Food being unloaded at Calcutta port. In late July 1943 the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, demanded food imports as a matter of extreme urgency, no matter ‘how unpalatable this demand must be to HMG’. Yet by mid-October the secretary for state for India, Leo Amery, was still referring in public only to ‘scarcity verging on famine’. Churchill was even less sympathetic, referring to ‘Indians breeding like rabbits and being paid a million a day by us for doing nothing about the war’.
(William Vandivert, Life)
The ‘food drives’ of summer 1943 followed from the hoarding hypothesis, and the meagre hoards located by them are strong evidence against the claim that there was enough food for all. The first drive, which excluded the twin cities of Calcutta and Howrah, began on 7 June. It unearthed little rice, and food minister Suhrawardy’s claim that boats and carts had been used to conceal stocks impressed nobody. The drive laid bare the gravity of the situation. The second drive, targeting Calcutta–Howrah in early August 1943, forced Suhrawardy to concede that stocks in the hands of consumers, traders and employers were meagre.
The relatively small number of traders fined during the spring and summer of 1943 is further circumstantial evidence against large-scale speculative hoarding. Throughout the crisis the authorities campaigned against the twin offences of hoarding and profiteering. Traders who withheld stocks without declaring them and traders who made a false declaration were liable to fines and worse. Retailers charging more than the controlled price were similarly liable. The non-trading hoarder, whose motive was fear, was not immune, but the main target of the campaign was the creature who, ‘for sheer greed, grabs and withholds from circulation the food of his fellowmen’. In the first week of April 1943, 39 cases of profiteering were detected: eighteen related to sugar, nine to kerosene, eight to coal, two to salt and two to atta. In the following week 104 cases were dealt with, of which 55 related to sugar, 25 to kerosene, twenty to coal, one to mustard oil and three to medicines. In the last week of April the Ministry of Civil Supplies proceeded against 82 people for profiteering and hoarding; 29 cases related to sugar and 27 to coal. The pattern was repeated in the following weeks and months.
The huge increase in forced land transfers during the famine is also consistent with a poor harvest. Hundreds of thousands of smallholders were forced to sell off some or all of their land; 1.7 million land transfers were made in 1943, and 22.9% of families were forced either to sell or to mortgage all or part of their paddy land. The real price of land fell, implying that most of the sales were by smallholders normally reliant on agricultural labour to make ends meet and who needed the cash to buy food. This is hardly surprising, but even P.C. Joshi, leader of the Communist Party, conceded that the middle peasantry also suffered in 1943. ‘How is it’, he asked, ‘that even the middle peasant has to sell off; where did his rice go?’ Joshi’s answer—that ‘he got humbugged by the hoarder and tempted by the high price offered’ and ‘began sinking to the status of a pauper’—lacked conviction. But that nobody had enough food in Joshi’s view, except a small minority of landlords and moneylenders, surely implies a general supply shortage.
The Communists played a curious game during the famine. The party’s support for the war effort led to its legalisation in 1942. Its organisational and relief work won it plaudits during the famine, although its anti-Congress stance and uncritical support for the war alienated many. The party and its affiliates vigorously supported the food drives, and even after the authorities conceded that there was a food availability problem the party weekly, People’s War, continued to target the hoarder. A sympathiser later castigated the party for its ‘tame emphasis on the need to prevent food riots and unearth hoarding’.
Summary
There was a food availability problem, though its extent cannot be resolved with any accuracy. That there was a deficit may be inferred from informed commentary at the time, from the failure of the food drives and from the high incidence of forced land sales by starving peasants. In normal times Bengal might have been resilient enough to cope with the shortfall, but in 1943, given military requirements and war-related disruption to trade and communications, the consequences were disastrous.
Neither price movements nor the outcome of the food drives of the summer of 1943 support the case for excessive hoarding on a massive scale. Markets did ‘fail’ in another sense, however: the disruption of transport facilities led to huge increases in the price of rice in the east of the province. The problem in Bengal in 1943 was the failure of the imperial power to make good a harvest shortfall that would have been manageable in peacetime. HI
Cormac Ó Gráda is Professor of Economics at University College Dublin.
Further reading:
A.K. Sen, Poverty and famines: an essay on entitlements and deprivation (Oxford, 1981).
C. Ó Gráda, Famine: a short history (Princeton, 2009).