

1949: 100). Braund concurred, telling
the Famine Commission that crop estimates in Bengal were based on guesswork (Nanavati IV: 992).
The Famine Commission nonetheless
based its calculations on these forecasts,
with certain adjustments. By changing
the estimated area and yields of the fields
under cultivation, adding in imports and
minor harvests later in the year, as well as
after making other corrections, the commission estimated that the food supply in
1943 was 8.896 million tonnes, compared
to a normal supply of 9.62 million tonnes
(Woodhead 1945: 215). This apparently
small shortfall of 7,24,000 tonnes (7%)
translated into a per capita availability
of grain that was higher in 1943 than in
1941, and led Sen to claim that the food
shortage was in itself too small to cause
famine (2004: 62-63).
As Goswami has noted, it is the supply
situation at the beginning of the year
that is predictive of famine, not the
grain availability in the entire year
(which was of course increased by relief
shipments after famine set in). He recalculated the official figures to find that
there was little carry-over of rice from
the previous year, resulting in a significantly greater shortage in 1943 than in
1941 (Goswami 1990). Other documents
yield other numbers. The Transfer of
Power volumes indicate that early in 1943
the Government of India estimated a rice
shortfall in Bengal of 1.4 million tonnes
for the populace alone, and two million
tonnes including defence and export
requirements (Mansergh III: 333-34, 357,
394). In documents held by the ministry
of war transport in London and originating in the India Office, which presumably
got its numbers from the Government of
India, estimates of the rice shortage in
1943 are as high as two million tonnes in
Bengal alone, and 3.5 million tonnes in
India as a whole.5 (The Bengal figure
corresponds to a 30% shortage in the
aman harvest, as per the director of
agricultures original estimate.) OGrada
(2008) reviewed the price trends, newspaper reports, official communications,
and harvest data during 1943 and concluded that there was a significant deficit and the authorities knew it.
vol xlIX no 11

What else did the commission blame

the famine on? To understand that, one
needs to look at Amerys further instruction that the government keep the
political side of this business out of it as
far as possible by choosing the members
of the inquiry committee carefully and
by limiting its field of study to personnel
and events within India (Mansergh IV:
663). In particular, Amery told Wavell
that the Famine Commission should avoid
looking into strategical and other circumstances as may have contributed
to internal transportation difficulties or
affected HMGs decisions in regard to
shipping of imports (ibid: 468, 725). In
other words, the commission would not
look into the question of railways almost
all the trains were employed in the war
effort, and few had been made available
to take wheat from Punjab to Bengal.
More important, the commission would
ignore the entire issue of shipping. Only
massive imports of rice or wheat from
outside India would have broken the
famine, and the implicit assumption the
commission made was that ships were
not available.
So the commission examined local
factors in a lot of detail, and avoided
every lead that led to London. Apart from
the food shortage, it blamed corrupt rice
brokers, the Bengal administration, and
to a lesser extent the Government of
India for the famine. It did not interview
Wavell, who had been commander-inchief of the Indian Army while it implemented a scorched-earth policy in Bengal,
and therefore did not learn that the
orders had originally come from London.6
The commission did interview Pinnell,
who had been sent to Bengal by Linlithgow
to help implement the scorched-earth
policy, but although he was probably
aware of the orders provenance, he was
not asked about it. Nor did the commission seek testimonies from anyone who
had since left India such as Linlithgow
himself, an expert in Indian agriculture
who had presided over the start of the
famine and who, in July 1943, had estimated a death toll of up to one and a half
million (Moon 1973: 32-34).
Two months earlier, Linlithgow had informed Herbert that food problems arise
in acute form solely as a result of the war
73

