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.’

My research is also leading me to examine the cultural and emotional meanings with which food was invested in wartime Bengal, and its role in cementing societal, familial and community bonds. Two-and-a-half million men from undivided India, including Bengal, served colonial powers in a European war that had very little to do with them, so that they could support their loved ones at home. Their despair at hunger in the homeland is evident from the letters they were exchanging with family and friends. One such letter-writer notes, ‘It is really shocking to hear the price of foodstuff in our place, who is responsible for that? Why is it so? I cannot understand. I think half the population will be wiped off in the near future.’ And another soldier explains, ‘It is to feed my family that I joined service, while I am to suffer separation and service in distant foreign lands. If what I earn can’t feed them properly, what will be the use of such service.’

At home in India, women in rural Bengal had their caregiving and nurturing roles, underpinned by the preparation and provision of food, suddenly – and terribly – disrupted. The affective ties between mother and child, husband and wife, neighbour and friend, affirmed through the sharing and partaking of food, were severed. The three million who died of starvation and other diseases associated with malnutrition form the crucial part of this complex and disturbing history – but there is so much more to examine as the very fabric that knitted society together in Bengal was pulled apart.

What does it mean to remember the Bengal Famine in the twenty-first century? I argue that it re-calibrates our current relationship between food and our emotions, and speaks to present-day concerns regarding the sustainability of food production and the resilience of vulnerable communities in securing food, particularly from the Global South. How did the 1943 Bengal Famine affect Bengali diet, for instance? I am also interested in the role of memory and creative practice in relation to the famine, and have recently worked with artist Sujatro Ghosh and curator Sona Datta on the art exhibition ‘Hunger Burns’, which ran from May to August 2024. The artworks were exhibited in a public library – the Idea Store in Watney Market, in London’s East End – home to a large British Bengali population. The exhibition considered how the act of starvation turns food into not only a site of nourishment but, equally, of desire and longing. It is these emotions that I seek to investigate further.

Diya Gupta is a Lecturer in Public History at City St George's, University of London. Her first book, India in the Second World War: An Emotional History was shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society's 2024 Gladstone Prize. Her current research project examines the nature of wartime violence as it turns inwards, targeting colonised civilian bodies.

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