[Music] they gave India Railways cricket and bureaucracy but now historians say that the British may have left India with much worse the general consensus that the British would like to give you is that they were really good colonizers compared to for example the belgians and the Congo but when you actually looked at the figures you see that there were at least 50 million excess deaths in the period between 1880 and 1940 and some people say in fact it might have been even like 100 million recent analysis by economic historian Robert C Allen suggests that extreme poverty in India more than doubled under the British with real wages falling and famines increasing in frequency and severity some Scholars say that at this period the Indian life expectancy dropped to 22 years 22 which is like when you think about it it's unbelievable we shall defend our Island whatever their class may be we shall Never Surrender and while Winston Churchill was leading the fight against the Nazis in World War II experts now say he caused a massive famine in 1943 in Bengal which produced a third of India's rice with the Japanese invasion of neighboring Burma he introduced a scorched Earth policy destroying significant rice fields to deny Japanese Invaders Food Supplies and that's not all there is no doubt that if not overtly certainly covertly he contributed to the death rate because he actually redirected and stopped ships carrying produce to the Bengal Delta because he was scared that the Japanese in the second world war would take over the ships and he was not particularly empathetic to the population there he didn't sort of really feel the need to rush in to try and save them in her book Churchill's secret War journalist medusri Mukherjee reported that the PM thought the Indian army was useless and the secretary for India Leo Emery wrote in his diary Churchill said Sending relief would be no good as Indians breed like rabbits anyway I feel that Churchill was focused on the saving of the empire for Britain he was not focused on the welfare or well-being of the colonial subjects I mean there is enough evidence in the war cabinet papers to show that with the average daily ration of about 400 calories the same as buchenwald concentration camp prisoners it's in estimated that more than 3 million people died as a result my parents were actually in Calcutta during the famine in 40 to 43 and they experienced a kind of trauma that stayed with them till their deaths my mother used to tell me the story of how there would be skeletal people in the street begging for the water drained from cooking rice asking for starch water how they would be dead bodies that there were not enough people to cremate which would just lie there it had a terribly traumatic impact on them and they remembered it for the rest of their lives and when other El Nino weather events caused more droughts it's thought the East India Company and the British Raj male Administration resulted in millions of needless deaths but despite a massive population increase India has an experienced major famines its independence 75 years ago the British have got off relatively lightly in terms of their colonial rule and the reason I think for that is the way in which they have control the archives and they have written the story of colonialism and it has been about education trains legal regimes it has not been about Hunger famine the industrialization commiseration all of those have disappeared from their history books