In a Brexit-scarred Britain, increasingly reminiscent of its days as a colonial power, a new documentary on the ghastly Bengal famine of 1942-43 is raising fresh, uncomfortable questions on the Empire’s bloody legacy. The documentary, Bengal Shadows, made by two Bengali-origin French filmmakers, revolves around the British empire’s role, especially that of former Prime Minister Winston Churchill, in causing and exacerbating the Bengal famine, which starved nearly five million people to death.

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It held its first show in the United Kingdom last month, at a screening at the School of Oriental And African Studies (SOAS), University of London. The film has sought to tie in rare eyewitness accounts with historical research material and aims to pin the blame for the famine firmly onto the empire’s policies and Churchill’s decision making. With Britain increasingly showing signs of a growing nostalgia for its colonial past, this documentary is seeking to initiate a fresh conversation about the bloodied, little-known legacy that British colonialism has left behind in India. After last year’s referendum vote to leave the EU, there have been increasing calls to either glorify Britain’s colonial past or, ‘white-wash’ its past crimes. Since the vote, policymakers in the UK have been hinting that Britain would now develop a fresh focus on the Commonwealth and creating new trade partnerships with them. Internally, officials have dubbed this plan a way to create ‘Empire 2.0’. The UK’s International Trade Secretary Liam Fox even convened a first-of-its-kind meeting of trade ministers from across its former colonies earlier this year.

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Last year, a poll by YouGov, an internet-based data analytics and research firm, found that 44% people it surveyed said that Britain should be proud of its colonialism. This was fresh on the heels of an ongoing, spirited global campaign ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ striking against the legacy of Cecil Rhodes, a British colonialist in Africa. The campaign seeks to decolonise education and rid it of institutional racism, with the statue of Rhodes as a British imperialist being its symbol across campuses globally, including at Oxford University in the UK. In the poll, 59% said that the statue at Oxford must not be taken down. Later, Oxford’s Oriel College decided that the statue would not be taken down. Last week, Oxford University courted controversy when it announced a research project named ‘Ethics & Empire’, which aims to look at the rights and the wrongs of British colonialism. Over 170 international academics from across the UK, US, India and South Africa, have signed a letter expressing their “surprise and concern” at the project.

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The famine and the empire

At such a time, the documentary seeks to burst the bubble of a romanticised colonial past by drawing attention to the policies of the empire that led to the deaths of millions in the region. It seeks to interrogate the period between 1942 and 1943 in Bengal through the lives of eyewitnesses who saw the famine first hand. The documentary has eyewitnesses narrate sights of families selling their daughters in order to buy meals, women and children standing outside the homes of those better off, begging for the water in which rice was boiled.

 

The reasons behind the crippling famine, which affected the Bengal region, have been contested, with historians and scholarship being divided about the role of the British empire in it. Historians like Madhushree Mukherjee, author of the book Churchill’s Secret War believe that the empire and Churchill were culpable for their deliberate negligence in causing the famine and exacerbating it, while many others believe that the famine was caused due to external reasons and the empire was, at best, torn between keeping its war effort strong and providing relief to Bengal.

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The famine’s reasons were complicated and manifold. A major reason was the cyclone of October 1942 which washed away the crop that year, leaving very little rice till the next harvest season, next year. With the advent of the Second World War and the onward march of the Japanese on the South East Asian frontier, the empire was increasingly nervous of a Japanese invasion of India, especially after Burma fell. That is when a cornered empire announced the implementation of the “scorched earth” policy, one where both, the military and civil administration was instructed to destroy all industrial, military and transport facilities along with means by which the enemy army can gain sustenance so that even if the area falls in the enemy’s hands, the enemy can’t do much about it. This would mean that water stocks and food should be kept to the bare essential minimum quantities that the local population would require. As Mukherjee writes in her book, this meant that since the rice crop was already harvested, the British administration ordered a forceful seizure and destruction of all rice storage.

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