In Britain, the first memorial to a famine Bengal never forgot — and India never marked

That was in 1943, when Mitter was just five years old. Bengal was in the grip of a devastating famine that claimed an estimated three million lives. Mitter had nearly forgotten about it, or as he says, “it remained in his subliminal memory” — until journalist Kavita Puri asked him about the famine a few years ago.

Last month, at the Manchester Museum in the UK, Mitter revisited those fading recollections before an audience of nearly a hundred. Organised by the University of Manchester’s History Department and the museum, in collaboration with the Imperial War Museum North, the gathering is believed to be the first memorial ever held to honour the victims of the 1943 famine.

The 1943 Bengal famine memorial at the Manchester Museum was attended by approximately 100 people. (Photo from collection of Professor Anindita Ghosh)

“How can three million people die in British India, and there is not even a single museum, memorial, or even a plaque anywhere in the world?” asks Puri, one of the speakers.  The very question, she says, inspired her BBC Radio 4 podcast Three Million, about the Bengal famine, which inspired the event.

Puri worked with Professor Anindita Ghosh of the University of Manchester. Ghosh, who had organised several public events and panel discussions on it earlier, was keen on marking out the October memorial from her previous events. For the first time, the victims of the famine were commemorated through poetry, song, and film. And yet, one question hung heavy in the air: why is it so hard to remember the famine?

The 1943 Bengal Famine

When Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, the priorities of the colonial authorities in India shifted considerably. Every decision became tied to wartime defence, security, and mobilisation.

 

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Japan’s entry into the war in 1941 intensified British anxieties. After a rapid string of Japanese victories across Southeast Asia — and the fall of Burma in early 1942 — Bengal, particularly Calcutta, became central to British wartime planning.

However, as historian Janam Mukherjee notes in his book Hungry Bengal, the British government’s plan to ‘defend’ the city had little to do with military reinforcement. “Instead, the war cabinet in London opted for a scorched earth campaign in Bengal– a scheme to ‘deny’ Japan the resources that it might utilize to advance on Calcutta in the event of invasion,” he writes.

Bengal famine of 1943: Dead and dying children on a Calcutta street published in the Statesman 22 August 1943 (Wikimedia Commons)

The main objective of the policy was to confiscate any “surplus” stocks of rice in the coastal districts of Bengal, which were most vulnerable to attack from the Axis powers. Government agents used coercion to confiscate grain, much of which rotted in godowns even as starvation spread. By April 1942, the price of rice had soared, and there was distress both in the city and the countryside.

The second part of Britain’s defence policy was “boat denial”. It meant denying any kind of transport from the coast of Bengal to the invading Japanese army. This led to the confiscation of approximately 45,000 rural boats, thereby crippling the movement of labour, supplies, and food.

A cyclone in October 1942 further compounded the crisis, destroying large amounts of paddy stocks and killing thousands. Rural Bengal, particularly Midnapore, Noakhali, and Tamluk, was most affected, forcing thousands to flee to Calcutta in search of food and work.

In his book An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor describes the famine situation as the “British colonial holocaust”. Official records estimate the death toll to have been 1.5 million, but later investigations suggest closer to three million deaths.

Journalist Madhusree Mukherjee, in Churchill’s Secret War, documented wrenching accounts of starvation — mothers grabbing the last crumbs of food from their children, villagers stripping fields bare of every edible leaf or blade of grass, and women forced into prostitution for survival.

By August 1943, Calcutta’s streets were littered with corpses. Yet the British government remained in denial. The War Cabinet refused aid; censorship prevented newspapers from naming the famine. On 8 August, The Statesman’s editor, Ian Stephens, published a blistering editorial: “By mumbling that food shortage did not exist, they willed themselves into belief that the dread spectacle would vanish.” Days later, he printed the now-historic photographs of the starving — images widely credited with finally spurring relief.

The difficulty in remembering the famine

Since the 1940s, writings on the famine have been focused on finding the “causes”. For the British parliamentarians, the famine was the doing of India itself. Winston Churchill blamed Indians for the famine, claiming that “they breed like rabbits”.

Tharoor, in his book, reproduces a portion of the report on the Bengal famine that put the blame for the shortage on factors such as culture, population and climate; everything else except their own policies.

“But the public in Bengal, or at least certain sections of it, also have their share of blame. We have referred to the atmosphere of fear and greed which, in the absence of control, was one of the causes of the rapid rise in the price level. Enormous profits were made out of the calamity, and in the circumstances, profits for some meant death for others. A large part of the community lived in plenty while others starved, and there was much indifference in face of suffering.”

