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"The Indian Famine Crises of World War II"

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 2009 Wayne Rasmussen Award

Mark B. Tauger, “The Indian Famine Crisis of World War II,” British Scholar, Vol. I, Issue 2
(March 2009): 166-196.

First, permit me to thank the members of the Rasmussen Award Committee for their
close reading of the articles submitted for consideration and their lengthy discussions on
the merits of the finalists. The members of the committee were Sara Gregg,
a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Library, and Victoria Woeste, a research
professor at the American Bar Foundation.

In making the selection for the best article published in a journal other than Agricultural
History, the 2009 Rasmussen committee faced a daunting task. The seventeen articles
submitted for consideration spanned a global, chronological, and topical range that
extended from Medieval French forest management to atomic energy and world food
production. Scholars utilized agricultural practices to understand changing gender roles,
economic development, immigration, war strategies, national policy, and technological
innovation. The committee was highly impressed with the scale and direction of the new
agricultural scholarship. One author used chick-sexing to understand the critical role that
Japanese-Americans played in Depression-era and World War II food production. This
humble yet-critical activity provided an economic ladder for upward mobility and an
essential national service in that undermined American fears over the Nisei in their
presence. Another article explored the Israeli and Palestinian conflict as an“imperative
for extensification along with intensification” on the one hand and agricultural needs
based on water and land scarcity on the other. By looking at the conflict through the lens
of agriculture, the author demonstrated the role of agriculture in national policy-making
decisions and in longstanding regional dispute. A third entry that we admired tackled the
oft-discussed issue of the boll weevil infestation in the Mississippi Delta to demonstrate
the ways in which planters utilized the crisis to claim their control over the environment
as the “natural” result of their racial supremacy and control over labor. These and other
articles demonstrated merit and caused us to re-evaluate and re-think our own
understanding of the agricultural past. After considerable deliberation and discussion, the
committee decided that the 2009 Wayne Rasmussen Award should be presented to

Mark B. Tauger, Associate Professor of History at West Virginia University for his
article “The India Famine Crises of World War II” which was published in March 2009
issue of the journal British Scholar.

Tauger’s close reading of the empirical data, his bold challenge to the accepted
interpretation of the Bengal famine as the legacy of colonialism, his placement of the
regional history within the larger global famine historiography, and his clear presentation
of complex economic, agricultural, environmental and social factors all brought his work
to the forefront. Tauger argues that the well-known famine crisis that engulfed Bengal in
1943 was not, as has been previously understood, a man-made crisis. Rather the famine
was part of a larger Indian food and subsistence crisis that resulted from major harvest
failures in 1942 and was exacerbated by the circumstances of World War II. He
challenges the perception that the British government was indifferent to the suffering and
places colonial efforts within the framework of military realities in Southeast Asia and
the Indian subcontinent.

Tauger suggests that advocates of the “man-made” famine thesis argue from
positions of political nationalism and overlook environmental factors, as in the Irish
potato famine and the Soviet famine of the 1930s. In the case of Bengal, Tauger
questions statistical evidence that supported the analysis of a famine created by hoarding
and grain merchant price gouging and as well as claims that production estimates rather
than actual production were used to arrive at the man-made thesis. By focusing on
environmental conditions, including the Midnapur cyclone of 1942 and the outbreak of
the plant disease helminthosporium oryzae, Tauger lays the groundwork for a crisis of
subsistence farming that led to famine in the larger Indian subcontinent.

Regional crop failures and famines became more commonplace by the late 1930s.
As Tauger notes, “even the surplus-producing provinces no longer yielded sufficient rice
to meet the needs of the growing populations in the deficit provinces.” Imports from
Burma were routine, and when the Japanese conquest of Burma in the spring of 1942 cut
off supplies to India, the effect was felt in regional famines.

By placing the Bengal famine within the larger context of environmentalism,

Tauger connects the events of 1943 with changes in land use that began in the 18th
century and culminated in the Green Revolution of the 1960s. As he alludes to the
military crisis of World War II, Tauger invites scholars to engage in famine studies that
recognize the “complexity, depth, and implications” of these events.
British Scholar
Vol. I, Issue 2, 166-96, March 2009

The Indian Famine Crises of World War II

Mark B. Tauger

Introduction: The Bengal famine as an issue in historiography

The causes and character of the Bengal famine of 1943 appear to be settled issues in
South Asian history. According to the generally accepted viewpoint, food availability
in Bengal was not low enough to have caused a famine. The key proponent of this
viewpoint, the economist Amartya Sen, uses data from the 1944 Famine Inquiry
Commission Report on Bengal in his book Poverty and Famines to argue that Bengal
actually had higher food availability in 1943 than in 1942.1 Most studies of this
famine and others refer to Sen’s chapter without questioning the data or his use of it.2
Consequently historians have sought the cause of the famine in social, economic, and
political factors: wartime inflation intensified by military spending in Bengal, British
efforts to deter a Japanese invasion (the rice- and boat-denial policies), hoarding and
speculation by grain traders, and allegations of British indifference to suffering of
Indians and willingness to use famine to suppress opposition.
This “man-made” famine argument, however, rests on uncritical acceptance of
one set of unreliable statistical data that Sen and others have incorrectly described as
“production data.” As will be shown below, scholars who presented this view of the

Mark B. Tauger is an associate professor of history at West Virginia University. His main
research area has been Soviet famines and agricultural policy, but he has since extended his research
interests into world agrarian history. He also has earlier background in musicology and as a classical
pianist. His email is [email protected].

1 Famine Inquiry Commission, Report on Bengal, 1944, reprint Usha Publications, New
Delhi, 1984 (hereafter FIC); Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines (Oxford, 1981).
2 Paul R. Greenough, Prosperty and Misery in Modern Bengal: The Famine of 1943-1944
(New York, 1982). In a recent article, M. M. Islam has basically agreed with Sen, but with some qual-
ifications; M. Mufakharul Islam, “The Great Bengal Famine and the Question of FAD Yet Again,”
Modern Asian Studies 41, no. 2 (2007), pp. 421-440.
_________________________________________________________________
ISSN 1941-6105 Print/1941-6113 Online
© 2009 British Scholar
 The Indian Famine Crises of World War II 167

famine had clear evidence that discredited these data, but they did not acknowledge
this conflicting evidence, let alone address its implications. As a result their discussions
of the rice harvests in Bengal before the famine have misrepresented both the data
and the causes of the famine. These scholars also claim that Bengal had no shortage
of rice during the famine, yet they minimize or ignore environmental conditions
that did in fact cause serious shortages. Much more reliable harvest data from rice
research centers in Bengal during the famine show that Bengal had a major harvest
failure in 1942 and a significant shortage of rice.3
These studies’ criticism of British authorities as indifferent to the famine is
also inaccurate, most importantly because almost all studies of the famine focus on
Bengal, and ignore the broader picture. British and other government authorities
in India had to confront a series of subsistence crises that emerged from drought
and other factors in many parts of India during the war, crises that were publicly
recognized and often officially declared to be famines. For the British and for most
Indians, the Bengal famine was part of a much larger crisis.4 This article argues
that these crises are more accurately described as the Indian famine crises of World
War II rather than narrowly as the Bengal famine. Natural disaster caused crop
failures, food shortages, and famine in several regions. Governments at all levels
worked to alleviate these famines, although some regional authorities were more
successful than others. The circumstances of World War II made relief difficult: the
Viceroys Lord Linlithgow and Viscount Wavell repeatedly appealed to London to
allocate shipping to transport food supplies to India, but London focused on war in
1942-1943, had limited shipping capacity because of continual losses to German
and Japanese submarines, and could not provide much aid until later. Finally, in
response to this crisis, which was at root a problem of production and shortage
more than of markets, the British began efforts to increase food production with the
“Grow More Food” campaign that led to development policies in independent India
and Pakistan.
Two background notes are necessary here. First, in Bengal and other eastern
regions of India, the farmers ordinarily grew three rice crops. The main one was the
aman crop, planted in summer and harvested in December, which provided about
two-thirds to three-quarters of the year’s supply. The secondary crop, the aus crop, was
planted in spring and harvested in fall, providing about one-quarter to one-third of

3 After completing this article I learned of a lecture available on the internet by Cormac O’
Grada, “The Ripple that Drowns: Twentieth Century Famines as Economic History,” which presents
additional sources showing that the Bengal famine was the result of a shortage; http://www.ehs.org.
uk/downloads.asp , accessed 4 March 2009.
4 Islam argues that the situation in Bengal needs to be seen in a longer time perspective,
but the more important issue for 1943 was the broader geographical context; Islam, “The Great
Bengal Famine.”
168 Mark B. Tauger

the supplies. In some regions peasants also planted a small boro crop at the beginning
of the year and harvested it in late spring, but this provided only a small amount of
grain. In western India, the farmers planted generally two crops: the kharif in early
spring to be harvested in fall, similar to the aus, and the rabi crop, planted in fall
and harvested at the end of the year or the beginning of the next year, similar to the
aman crop. Second, during British colonial domination of India, the subcontinent
was divided into two political categories of territory: British India, the region ruled
directly by Britain, and some 560 Princely States, which remained nominally under
their own rulers. The British Raj ruled these states indirectly, through a British
representative (“resident”) in the larger states, and through regional administrative
agencies that oversaw the numerous smaller states.

