A Dying Colonialism: World War Two, the Bengal Famine and Civil War in India (1939–1946)

Wednesday, 07 October 2026 | Room 519, Fifth Floor, Kaneff Tower, Keele Campus, York University

With Janam Mukherjee, Toronto Metropolitan University

This talk will examine the impacts of World War Two on colonized India, particularly through the lens of the Bengal famine, which killed 3-5 million people between the years 1943 and 1946. On the allied war-front against Imperial Japan, Bengal bore the brunt of wartime policies that can only be described as authoritarian. During the Quit India movement, the revocation of civil liberties, mass arrests, collective fines and even machine gunning from the air characterize the dying colonial state's response to the freedom movement. Meanwhile, in Bengal, a scorched-earth campaign, in the name of discouraging Japanese invasion, destroyed local transportation and ignited a frenzy in commodity markets. The price of rice began to skyrocket. By the summer of 1943, hundreds of thousands of starving people descended on the colonial city of Calcutta, the central hub of wartime production and troop movements for the allied war with Japan. I will furthermore examine the impact that mass starvation in Bengal had on the political economy of Bengal, and India as a whole, with particular focus on the Calcutta Riots of August 1946—the first cataclysm of communal violence in British India in the lead up to independence and partition.

Janam Mukherjee is an associate professor of history at Toronto Metropolitan University. He teaches classes on colonialism and decolonization, South Asia and oral history methods and practice. His primary research is structural violence in colonial India. His book Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire, is a foundational study of World War Two in India and the Bengal Famine of 1943.

This event is part of the Demos, Democracy and Democratization: South Asia Lecture Series 2026–27.

For more information: sarc[at]yorku.ca