The Bengal Famine Was Not a Food Shortage

In the autumn of 1943 the pavements of Calcutta filled with people who had walked in from the villages of Bengal to beg for rice and, in thousands, to die. Estimates of the dead range from about one and a half million to three million. They perished in a province where, on much of the evidence, there was food. The famine has long been told as a story of absence, of a failed crop and a war that took the ships. A more disturbing reading says that the rice was there and the people could not reach it.

The conventional account is not foolish. In October 1942 a cyclone and tidal wave ravaged the district of Midnapore, and a fungal disease called brown spot damaged the winter rice crop. Burma, which had sent rice to India, fell to Japan in the spring of that year, and the loss of those imports frightened the market. The colonial government also adopted a policy of denial in the coastal districts, seizing boats and stocks of rice so that an invading army could not use them, and the fishermen and ferrymen who lost their boats lost their means of living with them. These facts explain why the shortage story seemed natural. The winter crop was below average, and officials who walked through bare markets in Calcutta assumed that the grain had run out. Hoarding and panic buying then emptied the shelves faster than the harvest alone could have done, so that a scarcity that was merely feared began to produce itself. A story of too little food was easy to believe because the empty shops confirmed it every morning.