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Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire
The years leading up to the independence and accompanying partition of India mark a tumultuous period in the history of Bengal. Representing both a major front in the Indian struggle against colonial rule, as well as a crucial Allied outpost in the British/American war against Japan, Bengal stood at the crossroads of complex and contentious structural forces - both domestic and international - which, taken together, defined an era of political uncertainty, social turmoil and collective violence. While for the British the overarching priority was to save the empire from imminent collapse at any cost, for the majority of the Indian population the 1940s were years of acute scarcity, violent dislocation and enduring calamity. In particular there are three major crises that shaped the social, economic and political context of pre-partition the Second World War, the Bengal famine of 1943, and the Calcutta riots of 1946. Hungry Bengal examines these intricately interconnected
events, foregrounding the political economy of war and famine in order to analyse the complex nexus of hunger, war and civil violence in colonial Bengal at the twilight of British rule.
events, foregrounding the political economy of war and famine in order to analyse the complex nexus of hunger, war and civil violence in colonial Bengal at the twilight of British rule.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
March 14, 2018
Bengal has ironically been a land of abundances and famines. A background to the geographical, economic and political history of this land is imperative to understand Bengal and its people. Janam Mukherjee’s Hungry Bengal is just that – an insightful history of the pre-independence Bengal with focus on WWII and its impact on colonial Bengal.
The book changes many a perceptions. For starters – the very definition of famine; that it could be caused by the inability of a certain section of the society to procure food rather than the common perception of ‘unavailability of food’. The book also reveals the financial and psychological impact of WWII on the Indian subcontinent, particularly Bengal. And although it highlights the British Prime Minister’s apathy towards suffering Indians, it is the indifference of our own people in powerful positions that comes out as the greater betrayal.
In 1943, Bengal did not suffer so much from the drought that it did from denial of rice and boats. In the name of war, cultivators were paid a pittance for the rice they were made to sell forcefully, later appropriated and stored in government and corporate godowns which then rotted while people across Bengal starved to death. Even the essential personnel (industrial workers) for whom the rice was meant, did not always benefit from it. ‘The anyhow underfed Bengalies’ as said by Churchill were dispensable, an inexpensive and accepted collateral damage in the greater scheme of things in the British war. This is in stark contrast to the arrangement that the British government made for their own citizens, so much so that during the entire period of the war, the average health of British citizens was surprisingly quite good.
The description in Hungry Bengal of famine struck Bengal slowly draining of its compassion is heart-wrenching; the dispassionate disposing of the dead bodies only a glimpse of their importance when alive.
Also, the British policy of divide and rule cannot be any clearer than during this period. When the Indian National Congress protested the Indian involvement in the unrelated WWII, the British reason for preference of the Muslim league was celebrated. The riots following the Direct Action day in August 1946 were planned against the British, but the fact that they turned communal brought much relief to the Brits. Hungry Bengal covers the post-famine communal riots in great detail with emphasis on the effect of longtime deprivation of food and resources on the poor despite their social background.
I highly recommend the book to anyone who is interested in South Asian history, politics and socio-economic health of the Indian diaspora during the colonial times.
The book changes many a perceptions. For starters – the very definition of famine; that it could be caused by the inability of a certain section of the society to procure food rather than the common perception of ‘unavailability of food’. The book also reveals the financial and psychological impact of WWII on the Indian subcontinent, particularly Bengal. And although it highlights the British Prime Minister’s apathy towards suffering Indians, it is the indifference of our own people in powerful positions that comes out as the greater betrayal.
In 1943, Bengal did not suffer so much from the drought that it did from denial of rice and boats. In the name of war, cultivators were paid a pittance for the rice they were made to sell forcefully, later appropriated and stored in government and corporate godowns which then rotted while people across Bengal starved to death. Even the essential personnel (industrial workers) for whom the rice was meant, did not always benefit from it. ‘The anyhow underfed Bengalies’ as said by Churchill were dispensable, an inexpensive and accepted collateral damage in the greater scheme of things in the British war. This is in stark contrast to the arrangement that the British government made for their own citizens, so much so that during the entire period of the war, the average health of British citizens was surprisingly quite good.
