Doublethinking famine

'Who was really to blame for the Bengal famine?' asked George Orwell in a 1945 essay titled 'Notes on Nationalism' referring to the World War II-era calamity. 'Probably the truth is discoverable, but the facts will be so dishonestly set forth in almost any newspaper that the ordinary reader can be forgiven either for swallowing lies or failing to form an opinion.' During the war, Orwell had served with the BBC, writing propaganda for transmission to the Subcontinent. His task was to ensure that the inhabitants of British India supported the war effort, notwithstanding their unhappiness with colonial rule. Orwell had quit the BBC in the autumn of 1943, right after – and possibly because – news of the famine had broken in London.

Born in what in 1903 was Bengal Province, and having been concerned about hunger in the British colonies as an adult, Orwell was no doubt informed about the drivers of the famine that an inquiry commission had subsequently listed. These included the Japanese occupation of Burma in the spring of 1942, which had cut off rice imports for India's poor; 'scorched earth' military measures in coastal and eastern Bengal, designed to retard a feared invasion by the Axis forces; cyclone and pest infestations that damaged the province's subsequent rice crop; and hoarding by local speculators. However, Orwell could not have known about factors that the famine commission had neglected to discuss, such as inflationary financing of the massive war effort and the War Cabinet's direct role in exacerbating the famine.