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The famine that had food

What a boy saw in Bengal in 1943, and the question it gave the world · 12 min

In 1943, a nine-year-old Amartya Sen watched starving villagers pass his school in Bengal, while no one he knew went hungry. Estimates of the dead run into the millions and are still disputed. Decades later he argued that what decided who starved was not how much rice there was but who could still afford it, a case historians still debate. Why people go hungry beside full markets, and how to check your own routes to what you need.

Takeaways

  • In the Bengal famine of 1943, the official inquiry put the food shortfall at about three weeks' needs for the year, and by Amartya Sen's figures there was more food per person than in 1941, a year with no famine. The price of rice rose five or six times, and the rural poor could no longer buy it.
  • Sen's lesson: hunger is often about who can get food, not only how much food exists. Historians still argue about how big the real shortfall was.
  • Your lens: when something you need gets hard to reach, ask whether there isn't enough, or whether your route to it has been cut. Then count what your work buys, and protect one route.

Chapters

  1. The boy who saw it pass0:17
  2. A shortage, surely2:07
  3. What your work can buy3:57
  4. Two people, one empty cupboard6:48
  5. Hear it done7:58
  6. Build yours9:15
  7. The answer10:36

References

  1. Sen, A. — Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation(1981)
  2. Famine Inquiry Commission — Report on Bengal(1945)
  3. Sen, A. — Home in the World: A Memoir(2021)
  4. Dabhoiwala, F. — Becoming Amartya Sen (The New York Review of Books)(2022)
  5. Tauger, M. B. — The Indian famine crises of World War II(2009)
  6. Tauger, M. B., & Sen, A. — The Bengal famine (letters, The New York Review of Books)(2011)
  7. Ó Gráda, C. — 'Sufficiency and sufficiency and sufficiency': Revisiting the Bengal famine of 1943–44(2010)
  8. Mishra, V., et al. — Drought and famine in India, 1870–2016(2019)
  9. Sen, A. — Development as Freedom(1999)