The description in Hungry Bengal of famine struck Bengal slowly draining of its compassion is heart-wrenching; the dispassionate disposing of the dead bodies only a glimpse of their importance when alive.
Also, the British policy of divide and rule cannot be any clearer than during this period. When the Indian National Congress protested the Indian involvement in the unrelated WWII, the British reason for preference of the Muslim league was celebrated. The riots following the Direct Action day in August 1946 were planned against the British, but the fact that they turned communal brought much relief to the Brits. Hungry Bengal covers the post-famine communal riots in great detail with emphasis on the effect of longtime deprivation of food and resources on the poor despite their social background.
I highly recommend the book to anyone who is interested in South Asian history, politics and socio-economic health of the Indian diaspora during the colonial times.
June 12, 2018
Great book that weaves a long duree history of the Bengal famine with the pressures of WWII in the Eastern theatre and the rising tide of Indian nationalism and communalism. Mukherjee provides a convincing link between the deficiencies of colonial policy in reaction to the Japanese invasion of SE Asia, the Great Calcutta killings of 1946 and the structural violence caused by mass deaths due to famine, disease and disaester that wracked much of the Bengal countryside during the period.
March 24, 2022
This book examines the circumstances around the Bengal Famine in 1943 in India, where millions of people died due to starvation, mostly caused by WWII and government incompetence. It's a very dense book to read, but fascinating especially if you are curious about the history of famine, disease, WWII, or India.
August 21, 2025
Janam Mukherjee’s Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire is one of those works that forces the reader to look at the Bengal Famine of 1943 not as an isolated calamity of crop failure and hunger but as part of the deep political and social convulsions that shook Bengal in the last years of colonial rule.
The book argues with patient research and sharp narrative force that famine was not a natural disaster but a manufactured one, born out of war policies, imperial extraction, and the callous governance of an empire already showing cracks. What emerges is a picture where famine, communal tension, and the impending end of the Raj cannot be disentangled from one another.
The opening sets the tone by dismantling the colonial narrative that famine was simply a question of shortage. Mukherjee points instead to the structures of neglect, distorted wartime priorities, and the sheer violence of policies that privileged empire over human life.
Bengal in the early 1940s was already vulnerable—a peasant economy tied to the jute trade, dependent on imported rice, and badly exposed to fluctuations in supply and price. The war tightened the screws: requisitioning, military occupation, and the “denial policy” that stripped coastal Bengal of rice and boats to prevent their use by a possible Japanese invasion.
In reality, these measures crippled food distribution, inflated prices, and deepened scarcity. It was not so much an enemy invasion but the preparations against it that condemned Bengal’s poor to starvation.
Mukherjee’s chapters on the famine itself are searing. He shows the grotesque inequality in access to food—while the military and urban elites secured supplies, the rural poor were left to wither. Starvation spread with disease, migration, and social breakdown. But equally striking is his depiction of administrative indifference.
The refusal of the British government to import grain into Bengal, even as people starved by the millions, reveals a chilling logic of imperial governance: the subjects were expendable when weighed against the needs of empire. Relief, when it came, was both inadequate and deeply politicized. Aid became a tool of patronage and loyalty, manipulated by parties, landlords, and local bosses, further entrenching inequality and bitterness.
One of the strongest interventions of Hungry Bengal lies in connecting famine to the sharpening of communal tensions. Scarcity did not just kill; it corroded trust, turning communities inward, pitting Hindus and Muslims against each other in an atmosphere of suspicion and competition. Mukherjee suggests that the famine years were not only about mass death but also about the slow poisoning of intercommunal bonds, laying the groundwork for the communal violence of 1946 in Calcutta and Noakhali.
