Table of Contents
BENGAL FAMINE(1943)
PART 1
BACKGROUND
• From the late nineteenth century through the Great Depression, social and economic forces exerted a harmful effect on the structure of Bengal’s income distribution and the ability of its agricultural sector to sustain the populace.
• These included a rapidly growing population, increasing household debt, stagnant agricultural productivity, increased social stratification, and alienation of the peasant class from their landholdings.
• These processes left social and economic groups mired in poverty and indebtedness, unable to cope with the economic shocks they faced in 1942 and 1943, in the context of the Second World War.
• According to a 1941 census.Its population had increased by 43% between 1901 and 1941—from 42.1 million to 60.3 million. Over the same period India’s population as a whole increased by 37%
BACKGROUND
• Bengal’s economy was almost solely agrarian, but agricultural productivity was among the lowest in the world.Land quality and fertility had been deteriorating in Bengal and other regions of India, but the loss was especially severe.
• It was estimated in 1930 that the Bengali diet was the least nutritious in the world. Structural changes in the credit market and the rights of land transfer in rural Bengal not only helped push it into recurring danger of famine, but also dictated which economic groups would suffer the greatest hardship.
• The Indian system of land tenure, particularly in Bengal, was very complex, with rights unequally divided among three diverse economic and social groups: traditional absentee large landowners or zamindars; the upper-tier “wealthy peasant” jotedars; and, at the lower socioeconomic level, the ryot (peasant) smallholders and dwarfholders, bargadars (sharecroppers), and agricultural
BACKGROUND
• Agricultural labourers.Zamindar and jotedar landowners were protected by law and custom,but those who actually cultivated the soil, with small or no landholdings, suffered persistent and increasing losses of land rights and welfare.
• The jotedars effectively dominated and impoverished the lowest tier of economic classes in several districts of Bengal.
• At the time of the famine, millions of Bengali agriculturalists held little or no land. In absolute terms, the social group which suffered by far the most of every form of impoverishment and death during the Bengal famine of 1943 were the landless agricultural labourers.
JAPANESE INVASION TO BURMA
• The Japanese campaign for Burma began in late December 1941, and set off an immediate exodus for India of more than half of the one million Indians then living in Burma. • On April 26, 1942, all Allied forces were ordered to retreat from Burma into India. Immediately, the demands of the military became the focus of official attention;
• By April 1942, Japanese warships and aircraft had sunk approximately 100,000 tons of merchant shipping in the Bay of Bengal.The Japanese raids put additional strain on the railways, which also endured flooding in the Brahmaputra, a malaria epidemic.
• Throughout the period, the rail transportation of relief and civil supplies was compromised by the railways’ increased military obligations, and by the dismantling of the rail tracks also.
CONDITION WORSENED
• The fall of Rangoon in March 1942 cut off the import of Burmese rice into India and Ceylon. Due in part to rises in local populations, prices for rice were already 69% higher in September 1941 than in August 1939.
• The Japanese attack had not only provoked a scramble for rice across India, but had also sparked a dramatic and unprecedented price inflation in Bengal, and in other rice producing regions of India.
• Across India and particularly in Bengal, this caused a “derangement” of the rice markets. Despite this, Bengal continued to export rice to Ceylon for months afterward, even as the beginning of a food crisis began to become apparent.
• The influx of refugees created more demand for food, clothing and medical aid, further straining the resources of the province.All this, together with transport problems were the direct causes of inter-provincial trade barriers on the movement of foodgrains, and contributed to a series of failed government policies that further exacerbated the food crisis
ABRUPT POLICIES
• Nearly the full output of India’s cloth, wool, leather and silk industries were sold to the military. British military authorities feared that the Japanese would proceed through Burma and invade British India via the eastern border of Bengal.
• As a preemptive measure, they launched a two-pronged scorched-earth initiative in eastern and coastal Bengal to prevent or impede the invasion by denying access to food supplies, transport and other resources.
• First, a “denial of rice” policy was carried out . As a second prong, a “boat denial” policy was designed to deny Bengali transport to any invading Japanese army. It applied to districts readily accessible via the Bay of Bengal.
• The policy authorised the Army to confiscate, relocate or destroy any boats large enough to carry more than ten persons, and allowed them to requisition other means of transport such as bicycles, bullock carts, and elephants
ABRUPT POLICIES
• Many Indian provinces and princely states imposed interprovincial trade barriers beginning in mid-1942. preventing other provinces from buying domestic rice. One underlying cause was the anxiety and soaring prices that followed the fall of Burma.
• As food prices rose and the signs of famine became apparent from July 1942, he Government of Bengal and the Chamber of Commerce devised a Foodstuffs Scheme to provide preferential distribution of goods and services to workers in essential war industries, to prevent them from leaving their positions.
• Rice was directed away from the starving rural districts to workers in industries. Essential workers received subsidised food.
