The Statesman of Calcutta Printed Photographs of Starving People From 22 August 1943 Under Wartime Press Rules, and the Government's Own Inquiry Later Called It a Public Service

The Statesman of Calcutta printed a series of photographs of starving people in the city’s streets in its Sunday edition of 22 August 1943. The Government of India’s own Famine Inquiry Commission, in its 1945 Report on Bengal, said most of the gruesome pictures of famine victims were taken in the weeks when destitute villagers lay on Calcutta’s pavements, that the Statesman’s pictures “familiarised the world with the horrors of the Bengal famine,” and that in printing them the paper “rendered a valuable public service.”

The paper was English-owned and edited by Ian M. Stephens (1903 to 1984), according to Joanna Simonow’s Online Atlas entry on the relief effort. This piece covers what the press was allowed to print, what the Statesman and the Indian papers printed, how London reacted, and what the documents show about the army’s move into relief under the new Viceroy, Lord Wavell. The grain and shipping record is in our account of the official papers, and our shorter piece gives the argument in outline.

The rules the press worked under

Leo Amery, the Secretary of State for India, gave the Commons the legal position on 4 November 1943. The central and provincial governments, he said, worked with the Press Advisory Committees to encourage Indian newspapers to impose “any necessary restrictions” on themselves, and held power to issue orders under the Indian Press (Emergency Powers) Act of 1931 and Defence of India Rules 40 and 41. The orders differed from province to province and were under constant review, so he could not give details.

Simonow writes that the Defence of India Act of 1939 added a tool to the press laws already in place, one that let authorities ban print they judged harmful to the war effort. In official despatches, she reports, the words “famine” and “starvation” were frequently struck out and replaced with “food situation.” Stephens’s memoir Monsoon Morning (1966), which she cites, says despatches used “food crisis.”

The rules had been used on the Indian press that year. On 21 January 1943 Amery told the Commons that most of the Hindu nationalist papers had not published on 6 January in protest at an order banning messages about a hunger strike by Professor Bhansali, who wanted an inquiry into alleged excesses by troops and police at Chimur. The restrictions were then modified. Asked whether most Indian papers, including those outside the Congress camp, had protested, Amery answered “Yes, Sir.” Cormac Ó Gráda adds that news of the cyclone of 16 October 1942 in Midnapore took nearly a fortnight to reach a senior Bengal minister, and that papers backing the Quit India movement (see our account of 1942) were censored or shut.

The same paper by Ó Gráda says the government did not ban reports of the famine, nor newspapers not judged directly subversive. Amrita Bazar Patrika and the Hindustan Times kept appearing, he writes, though they probably censored themselves. A report from the All-India Newspaper Editors’ Conference, reprinted in Dawn in 2018, shows the rules reached the famine itself: the Standing Committee called the pre-censorship of the Patrika’s news and articles about the famine “entirely uncalled for,” saying the government had ignored the advice of the Bengal Press Advisory Committee. Coda Story, a news site, says the emergency rules barred the word “famine” outright. Of the sources opened here, none prints the text of such a ban.

Months on the official line

Ó Gráda, who read the 1943 files and press, finds that the Statesman “toed the official line, berating local traders and producers, and praising ministerial efforts” for months before August. He dates the change to early July, when it ran an editorial calling for “more and cheaper food.” By 13 August it was writing that “apparently there are months of this penury and disintegration to come,” and it grew impatient with speeches that called on the public to rally behind the official campaign against hoarding.

Stephens later said the paper had been sounding the alarm since March 1943. Ó Gráda disagrees, citing the memoir’s pages 169 to 197 and Paul Greenough’s study of the famine. He adds that the paper later confessed it too had been duped into false hopes.

Sunday 22 August 1943

Simonow writes that the Statesman’s standing as a reputed English-language daily gave it room to test the press regulations, and that its photographs ran between 22 August and 24 October 1943. In January 1944 they were reprinted as a special edition, “Maladministration in Bengal.” In her Online Atlas entry she says Stephens turned to the photographs after critical editorials failed to draw attention, and that he did so by using loopholes in the emergency rules. Coda Story likewise says he used a gap in the censorship rules. No source opened here says which rule the gap was in or reproduces Stephens’s exchanges with the censors, and Monsoon Morning, whose chapters on the famine are headed “Famine: Preliminary” and “Famine: A Campaign,” could not be opened.

The Commission put the number of destitute people in Calcutta at nearly 100,000 by mid-October. J. R. Symonds of the Friends’ Ambulance Unit, writing in a collection K. Santhanam published in 1944, said that by August, “when the vigorous articles and macabre pictures of The Statesman brought the condition of Calcutta before the whole world,” free kitchens had begun to spring up across the city. The Commission recorded that from September a small daily ration of cooked food was available to any destitute person who asked.

The Commission’s phrase “for the first time” is open to question. Simonow’s atlas entry says famine pictures had appeared in Bengal’s Indian newspapers for months before the Statesman’s series.