This is where his narrative diverges from purely economic histories of the famine, because he insists on seeing famine as political violence with long aftershocks in Partition-era Bengal.
The last part of the book draws the circle wider, linking famine to the loss of legitimacy of colonial rule itself. It was not only nationalist rhetoric but lived experience that delegitimised the Raj—what faith could remain in an empire that presided over mass starvation and then refused to acknowledge its responsibility?
The famine became both a wound and a rallying cry, collapsing the fragile moral scaffolding of colonial authority. By the time independence arrived, Bengal was already a society fractured by hunger, displacement, and communal division, and Partition became both culmination and continuation of these ruptures.
Mukherjee’s arguments resonate with and extend earlier scholarship. Bipan Chandra, Sumit Sarkar, and Sugata Bose have emphasised exploitation and peasant struggles, but Hungry Bengal insists on the famine’s entanglement with communal politics.
Madhusree Mukerjee’s Churchill’s Secret War exposed Churchill’s direct culpability, but Janam Mukherjee focuses more on Bengal itself—the social, political, and human consequences on the ground. Joya Chatterji’s Bengal Divided and Yasmin Khan’s The Great Partition traced communal mobilisation and Partition violence; here Mukherjee shows how famine conditions themselves incubated those very divisions.
The book’s power lies in refusing to treat famine and Partition as separate catastrophes. Instead, it presents them as two moments of a single unfolding process—famine as both revelation and catalyst.
It revealed the brutality of colonial governance, and it catalysed the communal fissures and social unrest that would define Bengal’s experience of the end of empire. What results is not only a history of famine but a history of Bengal’s disintegration under the twin pressures of war and colonial rule.
Reading Hungry Bengal is sobering, because it refuses consolations. The famine is not narrated as an aberration or accident; it is shown as the logical outcome of a system that was exploitative to its core. Nor is it allowed to sit in isolation, as though starvation were a one-off tragedy. Instead, Mukherjee draws the lines forward into Partition, showing how hunger, fear, and distrust traveled with Bengal into the violent upheavals of 1946–47. This fusion of economic, political, and social history makes the book not just a contribution to famine studies but a lens into the very nature of late colonial rule in India.
In sum, Hungry Bengal is a work that forces us to rethink the famine as both symptom and turning point. It demonstrates how war, famine, communalism, and Partition were not separate stories but interwoven strands in the unravelling fabric of colonial Bengal.
Its meticulous research and unflinching narrative place it alongside the most important works of modern South Asian history, while its moral force ensures that the suffering it recounts cannot be read as numbers alone.
Mukherjee’s Bengal is hungry, but its hunger is also political—a hunger for survival, dignity, and freedom that empire denied.
The book argues with patient research and sharp narrative force that famine was not a natural disaster but a manufactured one, born out of war policies, imperial extraction, and the callous governance of an empire already showing cracks. What emerges is a picture where famine, communal tension, and the impending end of the Raj cannot be disentangled from one another.
The opening sets the tone by dismantling the colonial narrative that famine was simply a question of shortage. Mukherjee points instead to the structures of neglect, distorted wartime priorities, and the sheer violence of policies that privileged empire over human life.
Bengal in the early 1940s was already vulnerable—a peasant economy tied to the jute trade, dependent on imported rice, and badly exposed to fluctuations in supply and price. The war tightened the screws: requisitioning, military occupation, and the “denial policy” that stripped coastal Bengal of rice and boats to prevent their use by a possible Japanese invasion.
In reality, these measures crippled food distribution, inflated prices, and deepened scarcity. It was not so much an enemy invasion but the preparations against it that condemned Bengal’s poor to starvation.
Mukherjee’s chapters on the famine itself are searing. He shows the grotesque inequality in access to food—while the military and urban elites secured supplies, the rural poor were left to wither. Starvation spread with disease, migration, and social breakdown. But equally striking is his depiction of administrative indifference.
