In the middle of the Second World War, in the dying days of the British Empire, an estimated three million people died from hunger and disease linked to famine. The victims were Indians, but also British subjects. The Bengal famine of 1943  stands as one of the most devastating losses of civilian life on the Allied side. Incredibly, however, not a single memorial, museum, or even a plaque—anywhere in the world—commemorates the millions who perished. Remembrance of the famine and its victims is fraught in Britain. But the subject is also complicated in India and Bangladesh.

Much debate has focused on the many complex causes of the famine. One of the main factors, of course, was war. Britain had declared war on Germany on behalf of its colony India—enraging many nationalist Indian leaders who had not been consulted. After the Pearl Harbor attack of December 7, 1941, Britain was also at war with Japan.

For the masses of rural Bengalis who were struggling to survive in impoverished India, war had already touched their lives. Inflation had made the price of rice—Bengal’s staple food—soar. Once Burma fell to the Japanese in early 1942, Japan’s cheap rice ceased to be imported.

Even before this, the rice supply was greatly curtailed, as hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers in Calcutta (now Kolkata) made their way to and from the Asian front fighting the Japanese. They, along with  factory workers in wartime industries, needed to be fed. They had priority status because of their role in the wartime effort.  

With the fall of Burma, the Japanese were on the border of Bengal. Having seen the Japanese’s rapid advance across Southeast Asia, colonial authorities feared that if Japanese forces were to invade British India, they would commandeer local food supplies and transport to fuel their incursion. The empire needed to be defended, so drastic action was taken. Boats from thousands of villages along the Bengal Delta were confiscated or destroyed. So, too, was rice. This was called the “denial” policy: to deny the enemy access to supplies. Not surprisingly, this scorched-earth policy strained the already fragile local economy. Without their tens of thousands of vessels, fishermen could not go to sea, farmers were not able to go upstream to their plots, and artisans were unable to get their goods to market. Critically, rice could not be moved around. The price of rice thus spiraled even further, and it was hoarded, often for profit. Then in October 1942 a devastating cyclone hit one of the main rice-producing regions, and crop disease destroyed much of the rest of the supply.

A famine code was initiated by colonial authorities to prevent mass starvation, but it was wartime, and few abided by it. Famine was never officially declared in Calcutta by the regional government or colonial authorities in Delhi, which would have compelled imperial authorities to send aid to the countryside. In fact, the word “famine” was not allowed to be reported in newspapers or pamphlets because of colonial “Emergency Rules” passed during the war. Britain feared that knowledge of the extent of hunger could be used by its enemies.

However, Indian journalists, photographers, and artists defied the censor. Chittaprosad Bhattacharaya was one. He traveled around Midnapore district using ink to sketch victims of the famine. The images are detailed and harrowing, of bodies being eaten by animals, humans who no longer look like humans. But the artist affords them dignity, writing their names when he could, and giving a sense of who they were, what they did, and where in Bengal they came from. He published the pamphlet in 1943 as “Hungry Bengal: A Tour Through Midnapore District.” Nearly all 5,000 copies were immediately confiscated by the British.

It was at this time, too, that Ian Stephens, the editor of the British-owned Statesman newspaper, was in Calcutta. As head of one of the largest English-language newspapers in India, Stephens faced a supreme moral dilemma: was his job to patriotically support the colonial authority during the war and not report on the famine? Or was his duty to tell his readers the truth about the horror unfolding on Calcutta’s streets, the famine that was sweeping across Bengal?

Stephens made his decision on August 22, 1943. He used a loophole in the censorship rules and published photographs showing emaciated people, close to death, on the streets of Calcutta. Papers soon sold out. It wasn’t long before news of the catastrophe unfolding in British India reached London and Washington. The famine in Bengal was now impossible to contain.

And this is where we get to the heart of the bitter controversy about the Bengal famine: the role of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and whether, once he knew about the famine by the summer of 1943, he did all he could to alleviate it. There are questions over whether his views on Indians—documented particularly by his Secretary of State for India Leo Amery—affected his response to the disaster. Discussions center on whether Churchill and the war cabinet could have released more shipping to send food aid, in the middle of the war, when they were fighting on many fronts. It’s an incendiary debate. Google the words “Bengal famine,” and you’ll see just how divisive the subject is.  

While people argue over the causes of the famine and Churchill’s response—both of which are important and necessary to explore—it has obscured discussion of the three million people who died. Three million. Think about that number. My work has been to excavate the stories of the last remaining survivors who have rarely been asked to tell their own stories. Eighty years on, it is a race against time to record them. There are eyewitnesses, too, who recall the cry of phan dao—asking for the starch water of rice, not even rice itself. They still recall with horror the scenes they saw, their helplessness, and sometimes the guilt they felt over not being able to alleviate all the suffering.

In Britain, the Bengal famine of 1943 is little known. Nor are the other famines that took place during the hundreds of years of Britain’s presence in India. It is an ugly chapter in Britain’s colonial history, one that mars the nation’s righteous narrative of fighting Axis powers. A deeper reckoning with the country’s imperial past has begun, however. The Imperial War Museum in London recently opened new World War Two galleries, and a small corner is dedicated to the Bengal famine, framing it within the context of the war. As of yet, though, the teaching of the Bengal famine does not figure in English students’ curriculum.

