By November 1943 Bengal Had 6,625 Famine Kitchens, and Indian Relief Committees, the Ramakrishna Mission and an Army That Handled More Than 70,000 Tons of Grain Were Working Beside the Government

The Famine Inquiry Commission counted 6,625 food kitchens in Bengal in November 1943. The Government of Bengal ran 4,469 of them, and private relief organisations financed and ran 551. The remainder, 1,605 by subtraction, were subsidised by the government and run by other agencies.

The Commission’s 1945 Report on Bengal is also the main official record of who fed the province beside the government: Ramakrishna Mission volunteers in the villages, relief committees living on public donations, and from November an army that took over the movement of grain. The causes of the famine, the shipping argument in London and the death toll are in our document-by-document piece and the shorter account.

The first free kitchen opened in Chittagong in May 1943

Free kitchens began as a local decision. The Commission says the first in Bengal opened in Chittagong in May 1943, and it credits the Circle Officer of Rouzan with the idea that was later extended to most of the province. A memorandum of 18 August then told district officers across Bengal to set up kitchens at once. On 12 October Leo Amery, the Secretary of State for India, told the House of Commons that 2,600 free kitchens run by the government, and many others it subsidised, were feeding 1,300,000 people a day.

Results varied by district. In Tipperah, where kitchens could not get food, deaths in December 1943 stood 272 per cent above the five-year average, and the Commission tied the different course of deaths there and in Chittagong to how adequate relief was.

Gruel at 750 calories in Calcutta

Calcutta held nearly 100,000 destitute people in the middle of October, by the Commission’s reckoning, most of them from the 24 Parganas and Midnapore. From September each could get a small daily ration of cooked food for the asking, served at the same hour in every kitchen so that nobody collected two meals. Non-official bodies ran 40 of the city’s kitchens. Most of the gruel was cooked in seven government kitchens and sent to government and voluntary kitchens alike.

T. G. Narayan, who covered the famine for The Hindu, described one such kitchen in October 1943, an air-raid-precautions kitchen on Lansdowne Road that cooked for 3,000 people a day. The standard gruel, which the Government prescribed for any kitchen that wanted subsidised grain, was equal parts rice, dal, bajra and jowar (two millets) with a little vegetable, oil and spice. Narayan put it at 750 calories, against about 2,500 in a hospital’s invalid diet. The Government held it enough to keep a man alive if he did no manual work, he wrote, while non-official medical opinion held that the destitute needed far more. “It kept them alive, but it starved them out gradually,” he concluded.

Who carried more of the load in Calcutta is argued in the record. Narayan wrote that the Government supplied subsidised grain and lent some kitchens and staff, but that the main burden of relief in the city “was shouldered by public organisations”. Tushar Kanti Ghosh, editor of Amrita Bazar Patrika, wrote in The Bengal Tragedy that “it is private charity that has been doing the major part of the work of relief.” The Commission, looking at the whole province, held that relief on a wide scale “could be provided only by Government action” and that voluntary effort “could only be relatively small”. It added that the voluntary organisations “very materially assisted in the mitigation of suffering.”

The Ramakrishna Mission at Sarisha

Narayan spent a day in October 1943 at Sarisha, 26 miles from Calcutta, where the Ramakrishna Mission had kept an ashram since 1921. Relief there began about June. By October it covered some 75 square miles and more than 100 villages with 60,000 people. About 20,000 were getting relief of some kind and another 12,000 needed it, but the Mission lacked the funds and material to reach them.

Five free kitchens under its supervision fed nearly 6,000 people a day. Each week the Mission gave 100 maunds of rice (a maund is about 37 kilograms) free to selected families and sold 300 maunds at controlled prices. Nearly 100 of its students surveyed villages and issued tickets for meals, milk, grain and cloth, and the grain and cloth came, Narayan wrote, from the Bengal Relief Committee, the Marwari Relief Committee and the Government. He judged those on relief there healthier than those in Calcutta, though the kichuri, he wrote, was not enough to sustain a peasant.

The Mission’s own report, as Joanna Simonow summarises it, says relief eventually reached almost 1,200 villages and 22 towns. Answering the charge that voluntary relief clustered in Calcutta, the Commission said old-established bodies with trained staff did valuable work in the districts, and that it had “heard from many quarters of the excellent work” of the Ramakrishna Mission in rural areas.

What the committees reported about themselves

Several Bengal bodies published figures in late 1943, and T. K. Dutt of Lahore reprinted them in Hungry Bengal. They are the organisations’ own, unaudited counts.

The Bengal Relief Committee reported that in 23 districts it ran 172 free kitchens and free-dole centres serving 82,523 people, and supplied foodstuff at Rs 10 and Rs 12 a maund to 83,685 people. Its donations to 31 October 1943 came to about Rs 14,45,500 in cash (1.45 million rupees) and goods worth about Rs 4 lakh (400,000 rupees). The Bengal Provincial Hindu Mahasabha reported about 150 centres in 20 districts and Calcutta, among them 122 free kitchens and cheap grain stores. It said it served more than 50,000 people a day, mainly outside Calcutta, and had a policy “to render relief to all persons, irrespective of any other consideration, religious or otherwise.” The same report said the work of all the non-official bodies together was “hardly sufficient” for the crisis. The Marwari Relief Society, Simonow writes, ran more than 60 centres in Calcutta and the districts and distributed Rs 14.3 lakh (1,430,000 rupees) of food, clothing and medicine.