The refusal of the British government to import grain into Bengal, even as people starved by the millions, reveals a chilling logic of imperial governance: the subjects were expendable when weighed against the needs of empire. Relief, when it came, was both inadequate and deeply politicized. Aid became a tool of patronage and loyalty, manipulated by parties, landlords, and local bosses, further entrenching inequality and bitterness.
One of the strongest interventions of Hungry Bengal lies in connecting famine to the sharpening of communal tensions. Scarcity did not just kill; it corroded trust, turning communities inward, pitting Hindus and Muslims against each other in an atmosphere of suspicion and competition. Mukherjee suggests that the famine years were not only about mass death but also about the slow poisoning of intercommunal bonds, laying the groundwork for the communal violence of 1946 in Calcutta and Noakhali.
This is where his narrative diverges from purely economic histories of the famine, because he insists on seeing famine as political violence with long aftershocks in Partition-era Bengal.
The last part of the book draws the circle wider, linking famine to the loss of legitimacy of colonial rule itself. It was not only nationalist rhetoric but lived experience that delegitimised the Raj—what faith could remain in an empire that presided over mass starvation and then refused to acknowledge its responsibility?
The famine became both a wound and a rallying cry, collapsing the fragile moral scaffolding of colonial authority. By the time independence arrived, Bengal was already a society fractured by hunger, displacement, and communal division, and Partition became both culmination and continuation of these ruptures.
Mukherjee’s arguments resonate with and extend earlier scholarship. Bipan Chandra, Sumit Sarkar, and Sugata Bose have emphasised exploitation and peasant struggles, but Hungry Bengal insists on the famine’s entanglement with communal politics.
Madhusree Mukerjee’s Churchill’s Secret War exposed Churchill’s direct culpability, but Janam Mukherjee focuses more on Bengal itself—the social, political, and human consequences on the ground. Joya Chatterji’s Bengal Divided and Yasmin Khan’s The Great Partition traced communal mobilisation and Partition violence; here Mukherjee shows how famine conditions themselves incubated those very divisions.
The book’s power lies in refusing to treat famine and Partition as separate catastrophes. Instead, it presents them as two moments of a single unfolding process—famine as both revelation and catalyst.
It revealed the brutality of colonial governance, and it catalysed the communal fissures and social unrest that would define Bengal’s experience of the end of empire. What results is not only a history of famine but a history of Bengal’s disintegration under the twin pressures of war and colonial rule.
Reading Hungry Bengal is sobering, because it refuses consolations. The famine is not narrated as an aberration or accident; it is shown as the logical outcome of a system that was exploitative to its core. Nor is it allowed to sit in isolation, as though starvation were a one-off tragedy. Instead, Mukherjee draws the lines forward into Partition, showing how hunger, fear, and distrust traveled with Bengal into the violent upheavals of 1946–47. This fusion of economic, political, and social history makes the book not just a contribution to famine studies but a lens into the very nature of late colonial rule in India.
In sum, Hungry Bengal is a work that forces us to rethink the famine as both symptom and turning point. It demonstrates how war, famine, communalism, and Partition were not separate stories but interwoven strands in the unravelling fabric of colonial Bengal.
Its meticulous research and unflinching narrative place it alongside the most important works of modern South Asian history, while its moral force ensures that the suffering it recounts cannot be read as numbers alone.
Mukherjee’s Bengal is hungry, but its hunger is also political—a hunger for survival, dignity, and freedom that empire denied.
April 18, 2018
An in-depth enquiry into Bengal famine and various factors contributing to it, like colonial negligence, communal politics and wartime profiteering. A brilliant historical account of the much-overlooked part in Indian history!
January 11, 2023
One of the most psychologically difficult books I've ever read. The horrors which the British unleashed on India are widely ignored by westerners. This book perfectly captured the extreme racism of Britain and it's leaders
January 13, 2024
The book is a brilliant take on the otherwise neglected history of Bengal Famine. It problematizes the historic event as well as the factors that led up to it. Politics, history and famine are all dealt with deft academic astuteness in this fascinating book.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews