In an email from London, broadcaster and writer Kavita Puri writes, “Last night was an incredibly moving and beautiful event. I was able to say out loud the name of Kshetramohan Naik, one of the few names of the three million victims that I have found. He represents all the many millions more that died, and have been forgotten for so long. To see, in a British museum, the images of some of the survivors I spoke to was poignant. The coming together of institutions like the Imperial War Museum North, Manchester Museum and the University of Manchester is significant. The famine in Bengal and the victims have been overlooked for too long. Last night was a beginning.”
Puri is referring to a memorial event titled Remembering the Bengal Famine of 1943 that was organised at UK’s Manchester Museum on October 22. It is the first time in 80-plus years that British institutions have come together to publicly acknowledge this tragedy.
The event was inspired by Puri’s BBC podcast titled Three Million, which was aired in February 2024.
“British subjects lost their lives in the famine, yet there is no memorial or a plaque for them in Britain or anywhere in the world,” says Nusrat Ahmed, who is the curator of South Asia Gallery of Manchester Museum. Over two dozen exhibits were on display in the South Asia Gallery. Japanese propaganda posters, palpably anti-British, depicting starving and dying Indians while the British feasted. Photographs showing women queueing up for rice in Calcutta’s Lake Market area. A photograph and audio clip of Sheikh Kassem, a 104-year-old survivor from K-Plot island in the Sundarbans, reminiscing how 300 out of 500 inhabitants of the island died in the famine. Ahmed adds, “This event, the first of its kind, was meant to unravel erased history and challenge traditional narratives fed through history books in Britain.”
Puri started researching the famine after hearing the chilling testimony of Pamela Dowley Wise, a 97-year-old British woman, in a documentary on Partition. “She described dead people all over Calcutta’s streets, in Chowringhee, near Victoria Memorial, vultures preying on them,” says Puri. “I recorded the experience of survivors and witnesses of the famine,” she adds. Currently, Puri is working on a book that will include all testimonies and documents she has gathered so far.
Writer and art historian Partha Mitter, who is based in Oxford, UK, was interviewed by Puri for her podcast. He agrees to an email interview with The Telegraph. He says, “I was five at the time. Our house was on Harish Mukherjee Road. I remember our cook would put out rice and gruel for the victims, but they were too weak to even move.”
Puri also collected eyewitness accounts of a few surviving villagers in the Sundarbans and Midnapore. Her guide was writer Sailen Sarkar, who had first traced them for his own Bengali book on famine Durbhikkher Sakkhi or Witness to a Famine. In a 2018 article in The Telegraph titled Look Back in Hunger, many survivors had been interviewed; most of them, over 90 then, are now dead.
Bijoy Krishna Tripathi, 108, had spoken of skyrocketing food prices in the autumn of 1942; this was close on the heels of a devastating cyclone. He spoke of how men sold their wives and daughters for sacks of rice, and women ran away with strangers, seduced by the promise of two square meals a day. Abedan Bibi recalled meals comprising boiled gira shaak and shapla — water plants — fished out from ponds.
Growing up in Britain, neither Ahmed nor Puri ever found any mention of the famine in their school history texts; not even “as a footnote”.
Diya Gupta, who is co-director of the modern history cluster at City St George’s, University of London, and was a speaker at the memorial event, has a problem with the name “1943 Bengal Famine”. She believes it relegates the mass death event into a “regional occurrence in the Global South” and glosses over the fact that it happened due to “colonial mismanagement and a global war”.
News of the famine had indeed been downplayed. British authorities had imposed wartime censorship on the media. But editor of Calcutta-based news daily The Statesman, Ian Stephens, found a loophole. The law applied to written text; there was no ban on photographs. On August 22, 1943, The Statesman printed visuals of the famine-stricken dying on the streets.
Artists Chittaprosad Bhattacharya, Zainul Abedin, Gobardhan Ash and Somnath Hore visually documented the famine and its ravages. Copies of the pamphlet Hungry Bengal, featuring sketches and written accounts by Chittaprosad, were seized and burnt by the British.
Janam Mukherjee, who has written the book Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire, writes in a long email from Canada, “The Bengal Famine of 1943 is largely absent from British history because of the abundant evidence of British culpability in this event.” According to Mukherjee, who was the primary historical advisor for Three Million, British wartime policies, indifference to the fate of non-white, colonised people and unceasing imperial greed are all defining aspects of the famine. He states that in the wake of World War II, Britain wanted to claim not only military victory over the Axis powers but also moral superiority. Mukherjee adds, “Their role in the deaths of a few million brown people thousands of miles away from their homeland does not fit in with this picture of the victors.”
It is commonplace for laypersons and experts alike to hold the then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill responsible for the famine. But military historian and director of narrative and content at the Imperial War Museum, Peter Johnston, disagrees.
According to Johnston, who spoke at the event, food supplies to Bengal were already reduced in the years preceding because of the cyclone, crop infections and the fall of Burma — now Myanmar — to the Japanese. Burma was a key exporter of rice to Bengal till 1942. He continues, “The mass deaths came about as a combination of wartime inflation, speculative buying and panic hoarding, which together pushed the price of food out of the reach of poor Bengalis.” But he concedes that these conditions were exacerbated by the decisions of the War Cabinet in London.
The famine doesn’t find mention in the history of World War II in Britain. Only now, the Imperial War Museum is taking initiatives to revise the narrative.
Many of those associated with the October event suggest that one of the key reasons for this is the changing perception of Britain’s role in World War II, especially among the new generation. Says Gupta, “This generation is less brought up on a diet of imperial nostalgia and is willing to discuss and debate the colonial past.”
Anindita Ghosh, who is a professor of Indian History at Manchester University and one of the organisers of the memorial event, says, over 120 students attend her own module on colonial history every semester. She adds, “They are open to knowing about and reflecting on the colonial past of the nation, warts and all. And these are mostly British-born students of Anglo-Saxon heritage.”