Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire

The author depicts a tragic picture of the most devastating 1943 famine in Bengal, highlighting the deep entanglement of the catastrophe in the region's history.

The author depicts a tragic picture of the most devastating 1943 famine in Bengal, in his words, “a picture (that) became ever more deeply enmeshed in the structures and collective psyche of Bengal.

The countryside lay in ruins, with the social fabric of rural society torn to shreds by disease, dislocation and death. Whole villages had been wiped out and hardship continue to take a devastating toll.”

Mukharjee’s quest for truth and objectivity allows him to rise above a narrow communal narrative and identify the real reason behind this most tragic event in the history of Bengal. His goal in this book is “to investigate the tightly wrought structures of influence and indifference that gave birth to famine in mid-twentieth century Bengal; to unfold the dialectics of power and powerlessness – from the local to the global – that defined the trajectory of famine; and to trace the protracted and highly divisive consequences of a catastrophe that scarred the landscape of India for generations to come.” He successfully achieves this objective by examining the Bengal famine in the light of the wider course of events on the verge of independence.

He illustrates in clinical details how the “history of India in the 1940s has been trapped in the nationalist mode.” Mukharjee argues that this story of woeful human tragedy has been relegated to footnotes in brief articles and occasional isolated inspection because of the effects of the British Colonial rulers’ preoccupation with the World War. This book was written to address this oversight.

​Read the rest at the Muslim World Book Review

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