The Indian papers and the photographers

Amrita Bazar Patrika ran an editorial in August 1943 saying that the famine conditions of 1770 were “already upon us,” recalling the Bengal famine of that year. On 16 August it ran a front-page cartoon of emaciated people on a beach, with food ships far out at sea, captioned “A Mirage! A Mirage!” Ó Gráda notes that it also ran a series of graphic photographs in late August, and Simonow’s atlas entry cites one of its pictures from 9 September.

Tushar Kanti Ghosh, the Patrika’s editor, collected its pieces in The Bengal Tragedy (1944). The Patrika wrote, in a piece he collected, that descriptions of the daily scenes in Calcutta had been in the daily press long before the Statesman’s photographs, but “did not create much of an impression” in New Delhi or London. It said the Statesman had taken the lead in what officials called over-dramatisation, and elsewhere in the book it quoted the Statesman as writing that responsibility for the breakdown “inescapably rests in the last resort upon Authority in Britain and its immediate representatives here.” The book also records that photographs “continue to appear in the Calcutta press,” naming the Hindustan Standard as one paper running them. The over-dramatisation charge, the Patrika wrote, came from the Home Secretary to the Government of India, Conran-Smith, who said in the Council of State that the food situation in Bengal was being over-dramatised.

The Communist Party’s weekly People’s War carried the other well-known set. Its issue of 14 November 1943 printed an article by the party’s general secretary, P. C. Joshi, illustrated with photographs by Sunil Janah, according to Ó Gráda’s notes. Down To Earth says Joshi took the young Janah with him on a tour of the stricken province, that postcards of the pictures were sent abroad to raise funds, and that the government had eased its pressure on Communists because the party urged support for the war. The artist Chittaprosad’s booklet Hungry Bengal came out in 1943, and documenta 14 says all but one of 5,000 copies were seized and destroyed.

London, from 19 September

Simonow dates the first full report in the British press to the Sunday Pictorial of 19 September 1943, a United Press correspondent’s eyewitness account. The paper followed it with two photographs it had taken from the Statesman. She dates that issue 26 September, and the Online Atlas gives 25 September. The caption read: “They are not German slaves in Greece. They are citizens of the British Empire in India.” Two more Statesman photographs ran on 17 October. The Independent Labour Party’s New Leader and a pamphlet from the Federation of Indian Associations in Great Britain used the same pictures.

The Statesman had its own view of how little London knew. In an editorial of 5 October, quoted by Ó Gráda, it said wartime censorship “seems virtually to have withheld from the British public knowledge that there was famine in Bengal at all” until a fortnight or so earlier.

Amery’s answers changed over those months. On 28 January 1943 he told the Commons: “There is no famine and no widespread prevalence of acute shortage.” On 23 September he reported “distressing scenes both in the city and in the districts” and said of Bengal and the other deficit areas that “there is the menace of famine.” Simonow reads the second statement as an admission made days after the Sunday Pictorial’s story, and reports that in late September Amery criticised the British press for keeping the famine so prominent. On 21 October he gave the Commons a figure of about 2,000 deaths in Calcutta hospitals among people suffering from malnutrition since mid-August, with city mortality about twice normal. A week later he said about 8,000 people had died in Calcutta between 15 August and 16 October from causes directly or indirectly due to malnutrition.

The Commons held an adjournment debate on the famine on 4 November. On a Friday in early November, Simonow writes, representatives of seven British relief committees met at India House in London.

Wavell and the army

Wavell was sworn in as Viceroy on 20 October 1943. His journal records that he returned on 29 October from three days in Calcutta, where he toured the streets by night to see how the destitute slept and by day to see them fed, and spent a day in Contai in Midnapore. He found the distress “not as gruesome as the Congress papers would make out, but grim enough to make official complacency surprising.” He told the ministers to move the destitute out of Calcutta into camps, to accept a major-general and staff to help move supplies, and to press on with rationing. On 7 November, after a meeting with General Mayne of Eastern Command, he wrote that the army had raised the outflow of grain from Calcutta to the districts from 900 to 2,000 tons a day. Simonow adds that a Viceroy’s Distress Relief Fund opened in late October with a joint appeal from the Secretary of State, the Lord Mayor and the High Commissioner for India.

The journal does not mention the Statesman, and no source opened here ties a particular decision of Wavell’s to the photographs. The Commission credited the paper with a public service. Symonds, the relief worker, tied the pictures to the kitchens that opened in Calcutta. Simonow concludes that campaigns in Britain and India contributed to the authorities’ decision to respond, a move “severely delayed and limited in scope” that she judges to have averted more deaths, while warning that the link between famine photographs and public feeling was not straightforward. Her Online Atlas entry says the relief mission began only in November 1943.

Wavell himself wrote on 21 November that he believed “there is more anxiety and sympathy about the Bengal famine in England than anywhere in India.” On 12 January 1944 the Statesman rebuked Amery for blaming the provincial authorities. It said the authorities in London, Delhi and Calcutta had given soothing assurances while disaster approached, and that if the aim was to hide the facts, there was no reason to think the public was being told the truth now. The passage ends: “Government cannot have it both ways.”