Churchill’s Secret War
Most readers with an interest in world history are familiar with Ireland’s seven-year Potato Famine, which lasted from 1845 until 1852. Fewer know of the catastrophic 1943 famine that claimed up to three million lives in Bengal, an eastern Indian state and then British colony. In the fall of 1942, Bengal’s rice crop failed following a devastating cyclone. As World War ii raged on its eastern border with the Japanese invasion of Burma, Bengal went on to lose its source of rice imports. Despite this crisis, the enormous loss of life due to starvation was avoidable, argues author Madhusree Mukerjee, a former contributing editor at Scientific American.
Mukerjee dispassionately blames Winston Churchill and his War Cabinet for the tragedy. According to the official account, Bengal did not receive aid during the famine because there were neither food supplies nor ships to spare for such a relief effort. The rice-eating Bengali people would, British leaders further alleged, shun wheat. (Rural Bengal still considers the golden grain to be a luxury food, Mukerjee points out.) Churchill’s bigotry toward Hindus, in general, and toward Mahatma Gandhi, in particular, is relatively well known. Even so, that the British prime minister declined to send Canadian and American food aid intended for India comes as a shock to the contemporary reader. As the Bengali people starved, Churchill meanwhile sent shiploads of Australian wheat to a Balkan stockpile meant to feed southern Europe once the war came to an end. Grain imports also went to other British colonies all along the Indian Ocean.
Why was India, the jewel in the crown, singled out as unworthy of food relief? Churchill famously proclaimed that he would not permit the British Empire’s dissolution, and yet he was forced to do just that near the war’s end. One must conclude, then, that Bengal paid the price for this turn of events. The most damning evidence against Churchill in Mukerjee’s book comes from the private papers of top British officials. In public, Leopold Amery, the Secretary of State for India, dutifully placed responsibility for the Bengal calamity “on Indians (for overpopulation, hoarding and misgovernment), the United Nations (which controlled shipping), and the Almighty (for crop failure)” (p.200). However, Amery’s diary and correspondence reveal that he viewed the famine as a direct consequence of a war effort that tapped India dry of resources and manpower in the interests of an Allied victory.
For his part, the Viceroy of India Lord Wavell observed that Churchill, who did not so much as respond to his telegrams about the dire famine in Bengal, did write to ask if Gandhi had died yet. That question seems logical, if peevish, given the gaunt Indian leader’s age (Gandhi was seventy when the war began) and given that fasting unto death had been Gandhi’s chief form of protest in his long career as a freedom fighter.
Mukerjee does not rely solely on British documents to tell the story, however. She also interviewed scores of people in West Bengal who lived through this horrific period. Villagers who walked to Kolkata in the hope of finding food often breathed their last breath in the streets of the capital, eyewitnesses recall. Ashoka Gupta, a housewife-turned-social worker, recalls: “There was a hospital behind our house, and every morning some mothers would have left their babies on the steps in the hope they would be saved.”
The famine technically came to an end in December 1943, when Bengal experienced a bountiful rice crop. But a malarial epidemic then struck the region; and, for a while, it seemed likely that few would be left to do the harvesting. In 1944, India received some 660,450 tons of wheat, thanks to the combined efforts of several leaders. If Churchill had again stubbornly refused to send this aid — a second famine would likely have been the result.
Much against Churchill’s wishes, India gained independence three years later, on August 15, 1947. But the violence of the Indian-Pakistan partition that accompanied political freedom seems to have wiped the 1943 famine from public memory. (West Bengal remained with India, while East Bengal, which initially went to Pakistan, later became the independent nation of Bangladesh.) A book on famine can hardly be uplifting; but the narrative told in is riveting, nonetheless. Mukerjee’s accomplished prose brings to light a forgotten chapter in the subcontinent’s agricultural and political history.
In the shadow of Partition’s bloodshed, the Bengal famine was folded into silence. But its ghosts remain—in the dissertation of a Nobelist in economics and in films and stories.
Read the entire review of Churchill’s Secret War. pdf.
