Hungry Bengal

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 Bengal: 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.

‘Janam Mukherjee has written an engrossing account of the most tragic event in the history of Bengal, the Great Famine of 1943 ... What singles out Mukherjee's book is his thesis that the famine was at the root of the Hindu-Muslim violence that consumed Calcutta during the Great Killings of 1946, thereby contributing to the even more cataclysmic partition of the subcontinent a year later.’ - History Today

‘Mukherjee's great achievement in Hungry Bengal is to show how starvation provided an essential underpinning for the outbreak of communal violence in Calcutta in August 1946. ... As Mukherjee insists, the Bengal Famine was no natural disaster ... Indian elites and political leaders were both accessories and beneficiaries ... Here, Mukherjee highlights a crucial silence in Indian historiography.’ - New Left Review

‘The victors write history, but finally in this outstanding polemic, Mukherjee tells the victims' side of the story.’ - Asian Review of Books

‘By refocusing the chronological lens of famine and by consistently showing how government prioritisation of the war effort affected Bengal, this highly original book achieves a paradigm shift in thinking about the famine. Extremely comprehensive, clearly written, and justifiably angry, Hungry Bengal will be indispensable for scholars of modern India.’ - Yasmin Khan, author of The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan