Empire: World History - 170. The Bengal Famine: A Disaster on the Horizon

Episode Date: July 22, 2024

In 1942, in the midst of the Second World War, the British administration feared that Japanese forces would take India as part of their campaign. To prevent access to resources in the event of a potential invasion, colonial forces enacted a “denial policy”, confiscating rice and destroying boats. This, along with a cyclone and political unrest, led to starvation in the countryside of Bengal, forcing people to flee to cities in a desperate search for food. Listen as Anita and William take a break from the American series to revisit an important and tragic event in 20th century Indian history, with guest Kavita Puri… Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: Anouska Lewis Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Duremberg. We're delighted. This is a very exciting time for us because we've got one of our very special guest stars who you will. be familiar with. One of our most favourite ever guest. Yeah, absolutely. It was a long time ago that Kavita Puri was with us. She made me weep last time. She made you cry. Yes, she did. I think the only

person who made you cry while recording, I mean, normally you have a little blob on the way home, mainly because I've been a bit mean, but this is you being moved. Kavita, welcome. I'm so, I'm so happy to be back with you, and I'm going to try and make William cry again this time. Go for it. Just do it. He's a fragile, sleep-deprived state. The reason we're taking a break from the normal series and doing this mini-series because we just thought it was so very important.

Kavita recently made a rather excellent podcast series of the BBC. Rather excellent. It was all about the Bengal famine, something that we have mentioned in passing during our India series. But really, we thought it's high time. And since we know and love Kavita to lure her back. on the programme to talk to us about it. We should clarify that we're talking about the 1944 to 5 Bengal family,

because we gave a very in-depth pod on the 1772 Bengal family, which was at the beginning of the East India Company, which had, I think, 5 million deaths. And this one we only mentioned in passing, and it's absolutely essential that we do analyse it, because it's one of the atrocities of the British Empire, which is best known in India. If you ask Indians why they resent British rule, at the very, very top of the list will be the Bengal famine.

And they will be talking about 1943, not 1770, which is not widely known. A very useful clarification. But I do want to know from Kavita, who's just come back from India talking about the famine. Is there still that sort of rage, anger, cognizance, or even knowledge? Because we find that, you know, sort of as time goes on, that grip on history that isn't so old, even in India is getting. missing looser. I don't know what you found when you were there. It's really interesting. In India, they don't learn about it really. It's a sentence or two, which is quite baffling. And if people do know about it, they very much see it through the prism of Churchill. It's Churchill's famine.

It's absolutely personified in one person when people talk about it in Delhi dinner parties. Yet, there is no memorial or museum or plaque to the millions that died. And it's really worth emphasizing that it's at least three million and like so much of the Bengal famine, that number is incredibly contested, but the consensus is around three million. And you would think that there would be a plaque, just a little tiny plaque somewhere in India and there isn't. And I think that speaks to the complications of remembrance in India because, yes, it's seen as Churchill's famine, but there were people who lived in Calcutta, who lived in Bengal, who didn't suffer. And I think, There were people that lived in Calcutta who profited from profiteering.

Exactly. There were people who profited and there were people who saw it and did nothing. And so it is a complex remembrance. And also there was a hell of a lot going on in the 40s in India. You know, you had quit India and then you had the famine and then you had a couple of years, the Calcutta killings. In 1946, you had partition and then you had this new independent nation. And somehow, in the remembrance of all of this, the Bengal famine somehow in India has not been so. well-remembered. Camita, the historiography of this famine is very, very contested. There is a famous book, which was responsible for bringing it back into the popular memory, Maddochese's book, which was then partially attacked by Amartya Sen, who said the figure's wrong, the great professor of famis. He said she troubled herself with such a small data set that it didn't make any sense. And then there's been a counter-salvo from Churchill defenders, such as Dr. Zerrilla.