The Mahasabha’s relief is also disputed. Abhijit Sarkar’s 2020 study in Modern Asian Studies, built on the Syama Prasad Mookerjee papers and other primary sources, argues that the Mahasabha used relief for political ends. He says the party called Muslim food officials “saboteurs”, accused Muslim volunteers of converting starving Hindus in exchange for food, and demanded that Hindu and Muslim orphans stay in orphanages of their own faith. He concludes that private relief “became proportional to the political dividends” a group was expected to yield. The Commission noted that some voluntary bodies had political affiliations and that this did not ease co-operation, and it stated that “all communities benefited equally from the distribution of voluntary relief.” Sarkar writes about the politics around relief and the Commission about who received it.

Communists, the League, Lahore and Gandhi’s earlier warning

Ania Loomba of the University of Pennsylvania, drawing on the autobiography of Manikuntala Sen, writes that by September 1943 communist women were feeding 1,100 people a day from more than 12 kitchens and pressing the authorities for subsidised rice shops, and that sixteen fair-price shops were eventually opened. A 2021 review in the Johns Hopkins Macksey Journal says a People’s Relief Committee formed in 1943 ran a medical board and wrote to Wavell asking for relief.

The Chughtai Library in Lahore has digitised a 213-page National Archives of Pakistan file on the All-India Muslim League’s relief fund. Its catalogue says donations from individuals, businesses and district Leagues, from Tanjore to Gurdaspur, went through M. A. Jinnah’s office to the Muslim Chamber of Commerce in Calcutta for distribution. Only the abstract is open to readers who are not signed in. K. C. Ghosh names two non-official bodies that removed the dead from Calcutta’s streets beside the police squad, the Hindu Satkar Samity and the Anjuman Mufidul Islam.

In Lahore a United Bengal Relief Board formed in November 1943 with 20 member organisations, among them the Hindu Maha Sabha, the Muslim League, the Communist Party and the Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee. On 14 and 15 January 1944 its volunteers collected Rs 12,400 on Lahore’s streets.

Gandhi’s contribution came earlier. In Harijan on 18 January 1942, as Narayan reproduces it, he wrote that “Mere Government effort cannot deal with crises affecting millions of people, unless there is voluntary response from them.” He was arrested on 9 August 1942 (see Quit India), and Narayan writes that his counsel was denied to the people from then on.

The Viceroy’s visit and the Army’s grain movement

Wavell was sworn in as Viceroy on 20 October 1943 and, his editor notes, was in Bengal within six days. He spent three days in Calcutta, went round the streets by night to see how the destitute slept and by day to see them fed, and spent a day at Contai in Midnapore. His entry for 29 October says what he saw was not as gruesome as the Congress papers made out but “grim enough to make official complacency surprising.” He told the Bengal Ministers to move the destitute into camps and got them to accept a Major-General and staff to help with the transport of supplies. On 28 October Amery told the Commons that a Viceroy’s Distress Relief Fund would take gifts for Bengal and other distressed parts of India.

The Commission lists three forms of military help: officers for the Department of Civil Supplies, troops to move and distribute supplies, and military medical officers. Advance parties reached the famine areas by 11 November, and the main bodies, several thousand strong, arrived between 19 and 27 November. By the third week of November 8,000 tons had been distributed with military help, 24,000 tons by mid-December, and over 70,000 tons by the time the troops withdrew in March or April 1944.

On 7 November General Auchinleck, the Commander-in-Chief, told a press conference in New Delhi that 900 tons of food a day had gone from Calcutta to about 20 distribution centres in the districts and that the aim was 2,000 tons a day. Wavell’s journal for that day records the same rise, from 900 to 2,000 tons. Auchinleck added that lorries bore posters in Bengali and English reading “food for the people”, and that rice issues to Indian troops had been cut by two-thirds, with atta (wheat flour) in its place.

In Calcutta the troops “turned themselves into temporary coolies” to load and unload rice. They guarded trains and river steamers, placed travelling shops on boats, and reconditioned over 2,000 of the boats collected under the 1942 denial scheme so that they could carry grain. By mid-December 600 tons of warm clothing had gone to the worst districts, 100 tons of it flown to East Bengal by the United States Army Air Force. After visiting the 24 Parganas in December Wavell wrote, “The Army is doing a fine show.” Christopher Bayly writes that Indian and British soldiers shared their food with destitute people at camp gates.

What the Famine Inquiry Commission found about relief

The Government of India set up the Commission by ordinance in 1944 with Sir John Woodhead as chairman. It first met on 18 July 1944 and heard 130 witnesses in Calcutta, 45 official and 85 non-official.

Orders for large-scale relief were not issued until 20 August 1943, and the Relief Commissioner, a senior Indian Civil Service officer, was not appointed until 26 September. The Commission thought both should have come at least three months earlier. The relief measures taken, it said, “failed to prevent distress and death on a large scale”, because the August instructions came without adequate food and funds. It reported that the Government of India offered help in September 1943 and Bengal replied that it was not required, and it wrote: “If the Army had been called in two months earlier, say in September, famine mortality would have been considerably reduced.” When the army organisation took over transport, it said, “the problem of relief was immediately simplified.”

On money, the Commission recorded Rs 7.42 crore (74.2 million rupees) allotted for relief from October 1942 to March 1944, of which Rs 3.03 crore was for free relief. By the end of November 1943, it records, most of the destitute had left Calcutta, and over 55,000 people had been received in destitute homes and camps. From December 1943 the kitchens were gradually closed, and homeless and indigent people were housed and fed in workhouses, destitute homes and orphanages.