Bengal Famine 1943: How Churchill Starved 3 Million Indians | Independence Day 2026 | REACTION!!

How you doing? >> Now that you're here, terrible. >> The biggest, the baddest, wackiest, funniest, filmiest show on earth. >> [music] >> Hey, welcome back to our super dark side of Corbin's. >> I am Rick. >> it Instagram to do more juicy kind of sweet and twisted accounts like that. Welcome back. Today we've got a video and this is a educational video from the first post. I think we've seen a couple of videos from this. This is the Bengal famine of 1943. So, this will be an uplifting video. >> Oh, yes. >> Churchill starved >> Ready for a laugh a minute. >> a million Indians. >> Ready for a laugh a minute. You know, two people that are revered and loved abundantly in America are Winston Churchill and Mother Teresa. Yeah. Find them standing, gentlemen. >> [clears throat and snorts] >> And what a kind lady. Here we go. >> Now as India prepares to mark 80 years of independence, we're looking back at the stories that shaped India's history, including one of the darkest chapters of British rule, the Bengal famine, a catastrophe that left up to 3 million people dead. Was it simply a result of war, crop failure, food shortage, or did British policies turn a crisis into a catastrophe? >> Yep, on purpose. >> Over the next few days, we'll bring you stories from India's past. Some dark, some difficult, and some that deserve to be remembered. So, keep an eye out. This is episode one of the story of the 1943 Bengal famine. >> And we need a really big international movie about this. >> In the spring of 1943, American GI John Mueld thought he had escaped the worst of the war. After months in the dust and deprivation of Burma, now Myanmar, he was transferred to Calcutta. The glittering capital of British India's Bengal province. >> Probably. >> After London, Kolkata, then called Calcutta, was the second largest city in the British Empire. Known for its grand colonial architecture, universities, >> We've been there. >> and vibrant cultural life. Mule expected comfort, >> perhaps even a little luxury. Instead, he found a city dying. He saw starving families [music] on the streets, and children ravaged by disease and malnutrition. The city of palaces had become a city of mass starvation. >> [music] >> This is what Mule wrote in his journal. >> Calcutta was a city where the dying agony of the beggar in the streets existed [music] side by side with cocktail parties, or d'oeuvres, seven-course dinners, and padlocked [music] garbage cans. >> Oh, yeah. >> Mule had arrived in Calcutta during the Bengal famine. >> [music] >> A period of starvation, disease, and mass migration between 1943 and 1944. Up to 3 million Bengalis would die [music] during the famine. Most of them among the poorest in society. It's a staggering figure, almost three times [music] greater than the number of British soldiers and civilians who died in both World Wars combined. The Bengal famine didn't happen because there wasn't enough food. It happened because of the criminal neglect of the British Empire. >> Most famines [music] are not because of a lack of food. >> Today, the memory of the Bengal famine has all but disappeared. >> Wow. >> Those who do remember it still argue over one question. Who was responsible? >> The British. >> How could millions starve in one of the most fertile regions of the world? And why, more than 80 years later, is the Bengal famine still one of the most fiercely debated chapters of the British Empire? For centuries, [music] famines were blamed on nature. A failed monsoon, a drought, or a crop that simply never came. But Bengal was different. >> [music] >> There was no catastrophic drought in 1943. In fact, modern climate studies have found [music] that the Bengal famine was the only major famine in modern Indian history not caused by severe [music] drought. Yes, there were setbacks. Japan's conquest [music] of Burma in 1942 cut off an important source of imported rice. A powerful cyclone struck Bengal later that year, destroying [music] homes, damaging crops, and contaminating farmland with seawater. [music] A fungal disease also affected part of the rice harvest. Together, these events put enormous [music] pressure on food supplies. But they did not create a shortage large enough to explain the deaths of nearly 3 million people. The official famine inquiry commission estimated that the food deficit in 1943 was roughly 6% of Bengal's annual requirements. 