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Who is responsible for the Bengal Famine of 1943?
In the spring of 1943, American GI John Muehl was relieved to escape the dust and deprivation of Burma. The country was then a British colony under Japanese occupation during World War II. Meuhl was restationed to Calcutta (today Kolkata), the glittering capital of British India’s Bengal province. Calcutta was the second-largest city in the British Empire after London, a unique metropolis blending British education and architecture with Bengali culture and arts. But the Calcutta that Muehl documented in his journal was a far cry from the City of Palaces admired for its grandeur.
“During that first evening in Calcutta, the city seemed unbelievable in its expansive luxuries and creature comfort,” he wrote. “But Calcutta was also a city of hunger and starvation, of scurvy, rickets, malnutrition and death. For those who lived in its sprawling native cities, for the beggars and the untouchables who walked the streets endlessly, there was no meat, no rice or millet. For them there was only the bare sidewalk where they begged for food till they were too weary and sick, where they rubbed their swollen bellies and crawled after the affluent sahibs, where at last they lay dead in the gutter, patiently awaiting the lorries that would come and take them away to the burning yards.Calcutta was a famine city, but that was not the whole story. Calcutta was a city where the dying agony of the beggar in the streets existed side by side with cocktail parties, hors d'œuvres, seven-course dinners and padlocked garbage cans.”
Muehl had arrived during the Bengal Famine, a period of starvation, disease, and mass migration between 1943 and 1944. It's estimated that up to three million Bengalis died during the famine, most of them among the poorest in society. It’s a staggering figure – almost three times greater than the number of British soldiers and civilians who died in both World Wars combined.
Today, the memory of the famine has not just faded in the West, but also in India and Bangladesh. Many of the scholars and journalists who do recall it often argue over exactly what, or who is to blame for this devastating loss of life. Many suggest that the famine was an inevitable natural disaster caused by tropical storms and poor harvests. Others claim that the policies of Winston Churchill and his wartime cabinet directly caused the shocking death toll. Some blame the greed of Bengali merchants hoarding rice and driving up its price for profit.
I want to look at the different factors that led to this catastrophe to make sense of how it occurred. Could this tragic loss of life have been avoided, and was enough done to end it sooner?