The Grain That Never Came Bengal, 1943, and the Architecture of Starvation
Posted by Ian M on May 12, 2026, 8:57 pm
The Grain That Never Came
Bengal, 1943, and the Architecture of Starvation Nazem Alkudsi 21 Mar 2026 — 7 min read
The rice paddies were green that year. I want you to hold that image.
Not brown. Not fallow. Not scarred by drought or flood or the failure of the monsoon. Green. The fields of Bengal in the autumn of 1943 were producing rice — and three million people were starving to death in the roads beside them.
I first heard about Bengal not from a book but from a man who had lived it. At a dinner in London years ago, I was seated beside a retired Calcutta physician in his late eighties — sharp-eyed, deliberate with his words. When the conversation turned to famine, he set down his fork and went very still.
He was six years old in 1943. His family lived outside Midnapore. His mother kept a small rice store in the back of their house — not for sale, just enough. One morning, soldiers came and took it. All of it. They called it the Denial Policy. His father protested at the district office and was told the rice was needed for the war effort. Within three months, his mother was dead. Within five, his father. The boy survived because a rumour reached him that there was food in Calcutta. There wasn’t. But the rumour was enough to get him walking.
He told me this without anger. As if what had happened was so large, so structural, that rage had nowhere to land.
“They did not kill my parents with a bullet,” he said. “They killed them with a policy.”
I have carried that sentence for years.
Let me give you the architecture. Because architecture is what this was — not a disaster, not a famine in any honest sense of the word, but a constructed outcome. A supply-chain denial event executed through policy, administered through bureaucracy, and justified by the calculus of imperial war.
In March 1942, Japan took Rangoon. Burma fell. With it vanished between one and two million tons of rice that Bengal imported annually to feed itself. That single severance — one supply line, cut by conquest — exposed a dependency that colonial administrators had spent decades engineering and precisely zero years preparing to mitigate.
But the Japanese did not cause the famine. They created the preconditions. What followed was entirely British.
Within weeks, the colonial government launched what it called the “Denial Policy.” Not a relief policy. Not a contingency plan. A denial. Anticipating a Japanese invasion, British commanders ordered the preemptive destruction of Bengal’s capacity to feed itself. In coastal districts — Chittagong, Noakhali, the Sundarbans — soldiers confiscated rice stocks and destroyed them. Thousands of tons dumped into rivers. Under the “Boat Denial” policy, over 46,000 boats were seized or scuttled — the arteries of commerce in a land defined by its waterways.
Fishermen lost their livelihood overnight. Farmers lost their transport. The distribution network that moved food from where it grew to where it was eaten collapsed. Not because the system failed. Because someone dismantled it.
I wrote in The Underwriter’s War about how an insurance premium — not a torpedo, not a blockade — closed the Strait of Hormuz. A quiet recalculation in a London office made a shipping lane economically impassable while it remained physically open. Bengal in 1943 was the same mechanism running eighty years earlier. The food existed. The fields were producing. But the system of access had been deliberately withdrawn. You do not need to sink a single ship to starve a population. You only need to remove the means by which food travels from where it grows to where it is needed.
And then the prices began to move.
On 11 March 1943, the provincial government rescinded its rice price controls. Rice that had sold for thirteen to fourteen rupees per maund surged to thirty-seven by August — eventually reaching eight to ten times pre-crisis levels. The government blamed hoarding. When they searched for hidden stocks, they found almost nothing.
The rice was not hidden. It had been exported.
India shipped more than 70,000 tonnes of rice out of Bengal between January and July 1943. During a famine. While people died in the streets of Calcutta. The colony was not permitted to spend its own sterling reserves to import food. Not permitted to use its own ships. Every request for grain — from Australia, from Canada — had to pass through Churchill’s War Cabinet in London. For months, those requests were rejected.
Churchill.
I write his name and I feel the weight of a historiographical war that has raged for eighty years. His defenders point to the shipping crisis, the U-boat threat, the logistical nightmares of global war. They are not wrong about the constraints. But constraints are not the same as choices.
Leopold Amery — Secretary of State for India — recorded in his diary what happened when he pleaded for more shipping to Bengal. Churchill’s response began, by Amery’s account, with a flourish about Indians “breeding like rabbits” and being paid a million pounds a day for doing nothing about the war.
On 4 August 1943, the War Cabinet agreed to send 150,000 tons of barley and wheat. Churchill himself wrote that “something must be done.” But the gap between acknowledgment and action was measured in months and bodies. Viceroy Wavell’s telegrams were met with delay. The shipping that could have carried grain carried other things — war matériel, strategic reserves, the logistics of campaigns deemed more important than Bengali lives.
British officials inspect famine relief efforts in Bengal, 1943. The contrast between the standing administrators and the starving children at their feet captures the famine’s essential architecture. (Photo: Public Domain)
Here is what I need you to understand, because this is not history for its own sake. One-third of globally traded fertiliser passes through the Strait of Hormuz today. India sources sixty-four percent of its urea imports from GCC suppliers. When war-risk premiums spiked three hundred percent this month, the missiles that struck the Skylight and the MKD Vyom were only the visible trigger. The deeper closure was actuarial — underwriters in London withdrawing coverage entirely, making the strait economically impassable even where it remained physically navigable. The fertiliser shipments that determine whether a farmer in Uttar Pradesh can plant his Kharif crop slowed to a crawl. Nitrogen fertiliser operates on a biological clock. A shipment two weeks late does not produce a two-week delay. It produces an entire lost season.
