In 1943, famine was sweeping through India, still one of Britain’s colonies at the time. The situation was dire. People were dying in their millions. Parents dumped the bodies of their starved children into rivers and took their own lives by jumping in front of trains. There were reports of dogs eating the dead in the villages of Bengal. Yet during this time, under instruction from the British, India exported more than 70,000 tonnes of rice to Britain, which could have kept around 400,000 people alive for a year.
