ARRIVING IN NEW Delhi on October 18, 1943, the new viceroy received a roundup of the colony’s affairs from the departing one. No progress was possible until Gandhi died, Linlithgow advised, and in any case India would take thirty years to learn how to govern itself. As for the famine, it could have been worse. Back in July Linlithgow had anticipated a death toll of up to a million and a half, but “we looked like getting off better than he had thought possible,” Wavell recorded.21
Days later, Viceroy Wavell flew to Bengal—and gauged that the situation was out of control. Ever since The Statesman had publicized the famine, wheat from the Punjab had been pouring into Calcutta, but it was still only enough for the city itself. Gruel kitchens had been opened in the rural districts, but “we simply have not the food” to give the portions prescribed by the famine code, the governor noted. Wavell mobilized the hitherto idle army to distribute relief and conduct vaccinations—an invaluable contribution, given that the military possessed the organization, the transport, the medical and other officers, and the pent-up energy that Bengal badly needed.22
Still, the army would need something to distribute. “This is now definitely a military as well as a charity problem since army must have a stable base,” Wavell explained to Amery. “Please impress upon War Cabinet that in my view situation is most serious and that if confidence is to be restored maximum possible imports of food grains against Government of India demand must be arranged.”23
BUT THE FAMINE had failed to temper the prime minister’s fury with Indians. That October, “apropos of nothing except some stuff which that wretched Cherwell had been pouring into his ears, [Churchill] exploded again on the subject of these monstrous debts which we were incurring to India for no value received and for the piling up of a useless and unreliable army in India itself,” wrote Amery. In early November, he drove with Churchill to a concert at Harrow, and on the way they talked about the colony. The prime minister reiterated that he would resist any move toward Indian self-government “as long as he lived.” Amery told him that the House of Commons was “unanimous that we should send more help from here” for the famine. Churchill retorted that he “did not care what the House thought in this matter. The thing was to win the war.”24
(The United Kingdom was releasing 500 tons of condensed milk from its stockpile. Field Marshal William Slim of the Indian Army would subsequently receive for his troops “battered, rusted tins” of milk, only half of which were still usable. The cans, he wrote, had been turned over from the United Kingdom stockpile and replaced with fresh cans from the United States.)25
Churchill did express sympathy to Amery for “having to bear all the kicks.” The secretary of state for India had to explain the famine to the politicians and public of the United Kingdom, and it was not easy. Speaking in various forums, Amery placed responsibility for the calamity on Indians (for overpopulation, hoarding, and misgovernment), the United Nations (which controlled shipping), and the Almighty (for crop failure). His correspondence and diaries make it clear, however, that Amery saw the famine as a straightforward consequence of the war effort. “The real question of course is whether a poor country like India could ever have afforded, over and above what it has been asked to do for its own defence, to pay for its forces overseas and give as free lease-lend all the materials which we have bought from India during the war,” he wrote to the head of the Indian inflation committee.26
Famine and sterling debt were two sides of the same coin: the exhaustive use of Indian resources for the war. Ever since Japan had reached the border, vast quantities of cash had had to be spent on military construction and provisions, explained a financial adviser to army commanders in India. “Added to this the shortage of world shipping grew more and more acute, our Far Eastern sources of supply [of rice] were lost, and imports into India of consumer goods for the civil population were reduced to a comparative trickle. So more and more money was being poured into the pockets of all classes of consumers but the goods on which they could spend their money were dwindling away, because civil stocks were being exhausted without further imports, and military demands both for India and overseas were taking a larger cut of the cake.” The Government of India could not borrow or tax enough money and so had printed it, causing the prices of already scarce essentials to explode. Since the war began, the colony’s expenditure on it had escalated by more than ten times, from £40.2 million (in the fiscal year that ended in March 1940) to £429.9 million (in the fiscal year that ended in March 1943). Roughly half of this outlay accrued to the United Kingdom’s sterling debt—which, too, was rising steeply.27
“In my view the Indians have got themselves into a mess very largely through their own fault, but no one can deny that they have obtained in return for their current sacrifices altogether exorbitant sterling balances,” Cherwell complained. To his mind, inflation, famine, and the sterling debt were all the fault of the Indians, as he had taken to calling officials of the Government of India, despite the fact that its upper echelons were almost entirely British. He may have been echoing Churchill’s charge that “everyone who goes to India or the India Office becomes more anti-English than the Indians”—a reference to Linlithgow and possibly Amery. (“The suggestion that the officials here have used their position as agents of His Majesty’s Government with an eye to India’s interests only has caused intense resentment,” Wavell would protest to Amery. “To the best of my belief there is no foundation whatever for this suggestion, and I hope you will be able to scotch it.” For a British official in India to faithfully serve those who paid his salary would have been for him to betray his patriotic duty to his homeland.)28
