The Great Indian Famine

THE GREAT INDIAN FAMINE

September 24

journey from Ahmednagar

THE GREAT INDIAN FAMINE 1943-44

GEORGE BARNSBY

The Indian Famine of 1943-44 was one of the greatest crimes of British imperialism. The famine was entirely man made. About 3.5 million people died as a result of the famine. There was no overall grain shortage. Wheat was still being exported from India and if rice had been rationed there would have been no shortage of that.

The most vivid and passionate English reporter of the famine was Clive Branson. Not that I knew of Branson at the time. His reports were published only in 1944, by which time he was dead. His book British Soldier in India, the Letters of Clive Branson, was published by the British Communist Party and quickly found its way to India.

Branson was born in India to an army officer's family in 1907 but brought back to England as a baby. He received an education usual to an officer of preparatory school, followed by a public school. Here he showed a talent for drawing and subsequently went to the Slade School of Art where he became interested in Marxism and joined the Communist Party in 1932. When the fascists of Spain, Germany and Italy overthrew the democratically elected Republican government of

Spain, in what is often erroneously known as the 'Spanish Civil War, he joined the International Brigade. In one of his early battles he was captured and spent eight months in a Franco concentration camp. When he returned from Spain in 1938 he spent the period until his call-up to the British army in 1941 painting and doing political work in Battersea. Here, he unknowingly affected my political development, by working in the Communist Bookshop on Lavender Hill which I frequented. This I have subsequently learned from his widow, Noreen, who I have worked with ever since in the Communist Party History Group, now the Socialist History Society.

Branson arrived in India in May 1942. His first mention of famine in Calcutta was on August...