'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.
For instance, at Winston Churchill's personal insistence, India had continued to export rice for the war effort, even as it faced severe shortages. Worse, the prime minister had declined to relieve the famine, instead opting to stockpile wheat – available in Australia – for the use of the United Kingdom and Europe after the war was over. The famine commission had avoided these discomfiting issues. Rather, it had created the false impression that ships were not available to ferry relief, and that only imports of rice, which was scarce worldwide, would have broken the famine. The commission also failed to mention the international offers of rice and wheat that the War Cabinet had rejected.
Certain papers pertaining to these decisions on India were released to the public decades afterward. Along with transcripts of the secret hearings of the inquiry commission, they enable a partial reconstruction of events before and during the calamity. The transcripts were to have been destroyed, but one copy survived thanks to a renegade member of that commission. Nevertheless, at least one relevant file in the records of the India Office, the administrative centre in London that oversaw the Subcontinent's affairs, is missing and another has been destroyed. Pertinent documents are also missing from the papers of Leopold Amery, who served as the secretary of state for India at the time, and who had heated arguments with Churchill over famine relief. Microfilms of other documents have sections on shipping activity related to India blacked out. And a set of candid notes on War Cabinet meetings, released in 2006, stop unaccountably in mid-July 1943, just before Churchill made the first and most important of his decisions to deny famine relief. The death count in Bengal is estimated at about three million.