A Day After Amery Told the Commons Calcutta Rice Cost Six Times Its Pre-War Price, the War Cabinet Refused More Ships for Grain

On the afternoon of 24 September 1943 Field Marshal Archibald Wavell, the Viceroy-designate of India, went to a Cabinet meeting on food for India in the Prime Minister’s room at the House of Commons. His journal records it. “P.M. spoke scathingly of India’s economic inefficiency which made it necessary to supply it with food which otherwise might not be needed,” Wavell wrote. The Cabinet had arranged 100,000 tons of barley from Iraq and 50,000 tons of wheat from the Mediterranean. More could not come without drawing on the Middle East, where a reserve was being built for Greece and the Balkans. “Apparently it is more important to save the Greeks and liberated countries from starvation than the Indians,” Wavell noted.

The day before, Leo Amery, the Secretary of State for India, had told the Commons that the death rate in Calcutta over the previous seven months was “30 per cent. above normal.” A maund of rice, about 37 kilograms, then cost Rs 24 in the city after reaching Rs 37. The pre-war price, Amery said, was about Rs 4.

Our shorter piece on the 1943 famine gives the argument in outline. This one goes through the documents.

Rice and boats, 1942

Japan took Burma in the spring of 1942, and the army in Bengal planned for a landing from the sea. The Famine Inquiry Commission, which the Government of India appointed under Sir John Woodhead, describes a “denial” policy in two parts. Rice and paddy beyond local needs were to leave the coastal districts of Midnapore, Bakarganj and Khulna. Every boat able to carry ten passengers or more was to leave the parts of the delta thought open to invasion.

Large-scale rice buying stopped by the end of May 1942, when market prices passed the government’s ceiling of Rs 6 a maund. The Commission says the quantity bought “did not exceed 40,000 tons,” a small share of the surplus in those districts, and found no evidence that it caused scarcity anywhere. It did bring home to the people, in the Commission’s words, “in the most emphatic manner, the danger of invasion,” and it “increased local nervousness and probably encouraged cultivators to hold on to their grain.”

The boat order was issued on 1 May 1942. The Commission’s table for the end of November 1942 lists 66,563 registered boats in the area. Of these, 1,613 had been requisitioned for military use, 3,373 destroyed, 4,143 sunk but recoverable and 17,546 taken to “reception” stations, 26,675 in all. Another 19,471 had left the area with their owners to find work elsewhere, and 20,417 remained. The figure of 45,000 or 46,000 boats often quoted is close to the 46,146 no longer in the area, which includes boats owners moved themselves.

In that part of the delta, the Commission wrote, “boats form the chief means of communication.” Their removal “must have had a considerable restricting effect on the movements of foodgrains,” and the fishermen who lost their boats “suffered severely during the famine.” More than 80,000 families were also told to leave homes and fields that the military requisitioned in 1942 and 1943. The Commission saw “little doubt that the members of many of these families became famine victims.”

A price that had no precedent

The Commission’s price series for coarse rice in Calcutta shows a low of Rs 3 a maund in the early 1930s. In January 1942 it was Rs 5/10, five rupees and ten annas. By July it was Rs 8, “even though there was no question at that time of the province being short of rice.” In January 1943 it was Rs 12/8, a level that “had not been so high even during the boom period after the end of the last war.”

Part of the pressure came from outside Bengal. With Burmese rice gone, Ceylon, Travancore and western India bought from the Indian provinces instead. In the first seven months of 1942 Bengal exported 319,000 tons of rice, against 136,000 tons a year earlier, which turned a net import of 296,000 tons into a net export of 185,000 tons. On 26 January 1943 the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, wrote to Amery that “mindful of our difficulties about food” he had told Fazlul Huq, then Bengal’s premier, “that he simply must produce more rice out of Bengal for Ceylon even if Bengal itself went short.” Cormac Ó Gráda of University College Dublin quotes the letter.

Then rice went up in steps. On 3 March 1943 coarse rice in Calcutta was Rs 15, and by 20 March, after the Bengal Government decontrolled the rice trade, Rs 21. On 3 May it was Rs 21/1, and on 17 May Rs 30/10. The Commission put the rise at “five to six times the prices prevailing in the early months of 1942.” Famine, it said in its closing summary, “could have been prevented by resolute action at the right time to ensure the equitable distribution of available supplies.”

How much rice there was

The Commission found a shortage, though a modest one. The winter rice crop, the aman, normally fed Bengal for about 38 weeks. The crop reaped at the end of 1942 lasted about 29, after a cyclone on 16 October struck 3,200 square miles of the western districts while the crop was flowering, and crop disease followed. Counting stocks carried over, the Commission put total supply for 1943 at 49 weeks of requirements, a deficit of “about 3 weeks.” Its conclusion on causes was plain: “if the aman crop had been a good one, the famine would not have occurred.” One member, M. Afzal Husain, filed a minute saying the shortage was larger.

