THE BENGAL FAMINE OF 1943: COLONIALITY AND HOW FAMINES ARE MAN-MADE

Abstract

The Bengal Famine of 1943 killed an estimated three million people in colonial India, and its causes remain contested. This paper argues the famine was man-made not only materially, through collapsed entitlements and denied aid, but epistemically: colonial power authored the categories of drought, scarcity, and market failure through which it was measured. Drawing on Sen's entitlement approach alongside Said, Spivak, Foucault, and Mbembe, it examines how colonial statistical control decided who was sustained and left to die. Engaging Roy's work on the Deccan famines, the paper shows entitlement failure generalises beyond Bengal, and concludes that the reluctance to label the famine a genocide is itself constitutive of the same colonial epistemology that produced it.