Masani, who has appeared frequently in print saying this is just woke nonsense, that no one should take this seriously. So how did you find a way through all that? Well, there was massive nervousness on my part in approaching this subject. Anyone just taps the word Bengal famine into social media. You know, it's like people have very strong views on either side. And I think the question of culpability is extremely important. This massive catastrophe happened. It's one of the largest just losses of civilian life on the Allied side, and we have to understand it. But I think it's totally obscured, this humanitarian catastrophe, which has been almost a footnote in the story. And so I wanted to shift the lens and look into this three million and find out who they were

and also why it happened, but also why memory is so contested. It's interesting. We don't remember the famine. You talked about India. We don't remember the famine in Britain. The biggest response I've had to the series is I didn't have a clue. And it's partly because, as you say, William, it is one of the darkest episodes of colonial rule. But it also complicates our own war story, our narrative that we tell ourselves. Which is a heroic story and one of our favorite stories. And also our heroes. And so it's who we are, right? It's not surprising, therefore, that we don't remember it. And with greatest respect to you guys, I love you guys. I love your podcast. But you did a whole series, a brilliant series on India. And you talked about the 70-70 famine. But again, this was a

footnote. It was barely mentioned. No, you're right. You're absolutely right. We will make mistakes along the line and we try to correct me. Can I just ask you though one thing? I mean, for something that is so little talked about in this country, when somebody does talk about it, a veritable shitstorm appears. And I just wonder what it was like for you. yourself to sort of delve into this particular field. Did you find yourself being personally attacked and introduced and by whom? I honestly was terrified and I had some friends of ours who kind of took me out for a drink and said, do you really know what you're doing here? I mean, I didn't sleep. I had a lot of sleepless nights and I didn't know how it would be, you know,

received, but I was very, very careful and I actually did approach the podcast like an academic text. So I had footnotes. I done a lot of primary research. So even though my focus was on the oral history and the lived experience, I knew where all the fault lines were. I knew what people thought about it. So that is done in a light touch in the podcast, but I knew what I was getting myself into so I was very prepared. And thankfully, actually, critically, it was very well received across right and left. And you know, you can't go into this trying to please everybody because you can't. But what I did was my own due diligence so I could defend the work that I had done. On the other hand, one thing that's very much in your favour in a sense for giving a clear

narrative about this is that there are thousands of survivors still alive. 1945 was not the Victorian era or the middle of the Jordan. I was in Oxford a month ago. visiting the great Buddhist scholar Richard Gombrich. And it turned out that his wife, Professor Sajukta Gupta, was 10 years old at the time. I'm just noting that down because I should be giving her a ring after. She's good, isn't she? She's good. Never a wasted lead. You can tell the journalist at heart. Can we get into a little bit of context? We've talked about what we're talking about, but let's actually talk about it now. Let's give people an idea of what India was like in 1942, particularly when it comes to the relationship between Indians and the Raj.

The early 40s was this incredible heady time in India. So the Japanese in 1941 had just attacked Pearl Harbor and they were on the move across Southeast Asia. They had by early 1942 taken Singapore, which Winston Churchill said was one of the greatest military defeats for the British. In history. Exactly in history. They thought Singapore was completely impregnable, they had these amazing naval defenses, and the Japanese just went by bicycle behind them. It was the most extraordinary chapter. But you also have this independence movement that is just growing, and Bengal is kind of the epicenter of all of that. And so the colonial authorities are obviously concerned with the advance of the Japanese, but they're also facing a really

restive Indian population. And already by 1942, early 1942, inflation, war inflation is very high and rice. And we'll be talking about rice a lot. It is the staple food of Bengal was already becoming unaffordable for millions of people. And that is even before the kind of crisis hits. Can we to just, for those who don't know their geography, where is Bengal on the map of India and the So the province of Bengal is to the east of India and it is on the border with Burma. It's probably word saying that what was then East Bengal is now Bangladesh and West Bengal is in India and that happened after the partition in 1947. So this is also, and it's important to say this, this is a story that affects India. It also affects Bangladesh as well. And India's involvement in the

war is also going on in parallel to this. You know, enormous sacrifice from some Sometimes young men who've not even ventured far from their own villages, who've suddenly been sent overseas into some of the most horrific arenas of battle. There is blood and coin from India being spent in enormous quantity during this war. Completely. And so it's important to say that many nationalist leaders, particularly the Congress, were really pissed off because nobody consulted them. And there they were. They were fighting a war that they hadn't been asked to be part of. And it's really worth remembering. We're talking about two and a half million Indian soldiers who were fighting in various theatres. All volunteers?