Bengal in 1943 is the precedent. The decision was not to starve Bengal. The decision was that Bengal’s starvation was an acceptable cost. The mechanism — the quiet withdrawal of access, the rerouting of supply, the prioritisation of strategic interests over civilian food security — is running again, through the same waters, dressed in newer language.
The Famine Inquiry Commission, convened after the disaster, attributed the catastrophe to natural shocks, market failures, and administrative breakdowns. A perfect storm.
But Amartya Sen — who was nine years old in Bengal in 1943, who watched people die, who would later win the Nobel Prize for his work on famine — dismantled that narrative. Sen demonstrated that Bengal’s food availability in 1943 was actually higher than in 1941, a year with no famine. The problem was not supply. It was entitlement — who had the power to access food, and who did not.
Madhusree Mukerjee went further. In Churchill’s Secret War, she documented the systematic diversion of shipping, the export policies, the cabinet-level decisions that prioritized stockpiling over survival. A study in Geophysical Research Letters confirmed what revisionist historians had argued for decades: the 1943 famine was the only modern Indian famine not linked to drought. The study’s language was clinical. “Complete policy failure.”
Not crop failure. Not monsoon failure. Policy failure — the kind that requires meetings, memoranda, and the quiet agreement of powerful men that certain lives matter less than others.
The Gospel of Matthew records Christ saying: “I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat.” The indictment is not against those who lacked food. It is against those who had it and chose not to act.
Every empire learns the same lesson: you do not need to occupy a country to control whether its people eat. You only need to control the logistics. In The Coup That Never Ended, I traced the line from 1953 Tehran to today. Here, I am tracing an older line: from 1943 Calcutta to the Strait of Hormuz. The same imperial grammar — written in shipping routes instead of sentences — that treats civilian hunger not as a crisis to be averted but as a cost to be managed.
Three million dead. Green fields. Full granaries. And a supply chain not broken by accident but dismantled by design.
In the Mahabharata, there is a moment during the great dice game when Yudhishthira gambles away his kingdom, his brothers, his wife, everything. The tragedy is not that he lost. It is that every elder in the court watched it happen. Bhishma sat silent. Drona looked away. The men with the power to stop the destruction chose not to — bound by protocol, by loyalty to the wrong throne, by the calculation that intervention would cost them more than silence. Only when Draupadi cried out to Krishna — beyond the court, beyond the elders, beyond every human institution that had failed her — did a higher force intervene where conscience would not.
Bengal, 1943, was a Sabha moment — without the divine rescue. The food existed. The ships existed. The capacity to act existed. And the court watched in silence.
Whether the silence falls in 1943 Calcutta or in the insurance offices that today determine which tankers sail through Hormuz, the structure is identical. Only the distance between the decision-maker and the dying has changed — longer now, mediated by more layers of deniability. But the architecture is the same. And the dead are just as real.
The question that remains — and it is the question that should haunt every analyst, every allocator, every policymaker who models Hormuz as an energy event and ignores the food chain collapsing behind it — is whether we have learned to read that grammar yet. Or whether we will sit, as Bhishma sat, watching the dice fall, knowing what comes next, and choosing silence because the cost of speaking is higher than the cost of someone else’s starvation.
The rice paddies were green that year.
Remember that.
— Nazem
Sources: Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines (1981); Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War (2010); Vaidyanathan et al., “Drought and food shortages” in Geophysical Research Letters (2019); Famine Inquiry Commission, Report on Bengal (1945); Srimanjari, Through War and Famine: Bengal 1939–45 (2009); Leopold Amery, The Empire at Bay: The Leo Amery Diaries 1929–1945 (1988).
Nazem Alkudsi, CFA, is the founder of @LongArcNews. A former CEO in the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth ecosystem and four-decade veteran of institutional investing, he writes about capital, power, and civilisational patterns. Tell your story; Ask a question; Interpret generously http://storybythethroat.wordpress.com/tell-ask-listen/
His demolition of the Holodomor myth is impressive.Clio the cat, ?July 1997-1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ??2010-3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ???-4 November 2021 Georgina the cat ?2006-4 December 2025 Toni the cat ?2005-25 March 2026
I've done some reading on the famines that occurred in the Scottish highlands & islands shortly after the Irish one, and was interested to see the name Charles Trevalyan cropping up as one the British govt thought able to best manage the situation, albeit indirectly by pulling the strings of the Glasgow & Edinburgh aid agencies behind the scenes. Again, it was a case of not upsetting the 'free' flow of capital, involving much shipping of grain & potatoes out of the region to English markets who would pay a higher price, and sending armed troops to put down the rebellions that tried to stop this from happening. And relief couldn't be offered without strings attached, often including works that benefited the lairds by improvement of roads, drainage, bridges etc. - effectively a subsidy of their already dominant position using the labour of starving ppl w/ no alternatives to accomplish it. And, while there were genuine philanthropists among their ranks, more often the lairds exploited the situation to continue evictions & clearances for sheep farmers, and encouraged emigration (after the failure of the kelping industry especially) to Canada or Oz. I'm astonished none of them were assassinated, to be frank, but the attitude seems to have been that the poor old clan leader has been misled by associations with evil lowlanders and unscrupulous merchants, and we still owe him allegiance even if he violates the old norms & responsibilities at every turn, and profits the most from our degradation. Probably something I'm not getting, but it seems pathetic & subservient to me - though there was plenty of dissent, protest, rioting, land occupations etc to follow, as well as the crofting movement which built on that to secure the common ppl rights of tenure...