The Statistics of the “Man-Made Famine” in Bengal

In Poverty and Famines, Sen presents four case studies of famines which in his view
were caused not by shortages but by failures of “entitlements.” In discussing the
Bengal famine, Sen criticizes the viewpoint that the famine resulted from shortage,
put forward by the 1944 Famine Inquiry Commission Report on Bengal [hereafter
FIC] and other publications, and reworks the “official” harvest data contained in that
report to argue that no shortage prevailed.5 He presents a table of rice and wheat
production data in Bengal, recalculates imports and exports, and then calculates
running averages of two and three years to estimate the possible carryover of food
supplies between harvests. According to Sen’s calculations, Bengal had more grain
in 1943 than in previous years, and consequently the famine was not the result of a
decline in food availability in Bengal. Rather, Sen argues that the famine resulted
from what he describes as a wartime economic boom that raised prices faster than
wages. He devotes most of his analysis to showing that the victims were those whose
incomes and assets (which Sen calls “exchange entitlements”) did not increase or did
not increase sufficiently to enable them to afford food as prices increased in 1943.6
In the chapter Sen implicitly blames those who raised prices, without identifying
them or discussing their circumstances in any detail, and explicitly blames British
authorities for misunderstanding what he considers the root causes of the crisis,
because in his view they focused on shortages rather than on the victims’ exchange
entitlements.
Most scholars since Sen have accepted this intentionalist interpretation of the

5 Sen, Poverty, ch. 6, pp. 52-83.

6 On certain fundamental problems with Sen’s conception of “entitlements,” see Mark B.
Tauger, “Entitlement, Shortage, and the Bengal Famine: Another Look,” Journal of Peasant Studies
31, no. 1 (2003), pp. 45-72.
 The Indian Famine Crises of World War II 169

famine.7 Paul Greenough, for example, copied a long passage from one of Sen’s
articles as an appendix in his book.8 He notes that “Bengalis are in remarkable
agreement that the 1943-44 famine was a ‘man-made’ calamity” because “no drought,
flood, or crop failure caused a shortage of rice so great as to make widespread
starvation inevitable.” He dismisses “local crop failures” that occurred before the
famine as insignificant and describes the famine as “man-made” because it resulted
from the greed of grain traders and government maladministration. He does qualify
this argument, however, by noting that Bengal had experienced a long-term decline
in food availability before the war that made famine more likely, which implies at
least the possibility of shortage.9 In a comparative study of the Bengal famine and
famines in Honan and Tonkin during the war, Sugata Bose cites Sen’s argument as
proof that the attribution of famine to shortages is simply a “myth.” Bose asserts that
the concept of a “man-made famine” is not a mere “rhetorical accusation” but a valid
explanation, and he relies upon Sen’s calculations to justify his description of the
Bengal famine as “man-made.”10 Bidyut Chakrabarty, in his study of the Midnapur
rebellion of 1942, similarly cites Sen’s calculations and conclusion that the famine
was not the result of a shortage. Chakrabarty cites several articles from Biplabi,
the journal published in Midnapur that served as the main vehicle of Congress
Party propaganda during the Midnapur rebellion, which assert that the famine was
“deliberately created by the British.” The journal used this accusation as part of its
efforts to ‘rouse the people for an anti-British movement.”11 Chakrabarty never
questions this interpretation in his book. Along with historical explanations of the
famine, there is also a substantial popular literature and many websites that describe
the famine as “man-made” and even genocide. 12
Writers who accuse regimes of creating “man-made famines” often write from
a nationalist attitude of grievance and injustice but also on the basis of a sense of
mastery over nature, a hostile attitude toward government, and sympathy for the
plight of famine victims. In making such accusations, however, these writers often

7 A few have challenged Sen and argued there was a shortage; Peter Bowbrick, “The
Causes of Famine – A Refutation of Professor Sen’s Theory.” Food Policy 11, no. 2 (1986), pp. 105-124,
and the subsequent debate in this and later issues of the journal. On others, see Tauger, “Entitlement,
Shortage, and the Bengal Famine,” p. 53.
8 Greenough, Prosperity and Misery, pp. 286-98.
9 Ibid., pp. 85, 137-8.
10 Sugata Bose, “Starvation admidst plenty: the making of famine in Bengal, Honan, and
Tonkin, 1942-1945,” Modern Asian Studies 24, no. 4 (1990), pp. 699-727; here pp. 700-2.
11 Bidyut Chakrabarty, Local Politics and Indian Nationalism: Midnapur 1919-1942 (New
Delhi, 1997).
12 See for example the following websites: http://www.samarthbharat.com/bengalho-
locaust.htm ; http://globalavoidablemortality.blogspot.com/2005/07/forgotten-holocaust-194344-
bengal.html .
170 Mark B. Tauger

overlook or minimize environmental factors that undermine such accusations. Such

is the case for the Irish famine of the 1840s and the Soviet (not simply Ukrainian)
famine of the early 1930s.13 The “man-made” interpretation is also so ambiguous
that it can be applied in a different manner than to impugn the British authorities.
In April 1943, for example, the British Governor of Bengal, Sir John Herbert, wrote
to Viceroy Linlithgow about the food situation in Bengal, describing difficulties of
trade, profiteering and rumors of hoarding. He then noted that:

This and similar information leads me to the conclusion that

although there may be a slight general shortage, and sometimes an
acute scarcity due to maldistribution, there are unseen influences
at work seeking to produce a scarcity situation designed to lead
to wholesale disorders. The Publications recently issued by your
Government show that Congress was directly concerned in the
autumn disorders, which if more successful might have led to a
complete dislocation of the war effort. I cannot help feeling that
the same sinister influences now seek to create famine conditions
which will lead to disorders in which Muslims would come into
conflict with the forces of law and to wholesale rioting which may
cause a breakdown of the lines of communications supporting the
Eastern Army.14

Herbert’s suspicion that the Indian National Congress Party sought to create famine
and use it for their political objectives reflected the Party’s open attempt to disrupt
the British war effort in the “Quit India” campaign of August 1942. Some “man-
made” famine arguments contain a mirror-image of this, referring to hidden sinister
influences in the government that were willing to “permit” famine.15
Both versions of this intentionalist argument for a “man-made famine” reflect
the basic prejudice that underlies this interpretation. If we assume that no significant

13 On Ireland, see Peter Solar, “The Great Famine was No Ordinary Subsistence Crisis,” in
Famine: The Irish Experience, 900-1900, ed. E. M. Crawford (Edinburgh, 1989); on the Soviet famine,
see Tauger, Natural Disaster and Human Action in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933, Carl Beck Papers
in Russian and East European Studies, no. 1506 (Pittsburgh, 2001).
14 Enaytur Rahim, Joyce Rahim, eds., Bengal Politics: Documents of the Raj, Vol. II 1940-
1943 (Dhaka, 1999), p. 224. The “autumn disorders” were protests in Midnapur district in Bengal that
began as part of the “Quit India” movement. It should be noted that shortly before he died, Governor
Herbert concluded on the basis of more information that he had received during 1943 that Bengal
had a much more serious rice shortage than he had thought and that this shortage was a cause of
the famine; see O’ Grada, Tawney lecture, part 3, http://www.ehs.org.uk/downloads.asp , accessed 4
March 2009.
15 Chakrabarty, Local Politics, ch. 1.
 The Indian Famine Crises of World War II 171

crop failure occurred to cause a shortage before the famine, then to understand it
we must exclude considerations related to environmental factors, crop failures, and
shortages as explanations for the actions and experiences of all the different groups
and individuals involved (perhaps because we must accept Bose’s claim that these
explanations are “myths”). Led by this preconception, we then will seek evidence in
the sources that can be interpreted as efforts to create or abet the famine, whether by
intent or by default, even when that evidence could also be interpreted as reflecting
a shortage; this approach ignores evidence that cannot be so interpreted. Some
advocates of this viewpoint even omit mention of environmental factors that could
have contributed to the famine but were not man-made, as well as policies or actions
by governments or other actors that aimed to alleviate the famine. The assumption
that Bengal had no crop failure and no shortage functions as a kind of bias and
encourages tendentious, even paranoid, thinking and writing. The main cause of
the Bengal famine was by no means hidden, but (as will be shown below) it was
overlooked by both contemporary officials and politicians and latter-day scholars as
well.
Sen’s data on the famine do not unambiguously support the argument that
no shortage existed in Bengal in 1943. The Indian economist Goswami recently
recalculated the same data as Sen in a different way and showed that the harvest
fell by approximately one-third from the previous year, creating a serious food
availability decline in Bengal in 1943.16 Recalculation cannot compensate, however,
for the basic problem of these data, which is that were not “production” data. Sen
describes his data as “official production estimates,” but his source states that these
data “are based on crop forecasts prepared over a series of years by the Director of
Agriculture, Bengal.”17 The term “production” implies final results, but clearly these
data are forecasts, and not final results, and neither Sen’s text nor his table indicate
this. According to this source, the Final Report of the FIC, in Bengal these forecasts
were prepared on the basis of separate estimates of area and yield. Area estimates
were prepared by Circle Officers, who were responsible for a thana or district on
the order of 400 square miles in size, on the basis of the Officer’s discussions with
local officers and farmers and his own visual impressions, and were expressed not in
concrete areas but in comparison to the “normal” area. Yields were similarly estimated
by starting with a region’s “normal” or standard yield, based usually on limited crop-

16 Omkar Goswami, “The Bengal Famine of 1943: Reexamining the Data,” The Indian
Economic and Social History Review 27, no. 4 (1990), pp. 445-463. In this article he thanked Sen twice
for assistance, which seems to imply that Sen did not object to this reinterpretation. Islam examines
the overall FIC data and applies corrections to them. He concludes that rice availability did decline,
but not enough to cause a famine. He does not cite Goswami’s recalculation. Islam, “The Great
Bengal Famine,” 41, no. 2 (2007), pp. 421-440.
17 FIC, Report on Bengal, p. 204.
172 Mark B. Tauger

cutting samples of what looked to officials as “normal” fields and conducted many
years apart. The local officers would determine the “condition factor,” the relative
condition of the present year’s crop to the standard yield, again on the basis of visual
observation of fields.18
These estimates were thus far removed from any concrete measurements of the
areas and yields of the crops; they were speculative percentages of assumed averages.
Moreover, the personnel in Bengal who gathered the data were untrained and saw
the task as having low importance. As a result virtually everyone who dealt with
these data found them inadequate and misleading. 19 It was only in the wake of the
Bengal famine that officials began to use more up-to-date methods such as random
samples to obtain more reliable statistics.20
Thus Sen’s description of his data as “official production data” is misleading. If he
had described them as “figures based on forecasts made before the harvests, derived
from conversations with local officials and farmers, superficial visual impressions
of fields, and assumptions by different groups of officials, none of whom had any
specialized training in crop estimation, and expressed as percentages of presumed
normal crop areas and standard yields based on incomplete measurements taken
years before,” his description would not have had the connotation of validity that the
term “official production estimates” carries. As a result, he would not have been able
legitimately to assert the kind of certainty he did in his discussion.
The British economist Peter Bowbrick noted the unreliability the FIC data and
Sen’s misuse of it some years ago. Sen replied that “[I]t would be foolish to claim
great accuracy for any particular set of figures like these,” but argued that “if all
the available estimates point in a clear direction (in this case against FAD [Food
Availability Decline, i.e. crop failure and shortage]),” then it makes no sense to argue
for shortage with no other estimates.21 Yet Sen claims such “great accuracy” for his
statistics, rejects alternative estimates of harvests and peasants’ holdovers on the basis

