ABSTRACT
More than 3.5 million people starved to death in the Bengal famine of 1943. Twenty million were directly affected. Food grains were appropriated forcefully from the peasants under a colonial system of rent collection. Export of food grains continued in spite of the fact that people were going hungry. As the Bengali writer K.ali Charan Ghosh reports, 80,000 tons of food grain were exported from Bengal in 1943, just before the famine. At the time, India was being used as a supply base for the British military. "Huge exports were allowed to feed the
6 STOLEN J-farvest
More than one-fifth oflndia's national output was appropriated for war supplies. The starving Bengal peasants gave up over two-thirds of the food they produced, leading their debt to double. This, coupled with speculation, hoarding, and profiteering by traders, led to skyrocketing prices. The poor of Bengal paid for the empire's war through hunger and starvation-and the "funeral march of the Bengal peasants, fishermen, and Artisans.,,3
Dispossessed peasants moved to Calcutta. Thousands of female destitutes were turned into prostitutes. Parents started to sell their children. "In the villages jackals and dogs engaged in a tug-of-war for the bodies of the half-dead."4
