BENGAL FAMINE BROADCAST ON BBC by Dr Gideon Polya and other scholars in 2008

Some key comments by Dr Gideon Polya (La Trobe University) , Dr Sanjoy Bhattacharya (Welcome Institute, London) , Professor Christopher Bayly (Cambridge University) and Professor Amartya Sen (1998 Nobel Laureate in Economics, Harvard and formerly Cambridge) et al. on the BBC Broadcast with presenter Michael Portillo entitled “Bengal Famine”, Open Learn, 14 January 2008: http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/history/social-economic-history/listen-the-bengal-famine .

“Gideon

I discovered that the Bengal Famine actually existed from seeing the film Distant Thunder by the great Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray.

Michael

Although Gideon Polya, a scientist from Melbourne, Australia seems an unlikely expert on the famine, he’s made it a personal crusade, publishing, lecturing and broadcasting about it to any ready to listen.

Gideon

My father was a Jewish refugee to Australia in 1939. I of course knew about the Jewish Holocaust. And I was quite appalled at the end of Satyajit Ray’s film as we see a backdrop of famine victims slowly moving across the landscape he says that the manmade famine in Bengal in 1943-44, killed five million people. I’d never heard of this. And I went to my history books in my big personal library. It was not there. I immediately went to a local, very large academic library and there the primary documents from Bengali sociologists and academics from American writers and indeed some British writers, it was there in the Achaean academic literature.

Michael

Few dispute that the famine was man-made. There’s less consensus over the final death toll, though nobody puts it below one and a half million. Here’s the view of Professor Christopher Bayly of Cambridge University.

Christopher

Bengal is one of the most densely populated parts of the world. It had suffered quite badly during the depression of the nineteen thirties so it started at a huge disadvantage when the war broke out in 1939. Consequently when Burma fell and Burmese rice exports to Bengal collapsed the situation became even worse. And the problem deepened towards the end of 1942 when there was a cyclone in the Bay of Bengal, very similar to the recent cyclone which wiped out huge areas of paddy production.

Sanjoy

The speed of the Japanese advance created panic in India. Huge numbers of Indian, British, Chinese and American soldiers came back into India and everyone expected the Japanese to march into what is now the North Eastern wing of India.

Michael

Sanjoy Bhattacharya, a medical historian at the Welcome Institute in London.

Sanjoy

The Japanese dominated the Bay of Bengal. There were some bombing raids on Calcutta so there was generalised panic amongst the administrators. They actually expected Japanese troops to come in from various directions. In view of this they decided that it would best to destroy food and modes of transportation along areas where the Japanese troops might come in. And the scotched earth policy was intended to actually destroy food stocks and things like boats, bicycles, things that the Japanese Army had used very effectively in Singapore.

Michael

What impact do you think that had on the subsequent famine?

Sanjoy

There can be no doubt that that caused localised shortages of food. And generally it threw the market economy of the affected districts out of gear, completely. There can be no doubt about that.

Michael

I was speaking to Sanjoy Bhattacharya in the British Library in London where we’d come to look at an official report commissioned by the British government and published in 1945. It put the death toll at between one and a half and two million, but Sanjoy believes the figure is much higher.

Sanjoy

The Bengal Famine started in Bengal. But as panic responses from the state tried to bring the famine under control in Bengal localised famines were created in provinces surrounding Bengal. So that six to seven million figure includes the deaths that happened in let’s say the provinces of Bihar, Orissa and Asam.

Michael

Six to seven million.

Sanjoy

Million people. There are elements of the report, if read carefully and specially if you read the first draft of the report which is available at the National Archives of India, there were many people then who believed that supply actually had fallen only by about six per cent so should not have resulted in the level of deaths that ultimately occurred. And that is something someone else well known as Amartya Sen has also argued that it wasn’t a question of supply I was a question of changing entitlements.

Michael

Amartya Sen, a Nobel prize winning economist, argues that although the rural communities of Bengal, sandwiched between the Japanese in Northern Burma and the Allied forces massing in Calcutta were in a perilous position, starvation was not inevitable.

Amartya

The war efforts had expanded the income of a lot of people, particularly urban areas who benefiting from what was effectively a war boom. This is what in my classification is what is called a boom famine as opposed to a slump famine. So there was a boom going on. Lots of people getting more income, buying commodities including primarily food and prices were shooting up. So that was the primary reason. The government for some reason at the centre in Delhi had prevented trade between one state and another. And that bit of mistaken economics didn’t help very much because Calcutta was insulated. And the government was absolutely keen to keep Calcutta normal and quiet. So they had decided that the entire population of Calcutta will be covered by “ration shops at fair prices” quote unquote, which really meant that they would buy from the rural areas rice at whatever price they could get and then subsidised they would sell into the urban areas. So that of course made the food prices shoot up in the rural areas enormously more.

Michael

What’s interesting about your description is that it doesn’t appear to rest upon a shortage of rice.

Amartya

No it wasn’t. I think I have to say the British Indian government was callous. I don’t think they were criminal but they were certainly extremely callous and didn’t really worry too much about it. And secondly they were badly misinformed. What had happened is that there was a considerable expansion of demand for food because of the war boom. And with the same supply they were having rising prices. So it wasn’t connected with food deficit at all.

…

Michael

Rightly we recall the annihilation in Belsen, a horror that perhaps leaves no space in our memories for the millions who in Bengal starved largely due to administrative failure. What lessons could governments learn from the disaster? Gideon Polya, the Australian scientist who’s campaigned to put the famine back into the history books, and Armatya Sen who was born in Bengal.

Gideon

This isn’t simply an argument about rubbing out history. Scientists can help society through what is called rational risk management. It successively involves A, getting the accurate data. B, doing a scientific analysis. And then C, recognising this, taking action, changing the system, whether it’s a national system or a global system, to avoid a repetition.

Amartya

I think the fact that famines happen when they’re so extraordinarily easy to prevent – nothing in the world is easier to prevent – affects me. Being a Bengali I can’t say that it adds especially to that because this seems to me to be a basic human sympathy at seeing suffering all across the world which are completely needless.

READING

Three million Bengalis died all over the state. Many on Calcutta’s streets. Not a single loaf of bread was reported stolen from the bakeries and confectioner’s shops that ... and the new market. And I wonder then what was this.”

Dr Gideon Polya (La Trobe University) , Dr Sanjoy Bhattacharya (Welcome Institute, London) , Professor Christopher Bayly (Cambridge University) and Professor Amartya Sen (1998 Nobel Laureate in Economics, Harvard and formerly Cambridge) et al.on the BBC Broadcast with presenter Michael Portillo in “Bengal Famine”, Transcript, Open Learn, 14 January 2008:http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/history/social-economic-history/listen-the-bengal-famine ; also see Gideon Polya et al., Untold history – things we forgot to remember, The Bengal Famine, Transcript. This edition of The Things We Forgot To Remember was originally broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 7th January 2008, Information Clearing House: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24196.htm .