I mean, you covered this pretty well. It's always said that we're volunteers. But I think it's not always clear if sometimes they didn't have a choice. There were reports of entire villages going missing because they were worried that they would be press ganged because somebody would come in the morning. I mean, these are, again, in an oral tradition, things that aren't necessarily written down in the official record because it wasn't meant to be happening. But certainly there are cases where this is said to have happened, particularly in Punjab, where so many men, fighting men went over to fight.

And we should also say this is an amazing moment of modernisation and the arrival of maternity for many people in India. The fact that you had women working, often in munitions factories, you had many people coming from the villages to the towns. You had all sorts of people moving away from home for work. And this is a time when things like fridges first appear in India, when nine. Nightclubs are booming in Calcutta. The June of the Crown, I have mixed feelings about, both the book and the TV series, but the nightclub scene in Calcutta is very well brought to life by that. So it's probably worth mentioning that, and this is something I learned about,

that Calcutta, which was known as the Second City of Empire, and has a really long history in terms of empire, in terms of trade, was totally transformed by early 1942. So you have hundreds of thousands of Allied. soldiers descending onto Calcutta. And so these are Americans and Brits, but also West Africans and Chinese soldiers as well. But it's not only allied soldiers. You've got hundreds of thousands of laborers coming from outside provinces as well to work in

the factories to make things like ammunition and clothes for the Asian Front. And so Calcutta was really transformed. And so you have all these kind of makeshift bars and restaurants were booming. And, you know, American soldiers in particular, they had. had money to spend and when you go into the archives, they love Calcutta because they could have fantastic food and they'd be drinking all night. It's basically Ibiza. It was Megaparty Central. Abitha with jazz music. I think that's such an important thing that both of you have done because you know, most people when they say famine or they hear the word famine, they think of a dust bowl

where there is no electricity, no mod cons, but we're not talking about that. But it is a tale of two Bengals, because on the one hand, you've got Calcutta, which is thriving with all of this commerce, the GIs. Calcutta never runs out of champagne in the middle of this famine. But then you've got the rest of Bengal, which has a large rural population, and they do not have all of those mod-cons or, indeed, are plugged into any kind of support system. And we also should talk about a Bengal that is utterly transformed, because 1905, somebody we've spoken about before, Lord Curzon, decides to cleave it in two.

So let's talk about Bengal. What is it like in the larger area? Because we've talked about Calcutta, but what about Bengal in general? So life is completely unchanged. It's a province of 60 million people, and the majority of those are in the countryside. And by 1942, life is getting really difficult because they cannot afford the staple food of rice. And as the British are watching the Japanese approach, they've taken Singapore, by March Rangoon has fallen, the British are really, really worried.

And they think that India is going to be next. And so the colonial authorities take a really drastic action. It's a policy called the denial policy that will really affect the countryside, particularly in the Bengal Delta profoundly. And that involves a kind of version of the kind of burnt earth strategy that was used to get Spolian, for example, by the Russians. You make sure there's nothing available for the invaders who destroy standing crops, but you also destroy boats, which is crucial for the transport of anything in Bengal. And the British had seen how the Japanese had so swiftly and so successfully taken Singapore and Burma by using local supplies and local transport. that because the Bengal Delta, which is potentially where they would have entered, was defenceless, what they decided to do was to take surplus rice and surplus transport, which was predominantly

boats away from the countryside. And sometimes this was done. It was handed over. Sometimes money was passed between the authorities and the kind of peasantry, the farmers. In order to pay for the boats? Yeah, but often it was just taken. confiscated. They were either destroyed or the rice, for example, was taken to Calcutta. And it was catastrophic because the transport, the boats, it was an entire, you know, these tiny, delicate system of rivers. The entire local economy was run by boats. Fishermen couldn't fish, but artisans couldn't get their wares to market. But critically, rice could no longer be moved around.