Shows you just how pitiless & anti-human the ruling elites are, and the system of capitalism which serves their interests while it forces the rest of us to scrabble in the dust for a pittance.
Incidentally, my Italian partner had never heard of the Scottish famine either though was well versed on the Irish one. Then again, maybe that was down to me rather than any Italian teaching!
Mind you, in Italy they had been taught that Cromwell was a great guy. That's certainly not down to me!
Thanks for the heads up on the Scottish famine. Found some papers and books that seem worth checking out.
Re: For my sins I never knew it had happened in Scotland, too. I'm remedying that right away.
As I recall, the investigator the British Government sent up to see if the locals were actually starving or just "chancing their luck" as of course peasants do...was an individual by the Name of Mr Pine-Coffin.
-I kid you not. How they all must have laughed...
Got a whole load of pine coffins of all shapes and sizes when I looked that up.
Thought I'd make use of the opportunity and ordered one while I was there.
Anyway, apparently, Mr Pine married Ms Coffin n gave us a whole load of Pine-Coffins. One of whom, Edward, was sent to inspect the famine victims of Ireland and Scotland.
A later descendent fought in the 2nd World War and was nick-named "wooden box".
The Pine Coffins are still with us. Both above and below ground.
I thought the English gov of the day had merely sent somebody with the name of Pine-Coffin to inspect famine victims through sheer insensitivity.
My partner sees it differently - She reckons "It's perfectly natural for them to seek to ridicule those they regard as subhuman".
Thanks for the heads up. Not the kind of fact I'll forget in a hurry.
Actually he seems to have been one of the more conscientious officials they sent, confusingly! (nm)
As I understand it the govt managed to intervene just enough so that deaths from starvation or associated diseases were in the thousands, not the millions. I got the impression they let it get worse in Ireland to punish the independence movement which didn't have its counterpart in Scotland (unless you're talking about the Jacobites, but they had been smashed at Culloden 100 years previous). However the misery and outright destitution was real and played a big part in permanently emptying much of the highlands & islands of their human population. The lairds & victorian era empire politicians were more than happy with this outcome, since they wanted an end to subsistence farming, increased rents from fewer tenants and an expanded population of landless people willing to work in the factories for whatever money they could get. They also provided useful footsoldiers for imperial expansion into the new world & Australia, often ironically imposing the same kind of dispossession on the native people that they themselves had faced.
I like James Hunter's writing best - Making of the Crofting Community, Other Side of Sorrow, A Dance Called America. Tom Devine's Great Highland Famine has more thorough research and gives a more generous interpretation of the actions of the lairds. John Prebble's Highland Clearances is a classic (about halfway through it now) though more of a popular history, lacking footnotes and not attempting to be impartial - though how can you be with the subject material?
An interesting read, though it does come across as biased in favour of the British as Der says. The point about Sen basing his argument on 'official production estimates' and how 'the term "production" implies final results, but clearly these data are forecasts, and not final results' (p.9) seems like splitting hairs to me. I don't know if Sen explained the limitations of this data, which seem significant according to Tauger's presentation, but use of the word 'estimates' is all I need to understand that, while not 100% accurate, they're the best info we have to go on.
Otherwise, it was enough to convince me that the cyclone and rice disease were important factors in the famine, but not that British policies of denial (only mentioned in passing), free market fundamentalism, and deliberate obstruction of relief shipments based on racist discounting of the importance of stopping starvation of Indians, didn't exacerbate the famine, albeit perhaps not causing it outright.
I did wonder about Tauger's reliance on just 2 experimental research stations to suggest widespread rice failures across all of Bengal, but then it still sounds like better evidence than Sen was able to uncover (though he insists it's based on more than that official 'production estimate'). Btl letter exchange from a 2010 article in the New York Review by Joseph Lelyveld - original article in full here fyi: https://archive.is/20210513043216/https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/12/23/did-churchill-let-them-starve/
In his review of my book, Churchill’s Secret War [NYR, December 23, 2010], Joseph Lelyveld notes that I do not discuss Amartya Sen’s assertion that Bengal contained enough grain to ward off famine. I avoided this aspect of Sen’s work because his conclusion of sufficiency in Bengal has been seriously challenged. Historian Mark Tauger has shown that Sen based his crop estimates on projections, and that crop diseases spread by wet weather appear to have drastically reduced the actual harvest. The notes in my book contain a number of different estimates of the crop shortage, all of which are substantial. Furthermore, in his paper Sen misquoted the government’s estimate of the rice shortfall as a mere 140,000 tons (instead of the 1.4 million tons stated in the document he cites)—which led him to mistakenly claim that the authorities could not have predicted famine.
Sen’s insight that loss of entitlement provides a deeper explanation for famine remains true and profound, however. My work shows that the concept can be extended to include the far larger entitlement of British citizens than of colonial subjects to food—as illustrated by several of Churchill’s decisions. For instance, in January 1943 he acted on Cherwell’s advice to remove 60 percent of the merchant ships from the Indian Ocean, so that these vessels could instead be used to shore up the United Kingdom’s supplies of food and raw materials. By this move, he made it impossible for Australian wheat to be carried to India and triggered the famine in Bengal.
Madhusree Mukerjee
Joseph Lelyveld replies:
Amartya Sen has sent the following comment on the above letter:
Madhusree Mukerjee seems satisfied with little information. Mark Tauger’s data come from exactly two “rice research stations” from two districts in undivided Bengal, which had twenty-seven districts. Since weather variations have regionally diverse effects, it would require more than this to “seriously challenge” the analysis I made, using data from all districts, which indicated that food availability in 1943 (the famine year) was significantly higher than in 1941 (when there was no famine). Ignoring the range of data I used in my study, she misdescribes my estimates as being based only “on projections.”
