The Bengal Famine was a catastrophic famine that developed in the Bengal region and Orissa Province in the British Raj in 1943 in the midst of the Second World War. This covered what is now north-eastern India and much of Bangladesh. At the time, this part of India was near the frontlines of the fighting in the India-Burma theatre of the war as the Japanese continued to try to push into north-eastern India and to seize the city of Kolkata. Bengal’s position near the front interrupted agriculture, which was compounded by many farm laborers taking up positions as soldiers or within the military in some other capacity. All of this, combined with a bad harvest, led to massive food scarcity in 1943. This was in turn compounded by inadequate relief efforts on the part of the British government led by Prime Minister Winston Churchill. As people began to starve to death, they abandoned the land and fled into cities and towns like Kolkata in search of food. This had the unfortunate effect of compounding disease outbreaks which were occurring at the time such as a malaria epidemic. As such, more people possibly died from disease in 1944 as a knock-on impact of the famine than died from the famine itself. Estimates of the death toll vary considerable from around 800,000 to 3.5 million, with many modern studies leaning towards between 2.5 and 3 million deaths when disease is added in as a secondary cause of mortality. The famine intensified the calls for independence from Britain as the war came to an end. Indian independence and partition in 1947 would set off a wave of religious and ethnic mass migration that displaced tens of millions of people.[1]
Bengal Famine chronology of eventsBengal Famine chronology of events
Bengal in north-eastern India was one of the first parts of the Indian subcontinent that the English East India Company established colonial rule over in the eighteenth century, particularly so following the Battle of Plassey in 1757.[2] A century later the company had conquered virtually the entirety of modern-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, but in 1857 it faced an enormous mutiny which led to the British government taking direct control over India.[3] The mutiny was a sign of unrest about English/British rule and there was a constant and growing Indian independence movement throughout the entire period of direct British rule over the ‘Raj’. This peaked during the career of Mahatma Gandhi, but despite repeated promises that it would grant increased autonomy to India, the subcontinent remained under direct British rule all the way down to the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939.[4]
200 years of colonial rule in the Bengal region had created an uneven system of landholding with large estate owners alongside smallholders who eked out their living growing rice, jute, pulses and other crops on land irrigated by the Ganges River. These landholding problems were exacerbated by the impact of the war on Southeast Asia. The Japanese did not just attack the United States at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. They also launched attacks against the British colonies throughout Southeast Asia and the Dutch in the East Indies. While Singapore and other places had fallen in 1942, a deep war of attrition set in around Burma and along the north-eastern border of the British Raj as the Japanese try to move further westwards here and seize Kolkata. This would have the added benefit of cutting off Allied supply lines to their allies in China amongst both the Communists and Nationalists. Hence, Bengal was very close to the frontlines of the in the India-Burma theatre of the war by late 1942.[5]
The Bengal famine was not caused by a natural disaster such as a severe drought or flooding. It was man-made to a large extent as foodstuffs were redirected in the wider Raj to where they needed to go to facilitate the war effort. Then the Japanese offensive disrupted the supply system by basically removing agricultural produce from Burma (modern-day Myanmar) out of the supply chain. These issues tipped an already malnourished population that had been living for years in a calorie-deficient state into starvation. Then people began fleeing from the land into the cities and towns like Kolkata in search of food, which further compounded the agricultural situation. As the cities swelled, disease outbreaks that were a constant feature of wartime India were exacerbated, particularly a malaria epidemic. This in turn proved extremely fatal to people whose immune systems were incapable of fighting of such diseases in their malnourished states.[6]
The famine of 1943 and the disease outbreaks that lasted through much of 1944 caused widespread devastation. While the lower estimates suggests a death toll of between 800,000 and one million people, most modern studies tend to veer closer to thinking that 2.5 to 3 million people died in 1943 and 1944. The British government, led by Winston Churchill, has been heavily criticized in modern times for not taking adequate action to reallocate resources to Bengal and Orissa to tackle the food shortages once the famine started. If we take three million people as the death toll, then roughly six to seven times more people died in the Bengal Famine as died in Britain during the entirety of the Second World War.[7]
Extent of migration caused by the Bengal FamineExtent of migration caused by the Bengal Famine
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The famine led to people moving from areas of food shortages to other parts of India like Kolkata, the largest city in the Bengal Presidency, the British administrative region covering much of the northeast of India. Here they believed they would be able to acquire more food. The scale of this migration is hard to measure. India did not have entirely accurate demographic records under British rule owing to the sheer size of the subcontinent and its vast population, and there was certainly not a lot of counting being carried out under wartime conditions. What we do know is that Kolkata’s population had swelled to nearly three million people by 1950 from the 2.3 million people that had previously lived there when the Japanese first attacked the European powers in Southeast Asia and the Far East in December 1941. The expansion was greater still if the suburbs and wider metropolitan area of what was one of the world’s largest cities at the time is taken into account.[8]
Demographic impact of the Bengal FamineDemographic impact of the Bengal Famine
The foremost demographic impact of the Bengal Famine was the deaths of perhaps as many as three million people over an eighteen to twenty-four month period in 1943 and 1944. Beyond this the famine could be said to have caused mass movement between India and Pakistan before the end of the 1940s. In 1947 India sped to independence, a movement which was accelerated by the disillusionment with British rule that was exacerbated by the Bengal Famine.[9] When independence was entered into, no proper plans for the religious divisions of the Raj between Muslims and Hindus had been made. Thus, in the course of 1947 and 1948 tens of millions of people were displaced and ended up moving between newly independent India and Pakistan (which included Bangladesh until 1971) as religious violence erupted around the subcontinent. Had it not been for the Bengal Famine perhaps independence would have occurred in a different manner that limited the dislocation.[10]
See alsoSee also
Explore more about the Bengal Famine and the Partition of IndiaExplore more about the Bengal Famine and the Partition of India
- India, Births and Baptisms, 1786-1947 records collection on MyHeritage
- India, Marriages, 1792-1948 records collection on MyHeritage
- India Deaths and Burials, 1719-1948 records collection on MyHeritage
- Being Indian: Traditions and Genealogy on the MyHeritage Blog
- Being Pakistani: Traditions and Genealogy on the MyHeritage Blog
- Famine and Family History at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
References
- ↑ Richard Schneer, ‘Famine in Bengal: 1943’, in Science & Society, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Spring, 1947), pp. 168–179.
- ↑ https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/battle-plassey
- ↑ https://www.britannica.com/place/India/The-mutiny-and-great-revolt-of-1857-59
- ↑ https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/gandhi-leads-salt-march
- ↑ Donavan Webster, The Burma Road: The Epic Story of the China-Burma-India Theater in World War II (New York, 2003).
- ↑ Schneer, ‘Famine in Bengal’.
- ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/winston-churchill-policies-contributed-to-1943-bengal-famine-study
- ↑ https://www.newgeography.com/content/002620-the-evolving-urban-form-kolkata-50-mile-city
- ↑ https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/nutrition-and-dietetics/famine-decimates-bengal
- ↑ https://edition.cnn.com/2017/08/08/asia/india-pakistan-independence-timeline/index.html