Just so we have a clear picture for those that are not familiar with this. So in 1942, the Japanese, to the Japanese up still progressing northwards. The expansion of Japanese power is continuing to the terror of the Brits, who realized that just as Southeast Asia fell in a matter of weeks, the same can happen in India. And it could all be over by Christmas. The advance is heading towards what will become infile. And the following year, in 1943, the front line stabilizes at the collectors tennis court in infile. At either side of the tennis court of the two armies fighting over this front line. I mean, these are the incredible chapter headings of the history that, you know,

those of us who know will know it. But what I think, Kavita, your great gift is to actually talk to individuals who were there at the time. And one of the people that you spoke to, Pamela, who's sort of in them, tell us a bit about Pamela and, you know, how she's reacting to all of this going around her. How aware is she of what's going on around her? It's a colonial woman who was called Pamela Downey-Wise.

And she's the reason that got me interested in all of this in the first place, because I was interviewing her about something else. And she told me this extraordinary story of vultures eating dead bodies on the streets of Calcutta. I couldn't believe it. But I was interviewing her about something else. I came back to it. And I looked into this period and I couldn't quite believe it. So Pamela lived a lovely life just off the main road, Charingi Road in Calcutta.

What was she? What was she doing that? What was she? So she was 16 at the time and her family had been there. Generations. I think one branch of her family had come with the East India Company. But they were Jutwalers, so they kind of sold and traded jute. She went to the clubs and had Indian servants.

That was her only interaction with Indians, her servants. Life was quite separate. But she remembers the soldiers coming and she went with them to barter because she spoke Hindi and Urdu and she would picnic with them and they'd come to her house and they'd sing around the piano, the kind of old English songs. And she actually fell in love with one of the sons. soldiers and he proposed to her in the moonlight by the Victoria Memorial. A Brit or an American? Oh, it was a Brit. Everything's okay. There's the famous over-sexed, overpriced, over-priced and over here.

And she was having a grand old life. You know, war was great for her. I'm interested in her, and we'll come back to her, we'll circle back to her in a moment, because a lot of those people who do criticize the British very heavily and blame them entirely for what is to come and what is going come and what we're going to talk about, say that there was almost sort of a deliberate cruelty about what went on. And yet, you've got people like Pamela who just don't know what's about to happen and they're not really plugged in. They're just sort of, they're in their own bubble, they don't see what's coming, they're in the moment and they're having a final time. And I wonder how sort of representative that is of the Brits there. I think that's also true of a lot of

upper class Bengalis. A lot of upper class Bengalis are not aware what's going on on the countryside until suddenly these bodies start piling up in the streets and people start pouring in for the countryside. That's absolutely right. It was the elite, whether it's the British elite or the Indian elite, because until 1942, what is happening? And it's really important to say that Faisal Hukk, which was the Prime Minister of the Indian elected government of Bengal. There was a letter from him in August 2, 1942 to Governor John Herbert saying famine conditions are present in the countryside. And so by that point, famine conditions are in the countryside, but it is not yet in plain sight. It is not yet a famine.

