Bengali cuisine today is a living testament to these times. We have dishes that use jute leaves (a waste product from the jute being produced), tree barks, mango/jackfruit seeds, even just water leftover from cooking rice (people would beg at the doors of richer houses for the rice water). We have separate dishes for ripe/unripe/overripe fruits and vegetables. Nothing could be wasted. My friends would joke in school that “God you bengalis eat everything,” but there is a grim history behind it. — source, am bengali, grew up listening to grandparents’ stories.

A number of reasons but primarily British Colonia policy.

When the Japanese invaded Burma in 1942 there was a huge influx of refugees into Bengal, approximately 500,000 people which strained the local economy. Additionally the British Raj government had laws which forced local suppliers of goods such as food and textiles to sell to the military at a fixed low price but no price controls for the civilian market so any goods making it to the civilian market were already hugely inflated in price.

What really kicked off the famine that killed over 3 million people though was the British decision to enact a scorched earth policy in bengal in anticipation of a Japanese invasion, burning crops in the fields and destroying stockpiled food supplies.

Several members of the British government in India did in fact plead to Churchills cabinet during this period for relief shipments of food to stave off the growing famine from 1942-1943 including Viceroy Linlithgow, Secretary of State for India Leo Amery, supreme commander of Southeast Asia Admiral Louis Mountbatten, Commander in-Chief of British forces in India Claude Auchinleck, and Viceroy Archibald Wavell (Linlithgow’s replacement), but all of them were rejected. Churchill’s cabinet also refused offers of relief shipments from several other nations leading to speculation the the famine was deliberately engineered by Churchill and his government as a punitive response to the Quit India movement which is likely true.

I should also add that when asked about it Churchill apparently laughed and said the Indians deserved it for ‘breeding like rabbits’.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2019/...

aside from the policies of colonial regime mentioned above ,

there was also wartime money printing by colonial regime to finance the war effort, which I'm pretty sure you all know does what to food prices....

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Capitalist British colonialism killed more people than even the highest estimates for all of communism... India alone... Over 40 years.

TL;DR Best guess, India had about 165 million excess mortalities from 1880-1920.

"It is widely recognized that famine became more regular and deadly under British colonialism than in the Mughal period (Davis, 2002; Tharoor, 2017). There is evidence of a particularly severe mortality crisis in the late 19th century. Demographers have used India’s censuses to reconstruct life expectancy and the crude death rate between 1881 and 1920 (Dyson, 2018, p. 126, p. 279-280). Table 3 reports this evidence. As Allen has suggested that India’s welfare standards in the 16th century were similar to Western Europe’s, for comparison we also include average figures for England in the 16th- and 17th-century (data from Wrigley & Schofield, 1981). Both the English and Indian figures are the results of modern demographic reconstructions, so changes in the mortality rate are not affected by changes in the rate of registration. We see that in the 1870s India’s crude mortality rate had already risen considerably higher than early modern England. The situation deteriorated thereafter, with mortality rising by 19%, and life expectancy plummeting to 22 years. If we estimate exc...