Was Churchill Responsible for the Bengal Famine?

by Madhusree Mukerjee

Madhusree Mukerjee won a Guggenheim fellowship to write her previous book, The Land of Naked People. She has served on the board of editors of Scientific American. She lives near Frankfurt, Germany.

On August 4, 1943, Winston Churchill made one of his most important but least known decisions: he declined to send wheat to India, then a British colony, thereby condemning hundreds of thousands, or possibly millions, of people to death by starvation. The inhabitants of Bengal, an eastern province of India where famine was raging, were of little value to the war effort and in any case they were “breeding like rabbits,” he explained at subsequent War Cabinet meetings (as recorded by Leopold Amery, the Secretary of State for India). Churchill chose instead to use the wheat and ships at his disposal to build a stockpile for feeding civilians of the Balkans, whom he hoped to liberate from Nazi occupation.

Since 1939, the United Kingdom had been drawing grain and manufactures from India for the war effort, and the colonial government had been printing money to pay for these purchases. The resulting inflation had combined with other factors to precipitate famine in early 1943. The following summer, the Government of India asked the War Cabinet for half a million tons of wheat by year-end. The cereal would feed India’s two-million-strong army and workers in war-related industries; if any happened to be left over, it would relieve starvation. The mere news of the arrival of substantial imports would cause prices to fall, because speculators would anticipate a drop in prices and release any hoarded grain to the market. Churchill’s close friend and technical advisor, Lord Cherwell, demurred, however: he erroneously argued that India’s food problem could not be solved by imports. In any case, expending valuable shipping on Indians “scarcely seems justified unless the Ministry of War Transport cannot find any other use for it,” he added in a draft memo. (In the final version, this sentence was changed to a straightforward recommendation against sending grain.)

As a result of such considerations, that August the War Cabinet dispatched only a “token” shipment of 50,000 tons of wheat to Ceylon, there to await instructions as to final destination, and ordered for India 100,000 tons of barley—which was of little help because barley had a negligible effect on food prices. It decided instead that around 75,000 tons of Australian wheat would be transported to Ceylon and the Middle East each month for the rest of 1943, to supply the war effort; and a further 170,000 tons would pass by famine-stricken India en-route to a supply center in the Mediterranean region, there to be stored for future consumption in southeastern Europe. By year-end, India did receive 80,000 tons of wheat—far from enough to feed even the army, which continued to consume local grain that might otherwise have helped save the people.

That Lord Cherwell considered the rescuing of imperial subjects to be an inefficient use of resources may be deduced from the drafts of a lecture he had delivered during the 1930s. Cherwell, who was of German heritage, was then known as Frederick Lindemann and was a professor of physics at Oxford. In the lecture, he outlined a science-based solution to the challenging problem of perpetuating imperial control over subject peoples. The professor envisioned that technologies such as surgery, mind control, and drug and hormone manipulations would one day allow humans to be fine-tuned for specific tasks. Furthermore, he postulated, at the low end of the race and class spectrum one could remove from “helots” (Greek for slaves) the ability to suffer or to feel ambition—thereby creating a lobotomized subclass that would do all the unpleasant work without once thinking of revolution or of voting rights. The result would be a perfectly peaceable and stable society, “led by supermen and served by helots.”

Lord Cherwell evidently considered the existence of certain peoples to be justified only to the extent that they served their racial and class superiors—which may explain his reluctance to expend resources on imperial subjects who were unimportant to the war effort. Churchill himself may have subscribed to such a view. After attending one of the War Cabinet debates on sending famine relief, for instance, Field Marshal Wavell noted in his diary that Churchill wanted to feed “only those [Indians] actually fighting or making munitions or working some particular railways.” According to Amery, the prime minister felt that sending succor to Bengalis, whom he regarded as inadequate soldiers, was less important than sending it to Greeks, who were resisting the Nazis. Greece had suffered famine earlier in the war, but the calamity had since passed; in any case, the vast quantities of grain designated for the Balkans could only have been delivered after the Nazis were defeated, and would not impact the course of the war.

In 1943, the non-availability of grain forced government-run relief centers in Bengal to reduce the grain rations provided to famine victims to about four ounces a day. That came to 400 calories, at the low end of the scale on which, at much the same time, inmates at Buchenwald were being fed. The Bengal famine drew to an end in late December, when the province harvested its own winter rice crop. The death toll was about 3 million.