Bengal Famine of 1943 - Revisionists

Revisionists

Amartya Sen (1976) revived the claim that there was no shortage of food in Bengal and that the famine was caused by inflation, with those benefiting from inflation eating more and leaving less for the rest of the population, a claim which had been widely used at the time as a justification for not sending food to Bengal. Sen claimed that there was in fact a greater supply in 1943 than in 1941, when there was no famine. He rejected, without reasons, the calculations of The Famine Inquiry Commission, Afzal Husain, Mahalanobis, Pinnell (1945) and Braund (1945), each of whom had addressed all the evidence available, and concluded that there was significantly less food available in Bengal in 1943 than in previous years. Sen based his calculations purely on the crop forecast, assuming away the variations in carryover which were considered an important aspect of the rice market by contemporaries, and assuming that the only inter-provincial trade was by rail or by steamer, ignoring country boats which were the main transport other than to Calcutta. He also ignored all other sources of evidence. The crop forecasts which Sen uses as his sole source of evidence were generally considered to be meaningless, and the difference between one year’s forecasts and another was not just meaningless, but grossly misleading. Sen’s use of the data has been criticized in some detail by Goswami (1990 who says that even with the data Sen uses, calculations show that supply was substantially lower in 1943 than 1941. Bowbrick points out that if the famine was indeed caused by inflation, those who benefited from it would have had to eat many times more food per head than any population ever has. He also identifies more than 30 discrepancies between the evidence Sen presents and the facts in the sources he cites for it. Tauger (2006) (2009) makes similar criticisms.