Skip to main content

The Bengal famine of 1943

Statesman j.jpg

In 1943 Bengal was a generally accepted name for a large northeastern chunk of the British Raj.

In our own day, part of that chunk is known as Bangladesh. The rest is within India, but is divided into three states: West Bengal, Tripura, and Asam.

However defined, Bengal was the scene of a horrific famine in 1943. More than two million people died either of 'pure' starvation or of diseases common to the region, and seldom fatal except in a body weakened by malnourishment.  The causes of the famine are hotly disputed. Bad harvests were part of it, but the disruption of trading patterns by the war -- which was very close by at this time -- Burma was the front line -- was also part of it. The British government kept the matter as hush-hush as they could manage. They wanted to convey an atmosphere of normalcy in British India to the extent possible. That propaganda-driven denialism surely contributed to the death toll.

Beyond its humanitarian interest, the famine has a lot to do with the Indian people's insistence on independence after the war. As soon as the Japanese threat had disappeared, they clearly wanted nothing more to do with the Empire.

 Amartya Sen, in THE IDEA OF JUSTICE (2009) invokes this famine in order to defend the value of reasoning in politics and in the search for Justice. He is responding here to Jonathan Glover, author of a book critical of the whole idea of public reason, calling this Enlightenment idea a human disaster.

Sen is saying that reasoning about the causes and aggravating conditions of a famine is a good thing. It can assist those who want to help if they are not driven by sentiment alone, but by rational consideration of the facts and the options. Particular lines of reasoning night lead to negative results (as Malthusianism might lead to a hands-off approach), but surely the remedy for bad reasoning isn't the abandonment of reasoning altogether.

In a footnote Sen mentions the fact that so many of the deaths in Bengal were not pure starvation deaths. Reasoning from such facts would suggest that food assistance is not the only valuable sort of assistance famine victims require.



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more