Bengal Famine 1943: Millions Died as India Kept Exporting Grain

In January 1943, the Viceroy of India wrote that Bengal must send rice to Ceylon "even if Bengal itself went short." By the end of the year, the Bengal famine had killed millions. No army invaded Bengal. There was no drought. And the famine was never officially declared. This is how it happened: the war in Burma, the denial policy that took rice and boats from the coast, provinces closing their borders, a cyclone, a crop disease, a price collapse in Calcutta, and the requests for food that went to London. Then the hardest question: how many died, and who was responsible? CHAPTERS 0:00 A viceroy's letter 0:51 Sixty million people, one harvest 1:34 1942: the war takes Burma's rice 1:56 The denial policy: rice and boats 2:39 Provinces close their borders 3:11 Calcutta comes first 3:43 Cyclone and brown spot 4:36 Calcutta is bombed 5:01 Price control fails 5:19 A famine never declared 5:39 Asking London for food 6:30 Grain still leaving India 7:06 The Statesman's photographs 7:43 Wavell sends in the army 8:10 Disease after the harvest 8:30 Churchill, Roosevelt and the ships 8:45 How many died? 9:19 Who was responsible? 11:07 Hungry Bengal KEY NUMBERS (shown on screen with sources) • Estimated deaths: 0.8 to 3.8 million; most estimates around 2.1 million (Ó Gráda) • Famine Inquiry Commission (1945): about 1.5 million deaths from the famine and epidemics • Boats removed, sunk or destroyed under the denial policy by November 1942: 26,675 (FIC) • Rice prices in 1943: five to six times early-1942 levels (FIC) • India's exports, January–July 1943: 70,000 tons of rice and 21,000 tons of wheat (Hansard) • Wheat arranged for India by London: 400,000 tons from October 1943, plus 400,000 more by September 1944 (FRUS) SOURCES • Famine Inquiry Commission, Report on Bengal (1945) • Hansard, parliamentary debate on Bengal food supplies (1943), cols. 273–274 • Foreign Relations of the United States, 1944 (Churchill–Roosevelt telegrams) • N. Mansergh (ed.), The Transfer of Power, vol. III (Linlithgow to Amery, 26 Jan 1943) • Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines (1981) • Cormac Ó Gráda, Famine: A Short History (2009) and related work • Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill's Secret War (2010) • Mark Tauger, "The Indian Famine Crises of World War II" (2009) • Tirthankar Roy, on the causes of the Bengal famine Historians still disagree about the causes. The video shows each reading and who holds it. Maps: district outlines approximate Bengal in 1943 from modern boundaries. Boundary data: geoBoundaries (Bangladesh, CC BY 3.0 IGO; India, ODbL 1.0, © OpenStreetMap contributors where applicable). Rivers: Natural Earth (public domain). Illustrations marked "reconstruction" are not archival photographs. This is The World Before: the history behind decisions made in rooms the public never saw. Subscribe for the next one. More from the channel: • The Grain Was Taken: Holodomor full history • The Letter on Mount Lu: the Great Leap Forward #BengalFamine #History #WorldWar2