6% not 60, six. So, where did the food go? >> The British. >> Economist Amartya [music] Sen, who won the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his work in welfare economics, had witnessed the famine as a child. He very famously calls it an entitlement failure. The food existed, but millions lost the ability to buy it. As [music] panic spread, hoarding and speculation pushed prices even higher. >> Price gouging. >> And in early 1942, [music] a mound of rice, which was roughly 37 kg of rice >> [music] >> and a standard measure used in markets across British India, cost less than six rupees. By the middle of 1943, it sold for more than 30 rupees. >> [music] >> Wow. >> In some districts, >> Wow. >> prices crossed 100 rupees. >> I'm sure the economy was doing better than ever. >> It means that a day's wages could no longer buy a family's daily meal. >> What if somebody blocked the Strait of Hormuz? >> Agricultural laborers, fishermen, >> [music] >> rickshaw pullers, factory workers were simply left to fend for [music] themselves. No longer able to afford food for survival. Food remained in warehouses. [music] It remained in markets, but for millions, it had become impossible to afford. Mind you, this was happening at the height of the Second World War. After Japan captured Burma in 1942, British officials feared a Japanese invasion [music] of Eastern India. >> Uh-huh. Their response was the denial policy. A military strategy designed to deny food and transport [music] to an advancing enemy. But on the ground, >> [music] >> the policy crippled Bengal itself. Thousands of boats, the very lifeline of its rivers, were confiscated or destroyed. >> [music] >> Rice stocks from vulnerable coastal districts were seized or relocated. The result was that food stopped reaching the very people who needed it the most. Fishing communities lost their livelihoods. Villages became isolated. And the local trade networks that had sustained Bengal for generations began to collapse. And what was the British Raj doing as the crisis escalated? India's newly appointed [music] Viceroy, Lord Wavell, sent repeated urgent appeals to London asking for emergency grain shipments. >> [music] >> He requested around million tons of food grain to halt the catastrophe. Cabinet records today reveal that British officials in India repeatedly warned London that millions were facing starvation. [music] >> [music] >> But Britain, it was fighting for survival. During the Battle of the Atlantic of World War I, German U-boats had sunk thousands of Allied merchant ships, creating [music] a severe shortage of cargo vessels. Every available ship was being allocated to move soldiers, ammunition, fuel, and food to active theaters of war. >> the food ships. >> So, despite calls from British India, >> only a small fraction >> initially approved by then Prime Minister Winston Churchill's war [music] cabinet. The bulk of the imports arrived well after the famine had already reached its deadliest phase. Churchill himself is reported to have dismissed the crisis saying Indians were breeding like rabbits. >> That is a true quote. >> Churchill also frequently expressed deep hostility towards the Indian independence movement. >> Aw, what a shame. >> peevishly asked during Mahatma Gandhi's political fast, why Gandhi had not yet died. This was the racial attitude that influenced [music] Britain's response. By the end of 1944, up to 3 [music] million people were dead. Many did not die from starvation [music] alone, but succumbed to malaria, cholera, smallpox, and dysentery. Diseases [music] that spread rapidly through bodies already weakened by hunger. >> [music] >> The relief from the British Raj came much too late. And it was nowhere [music] near enough to match the scale of the catastrophe. Around 700,000 [music] families lost their livelihoods, while millions more were forced to sell their land, livestock, tools, and homes just for one more meal. Those who survived [music] carried the trauma for generations. >> It has been our duty to record disasters as it occurred. A million and a half of the poor of Bengal [music] fell victim to circumstances which it was within the power of human foresight to avert. >> More than eight decades later, there is no major international memorial or museum dedicated to the millions who perished. >> Oh. >> Remembering the Bengal famine means confronting an uncomfortable truth. That one of the deadliest disasters of the 20th [music] century was not simply the result of bad weather. It was a colonial catastrophe orchestrated by the British Empire. >> [music] >> Imagine living in a country where you don't apologize for things you did in the past. Just going to let America sit there for a second. >> Do you remember >> [laughter] >> Do you remember how bent out of shape some Americans got when President Obama went to Japan and had the audacity >> [clears throat] >> to bow before the Prime Minister and then apologize for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? How many people were ang- angry with that? Yeah. >> [snorts] >> Meanwhile in Gaza >> [laughter] >> Hey, we're not doing Gaza. We're just funding it. Okay? >> Yeah. >> It's different. >> Yeah. >> Now, after all How many people died in the partition? >> I got the the um >> During the that >> the >> the whole partition debacle? I don't know that number. I do know that the Holocaust saw 6 million Jews alone. That does not include a large contingent of other people groups. >> Oh. >> So, this is this is half of that. >> 1943, right? >> This? >> Yeah. >> 43 and 44. >> Okay. Uh 3 million. Estimated. Uh it the highest is 2 million estimated during the partition. So, we're [snorts] at 