Amartya Sen, who was a boy in Bengal in 1943, weighed the evidence differently in Poverty and Famines (1981). Senjuti Mallik, in a 2022 review in GeoJournal, summarises his figures: rice supply was about 5 percent below the previous five-year average and 13 percent above 1941, a year without famine.

Ó Gráda went back to the 1943 press and files and concluded: “There was a food availability problem, though its extent cannot be resolved with any accuracy.” He cites an assessment by a leading merchant and Muslim League politician that the shortage was one million tons. Bengal might have coped with that in peacetime, he writes, but in 1943, “given military requirements and war-related disruption to trade and communications, this was a disastrous deficit.” Earlier Raj famines are covered in Lord Lytton’s famine of 1876 to 1878 and the grain that left India while it starved.

What the 2019 drought study measured

In February 2019 Vimal Mishra of the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar and six co-authors published “Drought and Famine in India, 1870 to 2016” in Geophysical Research Letters. They reconstructed soil moisture from weather station records and simulations. Of six major famines since 1870, the abstract says, “five are linked to soil moisture drought, and one (1943) was not.”

Scroll.in covered the paper under the headline “New soil study confirms 1943 Bengal famine was caused by Winston Churchill’s policies, not drought.” The abstract does not mention Churchill or policy. It says nothing about the size of the grain harvest or the stocks in granaries. It rules out drought, and the Commission had already named other causes for the failed crop, the cyclone and a fungus. Ó Gráda reports that rainfall in west Bengal in October and November 1942 was above average.

Calcutta’s share and the hunt for hoards

More than half of India’s war-related output came from Calcutta, Ó Gráda writes, where up to a million workers were employed. Of 206,000 tons that came into the Bengal Government’s hands at Calcutta in 1943, wrote two of the Commission’s five members, Sir Manilal Nanavati and S. V. Ramamurty, 141,000 tons were kept in the city and 65,000 sent to the districts. They dissented from their colleagues on this point. The majority held that the villages would not have gained much from a smaller Calcutta allotment, because without controls Calcutta would have bought more from them, and it faulted Bengal’s government for failing to take control of supplies.

Bengal’s government also hunted for hoards. A Government of India memorandum of 7 September 1943, quoted by Ó Gráda, said the “anti-hoarding” drive “has achieved very little that is positive,” with stocks in the districts of “rather more than 300,000 tons” that were stocks and not surplus.

The Commission did find profiteering. It cited an estimate of Rs 150 crore (1.5 billion rupees) for the unusual profits on rice sold in 1943 and added: “We cannot vouch for the accuracy of this figure, but beyond question huge profits were made.”

The photographs and the word famine

Joanna Simonow, in the humanitarian history atlas, reports that “famine” and “starvation” were frequently erased from official despatches and replaced with “food situation.” Bengal’s government did not declare a famine, and the Commission called its policy of “No Shortage” in April to June 1943, “with the support of the Government of India,” “unjustified when the danger of famine was plainly apparent.”

The Statesman of Calcutta, which Simonow calls English-owned, had toed the official line for months. Its Sunday edition of 22 August 1943 carried a series of photographs of famine victims, and they were reproduced around the world. The British weekly Sunday Pictorial ran two of them on 25 September under the caption “They are not German slaves in Greece. They are citizens of the British Empire in India.”

Parliament heard the toll in stages. Amery told the Commons on 28 October 1943 that about 8,000 people had died in Calcutta between 15 August and 16 October from causes “directly or indirectly due to malnutrition.” His hospital figures for Calcutta on 16 December were 16,285 admissions of starving people and 6,156 deaths among them.

Cabinet, shipping and Wavell’s telegrams

In mid-July 1943 Linlithgow began demanding imports, no matter, as Ó Gráda quotes him, “how unpalatable this demand must be to H.M.G.” The War Cabinet held on 31 July that the shortage “was not the result of physical deficiency but of hoarding,” and offered 50,000 tons of Australian wheat as a “token shipment” and 100,000 tons of Iraqi barley. Ó Gráda reports that on 24 September it decided that diverting ships to carry grain to India before the next harvest was impossible. Amery wrote in his diary that “Winston [Churchill] may be right in saying that the starvation of anyhow under-fed Bengalis is less serious than sturdy Greeks, at any rate from the war point of view, but he makes no sufficient allowance for the sense of Empire responsibility in this country.”

Amery told the Commons on 12 October that the problem as far as help from Britain went “is entirely one of shipping.” Sorensen said on 28 October that the Australian Prime Minister had announced enough grain in Australia to feed India’s hungry if ships could be found, and Amery replied that Australia and Britain were “only too anxious to supply food to India if the very great difficulties of the shipping situation can be overcome.” Amery pleaded once more for ships on 10 November. Churchill’s first reaction, in Ó Gráda’s quotation of Amery’s diary, was “a preliminary flourish on Indians breeding like rabbits.”