And the urban elite, the urban classes, it's not yet hit Calcutta, but it is beginning. You know, famine just doesn't happen overnight. You're quite right. So the stage is set. They are alerted to it. August 1942 is important for two reasons because, you know, on the one, it's the first, you know, the canary in the mine is starting to sing. But also it's the same time that India Congress launches its Quit India movement. So you've also got a lot of political noise going on at the same time, which, I don't know, does it drown out the warning that famine conditions exist here? Also, as a quick kind of side note, when people talk about Quit India, people never mention this. But the denial policy massively fed into Quit India. But the anger that that kind of produced because people then couldn't work, their rice was taken away, and rice then began to be hoarded, often for profit by predominantly Indian merchants. And so all this anger feeds

into the independence movement and denial in particular, there's a denial resolution on July the 10th that's passed by Congress, which massively feeds into the kind of quit India movement. So in fact, you have this perfect storm and it's really worth remembering at the time. time that the British were trying to deal with the Japanese. They really feared an invasion. They were also dealing with this population that just didn't want them there either. I mean, you say it's the perfect storm and then a storm hits as well. So let's talk about the cyclone and what follows. The war is the context and you know you have inflation and then you have denial. And it's also really important to say that when Burma falls in May, 1942, that crucial Burmese rice, which is cheap

rice, then ends. It's no longer coming into the province of Bengal, and prices are rising and rising and rising. And you have in places like Midnapur, for example, which is one of the main rice-producing districts, where denial had been catastrophic. Midnipur, just to clarify, is on the coast? Yes, exactly. And it's... It was a big anti-British bastion and there'd been a big effort to put down that anti-British protest. And then on October the 16th, this absolutely devastating cyclone hits. And it wipes out a lot of the rice crops. And Minnapur was one of those districts that gave rice to a lot of other places in Bengal.

And then crop disease decimates a lot of the rest. So people often call the Bengal family of 1943 a man-made famine. in, but it is also exacerbated at this absolutely critical moment. When all the excess rights has been cleared out. If you've got these horrific people who are hoarding, these disgusting, I sometimes think these are the worst of humanity at a time when your fellows are suffering, you decide that you're going to make a profit, a fast buck out of this. Do the British do anything to price control?

Do they come in and seize any of these stores? Do they do anything to kind of marshal the need that happens after the cyclone? The Indian provincial government earlier in 1940s, you had put price controls on to kind of stabilise things. But that just encouraged hoarding, unfortunately. And there had also been trade barriers put between province, again, to stabilise prices, which meant that you couldn't get rice from other provinces. What was the logic of that? Again, it was to stabilise prices, so it wasn't a free-for-all.

In the end, what happens is, many months later, the colonial government then does remove the trade barriers and remove the price controls. But what then happens is prices then spiral even more. And those Indian merchants, once those trade barriers have gone, go across the border to places like ERISA and take rice there. So it increases their power over the market. In 1770, there's many similar things going on in Bengal. But there is no famine at all, further up river in Varanasi, in what's that, Uttar Pradesh. There is ample stocks of grain and of rice. Is that the same in 1943? I mean, if you were to go up river, up the Ganges, would you have found people short of things to eat up there?

Or is it specifically the Delta? I think that it was particularly Bengal. I suppose the difference between 1770 is that there was a war on. And so the war changes everything. And the countryside has been devastated. But the merchants were also able to go into the countryside and buy up whatever rice was needed. because the priority was the war effort. But in 1770, there were efforts,

particularly by the local princes who were still in power, to bring food down. And it wasn't a difficult thing. They hired boats and they brought rice down the river. Was there any sense that the British were deliberately obstructing that? I don't get the sense that the British were obstructing that, but their focus was entirely on the war. It's probably worth mentioning at this point that the viceroy,

so it's Viter and Linlithgow at the time. Who's an idiot? First sounds the alarm with London. What did Neru say about him? Slow of mind and heavy of body? Yes. Didn't his own family say very rude things about Linlithgow as well? All sorts of rudeness about Linlithgow.

Carry on, Kavita, anyway. But he at the end of 1942 raises the alarm with London. Now, he doesn't specifically mention Bengal, but he says there is a food crisis brewing in India, and he asks for food aid to be sent. And so that's the first time that the London learn of it. So they do, in a way, they do ask for help, but they go to London. We're going to take a break here.

