By – Aarushi Ghosh Choudhury

Abstract

The Bengal famine of 1943 is normally understood as a natural calamity, war-related famine, and the absence of rice supplies. In this regard, this article tries to prove that such an interpretation is too simplistic and, what is more important is that it protects the British government from the blame. Based on the approach developed by Amartya Sen and the studies by Saumik Paul on land and agriculture of Bengal, this article demonstrates that rice became a means of empire. It is necessary to say that in times of war it was crucial to allocate supplies between various social groups. The choice was made to save Calcutta and the war economy while starving Bengal villages. 

Introduction

Around three million people died of the Bengal famine of 1943. All of them were living in villages. None of them were living in Calcutta. According to the official British report on the Bengal famine of 1943, it happened due to the lack of the total amount of rice available for consumption in Bengal. In other words, the government blamed nature and the war and refused to blame itself. But, according to recent investigations, the total amount of food in Bengal in 1943 was higher than that in 1941, which means that there was no famine in that year at all. It sounds strange, but it is true that people were starving despite the availability of rice. The question is therefore about the people who were allowed to consume that rice and those who were not. First, a century of unequal land policies had already rendered poor farmers and labourers highly vulnerable. Secondly, during the war period, the government took decisions which ensured the safety of the town and the army, but at the cost of neglecting the countryside. The article challenges the validity of Sen’s theory, as describing it as an entitlement failure makes it seem like an accident, while in fact it was not. 

Sen’s Entitlement Theory and Its Weak Point

The key concept proposed by Sen is rather straightforward. He states that starvation occurs due to the inability of some individuals to gain access to food supplies rather than absolute food insufficiency. An individual’s ability to obtain food is affected by his/her property, including such assets as land, labor and others which can be converted into food supplies. Such a phenomenon Sen terms as the exchange entitlement mapping. This phenomenon depends on legislation, an individual’s social position and public policy. In the case of Bengal, this theory undermines the conventional theory of food shortages. The reason for famine was the inability of fishermen, labourers and craftsmen to convert their property into sufficient rice supplies despite the fact that the overall volume of rice remained the same. Self-sufficient farmers who produced rice themselves were protected. However, those who had to purchase rice using their labor and goods were under threat, since the prices for rice increased drastically while the wages were still low. Nevertheless, this theory has one drawback. Blaming individuals for suffering because of a change in entitlements fails to acknowledge that actual individuals with real choices made such changes happen. In one such instance, the government confiscated boats belonging to poor people living along the rivers, stating that such measures were necessary to prevent a nonexistent Japanese invasion. Furthermore, the British government based in London repeatedly rejected requests to transport extra grain using ships while at the same time preventing transportation of food within the Indian provinces. This was not an outcome of some market failure; this was an outcome of policy decisions, and the policy decision makers did have options of their own. The British administration thus was not a passive observer of market forces but an active belligerent enforcing trade barriers and property rights.Even Sen acknowledges that famine victims starved before well-stocked and guarded food shops, not because of any violation of law, but because of the very law which prioritised property rights of the shopkeepers over starvation of the masses. Hence, it was not a neutral market distortion, rather a state directed extraction. Thus, the challenge here is not only to replace the concept of shortage by that of entitlement. It is also to determine whose interests this system of entitlement serves.

Colonial Land Policy: Making Poor Farmers Vulnerable

The study by Paul reveals that the famine was not something that occurred suddenly but was the outcome of an extended period of unjustified land policy in colonial India. The Permanent Settlement system, introduced in 1793, converted land ownership from custom to private property that could be sold, bought, and mortgaged. Thus, the role of the landlord shifted from a traditional caretaker to a more business-driven owner who was interested only in making money. Although subsequent land policies in the 1800s were aimed at protecting poor tenants, in reality, these policies served more to protect the rich while leaving the poor tenants vulnerable and easily evictable when unable to provide proof of farming their lands for many years. Land prices collapsed during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and this affected everyone unequally. Rich moneylenders and landlords purchased land at low cost from poor peasant owners, and thus created a huge class of landless or nearly landless persons. As can be seen from Paul’s data, there is a definite correlation between the districts that experienced a lot of movement of land ownership, the districts that witnessed stiff opposition from sharecroppers to their landlords, and the districts that suffered the worst from famine. This is no coincidence, because it proves that the regions impoverished by colonial land policies became those worst affected in 1943. This is proven by the victims of famine. Fishermen, transporters, and landless labourers, who had no source of support through the land, suffered much worse than farmers and sharecroppers who could grow their crops. In summary, famine did not create Bengal’s vulnerability; it merely highlighted the vulnerability caused by a century-and-a-half of colonial land policies. The poor harvest of 1942 was merely the last straw.

Choosing Who to Feed: The War Economy and Denial Policies

While the British government failed to prevent the occurrence of the famine during the war, it went beyond to make decisions regarding the distribution of the scarcity and prioritised the war efforts above rural Bengal. The expenditure in terms of military and industries in and around Calcutta was extremely high, and this resulted in the rise of prices in Calcutta. On the other hand, there was very little movement in the wages paid to the peasants in the rural areas to match the prices of the rising rice. The government had direct protection for Calcutta. There was the implementation of rationing in which over one million people in Calcutta and their families received subsidies in rice, because it was the main priority of the wartime effort to provide food to the industrial zone of Calcutta. The government also had the ability to secure food supplies for rural areas, although it decided not to exercise such a power in favour of urban citizens. The denial of rice policy is illustrative in this case since officials took away the stocks of rice from the coastal regions in order to prevent any supplies from contributing to a nonexistent invasion of the Japanese. The rural lives of Bengalis were deemed an appropriate sacrifice for a military plan which was not even needed. Sen refers to 1943 as a boom famine, since it occurred amid economic development rather than economic recession. However, such a term suggests an economic mistake, while, in reality, this boom was the outcome of intentional spending decisions during wartime.

Conclusion

The Bengal famine of 1943 was far from being just another example of a natural disaster in which a benevolent government failed to intervene in time. The famine was caused by decades of colonial policies that had been concentrating poverty and risks on rural people for a century and a half, and then choosing at the crucial moment to prioritise the city over the countryside. It was an endogenous crisis where rural populations were treated as expendable externalities. Rice in such a context was neither a food resource nor anything else. Rice was taken away, denied, rationed and sold based on its value for the empire, and in the hierarchy of that value, rural Bengal’s fishermen, workers and sharecroppers came last in that list. Entitlement theory proposed by Amartya Sen is an important methodological tool proving the falseness of the shortage story. However, in order to give a truly political reading of food, one should not focus on the processes of market and entitlement failure alone, but rather on concrete decisions of concrete people. In such a perspective, the question about who got rice in 1943 will turn into the question about who mattered to the empire enough to be saved.

About the Author

Aarushi Ghosh Choudhury is a third year student at Jindal Global Law School,  O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat. She is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Legislative Law. She is exploring the diverse field of law while simultaneously developing the skills required to thrive in the legal profession. 

Image Source : https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/winston-churchill-policies-contributed-to-1943-bengal-famine-study