Lord Cherwell despaired that his imperial nation was “losing its instinct of self-preservation” and becoming too generous. The financial agreement with India was “most unfair to us,” he declared. India was not, for instance, being charged for certain military equipment that was sent from abroad. And whereas the United Kingdom paid for the early training of most of the native troops fighting in the Middle East and Africa, the colony was paying for British troops only while they were in India and not while they had trained in the U.K. (In August 1943, India was hosting 200,000 British soldiers. It had also paid for the training of 60,000 British troops in the years leading up to the war.) In one memo the Prof argued that the war in Libya was part and parcel of the defense of India, which should bear more of the cost of it. “Nothing will convince me that even under this one-sided agreement we have had value for our money,” he wrote. The Indians, he believed, had contrived to make “excessive profit at our expense.”29
Poring over the colony’s accounts, the S branch discovered what it termed a “scandal”: early in the war the colony had charged the United Kingdom customs duties on petrol sent for the army. As it turned out, the Government of India employed only 17 cost accountants (as opposed to 200 at the U.K.’s Ministry of Supply alone), who had made a further mistake. They had placed on India’s bill the petrol imported up until March 1942—which, according to the financial agreement, should have accrued to Britain’s. If that problem were also accounted for, the United Kingdom would owe the colony twice as much as it would get out of rectifying the customs error. So the Government of India suggested ignoring both mistakes.30
The S branch got the last word, however. It found that the reimbursement India demanded for petrol was much too high—which was the fault not of the Indians but of officials in London who had neglected to negotiate the price with sellers in the Middle East. The United Kingdom ended up repaying India only £5 million per year for the petrol, instead of the £25 million per year that the colony claimed it was owed. The upshot, as Cherwell’s assistant, Thomas Wilson, triumphantly put it, was that the S branch “paid for itself with a handsome margin to spare.”31
The inflation committee observed that the evidence “does not, in our view, sustain a general conclusion that H.M.G. has not had value for money.” Even so, the United Kingdom should repudiate the debt to India, urge
d the Prof. “Innumerable ways can, of course, be devised of wrapping up the brute fact that we cannot and will not pay the sums in question.” One was to forcibly alter the exchange rate between the rupee and the pound. (The possibility of just such a postwar devaluation of the rupee had aggravated the Bengal famine by making Punjabi peasants reluctant to exchange their grain for cash.) At the very least, Cherwell declared, India should bear the entire cost of the forthcoming campaign in Burma and Malaya.32
The colony would anyhow have to pay for the time being, Wilson pointed out in a paper drafted on behalf of Lord Cherwell. And whether or not the United Kingdom chose to reimburse any part of the cost in the distant future could make little difference to wartime inflation.33
FAMINE AND DEBT collided yet again on November 10, 1943, when Amery used Wavell’s report on Bengal to schedule a third War Cabinet discussion on relief. Bengal’s winter harvest of rice would not reach the market until January 1944, Amery advised. For the Government of India to have a “fighting chance” of procuring all the grain it needed from nervous cultivators, it would require another 50,000 tons of wheat by the end of December and a promise of the same quantity for each of the following twelve months. Leathers having already asserted that providing such quantities were out of the question, Amery concentrated on getting at least 50,000 tons for each of December, January, and February.34
The day before the meeting, the Prof wrote to the prime minister. “The quantities suggested are very small as compared with India’s total consumption of over 4 million tons a month,” he stated as usual. (Given Wilson’s September memo, he had to know that the argument was specious.) Such imports might have the effect of thwarting hoarders, but surely enough had been done toward that end. “Strong propaganda designed to discourage hoarding can be based upon the shipments we have already decided to make.” He continued: “This shortage of food is likely to be endemic in a country where the population is always increased until only bare subsistence is possible. In such circumstances small local shortages or crop failures must cause acute distress. After the war India can spend her huge hoards of sterling on buying food and thus increase the population still more, but so long as the war lasts her high birth-rate may impose a heavy strain on this country which does not view with Asiatic detachment the pressure of a growing population on limited supplies of food.”35
CHERWELL’S ARGUMENT WAS based on the famous proposition by the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, who in 1798 postulated that humans multiply faster than their means of sustenance, which meant that “premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.” Those peoples whose lack of sexual restraint caused them to reproduce recklessly were especially prone to what he called “positive checks” on their population. These unhappy constraints included war, disease, vice, and “the last, the most dreadful resource of nature”—famine. Malthus’s doctrine inspired no less than Charles Darwin, whose magnum opus On the Origin of Species is subtitled The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Because “more individuals are produced than can possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence,” Darwin wrote. “It is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms.”