The stage for a really miserable story has now been set. You have war. You have denial. So you have preparation for war, which has burnt any means of people to try and get food from other places. And you've had a cyclone hit a very, very important part of the. the infrastructure that would have been able to get food into this area. Join us after the break. When we hear about one particular man who is affected and sees with his own eyes as a child,

what goes on next, and then spends the rest of his life, studying famines, and eventually will win a Nobel Prize. Welcome back. So just before the break, I was teasing you that we have a really interesting story, another personal story which Kavita specialises in. Tell us about this young boy whose life will be shaped by the famine. So, Amarty Asen, who we all know is a kind of Nobel Prize winning economist, was a little boy, he was nine, and he had kind of grew up in Dakar,

and his family had sent him to the grandparents in Shantinikathan, because they were worried about the Japanese bombing, and Shantinikathan is obviously the kind of known as place, the kind of spiritual soul of Rabindranath Tagore, who the Sen family knew. and he while he was there, so he was at the beginning of 1943, began to see what was the start of the exodus to Calcutta, that people were so hungry that they began to move to the kind of main city, so in this case, Calcutta. And he would see people coming to his grandmother's door

begging for food. And he was so upset, he couldn't sleep at night. And he said to her, what can I do? I want to do something. And she gave him a cigarette in and said, you can fill it half with rice and give it to these hungry people. And he said, I, you know, I defied the rule and went beyond half the rice. And he did that. So the memory of those, the people that came from the law. How little help he could offer. And whatever he could do. And actually then there was a boy who came, who was 14, who was about to die. And that boy ended up living in his house till the day he died and they became good friends. But it totally shaped him. And what's so interesting, honestly, when I spoke to him,

This is a man who's 90. His clarity, so strong. He remembered it like it was yesterday. He got really emotional about it. Nothing was forgotten at all. Very similar to Sajukta Gopta, who's in the same town, at the same time, speaking last week in Oxford, just absolute total recall of these kids coming emaciated to her door. And a middle-class family who'd been doing fine and when simply not aware of what was happening,

the shock of seeing these half-dead people coming out of the boonies. And it's really worth saying that, of course, India, there are beggars in India. The people, they looked different. They were barely clothed. They were totally emaciated. And it was a really alarming sight. It seared it into the brains of these kids watching. It's also worth saying, these were fishermen, these were artisans, these were mothers.

these are people who didn't even know how to beg. And the cry that you always hear is, and it's the collective memory, it's Fandau, Fandau, and what they were asking for was not even rice. They were asking for the starch water of rice because they didn't think that people would. Anyone would give them rice. No. And it's a really complicated memory because that memory, and actually like the memory of the famine, is never held by the survivors.

It's held by the onlookers. It's held by the people like Amati's family. and these are people who didn't suffer and in that memory is a is a kind of guilt because you saw this and you either helped or you didn't help and there were many families who didn't. So I mean Survivors'

I'm fascinated by it, I've written about it and when I hear people recalling, seeing these people sort of suddenly turning up and they're quiet because they have no energy to speak they are all bones they are holding each other's hands I mean I can only liken it to something

out of a horror movie, you know, where sort of almost the undead come out of the shadows and come towards you. And for a young child to see that and see his fellow human beings coming as, you know, looking as if they weren't even alive at the time, not making very much noise, just asking for the simplest thing, which is just water from the starch of the rice that you will eat and the water that you'll pour away. Can we have that? It's so powerful. It is so powerful. And I don't know, I find it really moving. We'll talk about about it later, the survivors. I've interviewed a lot of people about really traumatic things and something so moving about seeing an elderly person recall something as a child because they look

like a child again. Yeah, again. And their response is like a child again. And they get really emotional. Sometimes I feel terrible that I'm even asking them to remember that time. But I think they're happy to speak and it's also they're happy to recall something that was never recorded in the official archive and has not been remembered in the collective memory. And I think there is dignity in that. We are heading towards the official response, and this is obviously the most sensitive thing, and I imagine the thing you were most worried about, Churchill's response. Now, Churchill is for many of the British listeners to this podcast very much our greatest national hero, the man who saved us for the Nazis, who stopped the Holocaust, who turned the