More recently, works by Madhusree Mukherjee and Tharoor have provided a nationalist critique of the British government and, more specifically, Churchill and his wartime decisions that led to acute food scarcity, price inflation, hoarding, and starvation.

Others, such as economic historian Tirthankar Roy, suggest that blaming the British government is overstated. “When one probes deeper, one sees that the immediate agency responsible for food transport was not Britain, but rather the elected government formed in Bengal, which, for political reasons, denied the famine for a considerable length of time, before it became obvious,” he tells indianexpress.com. The nationalist argument, he suggests, ignores the role and agency of local politics.

Puri asserts that the majority of the historical enquiries into the famine have focused on the factors responsible for it. In her documentary, she wanted to focus mainly on the people who experienced the hunger pangs of the famine, as well as understand why famine remembrance today is so difficult in Britain, as well as India and Bangladesh.

The famine occupies an uneasy place in collective memory. Janam Mukherjee observes that its imprint permeates Bengali culture — from the haunting invocation of “phyan dao” to the culinary habit of using every leaf and stalk so nothing goes to waste. Bengali literature, theatre, and cinema are full of famine references. The 1960s “Hungry Generation” of avant-garde writers drew explicitly from it.

In 2003, when he carried out the research for his book, the memory of the famine was everywhere. “I could open a conversation on any street corner and people had so much to say,” he says.

The famine is also seminal in Bengali nationalist circles, often held up to argue for the rights of the Bengali language and culture. During the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, when Churchill’s statue in London was defaced, many invoked the famine again.

But remembrance has rarely translated into public commemoration. Unlike the Partition or the World Wars, the famine has no official monument. Puri says that there is a specific character to famines that makes it hard to commemorate. “It took Ireland nearly a hundred years to memorialise its famine,” she says. What makes a famine particularly horrific, she says, is that the ties that bind society together are totally subverted. There are accounts of people selling off their children for a bag of rice, or feeding themselves while their infants went hungry. “These things are not only traumatic, but also hard to recall,” Puri says.

Famines also kill selectively. In 1943 Calcutta, for instance, the wealthy dined in restaurants while the poor died on the streets. “The classes that suffered the famine do not have the voice or the agency to memorialise it,” says Janam Mukherjee. The lack of social interest in the victims is often the biggest hurdle in commemorating a famine. In the case of the Bengal famine, there was also the aspect of shame and culpability. The culpable agents, he explains, were not just the colonial government, but also the big industrialists in Calcutta and the elite non-Bengali Indians.

Politics of Commemoration

Commemoration of a human tragedy is a political event. The nationalist leaders of the 1940s and the post-independence government of India were not keen on commemorating the victims of the famine due to several factors, Ghosh explains. To begin with, the 1940s were a whirlwind of political events. “There was war, communal riots, and the Congress being very close to Independence, did not want to stir the British,” says Ghosh. She continues, “after 1947, when the history of India was written, Bengal became just a footnote to a larger nationalist history, with Gandhi’s Satyagraha and non-violence clearly taking the centre-stage.”

Even in Bengal, commemoration is entangled in the politics of Partition. The districts that suffered most were largely those that later became part of East Pakistan, and then Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, however, the memory of 1943 is overshadowed by the famine of 1974, which unfolded soon after the country gained independence from Pakistan.

Exhibition of photographs of the Bengal famine at the memorial in Manchester Museum (Photo from collection of Professor Anindita Ghosh)

At the Manchester memorial, several Bangladeshi attendees invoked 1974. “Clearly, 1974 is far more embedded in Bangladesh’s historical consciousness than 1943,” Ghosh says.

Janam Mukherjee argues it is “safer” to memorialise Bengal’s famine in the UK than in West Bengal. Among the diaspora, he says, the famine anchors a shared identity and sense of victimhood.

The memorial, at the same time, represents an emerging generation in Britain that is actively questioning its colonial past and reflecting on the crimes committed under the name of the empire. It prompted many to seek its inclusion in the narratives of World War II in Britain.

Peter Johnston of the Imperial War Museum, who was present at the memorial, spoke about the importance of commemorating the victims of the Bengal famine by public institutions in the UK.

A day later, on the BBC’s Today programme, Reverend Dr Michael Banner of Trinity College, Cambridge, drew a stark comparison: the 385,000 British combatants who died in World War II with the three million British subjects who died in the famine. Yet, no plaque or memorial exists to mark such a colossal loss. Quoting philosopher Judith Butler, he said: “Some lives are deemed grievable, others not so much.”