AT LAST
• The unfavorable military situation of the Allies after the fall of Burma led the US and China to urge the UK to enlist India’s full cooperation in the war by negotiating a peaceful transfer of political power to an elected Indian body; this goal was also supported by the Labour Party in Britain.
• British prime minister Winston Churchill responded to the new pressure through the Cripps’ mission, broaching the post-war possibility of an autonomous political status for India in exchange for its full military support, but negotiations collapsed in early April 1942.
• On 8 August 1942 the Indian National Congress launched the Quit India movement, intended as a nationwide display of nonviolent resistance. The British authorities reacted by imprisoning the Congress leaders. Without its leadership, the movement changed its character and took to sabotaging factories, bridges, telegraph and railway lines, and other government property.
BENGAL FAMINE(1943)
PART 2
NATURAL DISASTERS
• In late 1942 Bengal was affected by a series of natural disasters. First, the winter rice crop was afflicted by a severe outbreak of fungal brown spot disease.
• Then, on 16–17 October a cyclone and three storm surges in October ravaged croplands, destroyed houses and killed thousands, at the same time dispersing high levels of fungal spores across the region and increasing the spread of the crop disease.
• Following these events, official forecasts of crop yields predicted a significant shortfall. Traders warned of an impending famine, but the Bengal Government did not act on these predictions.
CHURCHILL
• Beginning around December 1942–January 1943, high-ranking government officials and military officers began requesting food imports for India through government and military channels, but for months these requests were either rejected or reduced to a fraction of the original amount by Churchill’s War Cabinet.
• The Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, was on one side of a cycle of requests for food aid and subsequent refusals from the British War Cabinet that continued through 1943 and into 1944 • Rather than meeting this request, the UK promised a relatively small amount of wheat that was specifically intended for western India (that is, not for Bengal) in exchange for an increase in rice exports from Bengal to Ceylon.
CHURCHILL
• on 4 August 1943 less than three weeks before The Statesman’s graphic photographs of starving famine victims in Calcutta would focus the world’s attention on the severity of the
• The cabinet again offered only a relatively small amount, explicitly referring to it as a token shipment. The explanation generally offered for the refusals included insufficient shipping.
• The Cabinet also refused offers of food shipments from several different nations. Churchill’s animosity and even racism toward Indians decided the exact location where famine would
FAMINE
• The acceleration to full-scale famine by May 1943 being a consequence of price decontrol. However, in some districts the food crisis had begun as early as mid-1942.
• In May 1943, six districts Rangpur, Mymensingh, Bakarganj, Chittagong, Noakhali and Tipperah were the first to report deaths by starvation.
• Deaths by starvation had peaked by November 1943;by December, disease had become the most common cause of death. Disease-related mortality then continued to take its toll through early-to-mid 1944.
• Among diseases, malaria was the biggest killer. From July 1943 through June 1944, the monthly death toll from malaria averaged 125% above rates from the previous five years, reaching 203% over average in December 1943
FAMINE
• The famine fell hardest on the rural poor. As the distress continued, families adopted increasingly desperate means for survival. First, they reduced their food intake and began to sell jewelry, ornaments, and smaller items of personal property.
• Eventually, families disintegrated; men sold their small farms and left home to look for work or to join the army, and women and children became homeless migrants, often travelling to Calcutta or another large city in search of organised relief.
• Corpses were disposed of in rivers and water supplies, contaminated drinking water. Many people drank contaminated rainwater from streets and open spaces where others had urinated or defecated. Disposal of corpses soon became a problem for the government and the public
CLOTH FAMINE
• As a further consequence of the crisis, a “cloth famine” left the poorest in Bengal clothed in scraps or naked through the winter.
• The British military consumed nearly all the textiles produced in India by purchasing Indian-made boots, parachutes, uniforms, blankets, and other goods at heavily discounted rates.
• It exported 177 million yards of cotton in 1938–1939 and 819 million in 1942–1943. The country’s production of silk, wool and leather was also used up by the military.
• In May 1943 prices were 425 percent higher than in August 1939. Many women “took to staying inside a room all day long, emerging only when it was their turn to wear the single fragment of cloth shared with female relatives
EXPLOITATION
• One of the classic effects of famine is that it intensifies the exploitation of women; the sale of women and girls, for example, tends to increase. The sexual exploitation of poor, rural, lower-caste and tribal women by the jotedars had been difficult to escape even before the crisis.
• hose who migrated to Calcutta frequently had only begging or prostitution available as strategies for survival; often regular meals were the only payment.
• In late 1943, entire boatloads of girls for sale were reported in ports of East Bengal. Families sent their young girls to wealthy landowners overnight in exchange for very small amounts of money or rice.
• Brothels were their sole means of survival. Women who had been sexually exploited could not later expect any social acceptance or a return to their home or family
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