The Great Bengal Famine in Britain: Metropolitan Campaigning for Food Relief and the End of Empire, 1943–44

Abstract

ABSTRACTHistorical research on the ‘Great Bengal famine’ has recently grown more diverse, but is still almost exclusively limited to political and economic dynamics that took place within the province and, at times, wider India. This article provides a fresh perspective on the unfolding disaster by reconstructing the emerging demands for food aid in Britain, arguing that to examine the famine through this lens can enrich the understanding of how (anti-) imperialism, colonialism and humanitarianism converged. It reveals that the responses to the famine, rather than being a seemingly natural expression of compassion and empathy, were conditioned by representations of the famine manufactured by Indian nationalists, anti-imperialists, and apologists of the empire. As information on the deteriorating food crisis in Bengal began to filter through to the metropole in January 1943, both Indian nationalists and the British left merged demands for food relief and claims for Indian self-rule in their anti-famine campaigns. Whereas anti-imperialists used literary and visual representations of the famine to illustrate the British Empire’s failure to care for its colonial subjects, conservatives lapsed into nineteenth-century rhetoric that framed the famine as proof of India’s unpreparedness for self-government. The mobilisation of food aid in Britain, thus, is illustrative of ideological and political contestations that accompanied the last years of the British Raj and the start of the age of decolonisation. At the same time, the delay and the very nature of public debates and responses to the Bengal famine in Britain illustrate the crucial role of the media in raising awareness for distant crises and point to the problematic relationship of mediated representations of humanitarian disasters and the successful mobilisation of aid.