18 FIC, Final Report (Madras, 1945), pp. 44-8. This passage explains that these practices
resulted from Bengal’s status as a “permanently settled” province, where taxes were fixed and not
based on production, unlike other “temporarily settled” provinces where trained revenue officials kept
more accurate records of agricultural production as the basis for changing tax assessments.
19 Clive Dewey, “Patwari and Chaukidar: Subordinate Officials and the Reliability of
India’s Agricultural Statistics,” in The Imperial Impact: Studies in the Economic History of Africa and
India, eds. Clive Dewey and A. G. Hopkins (London, 1978); George Blyn, Agricultural Trends in
India, 1891-1947: Output, Availability, and Productivity (Philadelphia, 1966); M. M. Islam, Bengal
Agriculture 1920-1946: A quantitative study (Cambridge, 1978). There were a few temporarily settled
areas in Bengal, as well as permanently settled areas outside of it, but this description represents the
general picture.
20 FIC, Final Report, p. 44.
21 Bowbrick, “The Causes of Famine,” pp. 111-13; Sen, “The Causes of Famine: A Reply,”
Food Policy 11, no. 2 (1986), p. 128.
 The Indian Famine Crises of World War II 173

of his data (see below), and ignores substantial contrary data. An important example
of data that Sen ignores is in the work of Tarakchandra Das, a professor at Calcutta
University during the famine, whose research on famine victims in Calcutta was an
important source for the FIC Report.22 Both Sen and Greenough cite Das’s later
book Bengal Famine in describing certain aspects the famine victims, but neither of
them addresses Das’ discussion of the harvest data in this book.
In his discussion of the causes of the famine, Das focuses on food shortages and
examines harvest data. He describes the method of estimation based on the crop
area and the “average” yield per acre, but points out: “The area under rice cultivation
and the annual yield from it in Bengal cannot be exactly estimated. Information
available from different sources vary [sic] enormously.”23 As proof he cites four
different estimates of the average rice area and yield during the 1930s, prepared by the
Famine Inquiry Commission, the Indian Department of Commercial Intelligence
and Statistics, the Land Revenue Commission, and those of an Indian scholar in a
plan for rehabilitating Bengal after the famine. The areas ranged from 21.6 million
acres to 27.4 million acres, and the average yield from 8.4 to 11.5 million tons. He
then cites additional sources from 1945-1946 that show similar discrepancies in
estimated areas and harvests.24
In Das’ view, “it is not unjustifiable to say that none of these sources can be fully
relied upon.” The data in these different estimates were gathered in a variety of ways,
but all of them were speculative. He cites the Land Revenue Commission Report
from 1940:

At the outside it must be observed that no dependable statistics exist

in Bengal which have been prepared on scientific basis to show the
yield of various crops. … In Bengal acreage figures are based upon
reports from districts, which are largely guesswork… The figures
have been proved hopelessly wrong in comparison with the areas
found in the largest settlement operations in Burdwan and Hooghly.
… The unreliability of the Agriculture Department’s 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 them as
being ‘largely conjectural’.25

Das then cites the serial publication Estimates of Area and Yield of Principal Crops

22 Tarakchandra Das, Bengal Famine (1943) (Calcutta, 1949).

23 Ibid., p. 98.
24 Ibid., p. 99-100.
25 Ibid., 100-1.
174 Mark B. Tauger

in India, for 1940-1941, which notes that since Bengal lacked a revenue agency
in the province, the area and yield data “are based mainly on rough approximate
estimates made by District Officers, and are more or less conjectural.” Finally Das
argues from his personal experience that the “ill-paid, illiterate village Choukidar
[village watchman]” was the last link in this chain of unreliable data. On the basis of
this discussion, Das concludes “Under these circumstances it is not safe to base any
conclusion as to the area and yield of rice in Bengal upon these figures.”26
Besides Das’ book in 1949, several articles, books, and archival sources (including
as noted the FIC Final Report) have provided even more evidence of the unreliability
of these data, but for the present discussion I will focus on Das’ book, because Sen
and other advocates of a “man-made” famine interpretation cite it.27 Das’ evidence
and arguments show that the “man-made” famine interpretation has a potentially
major inconsistency in that it criticizes the British for bad decisions in dealing with
the famine but accepts problematic and potentially politicized decisions by British
officials about the size of the harvest. Das’ discussion also undermines the evidence
for that interpretation of the famine. The argument that the Bengal famine was
“man-made” rests on Sen’s calculations using essentially one set of data in the FIC
Report. Das shows that the data in the FIC report are just one of several different
groups of estimates, none of which is based on any valid statistical studies, harvest
measurements, samples, or similar sources.
Sen did note that “the official estimates of agricultural production in India
have been criticized for a long time…” with reference to a study by the statistician
Mahalonobis, but he refers to George Blyn’s study of agricultural statistics to dismiss
such criticisms.28 These references are elliptical and misleading. Mahalonobis
criticized the statistics for overestimating the standard yield for decades, which would
substantially undermine Sen’s argument because it would imply that he was using
inflated data to deny the existence of a shortage.29 Blyn argues that the Midnapur
cyclone of October 1942 and the floods it caused reduced the Bengal rice harvest by
one-third, twice the decline that Sen asserted took place (and Sen questions Blyn’s
estimate), and he also proposed large alterations in the official harvest statistics that
Sen does not address. Consequently Blyn’s analysis cannot be used to support Sen’s
statistics.30 In any case, the issue is not whether others have criticized the data, but

26 Ibid.
27 See for example Henry Knight, Food Administration in India, 1939-47 (Palo Alto, 1954),
p. 20; Sumit Guha, ed., Growth, Stagnation or Decline? Agricultural Productivity in British India (New
Delhi, 1992); Dewey, “Patwari and Chowkidars.”
28 Sen, Poverty, p. 58. A series of articles published later cast further doubt on official
harvest estimates: Guha, ed., Growth, Stagnation, or Decline?
29 Islam, Bengal Agriculture, pp. 30-1.
30 Blyn, Agricultural Trends in India, fn 98, pp. 253-4.
 The Indian Famine Crises of World War II 175

whether Sen and the others who have made this argument accurately identified
the data, explained its character and sources, addressed the data’s uncertainty and
considered alternative estimates from their sources.31
Das’ arguments and evidence also raise an ethical issue. Sen, Greenough, and
other scholars knew his book, cited it, and clearly considered it an important and
trustworthy source. Yet none of them so much as mentions these passages in Das’s
study, let alone the fact that his sources and arguments undermine their evidence and
the whole “man-made” or “market entitlement” argument. These scholars either did
not read this passage, which would be negligence, or worse chose to ignore it rather
than address the challenge that it posed to their own evidence and conclusions.
Their writings would then be not an objective attempt to follow evidence wherever
it led, but rather an exercise in contrived use of sources to support a preconceived
interpretation, which because it blames the famine on British policies would have to
be seen as a political argument.

The Environmental Causes of the Famine in Bengal

The uncertainty of their data suggests at least the possibility that crop failures and
shortages played more significant roles in the famine than previously assumed. This
in turn requires investigation of environmental factors as causes of the famine. Yet
most scholars, and certainly all who subscribe to a “man-made” or “entitlement”
interpretation, have ignored or minimized the environmental factors that reduced
Bengal’s harvests. Sen and Greenough, for example, mention that in 1942 Bengal
experienced a series of natural disasters: a massive cyclone in mid-October, followed
by flooding and a plant disease, yet they insist that the harvest was not low enough
to cause a famine. How can they assert that after a massive cyclone, widespread
flooding, and serious plant disease, the harvest was still not low? The Midnapur
cyclone alone destroyed an estimated 1.5 million tons of rice, and Bengal ordinarily
produced only about 10-15 million tons, according to the highest estimates.32
These scholars have made little or no effort to investigate the effects of these
disasters, especially the plant disease helminthosporium oryzae. The reference to
plant disease certainly should have encouraged investigation given the case of the
catastrophic famine a century earlier in Ireland cause by the potato disease phytophthora

31 Das’ work was not the only source that posed a challenge to these statistics. Sen cited a
document by Bengal Governor Rutherford to criticize what he considered his unwarranted focus on
shortages, but on the next page of that document Rutherford presented data on the 1942 harvest that
was much lower than the one Sen used, but came directly from contemporary observers and deserved
at least to be considered; Sen, p. 82, fn 47; N. Mansergh, ed., The Transfer of Power 1942-7 (London,
1973), 4: 361ff. See also Tauger, “Entitlement, Shortage, and the 1943 Bengal Famine.”
32 Knight, Food Administration, p. 126.
176 Mark B. Tauger

infestans. Greenough cites one authority on the rice disease but does not refer to the
main article that presented statistical evidence of its effects. However, that evidence,
published by the scientist S.Y Padmanabhan (whom Greenough cited), provides the
crucial clues to the real causes of this famine.
From 1966 to 1976, Padmanabhan directed the central rice research institute
in Cuttack, under the Indian Council for Agricultural Research, ICAR, the Indian
government agency in charge of agricultural research. An agronomist who began
work in Bengal during the famine, Padmanabhan had substantial field experience
and many research publications. In his article in the American journal The Annual
Review of Plant Pathology, commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the Bengal
famine, he published the following table (Table 1): 33

Table 1: Yield of rice per hectare at the Rice Research Stations at Bankura
and Chinsurah in the epiphytotic year (1942) compared with yield per
hectare in the stations in a normal year (1941).

