DP History Research Resources

The causes and character of the Bengal famine of 1943 appear to be settled issues in
South Asian history. According to the generally accepted viewpoint, food availability
in Bengal was not low enough to have caused a famine. The key proponent of this
viewpoint, the economist Amartya Sen, uses data from the 1944 Famine Inquiry
Commission Report on Bengal in his book Poverty and Famines to argue that Bengal
actually had higher food availability in 1943 than in 1942.

As a boat moved across the Brahmaputra River from Bahadurabad, in 1943 October morning, a scientist
who was assigned by the government of Bengal noticed heaps of dead bodies all along the river bed, from
what seemed to have been an aftermath of a war. However, these dead bodies were not a result of any
form of plunder but rather an aftereffect of a disastrous famine that hit Bengal in the summer of 1943,
and ultimately caused the death of three million populations due to diseases and starvation. A relook at
the Great Bengal famine allows one to trace one of the worst mismanaged famines in 20th century South
Asia and how an environmental crisis was grossly linked to the economic and political crisis in Bengal.
While, tracing the background of the Bengal Famine of 1943 most pertinently points out to the
environmental crisis at its crux but a deeper analysis allows one to understand the a host of other
components in consideration, albeit, the high prices of commodities, the role of land market, subsistence
crisis, poor agrarian economy, negligent British policy and a host of other reason which this paper tends to
study.

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