On the other point mentioned by Mukerjee, she makes a story out of a typo in my quotation from a statement of the secretary of state for India, omitting to mention that the typo has not the slightest bearing on my assessment of the food situation. Moreover, even a “shortage” of 1.4 million tons is a small proportion of the total crop of “60/70 million tons” (as the secretary of state mentioned).
The confounding issue, of course, is the idea of “shortage” itself, as Lelyveld has noted. There was indeed a substantial shortfall compared with demand, hugely enhanced in a war economy, as I have described in detail, but that is quite different from a shortfall of supply compared with supply in previous years. Mukerjee seems to miss this crucial distinction, and in her single-minded, if understandable, attempt to nail down Churchill, she ends up absolving British imperial policy of confusion and callousness, which had disastrous consequences.
The Truth About the Bengal Famine Mark B. Tauger, reply by Amartya Sen
March 24, 2011 issue
In response to:
The Bengal Famine from the February 24, 2011 issue
To the Editors:
In a discussion about the book Churchill’s Secret War [Letters, NYR, February 24], Amartya Sen misrepresented both his and my work on the Bengal famine of 1943. Sen was responding to Madhusree Mukerjee’s statement that my studies had “seriously challenged” his assertion that the crop shortage in Bengal was too small to cause famine.
Sen dismissed my data on the grounds that they came from only two rice research stations, and that “weather variations have regionally diverse effects.” I cited data from an article by S.Y. Padmanabhan, director of the Central Rice Research Institute in Cuttack, India, which showed that the strain of brown spot that afflicted the rice crop of late 1942 was exceptionally virulent: none of the fifteen winter varieties grown in these two stations, which were hundreds of miles apart, demonstrated any capacity to resist the disease. Yields fell often to one tenth of the previous year’s (more or less normal) level. The article also presented meteorological evidence showing that weather conditions in 1942 were unusually uniform and favorable for the spread of the disease all over Bengal, as well as scientific tests indicating that weather conditions disseminated spores of the disease widely in Bengal in late 1942. As a result, plant biologists hold that there was indeed a significant shortage of rice in 1943.
Sen also stated that Madhusree Mukerjee “misdescribes my estimates as being based only ‘on projections.'” But Sen’s data derive in the main from the Famine Commission’s report, which notes that these figures “are based on crop forecasts prepared over a series of years by the Director of Agriculture, Bengal.” Indeed they are projections, a point also noted by economist Peter Bowbrick, and cannot be regarded as definitive.
Mark B. Tauger Associate Professor
West Virginia University
Morgantown, West Virginia
Amartya Sen replies:
First, the remark from the Famine Inquiry Commision’s Report on Bengal that Mark Tauger quotes to claim that this source of my data was based only on “crop forecasts” relates to the Commission’s “Statement I”: “Unadjusted Current Supply” (pages 205, 213). In contrast, the data that I used from the Report came from its “Statement III.” This is a different table of “Adjusted Current Supply,” with corrections including those of “estimates of yield” (pages 206–207, 215). Evidently, in his rush to criticize me, Tauger did not have the time to read what I had said (see Poverty and Famines, 1981, pages 59, 61). Nor does he note the fact that I also used sources of information other than the Famine Commission (pages 58–59).
Second, Tauger seems to think he can get an adequate picture of total food supply in Bengal from the data from just two rice research stations in two districts in undivided Bengal (which had twenty-seven districts) by quoting the generalizations made by the author of an article that presented those very data, supplemented by the musings of some unnamed “plant biologists.” To construct a comprehensive picture of total food supply in Bengal, we do, however, need actual food data from all the districts of Bengal.
Finally, Tauger says that I made the “assertion that the crop shortage in Bengal was too small to cause famine.” I did not. What I actually showed was that while the decline in rice supply was small, there was a substantial shortfall compared with demand, since the rise in aggregate demand was very large in the war economy of Bengal, leading to a sharp rise in the price of rice and the starvation of those left behind in the boom economy. I discussed all this in Poverty and Famines, including the distinction between a decline in food availability and a shortfall of supply with respect to demand, in investigating the disastrous confusion behind imperial policies based on the assumption that if food supply had not fallen much, there “could not be a famine.”
I had to discuss that critical distinction again in my response to Madhusree Mukerjee in the last exchange. I am sad that I have to explain the same distinction one more time—now for Mark Tauger. The imperial confusion, tying the causation of famines entirely to supply conditions (and in particular to the decline of food availability), ignoring the influence of demand and of the distribution of purchasing power, which led to the death of millions, seems hard to eradicate.
The Bengal Famine Mark B. Tauger, reply by Amartya Sen
To the Editors:
Amartya Sen, in his reply to my letter [“The Truth About the Bengal Famine, NYR, March 24], wrote:
Tauger seems to think he can get an adequate picture of total food supply in Bengal from the data from just two rice research stations in two districts in undivided Bengal (which had twenty-seven districts) by quoting the generalizations made by the author of an article that presented those very data, supplemented by the musings of some unnamed “plant biologists.” To construct a comprehensive picture of total food supply in Bengal, we do, however, need actual food data from all the districts of Bengal.
This statement misrepresents the facts I presented. As I wrote in my letter, my sources “showed that the strain of brown spot that afflicted the rice crop of late 1942 was exceptionally virulent” with none of the common rice varieties possessing any resistance, and “presented meteorological evidence showing that weather conditions in 1942 were unusually uniform and favorable for the spread of the disease all over Bengal, as well as scientific tests indicating that weather conditions disseminated spores of the disease widely in Bengal in late 1942.” Sen either failed to read what I wrote or chose to misrepresent it.