Bankura Chinsurah
Variety of paddy Yield kg/ha Percentage Yield kg/ha Percentage
1941 1942 Loss in Yield 1941 1942 Loss in Yield
Bhutmuri Aus (early) 1289 1242 6.81 372 1252
Kataktara Aus (early) 1421 1205 15.1 1250 1215
Tilakkachri Aus (early) 1867 1328 28.9 1713 965 43.7
Marichbati Aus (early) 1365 723 46.9 1365 674 50.3
Dharial Aus (early) 1323 669 49.5 1323 669 49.6
Charnok Aus (early) 1208 443 59.2 762 446 41.5
Dudsar Aman (med late) 2105 559 73.5 2102 1274 39.5
Badkalamkatti Aman (med late) 1504 909 39.5 1737 686 60.5
Indrasail Aman (med late) 2962 755 74.5 3094 755 75.6
Nonaramsail Aman (med late) 1693 426 74.7 1691 424 74.8
Chinsurah Aman (med late) 3778 880 76.7 2501 713 79.1
Sundermukhi Aman (med late) 2599 267 76.9 2362 272 88.5
Latisail Aman (med late) 5427 1122 79.3 2906 1125 61.3
Ajan Aman (med late) 3168 600 81.1 3173 561 82.3
Badshabhog Aman (med late) 1938 316 83.2 1189 757 59.9
Juijasail Aman (med late) 2499 331 85.5 2252 306 86.4
Boldar Aman (med late) 2426 306 87.3 2426 309 87.3
Raghusail Aman (med late) 2563 328 87.4 --- --- ---
Rupsail Aman (med late) 2156 284 87.7 2166 284 86.9
Patnai Aman (med late) 2751 336 87.8 2256 336 85.1
Dandkhani Aman (med late) 1722 152 91.2 1725 159 91.1
Source: S. Y. Padmanabhan, “The Great Bengal Famine,” Annual Review of Phytopathology, 11 (1973), 12.

It should be noted first that these data are from rice research centers. The standard

33 S. Y. Padmanabhan, “The Great Bengal Famine”, Annual Review of Phytopathology 11

(1973), pp. 11-26.
 The Indian Famine Crises of World War II 177

practice in such centers is to grow many different varieties of rice on different plots
and then to harvest the entire plot. This can be seen from the table, which gives the
yield as measured in kilograms per hectare. These data are genuine harvest data,
not samples, visual estimates, or guesses. They are qualitatively different from and
superior to all of the data from the FIC Report and all other harvest estimates that
Sen, Greenough, Das, and others cited. These data appear to be the only real harvest
data for the Bengal famine available in any scholarly study, as far as I have been
able to determine. Second, these data include crop results for twenty-one different
varieties of rice, which Padmanabhan identified as “the principle rice varieties widely
grown in Bengal.”34 The fact that every rice variety in two different rice research
centers succumbed to this rice disease strongly suggests that few varieties would have
been able to resist it.
The table shows that every variety of rice tested in the 1942 aman harvest had
dramatically lower yields than in the 1941 aman harvest, in virtually all cases less
than half to less than a quarter of the previous year’s yields. If these yields were even
reasonably representative of the effects of the plant disease on the crops, they would
imply that the 1942 aman harvest, normally responsible for more than two-thirds of
total rice availability in Bengal, fell to half of the previous year’s level, which would
have reduced the total rice availability for Bengal in 1942-1943 to two-thirds of the
previous year’s level. Since the aus harvest was also partly affected by the disease, the
total availability may have been even less. Also, since research stations operated on
a scientific basis with expert supervision and reasonably well-maintained equipment,
it is likely that their yields would have been better than those of many small or poor
farmers who would not have had access to these advantages.
In his article Padmanabhan described the severity and extent of this plant disease
and the climate factors that made such a devastating infestation possible. He and his
associates examined data on temperatures, cloudiness, rainfall and humidity at several
places in Bengal in the rice growing seasons from 1941 to 1944. They concluded that
“the epiphytotic year 1942 was different from the nonepiphytotic years of 1941, 1943,
and 1944 in (a) unusually heavy rainfall in September, (b) unusual and prolonged
cloudy weather in November, with very low sunshine hours and occasional rains, (c)
higher minimum temperatures than normal …” Their sources also included studies of

34 Padmanabhan, “Great Bengal Famine,” p. 11. Studies and catalogs of rice varieties in
India, from both before and after the 1940s, list almost all (19 of 21) of the varieties included in this
table. Most are listed in Races of Rice in India, a vast catalog of thousands of varieties published in
1910 that identifies each variety with references to earlier publications that list them, and many of
the tested varieties are also listed in two more recent compilations. Races of Rice in India (New Delhi,
1980), reprint of The Agricultural Ledger (Calcutta, 1911), 16: 6, 27, 28, 56, 89, 108, 142, 217, 236, 282,
373, 420-421, 443, 462, 486, 564; B. B. Dave, Varieties of Rice Grown in the Central Provinces (Nagpur,
1949), pp. 14, 48; Debal Deb et al., Seeds of Tradition, Seeds of Future: Folk Rice Varieties of Eastern
India (New Delhi, 2005), pp. 22-25, 30-31, 34-35.
178 Mark B. Tauger

previous epiphytotics, none of which reached the scale of 1942, but which provided
information on the way this disease would develop and spread. The disease usually
appeared first in the mature aus crop in August and September, and this infestation
“must have provided the necessary multiple foci for spread and infection of the later
aman varieties.”35 His table shows the 1942 infestation followed the characteristic
pattern.
Researchers exposed slides to the air during the growing seasons and found that
weather conditions of stable warm temperatures, high humidity and cloudiness, and
periodic rains brought an “enormous increase” in spore catch on the slides. The spores
spread from the time of the aus harvest. Padmanabhan noted that these favorable
conditions prevailed through the month of November in 1942 and concluded that “it is
probable that an unprecedented spore release occurred continuously during November
1942, thus providing one of the most essential conditions for the development of an
epiphytotic.” Under these weather conditions it would require as little as two hours
for the spores to infect the plants. These weather conditions in October also provided
“more favorable conditions for spore release and infection than the corresponding
month in other years.”36 October was the month of the cyclone and other storms that
preceded and followed it, whose winds would have spread the spores widely.
Researchers also noted that the plants were most susceptible to helminthosporium
oryzae when they were flowering and mature, precisely in the period when the weather
conditions spread the spores and made them most virulent. Poor soils, leached of
important nutrients -- a widespread problem in Bengal -- also made the rice plants
more susceptible to the disease. Padmanabhan concludes that the “in the interaction
of the host, pathogen, and environment in the 1942 rice crop season in Bengal”
conditions favored the pathogen, “with the result that the most devastating recorded
epiphytotic of helminthosporium disease of rice broke out in that year.”37
A report by the International Rice Research Institute [IRRI] explains that this
plant disease affects the plant when the spores fall on leaves, stems, or seeds and
penetrate the plant through “germ tubes” that grow into openings like leaf stomata,
or through appressoria, thicker tubes that use cytoplasmic pressure to penetrate the
plant’s epidermis. The disease often infects seeds, which grow into blighted seedlings
that can have a mortality rate as high as fifty percent or more. When the disease infects
mature rice plants, the plant’s panicles grow with unfilled grains, or fewer, smaller, and
lighter grains, and a decline in yield that again would approach fifty percent.38 An
infestation could thus be invisible or barely noticeable, so a non-specialist projecting a

35 Padmanabhan, “Great Bengal Famine,” pp. 16, 18.

36 Ibid., pp. 20-1, 23.
37 Ibid., pp. 23, 24.
38 http://www.knowledgebank.irri.org/RiceDoctor_MX/Fact_Sheets/Diseases/Brown_
Spot.htm, accessed 2 June 2007.
 The Indian Famine Crises of World War II 179

rice field’s yield by a superficial “eye-estimate” could completely miss it. This difficulty
of detection explains the large gap between the “official production data” that Sen
cited, based at best on such eye-estimates by overworked district officers, and the
much lower measured results from the research stations.
While the uncertainty of Indian harvest statistics has been shown many times,
my point here is that the official data specifically for the 1942 aman and aus harvests,
upon which Sen and others base their interpretations, are more inaccurate that usual
for these data, because of the unique weather and crop production circumstances
in that year. The plant disease was so severe specifically in fall 1942 because of a
confluence of the emergence of a highly virulent strain of helminthosporium and of
weather conditions unusually favorable for the disease. This plus the difficulty for
non-specialists to detect the disease led to inaccurate estimates of the harvest by
officials and a misunderstanding of the causes of the famine by many at the time
and since. Agronomists and plant pathologists have no hesitation in attributing
the famine to the disease. Padmanabhan compared the Bengal famine to the Irish
famine: “Nothing as devastating as the Bengal epiphytotic of 1942 has been recorded
in plant pathological literature. The only other instance that bears comparison in
loss sustained by a food crop and the human calamity that followed in its wake is the
Irish potato famine of 1845.”39 Padmanabhan’s article is cited in the standard history
of plant pathology by Ainsworth.40 The IRRI, responsible for the massive work that
introduced high-yielding rice varieties during the Green Revolution, attributes the
famine to the epiphytotic on the basis of its devastating effects: “The disease was
considered to be the major factor contributing to the “Great Bengal Famine” in 1942
resulting to yield losses of 50% to 90% and caused the death of 2 million people.”41
Causation is a complex issue, even in the case of a famine. Sen’s “entitlement
approach,” however, confuses and obscures issues of causation. Sen argues that
whether an individual starves or not during a crisis depends on exchange entitlements
(essentially the relationship between market prices for food and a person’s income
and assets). He writes: “A general decline in food supply may indeed cause him
to be exposed to hunger through a rise in food prices with an unfavourable impact
on his exchange entitlement. Even when his starvation is caused by food shortage
in this way, his immediate reason for starvation will be the decline in his exchange
entitlement.”42 Sen thus emphasizes the decline in exchange entitlement (in this case,
food prices that increase beyond a person’s purchasing power) and seems to minimize
the importance of the food shortage because it is not the immediate reason why