Wavell spent 1944 asking for grain. By 5 January he had telegraphed for a guarantee of 1,000,000 tons. His cable of 9 February to the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister said: “Bengal famine was one of the greatest disasters that has befallen any people under British rule and damage to our reputation here both among Indians and foreigners in India is incalculable.” A week later the Cabinet “turned down flat” his demand. By 24 March the Cabinet was offering 250,000 tons, and the Secretary of State suggested he announce the wheat imports and “conceal for the time being the export of 150,000 tons rice.” Wavell refused to do anything “so dishonest or stupid.” His entry for 26 April records what Sir Archibald Rowlands, just back from London, told him of the Cabinet committee on Indian grain. Among the courses it listed was “to tell the Viceroy to supply the Army’s needs and let the Indian people starve if necessary.”

By 26 June he had “extracted 450,000 tons.” He wrote on 11 October that after nine months’ struggle he had 700,000 tons “after H.M.G. had twice said no imports were possible at all.” Nine days later, a year into his viceroyalty, he judged the government’s attitude to India “negligent, hostile and contemptuous to a degree I had not anticipated.”

The case for Churchill

Churchill’s defenders have a real argument. Richard Langworth of the Hillsdale College Churchill Project writes that Bengal received 130,000 tons of Iraqi barley, 80,000 tons of Australian wheat and 10,000 tons from Canada in January 1944. He says Churchill called an emergency War Cabinet on 14 February to look for more grain without upsetting the D-Day plans, then asked President Roosevelt for help, saying Australia had a million tons but he lacked ships. Roosevelt declined. By the end of 1944, Langworth reports, Wavell’s million tons had come from Australia and the South East Asia Command. Grain also reached Bengal in 1943, 373,000 tons of wheat and wheat products by the Commission’s count, 93,000 tons of it from overseas.

Wavell’s journal answers part of this. On 7 September 1944 he recorded Mountbatten’s account of the Prime Minister, who “seemed to regard sending food to India merely as ‘appeasement’ of Congress.” Only the Chiefs of Staff, who saw that India had to be fed to serve as a base, “produced any food at all.” Wavell added that “there was really plenty of shipping but that Leathers would not part,” meaning Lord Leathers, the Minister of War Transport. Lelyveld, who doubts the “secret war” of Madhusree Mukerjee’s title, still writes that “probably it’s true that fewer Bengalis would have died had Churchill approved an emergency request from his own officials in India in July 1943 for shipments of 80,000 tons of wheat a month.”

The Commission’s Report on Bengal blames the governments in Calcutta and Delhi and does not name Churchill or the War Cabinet. Ó Gráda’s conclusion differs: “the lack of political will to divert foodstuffs from the war effort rather than speculation in the sense outlined was mainly responsible for the famine.”

Two quotations and a telegram

The best-known Churchill remark is “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” Ramachandra Guha, in The Hindu in 2005, gives it as an entry in Amery’s diary for September 1942, before the famine. The line about “breeding like rabbits” comes from Amery’s entry of 10 November 1943 and belongs to the argument over grain.

Wavell’s journal for 5 July 1944 reads: “Winston sent me a peevish telegram to ask why Gandhi hadn’t died yet! He has never answered my telegram about food.” Langworth prints what he says Churchill sent: “Surely Mr. Gandhi has made a most remarkable recovery, as he is already able to take an active part in politics. How does this square with the medical reports upon which his release on grounds of ill-health was agreed to by us?” He argues that Wavell’s line is his own characterisation, not a quotation. On 29 June, a week earlier, Wavell had written that “there is no immediate prospect of famine in Bengal.”

Counting the dead

The Commission’s figures show 1,304,323 recorded deaths in Bengal from July to December 1943, against an average of 626,048 for those months. It judged that excess deaths in 1943 were “of the order of one million,” and with 1944 added it concluded that “about 1.5 million deaths occurred as a direct result of the famine and the epidemics.” It said the 3.5 million estimate of Professor K. P. Chattopadhyay of Calcutta University, drawn from sample surveys, rested on a method that “cannot be accepted as statistically sound,” while granting that the official figures undercounted.

Later estimates cover different periods. Arup Maharatna’s table lists Sen at 2.62 to 3.05 million excess deaths for 1943 to 1946 and Paul Greenough at 3.5 to 3.8 million, a figure Maharatna calls “largely based on Sen’s calculations.” Maharatna, who published the same estimate with Tim Dyson in 1991, used registration data for the whole of undivided Bengal that earlier writers had not used. He arrived at about 2.1 million, within a range of 1.8 to 2.4 million, “much closer to 2 million deaths” than to 3 million.

By his calculation the population of Bengal in mid-1945 was still some 2 million below its mid-1943 level, and it “cannot have been until around mid-1947” that it regained its pre-famine size.