NOTES

situation, and one may reasonably hope

that with the conclusion of the war those
difficulties will become less if indeed they
do not, as one hopes they may, disappear
entirely (Gupta 1997: Part II). (The viceroy, like the secretary of state for India,
was far from being captive to the FAD
hypothesis. A lecture given by a senior
official of the Indian government to army
commanders in July 1943 also evinces a
comprehensive grasp of the several warrelated factors, such as inflation and the
excessive export of commodities, which
had led to the famine.)7 Linlithgow had
repeatedly and urgently warned Amery
that inflationary financing of the war effort was causing the Indian economy to
collapse, and in August 1942 his emissary
had informed the war cabinet in London
of the possibility of famine in India arising
from inflation alone (Mansergh II: 590).
But the Famine Commission did not discuss inflationary financing. It did learn
of but did not publish anything about
the roughly 80,000 tonnes of Indianregistered shipping that was under the
control of the war cabinet but was not
released to send famine relief to India
(Nanavati II: 461, 468-70). Although the
commission knew that rice exports from
India had continued until July 1943, it did
not publish that information. And while
failing to discuss the question of relief
imports, it left the impression that only
imports of rice, rather than wheat, would
have relieved the famine which was far
from the case. Rice was scarce worldwide that year, so that tactic let the war
cabinet off the hook for having sent only
token relief (Woodhead 1945: 103-07).
Discrepancies
A couple of examples will suffice to illustrate the discrepancy between the testimonies offered to the Famine Commission and the information it eventually
chose to publish. Pinnell testified that
during the boat denial campaign in eastern Bengal, nine-tenths of the large
boats that could be found were destroyed
or otherwise taken out of commission,
and he could not be sure how many still
remained (Nanavati II: 545-46). Nonetheless, the Famine Commission reported
that 20,417 boats, or a third of the total,
were still left, a figure whose absurd
74

precision served to mask its patent inaccuracy (Woodhead 1945: 26).

Similarly, the Famine Commission
concluded that about one million people
died in the famine without acknowledging that a comprehensive survey
of mortality in 1943 that statistician
P C Mahalanobis had submitted to the
commission pointed to at least 1.5 million
deaths in that year alone, and probably
twice as many in the famine taken as a
whole (Mukerjee 2010: 271). In truth, this
survey is not even to be found in the
Nanavati Papers but was unearthed by
historian Greenough at the Indian Statistical Institute, which suggests that some
documents were withheld from the Indian
members of the commission. In addition,
Mahalanobis was unable to repeat this
government-funded survey to measure
the mortality in 1944 from famine-related
disease a clear sign that the government
was not interested in learning the true
toll of the famine (Greenough 1982: 305).
Further, the Nanavati Papers show
that the administration anticipated the
death of a large number of people in the
rural area, in the words of Pinnell,
because of its actions in seizing grain for
the war effort belying Sens claim that
the administration did not anticipate
famine because it was obsessed with
FAD.8 The bulk of the evidence indicates
that there was a substantial decline in
food availability early in 1943, that both
the Bengal and the India governments
anticipated famine, and that the war
cabinet in London was repeatedly warned
of the possibility of famine arising from
a multitude of factors.9
In defending his use of the Famine
Commissions published data on Bengals
rice availability in 1943, Sen has argued,
Was the Famine Commission, then, callous or
devious by not making proper use of the data
that became available between 1942 and 1945?
There is little evidence of that. Indeed, the
commission tried to make its best effort in
explaining the famine (Tauger and Sen 2011).

Even a cursory examination of the

Nanavati Papers would suggest that this
confidence in the commissions integrity
is misplaced. In particular, given the
plenitude of mutually conflicting information on Bengals food availability in
1943, and the wartime commission having
march 15, 2014

been designed to spread fog rather than

to shed light, there appears to be ample
reason to regard its published estimates
of the harvest with scepticism.
Which is not to say that Sens entitlement framework is false far from it.
The likelihood that there was a significant shortage of grain in Bengal in early
1943 does not overturn the concept,
which can be formulated to subsume the
FAD hypothesis.10 Indeed, the famine
arose from a multitude of causes, almost
all of them deriving from the war, and
may even have been averted had someone more sympathetic to Indians been at
the helm of the British empire. A full
reckoning requires us to reverse Amerys
injunction and include the political side
of this business. That necessitates an
expansion of the entitlement concept to
include not just socio-economic factors
but specifically political factors and an
extension of the field of inquiry from
Bengal to the British empire as a whole.
Worsening the Famine
Time and again Winston Churchill chose
to privilege the comfort and economic
security of British citizens over the survival of colonial subjects, making a series
of decisions that worsened the Bengal
famine. A memo in the Cherwell Papers
indicates, for instance, that the total
wheat harvest in the British empire at
the end of the 1943-44 harvest year was
29 million tonnes a staggering quantity,
most of which the war cabinet wanted
to hold as a strategic reserve for the
future.11 So although there may not have
been enough rice in Bengal, there certainly was enough wheat in the British
empire to send the half million tonnes
of famine relief that Linlithgow had
demanded in July 1943. There was no
FAD in the empire as a whole, and the
war cabinet commanded enough ships
to transport grain around the world. In
1943, the UK imported 26 million tonnes
of food and raw materials for its civilian
population alone (not including liquid
cargo such as petroleum), creating a
stockpile of 18.5 million tonnes by the
end of that year the largest in its history.
British officials in India have since
taken a considerable part of the blame for
their incompetence in the response to
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NOTES