39 Padmanabhan, “Bengal Famine,” pp. 11.

40 G. C. Ainsworth, Introduction to the History of Plant Pathology (New York, 1981).
41 http://www.knowledgebank.irri.org/RiceDoctor_MX/Fact_Sheets/Diseases/Brown_
Spot.htm, accessed 2 June 2007.
42 Sen, Poverty and Famines, p. 4.
180 Mark B. Tauger

the man starved. Sen’s argument in this case is one of emphasis, however, and since
reason and cause are almost identical concepts, Sen’s last sentence could be rewritten:
“The increased food prices most immediately caused this man’s starvation because
they reduced his exchange entitlement, but the reason why the prices increased
was the food shortage.” The rephrased statement prioritizes the food shortage and
makes the entitlement problem a result of that shortage, which in fact occurred
first.43 Padmanabhan, writing years earlier, made a similar emphasis in a sentence
that could have been written in response to Sen: “Though administrative failures
were immediately responsible for this human suffering, the principal cause of the
short crop production in 1942 was the epidemic of helminthosporium disease which
attacked the rice crop in that year.”44
In terms of causation, there can be no doubt that the plant disease-induced crop
failure must be recognized as the cause of the crisis in Bengal, because it damaged
the plants and reduced the harvest before the prices skyrocketed. Prices peaked,
and destitution and starvation intensified only after the harvest of that aman crop.
Causation first of all concerns chronology and consequences, and there can be no
doubt that the crop failure took place before the peak of the famine and rice prices,
both of which can be seen as results of the crop failure.45
Other sources provide additional support for the conclusion that the famine
resulted from small harvests in 1942. Goswami’s estimate of the 1942-1943 harvest
as approximately one-third less than the previous year, based on an alternative
calculation of Sen’s data (see above), may also be close to what the harvest actually
was. This would seem to imply that the FIC data, despite their conjectural origins,
might be less inaccurate when manipulated correctly, but this conclusion depends on
the validation provided by the measured harvest data that Padmanabhan published.
Huseyn Shameed Suhrawardy, a Bengal politician who served as Civil Supplies
Minister in the Bengal provincial government during the famine, remembered the
warning at the Delhi Food Conference in December 1942 that because crops had
failed for two seasons in a row in Bengal, a serious famine was impending.46 This
seems to support the evidence presented by Padmanabhan that the plant diseases
damaged both the aus and aman harvests.
In mid-1943, British authorities launched a publicity campaign to persuade
people, and especially grain traders, that Bengal did not have a shortage and food
prices should not be so high. Sen agreed with the premise of this campaign and

43 Sen manipulates other concepts, including the legal concept of entitlements, in similar
ways; see Tauger, “Entitlement, Shortage, and the Bengal Famine.”
44 Padmanabhan, “Bengal Famine,” p. 11.
45 A table in Sen’s chapter shows that the prices of rice peaked in March-November 1943;
Sen, Poverty and Famines, p. 66.
46 H. R. Talukdar, ed., Memoirs of Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy (Dhaka, 1987), p. 18.
 The Indian Famine Crises of World War II 181

argued that widespread popular expectations of famine based on the number of famine
victims and the high rice prices were unjustified because there was no shortage.47 The
Indian historian J. N. Uppal, however, notes that “[A]s soon as it became clear that
the ‘aman’ crop was going to be poor there was an abrupt rise in prices in most of the
rice markets. The whole province was rent with reports about the havoc caused by
the cyclone. The word went round that this ‘aman’ crop was going to be the worst for
the last 20 years.”48 Uppal thus documents that people ignored the British publicity
because they heard reliable reports from informed people who knew it was a small
harvest. The spreading destitution would have reinforced this conclusion. Clearly
many Bengalis during the famine must have recognized there was a shortage, in
contrast to Greenough’s claim that all Bengalis thought the famine was man-made.

High Prices and Hoards

The “man-made” famine interpretation blames the famine on high food prices in
1943, and minimizes or rejects crop failure as an explanation for them. Sen attributes
the high prices to what he describes as an economic boom from government military
expenditures, widespread popular panic related to the war, a “slight” decline in the
harvest, and speculation by grain traders and better-off peasants who held back from
sale large hoards of rice.49 Almost all other scholars agree with this interpretation: Bose
entitles his article “starvation amidst plenty.”50 These explanations are problematic for
several reasons.
The term “boom” does not seem an accurate description of conditions in Bengal
and Calcutta in this period. According to eyewitness accounts in the FIC report,
Calcutta during the war became “largely empty” with vacant houses and shops
because so many people had left in fear of a Japanese invasion. Greenough notes that
“hundreds of shops and firms closed and as many as 300,000 persons were thought
to have fled [Calcutta]” after Japanese attacks in 1942.51 Transport was delayed and
crowded as refugees fleeing from Burma traveled around the countryside and spread
diseases, and in general people were highly uncertain and anxious.52 Government
spending on military construction only mildly mitigated this crisis.
The premise that traders in Bengal held back hoards of rice from the market
to drive up prices, which follows from the assumption that no shortage prevailed,
is particularly problematic. The first component of this viewpoint is the claim

47 Sen, Poverty and Famines, pp. 76-7.

48 Uppal, Bengal Famine, p. 68.
49 Sen, Poverty and Famines, p. 75ff.
50 Bose, “Starvation amidst Plenty,” p. 699.
51 Greenough, Prosperity and Misery, p. 109.
52 Knight, Food Administration, p. 75, citing FIC, p. 25.
182 Mark B. Tauger

that Bengalis held substantial carryover grain supplies from the previous harvests.
Ordinarily Bengalis would consume the harvest several months after it was gathered,
relying on the carry-over from the previous year, because they traditionally considered
freshly-harvested rice tasteless and difficult to digest.53
Sen acknowledges that no concrete data carryover exist but argues that his
harvest data and his calculations of successive two- and three-year averages prove
that the peasants had a substantial carryover and outweigh any contrary evidence.54
He specifically dismisses the analysis by Afzal Husain, a member of the FIC, as
a “surmise.” Husain wrote a long study included in the FIC report that employs
different assumptions and utilizes much more data than Sen used to estimate the
carryover.55 By the 1930s, according to Husain, Bengal was already a deficit province,
dependent on imports from other provinces and Burma for its margin of subsistence,
a point with which Greenough agrees and which Sen does not address.56 The partial
crop failure in 1940-1941 had already depleted most reserves, Husain argues, and
most people began eating the rice crop of 1941-42 in January 1942, rather than in
April as was customary. Bengalis thus had no substantial carryover and by eating
the new harvest early were reducing their reserves for the end of the year. By the
end of 1942, Husain argues, the remainder of the 1941-1942 harvest was mostly
consumed, and people again began eating the new harvest immediately.57 Goswami’s
recalculation showing a significant harvest decline, and Padmanabhan’s evidence of
small harvests in 1942 conclusively support Husain’s views.
In contrast to Husain’s analysis, which brings in a variety of data sources and
an awareness of the limited food resources that most people possessed (especially
peasants and laborers), Sen’s analysis relies almost exclusively on his simple running-
averages calculations of his “official production statistics,” which are not harvest data
at all and for which Sen himself later acknowledged “it would be foolish to claim
great accuracy.”58
In the second component of this argument for hoards, Sen and the advocates of
a “man-made” famine assume, based on their assumption of a large carryover, that
many traders had large hoards which they held back to drive up prices, but then when
the new harvest came in, “prices fell” and they released their hoards.59 To address
this issue we must consider the governmental attempts to expose those hoards, their
release, and certain contrary evidence.

53 Uppal, Bengal Famine, p. 55; FIC, p. 180.

54 Sen, Poverty and Famines, pp. 62, 83.
55 FIC, Report on Bengal, pp. 179-200; Sen, Poverty and Famines, p. 62.
56 Greenough, Prosperity and Misery, p. 80.
57 FIC, Report on Bengal, p. 188; Uppal, Bengal Famine, pp. 76-7.
58 See for example Sen’s dismissal of the FIC’s conclusions regarding a small carryover
based only on his running averages calculations, Poverty and Famines, p. 83.
59 See for example Greenough, Prosperity and Misery, p. 137.
 The Indian Famine Crises of World War II 183

When food prices began to rise early in the war, government officials widely
assumed that big traders had large hoards and from May 1942, with the Foodgrains
Control Order, applied a series of policies to expose them.60 During spring 1943 the
central authorities introduced free trade in rice first in the eastern region (Bengal
and its surrounding provinces) and then briefly in most of India. In this period
of approximately three months, traders and official purchasers from Bengal traveled
widely in the surrounding provinces (Orissa, Bihar, and Assam) seeking rice and
driving up prices in those regions drastically. They still acquired only some 91,000
tons of food grains, which was a small amount that had negligible impact on prices
in Bengal. 61
Next, the Bengal government conducted “food drives” in June and July 1943 to
expose large holdings in the countryside and Calcutta, using house-to-house searches
to uncover reserves and requisition especially large hoards. In rural areas this search
requisitioned 40,000 tons of rice and paddy and found one million tons of stocks
among ten million families, 56 million people. The Bengal Government considered
these stocks to be underestimated by 25 percent, but even then, this implies average
reserves of one-eighth of a ton, at most 400 pounds of rice and paddy per family for
a year, which is less than a pound a day per person and in no sense a “hoard.” Thus
the FIC considered this food drive to have documented a shortage of one million
tons of rice in 1943, rather than a surplus. The drive in Calcutta found 40,000 tons
of rice that would have provided rations for the city for less than two months.62 The
Foodgrains Control Order of May 1942 required traders to report their holdings to
the government, and the food drives found traders’ holdings corresponded to their
reports under this law.63
When the aman harvest came on the market, prices fell because traders had more
grain to sell and bid down prices to sell their stocks. Yet no evidence has been adduced
to prove what, if any, portion of the rice sold in late 1943 came from the previous
harvest, and since no data exist on carryover, it would appear to follow that no data
exist to show that any carryover was in fact sold. Those who adhere to the “man-made
famine” view simply assume that the new harvest brought out the “hoards.” This
in turn assumes that when the traders held their hoards in early 1943 they did not
compete with each other, which would have reduced prices, even though they made
desperate efforts to obtain rice in neighboring provinces during the free-trade period
of early 1943. This implies that these hoarders engaged in a tacit conspiracy in early

60 Knight, Food Administration, p. 50.

61 Ibid., p. 90.
62 Ibid., pp. 91-2; FIC, pp. 55-8.
63 Uppal, Bengal Famine, p. 102. He adds that these findings were “a direct lie to the
misguided propaganda carried out on behalf of the government that there was no real deficiency.” (p.
101)
184 Mark B. Tauger

