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Between Food Availability Decline and Entitlement Exchange: an Ecological Prehistory of the Great Bengal Famine of 1943

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The Bengal Delta

Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series ((CIPCSS))

Abstract

One autumn morning in 1906 in an East Bengal village, Sister Nivedita1 came across a few women standing up to their throats under water, gathering unripe grain stalk by stalk. As she offered these women her boat and assistance, they said they could not accept because they were naked. Nivedita was in East Bengal on a famine relief mission; hence she came across many such incidents and was no longer shocked by different degrees of human suffering. But she was surprised by the ‘freshness’ exemplified in these women’s experience of destitution and starvation. She noted: ‘Since my visit to Eastern Bengal I have had the opportunity of comparing the people … with those of another district nearer the capital [Calcutta], where famine and destitution have of late years become chronic. And I have learnt thus to measure the freshness of impression of hunger by the shrinking from loss of personal dignity in the stating of need.’2 Nivedita further observed that everything that one saw in East Bengal that day was ‘so much saved from happier times’ and warned that if the present strain continued long enough, it would surely give way to a ‘sordid pauperism’.3

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Notes

  1. Sister Nivedita, Glimpses of Famine and Flood in East Bengal in 1906 (Calcutta, 1907), p. 28.

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  2. Mahalanobis, the great Indian statistician, remarked that the famine of 1943 was not an accident like an earthquake or a flood, but the ‘culmination of economic changes which were going on even in normal times’. See P.C. Mahalanobis, ‘The Bengal Famine: the Background and Basic Facts’, Asiatic Review, XLII (January 1946): 315; see also APAC, Mss Eur 911/8, Pinnell Papers: ‘Confidential Memorandum on the Economic Condition of Bengal Prior to the Famine of 1943’, pp. 294–5.

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  3. Tim Dyson and Arup Maharatna, ‘Excess Mortality during the Bengal Famine: a Re-evaluation’, Indian Economic Social History Review, 28 (1991): 283.

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  4. The concept of ‘entitlement exchange’ is succinctly described by Amartya Sen: ‘Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat.’ Amartya Kumar Sen, Poverty and Famines: an Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford, 1981, reprinted 1988), p. 1.

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  5. Utsa Patnaik, ‘Food Availability and Famine: a Longer View’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 19(1) (1991): 1–12; David Arnold, Famine. Social Crisis and Historical Change (Oxford, 1988). For a summary of the debates around Sen’s approach and criticisms of it, see S.R. Osmani, ‘The Entitlement Approach to Famine: an Assessment’, Working Paper no. 107, UNU World Institute for Economic Research, Helsinki, 1993.

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  6. For perspectives on FAD as instrumented by natural disasters, see Mark B. Tauger, ‘Entitlement, Shortage and the 1943 Bengal Famine: Another Look’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 31(1) (October 2003): 47–8. One of the few exceptions that take a long-term ecological context is Vinita Damodraran, ‘Famine in Bengal: a Comparison of the 1770 Famine in Bengal and the 1897 Famine in Chotanagpur’, Medieval History Journal, 10(1–2) (2007): 143–81.

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  7. Cheng Siok-Hwa, The Rice Industry of Burma 1852–1940 (Kuala Lumpur, 1968), p. 211.

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  8. S. Bose, Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital: Rural Bengal since 1770 (Cambridge 1993), p. 23.

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  9. Arthur Geddes, ‘The Population of Bengal, its Distribution and Changes: a Contribution to Geographical Method’, Geographical Journal, 89(4) (April 1937): 344.

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  10. M. Mufakharul Islam, Bengal Agriculture 1920–1946 (Cambridge, 1978), p. 200; for two earlier but still relevant studies of decline or stagnation in India’s agriculture and per capita food output in the first half of the twentieth century, see Daniel Thorner and Alice Thorner, Land and Labour in India (Bombay, 1965) and George Blyn, Agricultural Trend in India (Philadelphia, 1966).

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  11. H.S.M. Ishaque, Agricultural Statistics by Plot to Plot Enumeration in Bengal 1944 and 1945, (part II, Alipore, 1947), pp. 5, 15–17, 21, 47–9, 69–70, 73, 75, 77–8, 82–4.

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  12. Annual Report of the Department of Agriculture, Bengal, 1929–30 (Calcutta, 1930), p. 19. (Hereafter ARDA.)

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  13. Ibid., p. 19.

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  14. S.Y. Padmanabhan, ‘The Great Bengal Famine’, Annual Review of Phytopathology, 11 (1973): 23. Other factors promoting this disease include lack of nutrient elements in the soil, accumulation of toxic elements in the soil, humidity and wet conditions.

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  15. Report of the Foodgrains Procurement Committee (Calcutta, 1944), p. 4.

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  16. M. Mufakharul Islam, ‘The Great Bengal Famine and the Question of FAD Yet Again’, Modern Asian Studies, 21(2) (2007): 437.

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  17. Mohammed Mohsen Ullah, Burir Suta (Rajshahi, Calcutta: 1317 BS; AD 1911), pp. 27, 28.

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  18. David Ludden, ‘Introduction: Agricultural Production and Indian History’, in David Ludden (ed.), Agricultural Production and Indian History (Oxford, 1994), p. 4.

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  19. Floud Commission Report, vol. IV, p. 54; Birendra Kishore Roychowdhury, Permanent Settlement and After (Calcutta, 1942), p. 292.

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  20. Chatterjee, The Present History of West Bengal (Delhi 1997), pp. 61–4.

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  21. Antonio Gramsci, Selections From the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. by Q. Hoare and G.N. Smith (London, 1971), p. 213.