the famine. To be sure, many of their

efforts were desperate and counterproductive. Nonetheless they delivered
superbly on the one count that mattered
to His Majestys government keeping
up the war effort. At the end of 1943, the
Indian Army, based in Bengal, began an
assault on Japanese forces in Burma
with soldiers who had been well fed,
well rested, well trained, and amply protected against malaria at a time when
thousands all around were dying daily
from lack of food and medicine. Clearly,
the soldiers entitlements far exceeded
those of Indian civilians. Even enemy
soldiers (tens of thousands of Italian
prisoners of war interned in India, many of
them in the eastern provinces) enjoyed
greater entitlement to food than Indian
civilians, being so well fed that during
the famine a camps commander asked a
visiting scientist how to make compost
out of surplus bread; that was when
people were starving (Ghosh 1944: 71,
footnote). And, of course, not a single
white person, soldier or civilian, perished
in the famine.
Among Indian civilians as well, the
perceived importance of a particular
class or region for the war effort made
for distinctions in entitlement. The socalled privileged classes of Calcutta,
who were important to the war effort,
were protected by rations and therefore
had greater entitlements than villagers.
During a war cabinet meeting, Churchill
opined that only those Indians who were
directly contributing to the war effort
needed to be fed, and the policy actually
carried out was an extension of this
principle (Moon 1973: 19). At least until
Wavell took over as viceroy and organised famine relief on a substantial scale,
British officials in India ranked the entitlement of Indians to survival in order of
their importance to the war effort.12
Indians did not vote in the British elections, and therefore their suffering was
of no consequence to Churchill. That observation appears to dovetail with another
of Sens famous claims no famines have
occurred in democracies, which enjoy
elections and a free press (2000: 24). But
there is a problem here. Democracy is an
attribute of a nation state; to regard a lack
of democracy as the primary explanation
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for famine is to confine the discussion

within the boundaries of the nation
where the victims reside just as Amery
had intended. Surely, a paucity of democracy does not adequately describe the
abject enslavement of India during British
rule, which caused tens of millions of
famine deaths; explaining these requires
additional concepts such as sovereignty
(Mukerjee 2013). If the entitlement framework is to attain its full potential, it
needs to be extended to the global political realm instead of being confined
to socio-economic discussions within a
single, artificially isolated, country.
Notes
1 Only one set of these transcripts are known to
be in existence, although it is likely that there is
at least another one in the UK, according to the
unpublished memoirs of L G Pinnell. The Nanavati
Papers need to be copied for preservation and
made more readily available to researchers.
2 Linlithgow Collection: 2336, Governor of
Bengal to Viceroy, 2 January 1943.
3 Amery Papers: AMEL 1/6/14 File I, Viceroy to
Secretary of State for India, 21 February 1943.
4 Ministry of War Transport Papers, MT 59/694,
Mance to Anderson, 29 December 1942.
5 MT 59/631, With Sir William Crofts Compliments: Indias Foodgrains Supply, 19 July 1943.
6 War Office Papers, WO 193/137, Secretary of
State to Government of India, Defence Dept,
30 January 1942.
7 WO 208/810, Address by the Financial Adviser,
Military Finance at the Army Commanders
Conference, 9 July 1943.
8 Nanavati Papers: File 6B, quoted in Law-Smith,
49-65. This author could not locate File 6B and
was told by attendants at the National Archives
of India that only one file of documents (in addition to the bound volumes) are to be found in
the Nanavati Papers.
9 Tauger has repeatedly asserted such a shortage,
and most scholars who have reviewed the evidence would seem to agree. The startlingly low
harvest figures calculated by Padmanabhan are
at the far end of the range of available estimates,
however. This authors preference is to trust the
Kisan Sabhas prediction, which was presumably
based on farmers own assessments.
10 Devereux (2001). In this formulation, FAD becomes one of several ways in which famine can
occur. Tauger holds, however, that FAD is a
prerequisite for famine.
11 Cherwell Papers: H307/1.
12 Unlike Linlithgow, Wavell was profoundly concerned about famine and his threat of resignation induced London to release ample shipments of wheat in 1944.

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vol xlIX no 11

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