The 1943 Bengal Famine: Emotional Landscapes of Hunger

The 1943 Bengal Famine was a product of catastrophic colonial mismanagement during the Second World War, yet remains a largely unknown part of British history and marginalised in South Asian historiography. The famine was man-made: over three million people needlessly perished. This is one of the largest losses of civilian life for the Allies, and yet it was brought about by colonial powers and not the Axis forces. How and why was this allowed to happen? Over eighty years on, what can we learn from this atrocity, and what consequences and responsibilities remain for us today?

The 1943 Bengal Famine was an event of international importance and the by-product of a truly global war, and it has clear resonances with conflict and hunger today. Those whose lives were precarious suffered most during the famine – the young, the old, women, artisans, labourers, landless farmers, itinerant minstrels or bauls, village artists and painters – some of whom would have best been able to represent hunger in Bengal but instead became its worst victims. As the future Prime Minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru, would say, the Bengal Famine became ‘the final judgment on British rule in India’. And, as historian Indivar Kamtekar notes, ‘Those who died in the Bengal Famine could not even be counted properly, because they counted for so little.’

My research project, born out of the findings of my first book India in the Second World War: An Emotional History (Hurst and OUP, 2023), investigates how hunger can be interpreted as a product of wartime violence. Instead of incendiaries falling on civilians, such as in London during the Blitz or the bombing of Dresden in 1945, this form of violence was slow and creeping, intensely embodied, and physically and emotionally depleting. It was devastating to experience, and utterly traumatic to witness. 

While historical analyses of the famine have largely been economic, political and social, my interest lies in the cultural transformations that it generated, and their creative and emotional afterlives. Poets like Sukanta Bhattacharya, quoted at the start of this blog post, along with novelists, artists and photographers in Bengal represented and documented the famine with increasing urgency, at a time when wartime censorship meant that even the word ‘famine’ could not be mentioned, and British colonial policy called out as the primary cause. And yet there were global witnesses to this atrocity as the city of Calcutta in Bengal took on a truly international character during the Second World War. It was here that soldiers from across the British Empire, along with American troops, were gathering to fight the Japanese in Burma and other parts of Southeast Asia.

What did these soldiers make of thousands of villagers, who walked miles from rural heartlands to reach Calcutta in the hope of obtaining food, begging for a little phyan or rice-starch, only to die on the streets? Their letters and diaries are testament to the lived realities of witnessing hunger as it escalated into catastrophe. British soldier Clive Branson writes eloquently, ‘Oh, why am I here as a soldier and conqueror, and therefore the prisoner of my conquest?’ And he goes on to observe, as food shortages grow acute, ‘The ordinary, decent people in England must do something – this is their Empire.’ And then, as he journeyed into Bengal, he notes in shock, ‘I saw women – almost fleshless skeletons – their clothes grey with dust from wandering.’