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  22. Sharecropping in Bengal was ‘a stage in between landholding and landlessness’. See A. Cooper, Sharecropping and Sharecroppers’ Struggles in Bengal 1930–1950 (Calcutta, 1988), p. 91.

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  23. The Times, 3 November 1943: 5; for the bhadralok’s relative immunity from famine, see Indivar Kamtekar, ‘A Different War Dance: State and Class in India 1939–1945’, Past and Present, 176(1) (2002): 218 fn.

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  24. Tim Dyson, ‘On the Demography of South Asian Famines, part II’, Population Studies, 45(2) (July 1991): 279–97.

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  25. Arup Maharatna, ‘Malaria Ecology, Relief Provision and Regional Variation Mortality during the Bengal Famine of 1943–44’, South Asia Research, 13(1) (May 1993).

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  26. C.A. Bentley, Malaria and Agriculture in Bengal. How to Reduce Malaria in Bengal by Irrigation (Calcutta, 1925).

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  27. Annual Sanitary Report, 1909, p. 13; for a note on relatively better health conditions in some places in nineteenth-century Bengal, see, Rai Chunilal Bose, Palli-swashtha O saral swashtha-bidhana [Village Sanitation and a Manual of Hygiene] (4th edn, Calcutta, 1934), p. 39.

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  28. Kiran Chandra De, Report on the Fisheries of Eastern Bengal and Assam (Shillong, 1910), pp. 71–3.

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  29. Ibid., p. 70.

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  30. ‘Since the protein in fish supplement the growth-promoting effect of the pulse proteins, it is highly probable that the pulse proteins will be utilized more efficiently when they are included in the diet containing fish.’ See K.P. Basu and H.N. De, ‘Nutritional Investigation of Some Species of Bengal Fish’, Indian Journal of Medical Research, 26(1) (July, 1938): 188. (Hereafter IJMR.)

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  31. A.B. Fry, ‘Indigenous Fish and Mosquito Larvae: a Note from Bengal’, Paludism: Being the Transaction of the Committee for the Study of Malaria in India, 1(5) (September 1912): 71–4.

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  32. K.P. Basu and M.N. Basak, ‘Biochemical Investigations on Different Varieties of Bengal Rice — part V’, IJMR, 24(4) (April 1937): 1067.

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  33. Ibid.

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  34. For a note on the shift to the boro variety because of the water hyacinth and other factors, see Ratan Lal Chakraborty, ‘Reclamation Process in the Bengal Delta’, in Yoshihiro Kaida (ed.), The Imagescape of Six Great Asian Deltas in the 21st Century (Kyoto, 2000), p. 26.

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  35. Prafullah Kumar Bose remarked in the early 1940s that the damage caused to crops and fishs by the water hyacinth alone was ‘crores’ (1 crore = 10 millions) of rupees. Quoted in ‘Geographical Record’, Geographical Review, 36(2) (April 1946): 229–30.

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  36. David Arnold’s Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley, 1993) remains a classic in this area of investigations.

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  37. ‘Extract from the Progs of the Lieutenant-Governor of Eastern Bengal and Assam in the Municipal dept, dated 11th October 1910’, in Paludism, 1(2) (January 1911): 93–8.

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  38. David Arnold, Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India (Cambridge:, 2000), p. 57; see also Iftekhar Iqbal, ‘Modernity and its Discontents. Studying Environmental History of Colonial and Postcolonial Bangladesh’ East West Journal, 1(1) (2007).

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  39. For the devastation caused by malaria in the embanked coastal area, see M.O.T. Iyengar, ‘The Distribution of Anopheles Ludlowii in Bengal and its Importance in Malarial Epidemiology’, IJMR, 19(2) (October 1931): 499–524.

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  40. See IJMR, 21(4) (April 1934): 935. For a general focus on colonial and post-colonial India’s relation with international health bodies, see Sunil Amrith, Decolonizing International Health: India and Southeast Asia 1930–65 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). For a note on the humane mission and public value of British imperial science and its agronomic failure to provide quinine at a price affordable to the public, see Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven and London, 2000), p. 231.

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  41. ‘The “pot well” was an earthen shaft lined by locally burnt pot rings with a diameter of 2 feet 9 inches. Such wells are sunk usually in the dry season, and are carried down to a depth of between 20 and 30 feet, i.e., until a depth of water of 4 to 6 feet is obtained. The well lining is generally built up some 3 feet above the ground surface and supported by a small earth ramp.’ T.H. Bishop, ‘The Working of the Cholera Prevention Scheme on the Lower Ganges Bridge Construction’, IJMR, 1(2) (1913–14): 300.

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  42. Ira Klein, ‘Death in India, 1871–1921’, Journal of Asian Studies, 32(4) (August 1973): 659.

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  43. In 1943, the number of deaths in Bengal increased by 58 per cent on the 5-year average. Where the average annual number of deaths was 1,184,903 in normal years, in 1943 it rose to 1,873,749. In 1943, the number of deaths due to cholera was 160,909 more than the normal annual average. In the same year, the number of deaths due to malaria was 285,792, more than the normal annual average. See ‘Banglar Mrittu Sankya’[‘An account of the mortality rate in Bengal’], Dacca Prakash, 12 March 1944, p. 2. For a note on the sharp increase of diseases in Bengal since the late 1930s, see K.S. Fitch, A Medical History of the Bengal Famine 1943–44 (Calcutta, 1947), p. 124.

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  1. University of Dhaka, Bangladesh

    Iftekhar Iqbal (Assistant Professor of History)

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© 2010 Iftekhar Iqbal

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Iqbal, I. (2010). Between Food Availability Decline and Entitlement Exchange: an Ecological Prehistory of the Great Bengal Famine of 1943. In: The Bengal Delta. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230289819_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230289819_8

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-31221-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-0-230-28981-9

  • eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)

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