1943 to force people to pay more, complete with false rumors of impending famine,
even though proponents of this view assert that Bengal did not have a shortage.
Advocates of this viewpoint also never explain or document how individual traders
living in the crowded conditions of Calcutta during the war, faced with groups of
angry consumers, suspicious officials and often soldiers with orders to expose hidden
hoards, could have concealed large hoards of grain on short notice. Greenough cites
cases of conflicts between traders and angry crowds.64 Husain argues that traders
would not have held stocks larger than their annual turnover, and probably held much
less. Uppal argues that traders bought supplies at high prices because they anticipated
selling them for more in a matter of days, not because they counted on hoarding.65
Sen describes the British authorities’ attempt to determine the shortage in Bengal as
“a search in a dark room for a black cat which wasn’t there.”66 This description would
seem to be more applicable to the hoards allegedly kept by traders. If it took the 1943
aman harvest to reduce prices, it is difficult to escape the suspicion that the price rise
resulted from a small aman harvest in 1942, and was further evidence of the crop
failure that Padmanabhan documented.
The assumption that people withheld reserves and money and were indifferent
to the suffering of the poor is a basic theme of the famine, even in the report of the
Famine Inquiry Commission.67 Some studies describe how famine victims died in
front of fully-stocked food stores, which implies that shopkeepers were too greedy
to attempt to alleviate their starvation. This is highly problematic because many of
the destitute people who arrived in Calcutta were on their last legs, and it is actually
a relatively complex medical problem to enable seriously weakened famine victims to
survive.68 Attacks and threatened attacks on shops and shopkeepers may explain why
some shopkeepers tried to keep destitutes away from their shops.69
A different view comes from Goparaju Ramachandra Rao or Gora, an associate
of Gandhi’s who visited Calcutta during the famine. In his memoirs Gora described
the actions of different groups in Bengal during the famine:

Looking at the other side, were all the shop-keepers so cruel as

to allow their fellow-men to die of dire hunger before their own
eyes? No. On the other hand they shed tears of pity and contributed
liberally and ran the gruel kitchens for the destitutes. They recited
hymns of ethics every day.70

64 Greenough, Prosperity and Misery, p. 107.

65 FIC, p. 186ff; Uppal, Bengal Famine, p. 171.
66 Sen, Poverty and Famines, p. 80.
67 Knight, Food Administration, p. 104.
68 On this see for example Uppal, pp. 140-1.
69 Greenough, Prosperity and Misery, pp. 95, 106-7, 129-130.
70 http://www.positiveatheism.org/india/gora13.htm#CHAP_VII , accessed 4 June 2007.
 The Indian Famine Crises of World War II 185

How common were such actions? This topic has been little investigated, although
potentially valuable sources exist on it. Certainly many people were indifferent, some
investigations did find a few hoards held by merchants or others, and some merchants
did hoard and profiteer, but their actions are not the whole story. Until a study discusses
the actions of these people more objectively and comprehensively, and approaches
more critically the biased claims of political actors, unsupported conspiracy theories
that contradict evidence and economic rationality, and false evidence of an adequate
harvest, we are not in a position to judge them.
The information and arguments presented above make it difficult to escape the
conclusion that the crisis in Bengal was exactly the opposite of the viewpoint that
dismisses crop failure and shortage as “myth” and affirms the validity of the “man-
made” famine. The conclusion of Padmanabhan and his associates, and the IRRI,
that there was a serious shortage from the plant disease, based on research in the
actual environmental conditions of the famine, clearly outweighs assertions that there
was no shortage by the advocates of a “man-made” famine interpretation, which is
based on a limited set of conjectural forecasts of changes in presumed averages of
area and yield made by unqualified personnel and one simplistic set of calculations
to determine total harvests and carryover reserves. The attribution of blame to
unscrupulous, heartless grain traders forcing up prices based on false rumors is the
“myth.” The reality was a crop failure recognized by Bengali scientists, politicians,
traders, and the public, but less by the British, and which traders tried to alleviate by
desperate purchases that drove prices up widely in eastern India, and by contributing
to relief efforts.

Beyond Bengal: The Indian Famines of World War II

Even more important for understanding this crisis is the substantial evidence that the
famine conditions in Bengal were part of a larger subsistence crisis. Most writings
on the Bengal famine, especially those that blame the British for this “man-made
disaster,” limit their focus to Bengal. At best they refer in passing to some of the
events outside Bengal, usually in an attempt to impugn British mismanagement. Yet
the context of crop failures, high prices, and subsistence problems in colonial India
and the nearby British possessions challenges the image of the isolated and “man-
made” Bengal famine. Uppal stated it better than he actually documented when he
wrote that “the rapidly deteriorating situation in Bengal should be viewed as a part of
the overall food problem of the subcontinent.”71 The following discussion surveys the
main agrarian and food-supply components of this subcontinent-wide crisis to raise
this overlooked issue and to explain why the Bengal famine must be view in its larger

71 Uppal, Bengal Famine, p. 87.

186 Mark B. Tauger

context to understand it accurately.

The context for these crises was the division of the subcontinent into two
subsistence regions and its overall need for imports. One group of provinces and
states - Sind, Punjab, the United Provinces, the Central Provinces and Orissa -
ordinarily produced a surplus, while virtually all of the other political units were net
importers, including Bombay and the Princely States to its south, Travancore and
Cochin, Madras, Mysore, Bihar, Bengal, and Assam. Indian subsistence depended
on regular trade in food between these two regions.72 By the 1930s, if not earlier,
even the surplus-producing provinces no longer yielded sufficient rice to meet the
needs of the growing populations in the deficit provinces, and they had to import
millions of tons of rice from Burma, the leading rice exporting country in the world.
Most studies of the Bengal famine refer to Bengal’s loss of rice from Burma after the
Japanese conquest of that country in spring 1942 and minimize its significance, but
the loss of Burma’s rice was more significant for Bombay, Travancore, and Cochin
than it was for Bengal. Deficit provinces were also often called upon to export grain
to regions with even greater deficits that were under British control, like Ceylon, and
to British allies, like Persia.
The British authorities, leaders, and many citizens of other parts of India thus
viewed Bengal in an all-India or even wider context. Some advocates of the “man-
made” famine view recognize that Bengal needed a margin of imports in order to
survive, but few if any of them note that most Indian states and Ceylon were in
the same position. Whether this situation resulted from a secular decline in per-
capita food production in India is a matter of dispute that relies (again) on uncertain
statistics.73 It is clear, however, that if crops failed in any significant part of India, it
would affect many other regions sooner or later, especially during a crisis period like
the war. Moreover, even with regular processes of trade to equalize distribution, much
of the South Asian population was poor and malnourished, and rapid population
growth exacerbated this situation. Consequently, even a relatively minor drop in food
production could lead to serious deprivation and hunger.
In India, World War II began simultaneously with a series of regional famines
in Rajasthan. Out of fourteen states and British territories in that region, the nine
largest states, including the great majority of this region’s territory, had declared
famines according to the Indian Famine Code in August of 1939, and one declared
a scarcity.74 Declaration of famine set in train a series of governmental measures to
provide relief. For most of these states the famine was one of the most severe in their
histories, with minimal or no rainfall from the monsoon and near-total grain and

72 Knight, Food Administration, p. 24ff.

73 On this see Guha, Growth, Stagnation or Decline?
74 O. P. Kachhawaha, History of Famines in Rajasthan 1900 A. D. – 1990 A. D. ( Jodhpur,
1992). p. 325, Appendix III.
 The Indian Famine Crises of World War II 187

forage crop failures. We can consider two examples of this crisis.

In Ajmer-Merwara, a small British-controlled province in the middle of the
region, the severity of the famine led British authorities to open eighteen relief camps
that housed and fed one-fourth of the province’s population as well as some 27,000
people from neighboring provinces seeking relief. The Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow,
visited these works. When grain traders (mahajans) attempted to take advantage of
the situation by raising prices, the British Commissioner in charge of the province
invoked the newly issued Defense of India law and forced them to sell their stocks.
He also held a meeting of well-to-do people on 10 August 1939 to solicit charitable
support, and they donated more than 17,000 rupees on the spot.75
In Marwar, the largest state in the region, the famine of 1939-40 struck after a
smaller declared famine in 1936-38, and weak monsoons in the years that followed.
After a total monsoon failure in summer 1939, the Maharaja declared a famine and
appointed a famine advisory committee and a relief coordinator. The government set
up dozens of relief works that employed almost six million people; local jagirdars also
set up works that helped half a million people. The government purchased grain from
Punjab and Sind, set up several low-priced stores, and supplied relief workers with
low-price wheat. The government also imported forage and established numerous
depots to feed cattle, and even opened the Maharaja’s forests for grazing. Private
charity took its lead from the Maharani who opened a free kitchen for destitutes in
her palace; soon a wide range of businessmen and other well-to-do people contributed
funds to charitable organizations or set up their own relief organizations. Even people
in Bombay and Calcutta set up relief organizations for the famine victims in Marwar.
The region also saw a conflict and strike over wages on relief works, which was settled
fairly quickly.76
The war thus began in India with a regional crop failure that created declared
famines and required imported relief supplies. The states involved had relatively small
populations, and they managed the crises reasonably well, although not without some
increased mortality. Still, these regional famines indicated the risk of a larger crisis.
Such a crisis occurred the following year in Bengal, where bad weather conditions
were estimated to have decreased the aman rice harvest of 1940-41 by more than two
million tons against what was considered a normal harvest. While all of these data,
as noted above, are suspect, it was clear that the partial failure of the aman harvest of
December 1940 reduced overall rice availability well below the necessary level (to an
estimated three-quarters of the normal level) even with limited imports from Burma.
As a result of this shortage in 1941, Bengalis apparently consumed most of whatever
carryover of rice they had from previous years and began eating the new crop of rice

