The Crystal Waters Around Cinque Island Have Plenty of Corals And

Placing the Great Bengal Famine in the Global Context Madhusree Mukerjee The Bengal famine of 1943 has generally been regarded as an unfortunate outcome of local factors. It was also, however, a wartime famine, and setting it in the context of World War II reveals the pressures exerted upon Indian grain markets by the British War Cabinet. A series of War Cabinet decisions in 1943 regarding the allocation of shipping precipitated and exacerbated the famine. The War Cabinet was stockpiling wheat for future use—which activity combined with Churchill‟s hostility toward Indians to preclude the possibility of sending adequate wheat to India. The 1943 Bengal famine has been extensively studied, mainly with the help of the report of a famine inquiry commission that began its secret hearings in 1944. To understand the framework within which the famine has traditionally been comprehended, it is important to look at the mandate of this commission. In October of 1943, Field Marshal Wavell arrived in India to assume up the post of viceroy, and took the first steps to ease the famine. Soon after, however, he faced a vociferous demand from Indian politicians for an inquiry into the famine. Amery, the Secretary of State for India, advised against yielding to such a demand, and when it turned out that these voices would not be quieted, he suggested deflecting the inquiry into a broader study of Indian agriculture. Eventually, however, Amery and Wavell had to agree to an inquiry. To minimize the damage, they chose the members of the inquiry committee carefully, and limited its field of study to personnel and events within India. In particular, Amery advised Wavell that the famine commission should avoid looking into “strategical and other circumstances as may have contributed to internal transportation difficulties or affected H.M.G.‟s decisions in regard to shipping of imports.” In other words, the commission would not look into the question of railways—almost all the trains were employed in the war effort, and few had been made available to take wheat from the Punjab to Bengal. More importantly, the commission would ignore the entire issue of shipping. Only massive imports of rice or wheat from outside India would have broken the famine, and the implicit assumption the commission made was that ships were not available.i As a result, the commission looked into local factors in a lot of detail, and ultimately blamed the failure of the local rice crop, the Government of India, the Bengal administration, and corrupt brokers for the famine. It did not interview military officers or anyone who had since left India (such as the former viceroy, Lord Linlithgow). It did not look into the role of the War Cabinet, or raise the question of whether relief could have been set from outside India. The commission did, however, leave the impression that only imports of rice, rather than wheat, would have relieved the famine. Rice having been scarce worldwide that year, that let the War Cabinet off the hook for not having sent relief. Also, the commission did not discuss the inflationary financing of the war effort, a major driver of famine.ii All these omissions led Amartya Sen to conclude that the Government of India‟s officials did not have a sophisticated comprehension of famine, and saw it simply in terms of food shortage. Sen further asserted that the crop shortage was in itself too small to cause famine. In fact the government‟s estimates for the rice shortage were far larger than Sen quoted. In addition, the government understood perfectly well the extent to which wartime inflation drove the famine, and appears to have anticipated the calamity. Sen‟s observation that famine arises from failure of entitlement is nevertheless perfectly valid; this analysis extends it to the global context.iii The report of the inquiry commission became the standard text for students of the famine, and has determined the way the famine has since been regarded: as an unfortunate compendium of local factors. Some researchers have supplemented the report of the famine commission with the Nanavati Papers, which are transcripts of the secret hearings of the commission. These were supposed to have been destroyed, but one member of the commission, Justice Nanavati, who was evidently not as reliable as Wavell and Amery had hoped, kept his copies. They are now to be found at the National Archives of India in New Delhi. These papers provide deep insight into what happened at the local level, and some information into New Delhi‟s interactions with London. They show, for instance, that about 80,000 tons of Indian-registered shipping was under the control of the War Cabinet, and was not released to send grain to India. And they show that India was exporting rice until July of 1943. To place the famine in the context of the world war, however, one needs to examine in detail those decisions made by the War Cabinet that impacted India. That requires fresh sources. These include War Office documents, available at the United Kingdom‟s National Archives at Kew; they show that scorched earth orders for coastal Bengal came directly from the War Cabinet. Most important are the Ministry of War Transport documents, which detail shipping priorities and allocations and contain quite a number of papers dealing directly with the famine. These papers provide estimates of India‟s food shortage that are far higher than normally supposed: for instance, one document lists a rice shortage of 2 million tons in Bengal alone, and 3.5 million tons in India as a whole. The Cherwell Papers, available at Nuffield College at Oxford, show the advice that Churchill was receiving from Lord Cherwell, his close friend and advisor on logistical and even some financial matters, such as shipping and India‟s sterling balance. Generally useful are the official histories of British wartime shipping, food supply, and economics. Factors driving Famine: Wartime Inflation Apart from the United Kingdom itself, India was the largest supplier for the British Empire‟s war effort. Almost its entire industrial production was pressed into supplying the war. During the war, India produced 600,000 miles of cotton cloth—enough to girdle the earth twenty-four times over. Out of this cloth were made 415 million pieces of military uniforms and 2 million parachutes for dropping supplies. Its entire production of silk was used for man-dropping parachutes. Its entire production of wool was used for 17 million uniforms and more than 5 million blankets for the army. Its entire production of leather was used for the war effort, to make 16 million pairs of boots, 5 million pairs of shoes, and 372,000 leather jackets. During the war, India maintained an army of about 2 million soldiers, which meant procuring 600,000 tons of wheat per year. In addition, India exported about 40,000 tons of grain a month, mainly to feed soldiers fighting around the Mediterranean region, as well as railway carriages and even some railway tracks. It also produced ammunition, binoculars, jute for sandbags, and innumerable other necessities of war.iv In total, India provided goods and services worth £2 billion to the war effort. Of that, according to an agreement drawn up in 1940, the United Kingdom would become liable for roughly half. During the war, however, the United Kingdom‟s share was regarded as a debt, called the sterling balance, to be paid after the war. This debt became a source of much frustration to Churchill, because for the first time ever the United Kingdom came to owe money to its colony, instead of the other way around. The debt, coming on top of the debt to the U.S., raised questions as to the U.K.‟s solvency after the war was over. The realization that the end of the war would bring economic hardship led the War Cabinet to stockpile food and raw materials for use after the war. This stockpiling would have a profound impact on India.v Meanwhile, however, the Indian government could not raise enough money by taxes and other means to pay for the war effort. So it printed cash to buy all these goods. For every rupee redeemable from the United Kingdom, it printed 2.5 rupees. The money flowed to industrial and urban centers, so that businessmen of all kinds came to be flush with cash, but they had nothing to spend it on because all the goods were earmarked for the war effort. They began to invest it in grain. By August 1942, inflation was so bad that a representative of the Government of India, Sir Jeremy Raisman, warned the War Cabinet that the Indian people were losing faith in the currency. If worse came to worst, and farmers chose to store their grain instead of exchanging it for the suspect currency, that “might give rise to famines and riots.”vi Rice Exports The second factor behind the famine was the Japanese occupation of Burma in March 1942, which cut off an essential supply of rice for India‟s poor. In most years, India imported between one and two million tons of rice a year from Burma and Thailand, and this source was gone. What is more, instead of seeking to protect India, the War Cabinet insisted that India absorb this loss and at the same time export rice to meet the needs of the war effort elsewhere, especially Ceylon. So in the fiscal year April 1942 to March 1943—after the war had arrived at India‟s borders—the colony exported 260,000 tons of rice and 100,000 tons of wheat.

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