5 million at the end of their 10 year in India. >> Right. At the end. >> Right. Yet, if you ask uh an American or British person cuz I guarantee they don't teach it. Uh um like you know, what's the one of the worst tragedies in the past, you know, 100 years? >> Everybody says the Holocaust because of course it is. It is an awful tragedy. >> Yeah. It not tragedy. It's a obviously a uh the Holocaust, right? Um Nobody's going to mention this cuz they don't know it. >> Correct. >> A man-made famine that didn't need to happen that they let happen. >> It's happening and has been happening. >> Mhm. >> I remember finding out back 25 some odd years ago. Uh it was that was when I first started to understand. I was probably about 30 years old. >> Mhm. >> And I was flabbergasted by stories in the news about starvation in Sudan. >> Yeah. >> And then I was reading about it and when I found out that the starvation had nothing to do with famine but had to do with the controlling government squeezing out the opposition by starving them out. And there would be zero chance of food donated by any organization in the world getting to the hungry because you couldn't get it into the country because the government wasn't allowing it and they were doing it to their own people. That was when I had my first real awakening to the evils that human beings are capable of doing to each other. Holocaust is obvious. It's evil and and terrible, but what you have there is just a hell-driven prejudice toward a particular group of people that you're trying to obliterate. >> Yeah. >> Right? >> Yeah. >> I find it at least equally as nefarious and evil to do something like this. >> Mhm. >> Where they are just your collateral You don't even have a passion to kill them. They are collateral damage. They breed like rabbits. They are nothing. They are You don't even have a a bad feeling about them. They're expendable because they're way less That's a question I saw somebody ask on a news show talking to um a person in Israeli government. And they said to them, "Is a Jewish life worth as much as a Palestinian life?" They would not answer the question. And they were asked five times in a row and kept saying, "Well, that's like asking me uh if a man and a woman are equal." And they said, "No, that is not what I'm asking you. It has nothing to do with gender equality or sex equality. I'm asking you if a human life" and they gave an example said, "I consider my life to be of no more worth than your life." So, I'm going to ask you again for the fifth time, is a Jewish life worth more than a Palestinian life?" And they wouldn't answer the question. >> Of course they wouldn't. >> And then I've seen another reel of somebody on the ground in Israel talking to an Israeli man who goes the other extreme saying that exact same question and says, "What's the value of a a Jewish life compared to Palestinian life? Is it worth uh is is the same value of a another Palestinian life?" And he said, "Oh, no. No. No, it's not even worth 10 million Palestinian lives." And they said, "One life?" He said, "Yes. You don't understand because you're not God's chosen people." >> [snorts] >> This is the This is the world that has always been and continues to be that >> It's amazing what happens when you >> really >> tell people that they're God's chosen >> Yeah. So, that we've said it before. You said it the other day. We were saying about the two the two best things that have ever really contributed to the the well-being of people on Earth is religion and politics. And you said, "Yeah, and then when you put them together." >> Yeah, it's great. >> Oh, it's so good. >> That's good stuff. >> Yeah. >> Um >> [clears throat] >> Yeah, it's that's awful situation. I I wish there would be more of a >> [snorts] >> a movie that could educate the world the West in particular. >> Yeah, Nolan, if you want to make a movie >> Well, well, I don't know if I'd want him. >> But, you could have >> No, I only say that because the world would go. >> Yeah, for the scale of it. >> Yeah, the world would go see it. >> Fund it. But, get it >> It would be told better by a huge amount of Indian filmmakers. Much better, but the audience that needs to see it is the audience outside of India. >> Mhm. >> Sadly, that's the only way that that would have to be done. You'd have to have a company that produces the way say like Brad Pitt will produce things where you get you could get an Indian film and an Indian filmmaker, but you need you need a Brad Pitt, you need a Leo DiCaprio, you need a Scorsese who'd be the producer and be the voice for it and the promoter of it to get it to be seen. >> Yeah. >> It It It It's sadly, that seems to be the only way cuz they're not teaching it in school here. >> No, unfortunately not. Um anyways, great video in terms of education-wise. >> Um >> Yeah. >> So, >> Um >> important to never forget >> videos like this. Uh please let us know what they are and anything else we need to know down below. >> The biggest, the [music] baddest, wackiest, funniest, filmiest show on Earth. >> Never forget. >> [music]