75 Kashhawaha, Rajasthan, pp. 65-72.

76 Ibid., pp. 110-30.
188 Mark B. Tauger

much earlier than usual.77

During this period prices increased all over the subcontinent. The government
anticipated this and early in the war issued policy guidelines for price regulation
by the provinces and then by the central government. The central government
also held a series of price control conferences to consult with provincial and state
representatives on local conditions and determine policies. Initially the officials of
the Government of India [GOI] considered price increases to be a fair compensation
to farmers for the low prices of the Depression years, but by 1941, when prices had
reached double the prewar level or more (partly because of the rice crop failure in
Bengal), the government acknowledged the need for active intervention in the market.
By January 1940, however, prices had risen so much in Bombay that the provincial
government opened low priced grain shops for the poor.78 Burma rice prices also
increased in 1941, because of a crop failure in the Arakan coastal region, the source of
most rice exports to India, and because of increased demand from China, Japan and
Singapore.79 In Travancore, rice prices doubled in 1941, and the state government
tried to combat this with fixed prices and reserve stocks, but famine conditions spread
in the state by 1942.80
The most important events in the Indian crisis occurred in 1942. The Japanese
campaigns that began with Pearl Harbor in December 1941 concluded with their
conquest of Southeast Asia in the first months of 1942. Japan took over Burma
in an intense campaign that began in mid-January and ended with the conquest
of Rangoon and northern Burma by mid-May 1942. The British widely applied
scorched-earth policies; the Japanese resorted to considerable atrocities, and after
their victory stopped rice exports from the Burma and ordered many farmers to
switch from rice to cotton and other crops.81
The Japanese conquest of Burma created an immediate and serious crisis for
several parts of India. On the west coast, Bombay was faced with living on less than
three-quarters of its usual grain supplies. Cochin, with a population of 1.5 million,
normally imported 60 percent of the rice it required, mainly from Burma. Travancore
imported a smaller but still substantial share for a population of six million.82 Both
states faced sudden shortages and rapidly rising prices. Their governments imposed
price controls, but the merchants and producers evaded these. They also tried to

77 Uppal, Bengal Famine, p. 58.

78 V. S. Patvardhan, Food Control in Bombay Province, 1939-1949 (Poona, 1958).
79 Knight, Food Administration, p. 43; Parvardhan, Food Control, p. 10.
80 Sri K. G. Sivaswamy et al., Food Famine and Nutritional Diseases in Travancore (1943-
1944) (Coimbatore, 1945), p. 123.
81 Frank N. Trager, ed., Burma: Japanese Military Admnistration, Selected Documents, 1941-
1945 (Philadelphia, 1971), pp. 66-7.
82 Knight, Food Administration, p. 58; Sivaswamy, Travancore; Sivaswamy et al., Famine,
Rationing, and Food Policy in Cochin (Madras, 1946).
 The Indian Famine Crises of World War II 189

import rice from Madras, but Madras had become a deficit province.
Finally, in December 1942 the Cochin Dewar and his government decided that
the only solution to the famine conditions was to impose monopoly procurement on
producers in the villages. This required an elaborate series of tactics and rules, not
always successfully followed, to prevent or discourage concealment and movement of
supplies to the black market. By 1943 Cochin managed to impose rationing in rural
areas, ahead of all other provinces, obtaining some 40 percent of the harvest for state
distribution.83
Travancore had much more difficulty managing its food supplies. Madras and
the central government agreed to provide substantial supplies for Travancore, but
could not do so: from July 1942 to April 1943 the state received only 88,000 tons of
the 300,000 tons promised. The situation improved only in late 1944, but even then
Travancore never received more than 60 percent of the quotas it was promised from
central government sources.84 The Dewar’s government realized that they had to
control marketing of grain but encountered various types of subterfuge by merchants
and producers to evade government orders. During fall of 1942 the government
published in the press threats that it would requisition lands if they were not used
for growing necessary cereals. In January 1943 the government required permits for
grain to be transported, but merchants tried to evade this. In September 1943 the
government declared what was essentially a state monopoly claim on rice produced
in Travancore. Even this measure did not obtain the amounts necessary for the
population’s needs. After much reluctance, from December 1943 to February 1944
Travancore introduced rationing for the entire country.85
While both Travancore and Cochin set up rationing, they remained undersupplied,
so their rations were quite small, below subsistence levels (e.g. 5 ounces of rice for
an adult) until the better harvests of 1943-1944 and increased food imports made
possible by Allied military victories increased supplies in India as a whole. As a
result, both Travancore and Cochin were unable to prevent substantial increases in
mortality, which, while not quite as high as in Bengal in the same period, were more
than double the normal rate.
Bombay responded to the crisis by rapidly sending negotiators to Madras, one
of Bombay’s usual sources of rice, to purchase more rice. Madras ultimately agreed
to allot 6,000 tons. This left Bombay province with less than half its normal supply
of rice. At the same time, Madras pleaded for wheat from Bombay, but Bombay
was already short of wheat supplies.86 In December 1942 the Governor of Bombay
warned the Viceroy that unless Bombay obtained food in the next week, he would

83 Sivaswamy, Cochin, pp. 10-19.

84 Sivaswamy, Travancore, p. 125.
85 Ibid., pp. 133-43.
86 Patvardhan, p. 25.
190 Mark B. Tauger

have to start moving people out of the city into the countryside to survive.87 In
early 1943 the province set up rationing, first in Bombay City and then in increasing
numbers of towns in the province.
Certain parts of Bombay Province faced worse conditions because of crop failures.
The most severe conditions were in the Bijapur district, an arid Deccan region that
had irregular monsoons and repeated partial crop failures in 1935-1936, 1937-1938,
1940-1941 and 1941-1942. The summer of 1942, however, was worse: the monsoon
faded after early June, and drought ruined the district’s kharif crops and prevented
the sowing of rabi crops. By December 1942 famine was declared throughout the
district.88 The provincial government established relief works relatively slowly, starting
only in April 1943. The maximum employment of 111,000 laborers was reached only
in August. Relief works were poorly distributed in rural areas, their locations did
not always correspond to the severity of the famine, and the works received irregular
and insufficient grain supplies and delayed wage distribution. One possible partial
explanation for these problems may be that the provincial government was occupied
with establishing a rationing system for the city of Bombay.89 The people of Bombay
responded to the crisis in Bijapur by organizing relief committees, donating large
amounts of money, providing many forms of relief including cattle feeding, medical
aid, and well digging, and investigating government relief works to expose problems
and to suggest solutions.90
Similar crop failures affected other regions as well. Madras Province was one
from which Bombay, Bengal, and central government authorities sought grain for
their own needs and for Ceylon. Yet Madras endured two consecutive monsoon
failures in 1942 and 1943, and by fall 1943 had established rationing in its main
towns. By September 1943 the British considered parts of Madras to be “seriously
deficit areas” along with Bengal.91 The Provincial Governor of Madras informed the
Viceroy in July 1943 of Madras’ shortage and its unfair treatment by other provinces:
on request from those provinces, Madras had sent “great quantities of rice to Ceylon,
Travancore and Cochin … although we knew we were short ourselves. Now, when
we are much worse off, the surplus provinces stick to their surplus and do everything
they can to avoid fulfilling their agreements in the basic plan [see below]...”92
Orissa Province, which bordered Bengal, had declining harvests from 1938-
1942, and then had large areas devastated by the Midnapur cyclone of October 1942,
another cyclone the following month, and subsequent flooding.93 As a result, the

87 N. Mansergh, ed., The Transfer of Power 1942-7 (London, 1971), 3: 436-7.

88 Report of the Bijapur Famine Relief Committee Bombay 1943 (Bombay, 1944), pp. 1-2.
89 Bijapur Relief Committee, pp. 18-22.
90 Ibid., pp. 2-18.
91 Transfer of Power, 4: 281, 302.
92 Ibid., p. 82.
93 Memorandum on the causes of food shortage and subsequent epidemics in Orissa in 1943 and
 The Indian Famine Crises of World War II 191

1942-1943 harvest in the province fell below even the low levels of the previous years,
which had already left the peasants practically no reserves. This situation disrupted
long-established patterns of trade within the Province. At the same time, prices
dramatically increased with the Japanese invasion of Southeast Asia. By mid-1942
popular complaints forced the provincial government to impose price controls on
grain markets and embargoes on trade outside the province.94
By mid-1943 the worsening situation in Bengal motivated the central government
authorities, as part of the Basic Plan that the central government arranged in spring
1943 to redistribute surplus food among deficit provinces, to redistribute grain
among the eastern provinces and states, partly to relieve the famine in Bengal. Orissa,
despite its own shortages, was prevailed upon to offer Bengal 24,000 tons of rice.
Orissa had shipped 22,000 tons when on May 18th, under pressure from the Bengal
government, the central government declared free trade in the eastern region. The
result was a massive influx into Orissa of merchants, traders, government purchasers,
and speculators, who bought up whatever grain they could find, disrupting local
markets and driving prices as high as they were in Bengal. When free trade finally
ended in July-August 1943, Orissa had undergone a food-supply and food-price
catastrophe that significantly worsened its already desperate conditions toward the
level of famine.95 While Orissa’s death rate was far below Bengal’s, it still sustained
significant numbers of deaths and deprivation from this complex crisis.
This incomplete survey shows that India had several regional famines during
1939-1944, with crop failures, food shortages, high prices, relief difficulties, and deaths
from starvation and diseases. 96 Many people, from government officials to traders
to educated people in the towns and often villagers, were aware of this situation and
attempted to alleviate these subsistence crises. Provincial governments appealed to
central authorities for supplies, negotiated among themselves to obtain emergency
allotments, and applied an array of policies from requisitions to rationing to obtain
food from internal stocks. Private charitable organizations, like the Bijapur Relief
Commission, raised funds, organized relief and exposed failings in government relief
efforts. Even opposition groups, such as the government of Congress rebels formed
in Midnapur after the “Quit India” movement in fall 1942, worked to alleviate these
famines.97
The evidence that the Bengal famine was part of a series of environmentally-
caused famines that many people attempted to alleviate also shows that “man-made”

measures taken to combat them (Cuttack, 1944), pp. 3-5.

