Back in 2003, I read Chomsky's Rogue States. I believe he mentioned something about British-induced famines in India. The last one occurred a mere sixty years ago in 1943. It was news to me that anywhere from 2 to 5 million Indians had been systematically starved/murdered so that the British could feed their WWII troops. Apparently Britian condoned one sort of genocide while condemning another--their sense of fair play was reserved for fair skin, although their policy in Ireland (and elsewhere) militates against this. Interesting that I had to excavate this information from beneath layers of whited-out history. And I was pretty numb by the time I learned that the British had created more famines during their colonial occupation in India than the country had experienced in its entire history. These British-famines extinguished the lives of some 29 million Indians. As Mike Davis points out:
The British insisted that they had rescued India from "timeless hunger". In fact, there were 31 serious famines in 120 years of British rule against only 17 recorded famines in the previous two millennia. It was the process of incorporating India into the world market to serve colonial interests that caused incalculable damage to Indian peasants, the agrarian economy, and food security.
I refused to believe any of this initially.
It seemed far-fetched that something like this could have happened and I was just now hearing about it. But I did more digging--books had been published citing governmental correspondence between British officials who openly expressed their intent to let millions of Indian subjects starve to death to further the machinery of Western politics and progress (that dirty word). Mike Davis wrote a harrowing account of the affair in his Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World. Satyajit Ray authored films which limned the despair of these famines, not the least famous of which is Pather Panchali. A lesser known film, Distant Thunder, treats of the Bengal Famine more directly. Zainul Abedin drew attention to the famine via his canvas.
There is a lesser known book, by Gideon Polya, almost difficult to read because of its horrific details of famine conditions and the calumny of Churchill and other British officials both in and outside of India who knew full well what was going on--who indeed engineered these famines beneath a smokescreen. The sudden, massive and widespread poverty these famines engendered in India was like an economic H-bomb--it is telling that Bengal and Calcutta as Chomsky puts it, "are now the very symbols of misery and despair. In contrast, [pre-colonial] European warrior-merchants saw Bengal as one of the richest prizes in the world. An early English visitor described it as 'a wonderful land, whose richness and abundance neither war, pestilence, nor oppression could destroy.' "
I refused to believe any of this initially.
It seemed far-fetched that something like this could have happened and I was just now hearing about it. But I did more digging--books had been published citing governmental correspondence between British officials who openly expressed their intent to let millions of Indian subjects starve to death to further the machinery of Western politics and progress (that dirty word). Mike Davis wrote a harrowing account of the affair in his Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World. Satyajit Ray authored films which limned the despair of these famines, not the least famous of which is Pather Panchali. A lesser known film, Distant Thunder, treats of the Bengal Famine more directly. Zainul Abedin drew attention to the famine via his canvas.
There is a lesser known book, by Gideon Polya, almost difficult to read because of its horrific details of famine conditions and the calumny of Churchill and other British officials both in and outside of India who knew full well what was going on--who indeed engineered these famines beneath a smokescreen. The sudden, massive and widespread poverty these famines engendered in India was like an economic H-bomb--it is telling that Bengal and Calcutta as Chomsky puts it, "are now the very symbols of misery and despair. In contrast, [pre-colonial] European warrior-merchants saw Bengal as one of the richest prizes in the world. An early English visitor described it as 'a wonderful land, whose richness and abundance neither war, pestilence, nor oppression could destroy.' "
Mike Davis, whom I mention above, has more to say about this in an article available online. Devinder Sharma also has an article available on the far reaching implication of famine/food as a political weapon which resonates in the food industry today.
I'm leapfrogging historically a bit here, but I'm bothered by the Indian government's silence on this issue. I suspect this has, among other agenda, to do with saving nationalist face...it's interesting because Polya calls these British induced famines holocausts, a term which seems reserved exclusively for the atrocities perpetrated against Jews during the very same period. There have been other "holocausts," in other countries, even within the last decade; they are not conferred the same sanctity/publicity (are these postmodern synonyms?). But then spin is everything these days.
It is no surprise that most British history books are practically silent on the Bengal Famines, which puts paid to another British chestnut: giving credit where credit is due.