In fact I did name a distinguished and prolific “plant biologist,” S.Y. Padmanabhan, whose key article, “The Great Bengal Famine” (Annual Review of Phytopathology, Vol. 11 (1973), cited twenty-five articles in scientific journals (not “musings”) by Padmanabhan, N.K. Chakrabarti, S.B. Chattopadhyay, T. Hemmi, T. Nojima, and several other Indian and Japanese scientists. In addition to this and many other articles, Padmanabhan also published Rice Research in India, co-edited with P.L. Jaiswal (New Delhi: Indian Council for Agricultural Research [ICAR], 1985), Breeding for Disease Resistance in Rice, coauthored with S. Gangopadhyay (New Delhi: Oxford University Press and IHB, 1987), Rice Production Technology (Bombay, 1980), Fungal Diseases of Rice in India: A Critical Review (New Delhi: ICAR, 1974), and other publications on related topics.
Both the International Rice Research Institute and the Indian Central Rice Research Institute (click on “Overviews,” “Background and Location”) attribute the Bengal famine to the plant disease that sharply reduced the 1942 harvest.
Sen further wrote that
the remark from the Famine Inquiry Commission’s Report on Bengal that Mark Tauger quotes to claim that this source of my data was based only on “crop forecasts” relates to the Commission’s “Statement I”: “Unadjusted Current Supply” (pages 205, 213). In contrast, the data that I used from the Report came from its “Statement III.” This is a different table of “Adjusted Current Supply,” with corrections including those of “estimates of yield” (pages 206–207, 215).
In fact, as the following table shows, in his book Poverty and Famines (Table 6.2, p. 61), Sen explicitly uses the data from “Statement I.” The following table excerpts the columns indicating years and the aman harvests from Sen’s table on “Foodgrains Availability in Bengal” in Poverty and Famines and the Statement I table in the Report on Bengal. (Bengali farmers usually harvested three crops: the aman, usually two thirds of production, in December, the aus, another quarter of production, in August, and boro, a small crop, in early spring.) sen-chart_1-WEB_ONLY.png
Sen wrote that “evidently, in his rush to criticize me, Tauger did not have time to read what I had said,” but his denial that he used these data suggests that he himself did not read what he had said.
The rice crop data in Statement III are identical to those in Statement I except for the estimate of cropland and harvest for the aman harvest. As the Report explained, the compilers of the tables produced their harvest data by multiplying the crop land with the yield-per-acre data, which was the same forecast data in both tables. The other data that Sen mentions were so small a fraction of the total harvest that they do not change the basic character of the data. My description of his data as “in the main” derived from forecasts and not final results remains correct. In some thirty-five years of publishing on the Bengal famine, Sen has never identified these data accurately as forecasts, and his letter to The New York Review perpetuates this misidentification.
The last section of his letter, on shortages, demand, and the “boom” in wartime Bengal, is more complicated than this space allows. I will simply refer readers to my article “The Indian Famine Crisis of World War II” (available on my website), which shows that hundreds of thousands of people fled Calcutta in 1942–1943 to avoid Japanese bomb attacks, apparently many more than were employed in wartime construction. Consequently it is difficult to conclude that demand increased significantly in Calcutta during the war. Rice prices rose sharply in 1943 because of the serious crop failures in 1942.
Sen refers to “the disastrous confusion behind imperial policies based on the assumption that if food supply had not fallen much, there ‘could not be a famine.'” Yet the real confusion, shared by Sen and the British authorities of the time, was the one he introduced by treating forecasts as harvest data and ignoring the scientific evidence of a catastrophic crop failure.
Mark B. Tauger Associate Professor Department of History West Virginia University Morgantown, West Virginia
Amartya Sen replies:
I cannot, I fear, hide a sense of exasperation as I enter this third-round exchange on a work of mine published more than a quarter of a century ago (Poverty and Famines, Oxford University Press, 1981), with which Mark Tauger has had some disagreement over many years now. While he has already written extensively on this subject, attacking my analysis of the Bengal famine (Chapter 6 in my book), those rebukes have not generated as much interest as perhaps Tauger would have liked. His old grumbles have now been majestically revived in a large-circulation leading journal, occasioned by a letter to the editor of The New York Review by Madhusree Mukerjee [“The Bengal Famine,” NYR, February 24], who cited Tauger’s work, in responding to Joseph Lelyveld’s critique of her book, Churchill’s Secret War [“Did Churchill Let Them Starve?, NYR, December 23, 2010]. As a result of the revival of Tauger’s work, led by Mukerjee and Tauger, we have now had three rounds of exchange. We have seen, in the first round (February 24), the search for great significance in a simple typo in my book that had no bearing whatsoever on my analysis of the Bengal famine. In the second round (March 24) as well as the first, we have seen the parading of a blatantly false statement to the effect that all my food production data for the Bengal famine were based on “crop forecasts.” Now comes the third round. I reply here to each of Tauger’s complaints in some detail.