The entwined worldview of Malthus and Darwin provided an explanation, beguiling to Victorian elites, not only for the evolution of species but also for the ordering of society. The “evolutionist will not hesitate to affirm that the nation with the highest ideals would succeed,” mused Savrola, a romantic hero that Churchill had created in the late 1890s, during his sojourn in India. Conversely, an excess of compassion could perpetuate the debilitating characteristics of defeated peoples, imperiling the greater good. An 1881 report by the Government of India on preceding famines concluded that the poorest Indians were the worst affected by such calamities, and if relief measures were to prevent their deaths they would continue to breed, making the survivors even more penurious. Death might even come as deliverance to those that nature had chosen to discard. Churchill had corroborated Malthus’s perspective, writing of an 1898 Indian plague: “a philosopher may watch unmoved the destruction of some of those superfluous millions, whose life must of necessity be destitute of pleasure.”36
In truth, Indian famines of the Victorian era cannot be fitted into Malthus’s framework, because he did not envision a worldwide grain trade that would enable the people of certain nations to consume far more or far less food than they could produce. Throughout the nineteenth century Indians were harvesting enough grain to feed themselves, but the export cycle had drained grain surpluses and driven food prices beyond the reach of the poor. Great Britain, in contrast, produced far less grain than necessary to sustain its people but was free of Malthusian constraints on its population because it relied on imported food. In short, to use the language that economist Amartya Sen would introduce—in the context of the 1943 Bengal famine—the vanishing purchasing power or “exchange entitlements” of some sectors of society, having been pitted directly against the far greater entitlements of others, resulted in starvation in India.37
In his memo to Churchill, Lord Cherwell suggested that the Bengal famine arose from crop failure and high birthrate. He omitted to mention that the calamity also derived from India’s role of supplier to the Allied war effort; that the colony was not being permitted to spend its sterling reserves or to employ its own ships in importing sufficient food; and that by his Malthusian logic Britain should have been the first to starve—but was being sustained by food imports that were six times larger than the one-and-a-half million tons that the Government of India had requested for the coming year. The memo did raise the prospect that harm would be inflicted on long-suffering Britons if help were extended to over-fecund Indians. At the War Cabinet meeting the day after the memo was promulgated, November 10, 1943, the prime minister gave his own Darwinian twist to Cherwell’s Malthusian considerations. Amery made his plea, following which “Winston, after a preliminary flourish on Indians breeding like rabbits and being paid a million a day by us for doing nothing about the war, asked Leathers for his view.”38
In his pronouncements over the years, Churchill had invented some wonderfully apt animal metaphors, with rabbits the least among them. A communist such as Stalin resembled a crocodile: “when it opens its mouth you cannot tell whether it is trying to smile, or preparing to eat you up.” After a coup had done away with a pro-Axis regime in Yugoslavia, he said Hitler was in a more vicious mood than a “boa constrictor, who had already covered his prey with his foul saliva and then had it suddenly wrested from his coils.” The prime minister declared that while facing Italian forces in the desert, Britannica was an “old lion with her lion cubs at her side,” one of which may have been India—or at least its warlike aspect, the army. Gandhi had once been a tiger, but he had long since descended the food chain. More often than not the small, brown, fangless, and numberless Indians whom the frail old pacifist personified brought to Churchill’s mind a prey species. “The British lion, so fierce and valiant in bygone days, so dauntless and unconquerable through all the agony of Armageddon, can now be chased by rabbits from the fields and forests of his former glory,” he had warned during the 1930s campaign against native self-rule. During the Quit India uprising, the government had the rebels “on the run.” Winston Churchill, the quintessential lion, was an excellent shot when it came to rabbits, and earlier in the war was heard to repeatedly murmur the first two lines of the ditty:39 Run rabbit, run rabbit, run run run.
Run rabbit, run rabbit, run run run.
Bang, bang, bang, bang! Goes the farmer’s gun
Run, rabbit, run, rabbit, run, run, run.
The prey’s role is to nourish the predator, and the predator’s role is to keep the prey from overbreeding. Lions do not feed rabbits.
In the War Cabinet meeting that November day, Leathers said that he could do nothing to assuage India’s hunger that December. He could, however, manage to send 50,000 tons for each of
January and February, and that was agreed upon. As it happened, Canada had offered a free gift of 100,000 tons of wheat to India to relieve the famine, and Viceroy Wavell had accepted. Churchill had already rejected Canada’s proposal because, according to a document with the Ministry of War Transport, “it would be unjustifiable to impose any additional strain on our shipping resources (especially if that involved seeking further shipping assistance from the Americans) for the sake of the wholly uneconomic prospect of shipping wheat from Canada to India.” But a Canadian ship of 10,000 tons had become available at Vancouver, and Prime Minister Mackenzie King wanted to fill it with wheat for India. To Amery’s consternation, Leathers and Churchill were “vehement against this” and resolved to stop the consignment. “I can only trust that they won’t have begun loading before Winston’s telegram arrives,” Amery recorded. “The trouble is that Winston so dislikes India and all to do with it that he can see nothing but the mere waste of shipping space involved in the longer journey.”40
At the time, a consignment of 9,000 tons of rice from Brazil was on its way to Ceylon, and shiploads of Australian wheat were circumnavigating India on their way to the Balkan stockpile. Other ships were traveling to Argentina to collect wheat for Britain—a trip twice as long as that to Canada or the United States. And as it happened, the United Kingdom already had more than enough wheat. “I hope that out of the present surplus of grain you will manage to do a little more for the domestic poultry keeper,” the prime minister directed the day after this meeting. If their hens could get more grain, Britons would get more eggs.41
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