A very British Repression

The National Portrait Gallery (NPG) recently was criticised for displaying a video installation by Helen Cammock that, among other things, blames Winston Churchill for the 1943 Bengal famine that killed an estimated 3 million people. A letter was signed by 50 members of the House of Lords qua peers accusing the NPG of telling a “barefaced lie”, accusing the artist of being “ideologically motivated”, with scant self-awareness on that front. Their attack has been buttressed by the right-wing media, all their supposed support for free speech conveniently forgotten when the speech criticises one of their own. Indeed, peers signing this letter—the author Andrew Roberts and Nicholas Soames, Churchill’s grandson—have both earlier bemoaned attacks on free speech, Soames going so far as to claim that people have every right to be rude about Churchill.

Cammock later withdrew the piece from the NPG, criticising the pressures being placed on artists and institutions. While there was no official governmental act to force this withdrawal, the optics of members of the House of Lords attacking an artist and a gallery, pressuring them into submission, are not indicative of a free society. Cammock is just the latest target of the ideological war now being waged by the British state through every institution at its disposal, including the government, courts, and media. It is not a new war; it is merely the continuation of centuries of authoritarian control exercised by the British state over those it considers expendable. Parts of it are being enforced through regulatory processes, taking the form of massive blows on the right to protest over the last decade; others are being waged by oligarchs through propaganda in the media that they own.

Cammock’s work is not the first piece of art on the Bengal famine to be suppressed by Britain. During the course of the famine, Chittaprosad Bhattacharya travelled through the Midnapore district, documenting the famine through sketches that both commented on the government’s culpability and documented the desperate pain of its victims.^[1] These sketches were published in a book, “Hungry Bengal”, and promptly banned by the British government.^[2] About 5000 copies of the book were confiscated by the authorities and burned. In every authoritarian and fascist empire, the burning of books and documents are a hallmark of attempts to bury evidence of wrongdoing to evade accountability.

Naturally, given the extent of repression around even the documentation of the Bengal famine, responsibility for the tragedy is debated. That does not imply that the truth of the matter leaves Churchill blameless; Churchill’s contempt for Indians and opposition to decolonisation is no secret. The actions of his government in rejecting requests for food by the Indian Viceroy and treating the situation with contempt; Churchill is reported to have stated that the starvation of “under-fed Bengalis” mattered less than the “sturdy Greeks”.^[3] Historians document his decisions in prioritising food for British forces as being instrumental in Bengali people being correspondingly deprived as a result.^[4]

Claiming that Churchill was blameless (as the peers implicitly attempt in their letter) follows a pattern of attempts by Britain to rewrite history, systemically erasing and downplaying anything that might be considered embarrassing. A document-purging process that came to be known as “Operation Legacy” was instituted by Iain Macleod, directing that documents that might “embarrass Her Majesty’s Government… Police, military forces, public servants” were not to be passed on to successor governments.^[5] These were either sent back to Britain or destroyed, eliminating any hope of an honest and accurate accounting of the extent of harms caused by Britain’s colonial legacy. Indeed, the Bengal famine was deliberately excluded and suppressed both in investigations into the famine and in historical documentations of the period by British institutions.^[6]

Certainly, there is more at play for the famine than Churchill’s responsibility for the devastating impact of actions of his government. The British Empire’s entire strategy in India, from forcing farmers to move from food to cash-crops (such as poppy for opium and indigo)^[7] to the impoverishment of these farmers through land and tax policies set the stage for famines not just by reducing local food production across the subcontinent but also through the deliberate impoverishment of farmers by dispossessing them of their lands and yields, rendering them incredibly vulnerable to shortages.^[8]

Amartya Sen additionally challenges the notion of food shortages being the sole cause of famines in exchange economies, where what people have to sell and the price of food are equally critical.^[9] Sen demonstrates that the cyclone (the usual event blamed for the food shortages) reduced food production, but previous years had seen even less production and per capita supply without any corresponding famines, just as the 1943 famine was largely hitting rural areas while urban areas like Calcutta were more protected by better distribution and access.^[10] Whatever the source of the shortage in local food production and availability, fixing it—Sen argues—is where failures are noted.^[11] The indictment of Churchill in this is not independent of indictments of capitalist economies more generally: impoverishment is always a critical issue in the context of access to purchasing food.

Famines in modern economies are ultimately political failures. Criticising political failures must always be open to all. Repression of such criticism, whatever its form, is the hallmark of an authoritarian state/society afraid of its citizens. The peers do not try to repress Cammock’s work because it misrepresents the truth, they are afraid of what the truth says about themselves. They are afraid of knowing that the legacies of empire are ones that render them on the wrong side of history, that those they exploit for luxuries far outnumber them and will eventually rise up against them, and that the entirety of their own self-worth and self-image, wrapped up in inheritances of power, will be exposed for the sham that it is.