In India and Bangladesh, the memory of hunger remains and is relevant in policy-making. The story of the Bengal famine is told in literature and film, sometimes by eyewitnesses, but it has seldom been told by the survivors. One man, 72-year-old Sailen Sarkar, has been trying to record testimonies, pen and paper in hand, of those who endured the worst. Yet there is no official archive in India or Bangladesh for them—as there has been for those who lived through the partition of India, which took place four years later, in 1947, an event that arguably overshadows the famine in collective memory. War and colonial authorities are to blame for the absence of any official commemoration of the famine, but while Indians starved to death on Calcutta’s streets, other Indians never wanted for food, carrying on their lives as normal. Others profited from the situation. For some, this is difficult to acknowledge, even after all this time.

It’s over 80 years on now, and the interview of eyewitnesses compiled for the podcast Three Million has started a conversation in Britain. Within families it is emerging that people were witnesses or British families had ancestors who saw those distressing scenes too. It is a shared history, albeit a difficult one. But we are just at the beginning of coming to terms with it, and seeing it as part of Britain’s imperial presence and our war story. In India and Bangladesh, the famine is remembered as a legacy of Empire, but the survivors’ stories have been almost completely overlooked.

The British left India in 1947. Today, in 2024, we are still just beginning to learn what it meant individually, generationally, and collectively, as well as why it happened, and what were the forces responsible. There is one gaping hole that is probably too late to recover meaningfully, and its absence from the archive will be forever felt: the millions who were lost and survived the famine of 1943, one of the most devastating events of the 20th century. 

Three Million can be heard on BBC Sounds or wherever you get your podcasts.

Niratan Bewan

Niratan was married at the age of eight or nine. She believes she was around nineteen at the time of the famine. She was living in Nadia district in a village called Durgapur. 

After the cyclone and floods (in October 1942) everyone stopped eating rice. On good days, we would get boiled red potatoes for lunch. We used to forage greens from the ponds and canal sides and from the forests nearby and eat those as well, boiled and with salt. We were at least better off than many others. We had a bigha or two of land. The men worked on that land, and sometimes on the landlord’s land too. Those were one-anna, two-anna days. Like I said, we were better off than many others. At least we had something saved up. That’s why, even without rice, we had boiled aairi, boiled musoor dal or bhura to eat. It was a kind of grass seed that we threshed until we got little balls like sago and then boiled. That’s what bhura was.

In those days, the children who were born suffered a great deal. Mothers didn’t have any breast milk. Their bodies had become all bones, no flesh. Many children died at birth, their mothers too. Even those that were born healthy died young from hunger. Lots of women committed suicide at that time. Many wives whose husbands could not feed them went back to their father’s houses. If they weren’t taken back, then they killed themselves. Some wives ran off with other men. When their husbands couldn’t feed them, they went with whichever man could. At that time people weren’t so scandalized by these things. When you have no rice in your belly, and no one who can feed you, who is going to judge you anyway?

Amartya Sen

Amartya Sen was nine in 1943, living in Santiniketan with his grandparents, 100 miles north of Calcutta. He’d been sent there from Dacca to avoid potential Japanese bombings. 

A couple of my friends and I were told that there is a man who is being teased by some nasty kids. And so, we went there and tried to intervene. He was enormously emaciated, starving for many weeks, and he arrived in search of a little food for our school. Clearly he was not in good shape, mentally. And that is often the case when there is starvation. I hadn’t seen anyone really starving like that before where I would even begin to wonder whether he might suddenly die.

Amartya wanted to do something to stop the suffering. He asked his grandmother if he could give them rice. 

I asked “how much can I give?” So she took her cigarette tin and said up to half of it you can give but if we try to share a larger amount among all the hungry people that you will see in our street, you will not be able to cope with feeding them all. I gave it to people, sometimes even violated the rule of going beyond half a tin. It was a situation of nastiness of a kind that I had never encountered before.

One of those who came to the house was a young boy — just a few years older than Amartya.

He’d walked from his village. His name was Joggeshwar, and he was given some food.

He was an enterprising young boy from a very poor family from an area called Dumkar, that’s about 40 miles. And he said that unless I escape, I’m not going to get any food. And by that time, he was totally exhausted. He sat underneath a tree, with a little utensil and some food and ate it with the greatest of relief. And then he stayed a few days. And then he stayed on. He was a very good friend of mine. Very good friend. Yeah, he lived with us to the age of 88 when he died I think.

Pamela Dowley Wise

Pamela was sixteen and a member of the British colonial class. She lived off the busy Chowringhee Road in a large white art deco building, full of Indian servants. 

The house was an English sort of house, beautifully built and everything. We entertained people there because it had a lovely veranda where we’d have lovely meals and things like that. The Victoria Memorial is where we used to go because of the grounds. We used to have evening picnics there and we would have sandwiches and all things were done very properly, you know.

She remembers Calcutta filling up with Allied soldiers. She became friendly with some of them, as her parents would have an open house for British soldiers. She often took British soldiers by rickshaw to the local market and helped them barter. 

They couldn’t speak Urdu — and I could. And so if they wanted to buy something, I would go with them and bargain for them and help them to buy things. I remember […] American and British soldiers were in our home and they used to come have dinner with us. And afterwards, we’d play the piano and sing the old songs, and happy days they were.

During the summer of 1943, the city of her birth completely changed, though her life of picnics at the Victoria Memorial, eating in restaurants, and going to her private club was unaltered.

There was no place you could go where you didn’t see dead bodies and vultures, it was revolting, actually. Because the vultures used to come down and eat these dead bodies. No, I mean, you couldn’t say I’m not going to the Victoria Memorial because there are dead people everywhere. There were dead people all over Calcutta. And when they died, they seemed to stay there. 

It was dreadful, dreadful. Yes, poor things. There’s nothing we could do about it. Because it was so vast, you see, but that’s what happened.