94 Ibid., pp. 6-10.
95 Ibid., pp. 10-11.
96 For example the large princely state of Mysore in the south also had small harvests and
starvation in 1942-1944; M. Sankar Linge Gowda, Agrarian Policy in the Mysore State (Dharwar,
1944); the author was a member of the state assembly and organizer of famine relief.
97 Chakrabarty, , Local Politics and Indian Nationalism, p. 156ff.
192 Mark B. Tauger

famine literatures have misrepresented and unfairly condemned the attitudes and
actions of British colonial authorities. This article will only raise a few key points
because the colonial government’s response to the crisis is a large and complex subject
that would require a separate study.
The Viceroy up to September 1943, Lord Linlithgow (Victor Alexander John
Hope) was to some degree a specialist on Indian agriculture. He chaired the Royal
Commission on Agriculture from 1926 to1928, during which time he travelled
widely in India, obtained detailed testimony that was ultimately published in 17
volumes, and wrote a final report that was followed up by numerous periodic reports
on fulfillment of the Commission’s recommendations. He frequently visited rural
areas and was committed to aiding Indian peasants.98 Descriptions of his attitude as
indifferent or hostile to the peasants, let alone accusations of genocide, are absurd.
Linlithgow was also committed to observing the new Indian Constitution of
1935, which allotted autonomy to provincial governments, and when the Bengal
famine emerged he was reluctant to interfere in the province. In the first months of
1943, that government fell into disarray because of political squabbles and the illness
of the British governor John Herbert, and the Central Government became involved
in aiding famine relief efforts with the limited reserves it had. By then, however,
Linlithgow was at the end of the third extension of his term, which Churchill had
demanded of him, and was preparing to be replaced. During his term he had contended
with Gandhi’s “Quit India” movement, demands from the Muslim League and many
other groups, the Japanese invasion, as well as the internal economic crises.
British and other leaders anticipated high prices from the beginning of the war.
Their reference point at first was the Great Depression, and their idea that farmers
deserved higher prices after years of low prices was not unreasonable.99 When it
became clear that the country faced a more serious crisis than anticipated, they
undertook the famine relief discussed above, established a Food Department, held
national meetings on food supplies, and instituted a series of short-term policies to
alleviate the crisis.100
They also undertook longer-term efforts to overcome the crisis. In response to
the Japanese takeover of Southeast Asia in early 1942, specialists in the Imperial
Council for Agricultural Research (the colonial predecessor to ICAR) urged the
central government to increase food production. This led to a national meeting and
the “Grow More Food Campaign,” in which officials made peasants and landowners
shift cropland from cash crops (usually fiber crops) to food crops and plant food crops

98 John Glendevon, The Viceroy at Bay (London, 1971), pp. 12, 33; Royal Commission
on Agriculture, Minutes of evidence taken before the Royal Commission on Agriculture (London, 1927-
1928), 14 vols in 17.
99 Knight, Food Administration, p. 36.
100 Transfer of Power, 3: 224, 249-50; Knight, Food Administration, ch. 7, p. 57ff.
 The Indian Famine Crises of World War II 193

on marginal lands. This campaign increased food cultivation several million acres in
its first year, and more afterwards, and the program continued into the independence
period. Natural disasters, including the crop failures and cyclones of 1942, frustrated
its effectiveness in 1942-43. As such, it did not achieve its highest goals in increasing
crop land, but it compensated for much of the area lost to cyclone and monsoon
failure.101 Travancore on its own undertook similar efforts to increase the area under
cultivation.102
Some government policies were mistakes, such as the decision in spring 1943
to allow free trade to induce hoarders to sell their stocks. When the provincial
leaders protested and demanded change, however, Linlithgow and his associates were
sufficiently honest and responsive to reverse the policy in a few weeks.103 Linlithgow
also repeatedly sent Churchill and the War Cabinet in London insistent demands for
immediate and substantial food shipments, accompanied by descriptions of famine
conditions from Provincial and regional officials. The War Cabinet initially resisted
allocating shipping from war material to food for India but ultimately sent a few
shipments in 1943. Sen and other writers criticize the British for these delays and
compromises in arranging this shipping, but this decision has to be viewed in the
context of the Nazi and Japanese attacks and the Allies’ efforts to resist them. During
the first six months of 1943 these attacks lost the Allies and neutrals more than 2.1
million tons of shipping. In the Indian Ocean alone from January 1942 to May 1943,
the Axis powers sank 230 British and Allied merchant ships totaling 873,000 tons,
in other words, a substantial boat every other day.104 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 helping
India at all.
In this context the issue of the harvest statistics takes on additional meaning.
Sen criticized the British for their concern with what he considered an irrelevant
shortage, but in fact his interpretation of the Bengal famine mirrors the British
interpretation.105 The second Governor of Bengal in 1943, Sir Thomas Rutherford
(appointed to replace Herbert when the latter became ill), wrote in a document that
the shortage was not very severe but was followed by unusual withholding of stocks

101 Report of the Grow More Food Enquiry Committee, Government of India, June 1952.
For an example of criticism see Islam, Bengal Agriculture, p. 38. Even if this criticism is true, it seems
mean-spirited to criticize a program overstating some of its statistics while ignoring its objectives of
increasing Indian food production and its partial success against considerable natural obstacles and
unjustified early criticisms; Knight, Food Administration, pp. 124-6.
102 Sivaswamy, Travancore, p. 128.
103 Knight, Food Administration, p. 64.
104 Knight, Food Administration, p. 98; www.naval-history.net/WW2CampaignsIndian-
Ocean2.htm, a site endorsed by the Imperial War Museum.
105 See also Islam, “The Great Bengal Famine,” p. 430.
194 Mark B. Tauger

and a disproportionate rise in prices, which is almost exactly Sen’s description.106 Sen
cites this document in an elliptical and misleading way to claim that the British were
concerned only with determining the shortage, when in fact Rutherford raised that
issue extremely briefly in order to estimate how much grain Bengal needed for relief.
Sen never considers the possibility that the British estimated shortages in order to
determine how to allocate limited relief supplies to meet needs all over India.
Yet the consensus of Linlithgow’s government that the shortage was small, which
Rutherford’s report reinforced, undermined the Indians’ claim for aid from London.
When the War Cabinet heard the Indian estimates of a shortage of a few hundred
thousand tons (those misleading official data again, but the same as Sen’s estimate
of small losses) against a harvest estimated in the tens of millions of tons, Cabinet
members were not impressed and agreed to shipments only under urging by military
leaders whom the Indian leaders had convinced to support their appeal.107 Given
such a small estimate of need in India, the British balanced relief for Bengal in fall
1943 with relief for the famine in Greece at the time, which they thought might be
worse than Bengal’s.108 Perhaps if Linlithgow had known that Helminthosporium had
reduced Bengal’s harvest by one-third, he might have been able to report a much
greater shortage to the War Cabinet and persuade them to prioritize India and send
supplies earlier.
When Viscount Archibald Wavell took over as Viceroy during fall 1943, he
recognized that the famine was more serious than Linlithgow realized because he
decided it was the result of a large shortage, and he criticized the War Cabinet for
working from manifestly false statistics that underestimated the shortage.109 He
too sent insistent demands to the War Cabinet asking for a million tons of grain,
and again he was put off for months and then offered a small fraction of what he
requested until the wartime situation stabilized.

Conclusion

The conventional view of the Bengal famine as a “man-made famine” that had no
origins in shortage is not only inaccurate but also unjustly narrow and oversimplified.
The real crisis was much broader and more complex. Government officials at all levels
faced a series of simultaneous crises with inadequate resources. Traders increased
prices simultaneously with monsoon failures, cyclones, and crop failures, and all of
these events were more widespread than the conventional interpretation envisages.
The Bengal crisis did not at first appear as serious as it became later. The subsistence

106 Sen, pp. 75-7; Islam, p. 60 and fn; Transfer of Power, 4: 361-5.
107 Transfer of Power, 4: 321-2.
108 Ibid., 343-4.
109 Penderel Moon, ed., Wavell: The Viceroy’s Journal (London, 1973), p. 55.
 The Indian Famine Crises of World War II 195

crises also occurred simultaneously with internal political and military crises.
British and Indian governments, both at the center and in the provinces and
states, were dealing with crop failures and subsistence crises from the outbreak of war
in summer 1939 onward. The “man-made” famine argument ignores the substantial
efforts undertaken by groups ranging from the War Cabinet in London to small
princely states and private relief organizations, as well as the obstacles and clearly
evident shortages of food reserves that they faced. The “man-made famine” argument
blames the British for the Bengal famine while ignoring British concerns regarding
the Japanese attacks on shipping and the food needs of other regions dependent on
Britain. The argument also seems to minimize the Japanese threat, evidenced by the
Japanese atrocities reported from Burma, and from which British and Indian military
forces protected Bengal and the rest of India.110
It is true that famine relief to Bengal in 1943 was delayed, and in principle,
with better leadership in Bengal (an issue that cannot be discussed here), many lives
could have been saved. Historically, however, famine relief has often been delayed
and inadequate and can be even today (e.g., Darfur). It is unjustified and unfair,
however, to accuse the British of creating a famine, let alone genocide, merely because
of delays, when they were struggling to import and distribute food among many
provinces and states from Cochin to Bengal and also implementing the Grow More
Food campaign to increase food supplies for the entire region.
This article also contributes to a new literature in environmental history that
connects the history of agriculture and famines in India (and elsewhere) with the
origins of environmentalism. Recent studies have traced environmentalism to 18th
and 19th century scientific studies in British and French empires that connected
deforestation with droughts that caused crop failures and famines.111 This awareness
led to a series of policies that in agriculture culminated in the Green Revolution of
the 1960s. This article shows the environment-famine connection is more complex
and diverse than the weather-drought-crop failure pattern of recent studies.112 It
also shows that the “man-made famine” interpretation not only misrepresents the
history of the World War II famine crises in India, but also can lead those who
apply it to other famines to overlook what may be the main causes and to miss the
complexity, depth, and implications of these important events that an environment-

110 Archibald Clark Kerr, the British Ambassador to China, noted in a telegram to Chi-
nese General Chiang Kai-Shek: “The longer I stay in India the clearer it becomes to me that the In-
dians have no conception of what would be the horrors of a Japanese occupation.” Transfer of Power,
1: 191.
111 Richard Grove, Green Imperialism (Cambridge, 1995); Gregory Barton, Empire For-
estry and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cambridge, 2002).
112 Mike Davies, Late Victorian Holocausts (London, 2001), also addresses the drought-
famine relationship but never resolves its acceptance of Sen’s interpretation with its environmental
emphasis on the El Niño-drought connection.
 196 Mark B. Tauger

based approach can provide.

Finally, several studies have included the Bengal famine as one more black mark
against Britain in the debate over the balance sheet of imperialism. My aim is to
understand the Bengal famine more accurately by placing in the broader contexts of
environmental crises that impacted Bengal and many other parts of India in the war
years. Before evaluating British actions, we must consider all sides in these events,
without preconceived arguments, omitted data and sources, and a narrow conception
of a crisis that affected, to some extent, all of India.

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