Three Famines Read Online Free Page A

for the next two centuries was largely free from famine. Bengal is only 77,442 square miles, with a population of 60 million at the time of the 1943 famine. An administrative line divided West Bengal from East, and that would become the future border between India and Bangladesh. Bengal’s twenty-six districts averaged over 2 million each in population and nearly 3000 square miles each in area.
    Bengal is a country of waterways, but the main rivers that flow into the Bay of Bengal through broad deltas are the Hooghly, the Padma, the Brahmaputra-Jumuna and the Meghna. The annual rainfall is 85 inches, which sheets down between June and September on the south-east monsoon. During that season, the farmers and peasants survive in their huts and houses on mounds raised above the fields.
    The trigger for the famine of the early 1940s was the arrival on the coastline of a number of cyclones during 1942, and of a November 1942 tidal wave, which flooded the region around the Ganges Delta, killing 15,000 people. Because of Bengal’s small elevation above sea level, the tsunami rolled far inland, across the low farmlands and rice fields. It spread salt, which poisoned – just as they were about to be harvested – the crops of Muslim and Hindu farmers in one terrible act of God. A fungal disease named rice blast – which, like the potato blight, attacked the leaves, stalk and grain – struck the paddy fields as a result of the wave of saltwater, because the surge had swept the spores from infected parts of the country into as-yet-unaffected ones. The rice fungus reduced the average rice crop in the coastal areas and beyond by a third. Therehad already been the Bengali equivalent of a drought, arising from less than normal rainfall in the 1942 June to September monsoon season.
    During a debate in the British Parliament, Secretary of State for India Leopold Amery raised the Malthusian concept that something must be done to outstrip the pressure of population, which, he said, was increasing at the rate of 300,000 per month. This left little of a surplus for the individual farmer or purchaser. When the Bengal Famine Inquiry Commission, established by the government in 1944, said that, of all the provinces of India, Bengal was pre-eminent, in that it had the largest number of mouths to feed, it also declared that the province produced the largest amount of cereals of any province, and it grew jute as well. But, for millions, the balance between viability and family disaster was a very narrow one.
    The 1943 drought, unexpected but not unprecedented, even in modern times – since, for example, there had been others in 1925 and 1927 – had its own influence on all three of the annual harvests. The province’s different seasonal crops had distinct names. The aus was a less important harvest sown in April and harvested in the monsoonal rain of August and September. It was a crop meant to see farmers and their families through a lean time in the autumn, and since it was eaten by poor people, among Hindus it was not considered appropriate for ceremonial purposes. Indeed, the aus is not a robust crop and needs to be parboiled to preserve it. The winter crop, aman , was sown in May or June in paddies that had begun to be flooded by the south-west monsoon, if it brought its normal rain to the fields. Harvested in November or December, the aman crop was intended to reach marketsin the spring of the following year. It was of finer quality, and was the largest and most important crop from which the farmer took his family’s food, with – ideally – some left over to be marketed. The boro crop was planted in the broad irrigated regions of Bengal in November and harvested the following February or March.
    Over the entirety of Bengal, coastal and inland, the 1943 harvest was no more than 5 per cent less than the crop harvested in late 1941 and early 1942, despite the tidal wave and drought. In the areas most affected, it did put the families of