In my March 24 letter, I had pointed out that the food production data used in my analysis did not depend only on crop forecasts, and that Tauger’s quotation from the Famine Inquiry Commission’s Report on Bengal applied only to Statement I of the commission, whereas I had relied on its Statement III (along with data from other sources), which made systematic corrections of the forecasts in Statement I. I suggested that Tauger evidently “did not have the time to read what I had said.” In this round, Tauger protests against my remark, and attempts to rebut this charge of incomplete reading by citing column 3 of my Table 6.2 in Poverty and Famines (p. 61). What he does not mention, astonishingly, is that in the same table (that is, Table 6.2), of which he cites only column 3, there are five subsequent columns (columns 4–8), taking us well beyond crop forecasts. In fact, column 5 there corresponds exactly to Statement III of the Famine Inquiry Commission (“Adjusted Current Supply of Rice”). I reproduce below the full Table 6.2 from my book, from which only column 3 was selectively quoted by Tauger to try to justify his mistaken attribution. sen-chart-2-WEB_ONLY.png
Column 3 of Table 6.2 presents the “official estimates” on which the government relied, and those estimates, corresponding to Statement I of the commission, are indeed based on crop forecasts. This, however, is only the starting point from which departures come in columns 4–8, using a sequence of corrections, explained in detail in the text of my book, beginning with “Correction 1: Adjustment of Official Production Estimates” (pp. 58–63). The Famine Inquiry Commission’s Statement III, to which I referred in my book, and also in my March 24 letter, is quite central here (column 5 of my table), along with my use of other information about food supply in Bengal in 1943. Tauger’s selective pointing only to column 3, totally omitting to mention the other columns, is altogether amazing.
There are two other issues in Tauger’s new rejoinder. First, he points out, quite rightly, that there were plant biologists, among others, who were worried about the possible impact on food production of bad weather conditions and the crop diseases that followed. But none of these contributions presents—or estimates—the actual size of total food production in Bengal, with data from all the districts. Some of them present selective crop data in a few regions (and in particular from two rice research stations in two of the districts, out of twenty-seven districts in Bengal), coupled with grand generalizations—without any data for aggregate food production—for all of Bengal about the likely impact on food output of weather conditions and crop diseases (including “brown spot”). But simple generalizations, even by plant biologists, without any backing from the statistics of aggregate food data for Bengal, cannot serve Tauger’s purpose of showing that the Bengal famine was generated by food supply decline (unrelated to demand conditions in the uneven boom economy of Bengal). To arrive at any such conclusion we would minimally need “actual food data from all the districts of Bengal,” as I discussed in my March 24 letter.
There are, as it happens, much data on the subject and several actual food output estimates for all of Bengal. Even the so-called “crop forecasts” were attempts to provide such estimates (the weather conditions influenced the acreage so that these forecasts based on acreage were not entirely isolated from the weather conditions); and these were the “official estimates” at the time, in 1943, on which the government relied. But of course, these estimates needed correction, and the actual food data from the commission’s Report on Bengal (1945) on which I focused (I repeat this again, given Tauger’s persistent attempt to ignore or sidestep this fact) came from Statement III, which reflected necessary corrections to the estimates in Statement I that had to be made—and were made. Column 5 in my Table 6.2 showed the effect of the corrections that were made by the Famine Commission, which it presented in its Statement III.
Was the Famine Commission ignorant of the weather conditions and their impact on food production? The commission, which was appointed in 1944 (the year after the famine), began its serious work around July of that year, and its Report on Bengal was completed when the actual impact of the weather conditions in the fall of 1942 could be fully assessed, publishing its report in 1945. The commission talked about the cyclone and diseases that followed, and used all the information it could by then obtain, which included among other information the actual impact of the much-feared storms and parasitic diseases in late 1942.
Was the Famine Commission, then, callous or devious by not making proper use of the data that became available between 1942 and 1945? There is little evidence of that. Indeed, the commission tried to make its best effort in explaining the famine (as I discussed in Poverty and Famines), but was restrained by its mistaken focus (like Tauger’s) on the supply side only, missing out on the demand side altogether. Mark Tauger states dismissively in his new letter that the commission’s “rice crop data in Statement III are identical to those in Statement I except for the estimate of crop land and harvest for the aman harvest.” How serious is this “except for”? Not only was the aman harvest—sown in May–June and harvested in November–December—by far the largest crop during the year in those days (the aman contributed 73 percent of the total rice harvest of Bengal, on an average, during 1939–1943), but it was also the aman that took the brunt of the cyclone that came in October, causing destruction and crop diseases (to the extent that they occurred). Tauger seems to miss altogether the significance of the Famine Commission’s corrections of the aman harvest to come to grips with the impact of the October cyclone.
The Famine Commission corrected the acreage figures for rice after noting some systematic errors that the official estimates had, which had been discussed earlier by Professor P.C. Mahalanobis, among others (these corrections resulted in raising the crop acreage estimates for the entire series, but of course we have to look at the relative ups and downs over the years within the series). Regarding yields, the commission noted:
After the acreage is estimated, the yield is estimated by a procedure involving two factors, viz. (a) the assumption of a “normal” rate of yield per acre, and (b) the estimation of the actual rate of yield of the year as a proportion of the “normal.”
(Report on Bengal, p. 207)
These assessments of actual rice production, supplemented by imports and exports, yielded the “current supply” in Statement III in the commission’s report, which is reflected in column 5 in my Table 6.2 (“Adjusted Current Supply of Rice”). I had three more columns, to supplement the rice supply figure by taking note both of wheat availability in addition to rice, and of population growth over time, to obtain per capita food grains availability (column 8). The result of all this indicated that the actual food supply per capita in Bengal in 1943 (the famine year) was significantly higher than in 1941 (when there was no famine).
The Famine Commission’s own observation, based on Statement III, was similar, even after it noted the impact of adverse weather conditions in the fall of 1942 on the aman crop of 1942–1943—the main crop that was affected by the cyclone and parasitic diseases—and on food availability in Bengal in 1943:
In the course of the 15 years preceding 1943, there were 3 years (1928, 1936 and 1941) in which the supply obtained from the aman crop reaped in the previous year, was seriously short because of the partial failure of that crop from natural causes…. In 1943, the shortage in the previously reaped aman crop was comparable to that which occurred in the 3 years referred to above. Actually it was less serious than in 1941. A phenomenal rise in the price of rice, however, occurred which was of a very different order from the small rise which took place in the earlier years of shortage. This suggests at first sight that the famine of 1943 was due to a breakdown in distribution rather than to insufficiency of supplies. (p. 13)
While the Famine Commission too—like Tauger—says little about demand conditions in explaining the sharp rise in the price of rice (Chapter 6 of my book was aimed at, among other things, correcting this persistent neglect of the demand side of price determination—and the neglect also of the consequences of huge inequalities in purchasing power, central to the causation of the famine), the commission made the unambiguous assessment that the impact of the natural calamity of the October cyclone had not reduced the crop harvest for rice availability in 1943 as much as natural calamities had for 1941, when there was no famine. This point seems to be missed altogether by Tauger.
In trying to stick to the old “supply side” explanation of the Bengal famine (without looking adequately at the demand side), the commission resorted to a presumption that the “carry-over” (by which it referred to the stocks of food grains carried from one year to the next) must have been far less in 1943 than in 1941. This was just an assumption since no data on carry-overs exist. I have discussed this entire range of empirical information in Poverty and Famines, Chapter 6, and the only issue to which I am drawing attention here is that the commission’s own assessment of crop loss as a result of the cyclone and crop diseases in 1942–1943 (on which Tauger concentrates), based on all the information available by 1945, was that it was far less severe than what had happened in 1940–1941 (which directly contradicts Tauger’s claims).
There was another detailed estimate of actual food production that was produced by George Blyn in his widely researched book, Agricultural Trends in India 1891–1947: Output, Availability, and Productivity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1966). In that work it emerged that not only was the acreage cultivated in Bengal in 1942–1943 much larger than in 1940–1941, even the yield per acre for Bengal as a whole was larger in 1942–1943 than in 1940–1941, confirming that the food availability during the Bengal famine was very substantially larger—not smaller—than in 1941, when there was no famine. I noted Blyn’s results in my book (p. 58).
The subject received close scrutiny also from M.M. Islam in his Bengal Agriculture 1920–1946: A Quantitative Study (Cambridge University Press, 1977), and from Sugata Bose in his “Starvation Amidst Plenty: The Making of Famine in Bengal, Honan and Tonkin, 1942–1945,” in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 24, No. 4 (October 1990). Bose has also discussed the causation of the Bengal famine in his authoritative study, Agrarian Bengal: Economy, Social Structure, and Politics, 1919–1947 (Cambridge University Press, 1986) and in Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital: Rural Bengal Since 1770 (Cambridge University Press, 1993).
All these studies confirm that the Bengal famine was not caused by aggregate food availability decline in the province. With all due respect to what the plant biologists feared, we have no good reason to rely on some generalized expectations of biologists (without any aggregate food output data for Bengal) and to reject the actual food output data for all the districts of Bengal that we get from these extensive statistical sources.
The remaining point in Tauger’s letter concerns a very odd argument about why demand for food could not have risen significantly, because of some outmigration from Calcutta, and this slender piece of reasoning is presented without taking any kind of note of the enormous governmental expenditure on war efforts, backed by a huge addition to the money supply and a fourfold rise of food prices. Tauger is evidently comfortable with his single-minded conclusion that “rice prices rose sharply in 1943 because of the serious crop failures in 1942.” It would perhaps be rude to disturb his comfort by bringing in any intervention of economic reasoning here (particularly the rather obvious, though neglected, role of demand conditions on prices), but for those who are interested in the economic causation of the Bengal famine, Chapter 6 of my Poverty and Famines discusses the different economic influences that fueled the boom economy of Bengal, with a sharp rise in the demand for commodities, particularly demand for food, but which also left some people, especially rural wage earners (whose wages had lagged seriously behind food prices), without the means to obtain much food.
The upward pressure on food prices was enhanced by the government’s drive to procure rice from rural Bengal to feed the Calcutta population through making food available in urban ration shops at heavily subsidized prices (mainly for helping the successful conduct of the war, for which “peace in Calcutta” was taken by the Raj to be extremely important), as well as by the speculative withdrawal of food stocks from the market by professional traders and also by the panic-stricken public. The sharp increase in food prices had devastating effects on the rural poor, especially on rural wage earners.
Without bringing in the demand side of the story and the distribution of purchasing power (including the relationship of prices to wages), it would be extremely hard to understand the causation of the Bengal famine. There have, of course, been many famines in which supply declines have played a very big part in the “entitlement failure” of the famine victims, and as I have discussed in Poverty and Famines, good entitlement analysis must take note of both demand and supply conditions.
In some famines, for example those in Ethiopia and in the Sahel countries in the 1970s, which I investigated in Poverty and Famines (see Chapters 7 and 8), the supply declines were indeed extremely important. While famines, in general, cannot be adequately understood only by looking at total food supply (which is especially problematic in explaining why some segments of the society starve, while others do just fine), nevertheless fall in food supply could be a critically important variable in some famines. These cases tend to belong generally to what I called, in my book, “slump famines,” and these do indeed occur. (Those commentators who see entitlement analysis as being, in general, hostile to paying attention to food availability miss the comprehensive nature and many-sided demands of the entitlement approach.)
However, the “boom famine” in Bengal in 1943 was clearly not caused by any sharp fall in food availability, as the food supply data from different sources bring out. The causation of starvation in that famine can be understood only by bringing in the impact of an increase in demand in the war economy, coupled with a very unequal distribution of purchasing power that left a large group of people unable to get enough food. The idea that the “supply side” is adequate in explaining—or anticipating—famines is not merely a serious epistemic error, it can actually extract a very heavy price in human death, as indeed it did in the disastrous Bengal famine of 1943.
These days, if you say there wasn't a terror famine, you get arrested and thrown in gaol....nm
Posted by Keith-264 on May 13, 2026, 10:31 pm, in reply to "Holodomor. nm"
nmClio the cat, ?July 1997-1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ??2010-3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ???-4 November 2021 Georgina the cat ?2006-4 December 2025 Toni the cat ?2005-25 March 2026
I know that's a joke but it wouldn't surprise me in the least! The times we live in. nm
-I don't give much credence to the hope that anything has improved.
Witnessing "Churchill" Trump in his reaction to the Minab school massacre, he denies, walks away and in a casual throwaway as he does so says : "...Whatever the report shows, I’m willing to live with...”
The direct murder of 165 children means absolutely nothing to him: similarly the murder of hundreds of thousands in Gaza in his mind becomes a Real Estate oppertunity.
-Theres little doubt the indirect murder of millions would also mean nothing at all: like, shit happens, right?
Linlithgow was replaced as Viceroy by a military man, Field Marshal Wavell.
Prime minister Winston Churchill assumed Wavell would share his lack of concern for the fate of the Indian people. On his arrival, Wavell actually toured the streets of Calcutta incognito and was shocked by the suffering he saw.
He was appalled by the failure to provide effective famine relief and set about trying to remedy the situation. He could feed Calcutta, but at a level just barely able to keep people alive. Many survived—if that is the right word—on a ration of 800 calories a day.
In the countryside, however, people still starved to death in their thousands.
Wavell asked the Churchill government to provide urgent assistance and to ship emergency food supplies to India.
To his horror, Churchill put every obstacle that he could in the way. On one occasion when Wavell pleaded for assistance in person, Churchill responded that Indians bred “like rabbits” anyway.
As far as Wavell was concerned, if it was a European famine, the government would give “quite a different answer to the one that we get”.
Churchill actually told Wavell that Indians starving was “less serious than sturdy Greeks”. This was all hardly surprising when Churchill said that Indians were “the beastliest people in the world next to the Germans” and that Hindus in particular were “a foul race”. Even his Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, was worried by Churchill’s “curious hatred of India” and concluded that he was “not quite normal on the subject”.
Indeed, on one occasion, he actually told Churchill that he did not “see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s”. These conclusions, it is important to note, were not those of some “woke” liberal, but those of a right wing reactionary champion of British Imperialism.
The Bengal Famine has been pretty much written out of the history books.
It is too big a crime to be compatible with the idea that the Empire was in any way a force for good and so was forgotten. The terrible deaths of millions was effectively cancelled by the British ruling class and its agents.
Only in the last few years has it begun to be so much as acknowledged. Even today it is usually ignored or mentioned in passing as an event of not much importance.Tell your story; Ask a question; Interpret generously http://storybythethroat.wordpress.com/tell-ask-listen/
> ... Witnessing "Churchill" Trump in his reaction to > the Minab school massacre...
-- Just a quick reminder that the clinical narcissist isn't merely 'incapable of empathy', but is in fact unable to understand that other people existing in the outside world are actually other people existing in an outside world. Yes, really.
There is probably no personality disorder more savagely disabling.
...takes me back almost 50 years....my dad had read some bio of Churchill where one of gardeners said he was a great man, used to give him the butts of his cigars. My dad, in proper Greenock parlance said..."what a mean ****, couldn't even give the bloke a full one!"
Greenock lingo said "Block" instead of "bloke". I hope some zionazis go to Inverclyde."I won't dignify the attacker's words by repeating them, they are horrific and vile."
Strangely enough, whist the BBC and the establishment couldn't gush enough about the great Churchill, my elderly relatives just got angry when his name came up. As a boy I was perplexed at the different readings of history: "Nothing but a Bloody Murderer..." was the least if it.
Shades of Madeleine Albright's "the price was worth it". Was it Lloyds? nm
then he turns into Enoch Powell claiming race riots are on the way, pretty much all over the place, because of too many immigrants. Ruining our pristine countries, that never had a problem before. Getting ahead of people at the doctor's and other queues. Predicts it'll start in Ireland, for feck sake.
He trawls shite you tube videos n finds what he wants.
People stealing our pristine women, our not so pristine men, our dogs and cats, and eating them. The dogs and cats, not the men and women. Then again... A bit of cannibalism would do the Irish a power of good.
Breaking into our hen houses. Getting the best haircuts at the barbers from their mates. Jumping queues all over the place. Did I mention stealing our women?
Feck off Douglas. We need to celebrate diversity.
No More Borders.
FREEDOM TO ROAM
Re: Colonel Douglas McGregor has long been saying Lloyds closed the strait but
nmClio the cat, ?July 1997-1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ??2010-3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ???-4 November 2021 Georgina the cat ?2006-4 December 2025 Toni the cat ?2005-25 March 2026
collectivised in absentia enforced by occupiers for privileged capital ...
on May 12, 2026, 8:57 pm