Calcutta, autumn 1943. People who walked in from the countryside lie on the pavements of the empire's second city, begging not for rice but for the water it was boiled in. Photographs in The Statesman push the story past the censors. Before it ends, between two and three million people in Bengal are dead.
Why then
Japan has taken Burma and its rice. A cyclone in October 1942 wrecked the crop. The army and the war factories of Calcutta have first claim on food; boats are seized across the delta so an invader cannot use them; prices soar. London refuses or delays most of the shipping that might have helped.
What they wanted
London keeps every ship for the war against Germany and Japan. Bengal's ministers deny there is a famine at all, and traders hoard against the next rise in price.
What changed
Wavell, the new viceroy, sends the army to move grain in late 1943, and the deaths begin to fall. For Indian nationalists the famine is the final verdict on the Raj. It is British India's last great famine; independent India will know hunger, but not this.
Still argued
Amartya Sen argued it was a collapse of people's means to buy food, not of the supply. The fight since is over blame: weather, war and local failure, or policy in London, Churchill's included.