tide of war. All these sort of things are the attributes that are given to him in British education. but obviously his reputation in India is very much the reverse. How in your research have you found Churchill's response to the notes, which are beginning to pile up now on his desk from the authorities in India? How does he react? So by 1942, at the end of 1942, when Viscount Linlifco is warning him that there's a food crisis in India, the notes are not yet piling up on his desk because no one's talking. talking about Bengal at this point. And Linlithgow asked for 600,000... There are a few other things

going on. There are a few other things going on, exactly. And Lindithko asks for 600,000 tons of aid. And the war cabinet says, well, we're so busy on so many different fronts. And we can give you 150,000 tons of wheat for northwest India. But in return, we need to ask effectively Bengal to export more rice for the war effort to Ceylon. And so more pressure is then put on on. At that point on Bengal and the rice production. And he agrees to this, does he? Yeah. So that was like, we'll ask them for more rice and, you know, we'll try and we'll try and give you 150,000. But they were trying, you know, at that point they were trying to do their best, but there were so many other things. And I think at that point, it was like there's a food crisis. It wasn't,

it wasn't kind of, there are famine conditions in Bengal. They weren't being told that yet. Because remember, famine is not declared. No one's calling this a famine. But there is a quote from Churchill at this time, I believe, that he says, Indians must learn to look after themselves as we have done. The grave situation of the UK import program imperils the whole war effort, and we cannot afford to send ships merely as a gesture of goodwill. That's right. So that is early 1943, and he does say that. He absolutely does say that. Can I also just put another thing to you? Marathia Sen, who we just talked about, you talked about so very movingly. He has an issue with others who've written about the famine, saying that there was no food. And he has said about

the districts in Bengal, he says the analysis I made using data from all districts indicated that food availability in 1943, the year of the famine, was significantly higher than 1941 when there was no famine. There was indeed a substantial shortfall compared with demand, hugely enhanced in a war economy, but that's quite different from saying there was a shortfall of supply compared with supply in previous years. So, I mean, he seems to suggest there was food. It wasn't that, you know, there wasn't any rice. It just wasn't getting to people. I mean, what is? I think the issue is the price, wasn't it? The price had risen due to hyperinflation. So this is one of the areas, which is kind of economic historians have poured over and there's a lot of loss of academic

literature. And I don't really go into this very much. But that is the crux. Was there enough rice and were the right people getting it? Could this have been done differently? Could it have been done differently, exactly. But again, it's the context of the war. And if there was any surplus rice, that was going towards the war effort. And the power that these Indian merchants had in order to buy up rice, which they could do in the countryside, and they were holding it and selling it when they wanted to. So I think there were a lot, a lot of forces at play. And in all of this maelstrom, nobody was thinking about the person in the countryside, the person who just couldn't afford the rice. And what's really interesting is when you read records of people in the

countryside of their memory of that time, they'll tell you how much rice cost at the time, because they still remember that because it was, they were totally priced out of the market, which is why they often had no choice but to leave the places that they lived and go to the towns and beg for food. Do we know what the displacement was? Do we have any number on just how many people were on the move looking for grains of rice? I mean, not really, but it was kind of, it was thousands. I mean, the records in Calcutta at the height of the famine, which is kind of the summer of 1943, say that in Calcutta and the official record, they were clearing about a thousand bodies a day. And what was the response from the authorities? I mean, they are having to, you know,

any kind of municipality is going to have to clear the streets of those bodies. And what about Pamela? Can we circle back to Pamela, who was living. living it large just months ago in, you know, Ibiza, the party capital. Now there are dead bodies on the streets of that capital. Does she say what happens? So what's happening at this point is from around the time that Amartia, so April, May, in 43, people are walking to the, to the cities. And what's happening alongside the kind of party-going allied soldiers who are on their way to or from the Asian Front or on leave and all these other new people coming in working in in the factories, you have these new arrivals and they are many thousands of them,

they come to the pavements or they gather in parks and they collapse, as you say, quietly onto the streets. And now famine, certainly by, you know, the summer of 1943 is an absolute playtime sight. You cannot deny that this is happening. Are there any soup kitchens being opened on the streets? So there are kind of soup kitchens here and there. Because famine has never been officially declared, either by the Indian provincial government or by the colonial authorities, there is no, you know, nothing comes into place. Not a coordinated response, no emergency action.

