For nearly thirty years, one explanation of the Bengal Famine stood above every other, and it belonged to Amartya Sen. He had watched the catastrophe unfold as a boy, grew up to become one of the most influential thinkers of his age, and won a Nobel Prize along the way. His account of why famines happen reshaped the study of starvation across the world. Then, in 2010, a science journalist with no formal training in history walked into the argument and reopened a wound many had assumed was long healed. Her name was Madhusree Mukerjee, and she put a figure back into the story that Sen had left almost entirely out of it. Winston Churchill.
The Famine That Killed Thirty Lakh
The Bengal Famine of 1943 killed close to thirty lakh people. Emaciated villagers wandered into Calcutta searching for food, corpses lay on the pavements, and children died on railway platforms. British soldiers posted in India wrote home describing scenes they could not square with a modern state. The causes were tangled. Japan had seized Burma in 1942, cutting off the rice imports Bengal leaned on. Fearing an invasion, the authorities pursued a scorched-earth policy, removing rice stocks and destroying boats so that nothing useful would fall into Japanese hands, and in the process wrecking the networks that moved food to the countryside. War spending sent incomes and then prices soaring. Traders hoarded, households stockpiled, rumour fed panic, and all the while India was being drained to supply the imperial war effort. The question was never whether many things went wrong. It was how much blame each one deserved.
How Sen Changed The Way The World Saw Hunger
Before Sen, most thinking about famine rested on a simple idea: that people starve because there is not enough food. In his 1981 book Poverty and Famines, he argued that this often got the story backwards. Bengal, he concluded, had not suffered a collapse in total food supply large enough to explain the deaths of millions. What had collapsed was people’s ability to buy what food there was. He called it entitlement failure. A fisherman lives by trading fish for rice, a labourer by turning wages into grain, and when prices race ahead of incomes, those lifelines snap. The war had created winners with fat pay packets and losers priced out of the market, and it was the losers who died, not because Bengal had run out of grain, but because they had become too poor to reach it.
The Hole Where Churchill Should Have Been
The theory was elegant, and it had an awkward consequence. If Bengal had not truly run short of food, then Churchill’s refusal to send more of it looked less like the hinge of the tragedy. Sen never spared colonial callousness, but the logic of his argument pointed at markets, inflation and administration rather than at one man in London. And that man’s record made the omission glaring. Churchill had opposed Indian self-rule for most of his life and spoken of Indians in terms his own colleagues found repellent. His Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery, recorded him saying relief would achieve little because Indians “breed like rabbits”, and once told Churchill to his face that he could see little difference between his outlook and Hitler’s.
The Journalist Who Reopened The File
Mukerjee’s ‘Churchill’s Secret War’, published in 2010, put empire back at the centre. She did not reject Sen’s insight so much as widen it, drawing on newly opened War Cabinet papers and private diaries to show a leadership that met Bengal’s pleas with indifference. By her account, Churchill acted in January 1943 to pull most merchant shipping out of the Indian Ocean, making it impossible to carry Australian wheat to a starving province. Her book leaned on the historian Mark Tauger, who had long argued that crop disease had cut Bengal’s harvest far more sharply than Sen allowed. If Tauger was right, the shortage was real and severe, and a leader who withheld grain in the face of it looked far more culpable.
The Quarrel That Would Not Die
The dispute caught fire in the New York Review of Books. A review of Mukerjee’s book drew a reply from her, which drew Sen himself into the columns, plainly irritated that a quarrel a quarter of a century old had been “majestically revived”. He dismissed Tauger’s evidence as drawn from just two rice research stations in a province of twenty-seven districts. Tauger fired back, Sen answered again, and readers came away remembering it as Sen versus Mukerjee. Both, in the end, were left standing. Sen’s idea that hunger is about access and not merely supply remains one of the twentieth century’s great correctives. What Mukerjee did was refuse to let empire slip quietly out of the frame, and drag the decisions taken in London, the denied requests and the redirected ships, back to where thirty lakh dead might fairly hold them to account.