So you hear of people saying, oh, you know, I got a bit of this, but it wasn't enough to live off. there were missionaries who were working, there were kind of Indian relief agencies who were doing what they could. But no, there was nothing at this point to speak of. This is an important point because in India, throughout its history, long pre-colonial, there are famines. You have descriptions from the early 17th century of massive areas of Madhubra-Radish completely devastated by famine. But there are in areas of responsible government, systems, in place in traditional India whereby grain is kept during years of plenty and given to the people in organised fashion in soup kitchens or in construction programmes. Go, for example, to Lucknow,

some of the biggest buildings there, the Imambar are built for famine relief. People can turn up, they register, they do a bit of work and they get given food twice a day. But the Raj does not react at this point to that. No provision is made to the people coming in for the countryside. There's no organised, centralized soup kitchens on the Maidan in Kolkata. in Charingi, in Salt Lake, giving out stuff? No, because, as I say, famine hasn't been declared. And there was a system which will come to later called the Famine Code. But for various reasons, that wasn't activated.

So with all these people who are just silently falling in the Medan and on the pavements and then being, you know, when they die, their bodies are certainly being cleared away. There is a response to that. What do people like Pamela make of all of that going on around her now? So Pamela... who remember she was at the Medan and the Medan is the kind of area around the Victoria Memorial and where she would go for moonlit picnics with her soldier friends. Always the sort of picnic area of Calcutta, people riding out there getting exercise, doing their yoga.

Doing their yoga. And, you know, it's where she was proposed to. She would walk her dog Thatch there. The Maidan now is covered in. bodies or people about to die. And I said to her, does that mean you stop going there? She said, no, no, you can't stop going to the Victoria Memorial. But there were... Goldcuppers. Goldcuppers at the Victoria Memorial is always meant to be the thing in bodywood movies. You went to go there and get these little snacks. Yeah, and you couldn't stop, she said,

but there were dead bodies everywhere. And then she said this thing that I'll never forget, and I'll never forget how she said it, that she would see vultures picking at dead bodies. And that became the normality in the second city of empire at the foot of the great Victoria Memorial. Where there is just for the people that don't know it, a massive marble statue of Queen Victoria sitting there in all her imperial regalia. And this was a real problem for the colonial authorities. So John Herbert, the governor of Bengal, passed the Bengal Vagrancy Act to try and start moving these bodies, these people off the streets. Not to feed them, just to move them. But to clear them.

Exactly, to clear them so that people couldn't see because this was a real problem for them. Bit of a downer for people who like to go for a walk in the Medan. I mean, that's just appalling. The same thing happened during the emergency with Mrs. Gandhi. She moves the starving and the poor of Delhi out beyond sight into places like Trilock Puri over the Umina, just so they're out of sight, just so that the picturesque capital looks healthy, looks well. But it's a terrible sign. It's a terrible sign. It's terrible. Well, it's also, as they say, you see it in the official record, it's not good for the morale of the soldiers to see this. And also, I think they were probably concerned about what the Americans would think. The Americans were already pushing the British for independence. And so I think they were concerned about the perception. But you know what? You clear bodies. It doesn't matter. You might be able to do that, but it doesn't mean you make the problem go away. We're going to end here.

But join us in the next episode of Empire, where despite efforts to, nothing to see here kind of policy that we're leaving you on, the famine continues and there is another plea to London for help. Join us then. Till then, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnden. And goodbye from me, William Durember.