Dear Prof Desai,

Many thanks for the pointer.  I found a recent essay by Patnaik highly
critical of the role Keynes played regarding the c. 1943 Bengal famine,
in the sphere of high politics and central banking.

However, I am coming at the matter from the vantage of the guy in the
street.   Patnaik might well offer a route to solving my puzzlements,
but I have yet to join the dots.  My only criticism of Patnaik is that
she seems a little ambiguous about the victim class in the matter.
Other sources stress that it was specifically the indigent self employed
service workers.   Patnaik sometimes seems to agree, but frequently
refers instead to the peasantry as a whole, and my understanding is that
agricultural producers were saved to a great extent by being self
sufficient in foodstuff.

I make three empirical observations underlying my puzzlement:

1)  The minutes of a meet of the Chamber of Princes at the time seemed
to lay the blame for the famine problem on a physical lack of small change.
Banknote collectors have identified a very large number of cardboard
token emergency “coins” which seem to follow through on that concern.

2)  The SS City of Cairo was sunk by a German submarine November 4 1942
en route from Bombay to England with 100 tons of silver coins on board.
This cargo was salvaged in 2013, and the proceeds apparently split
between the salvers and the UK Treasury.  Reports (in the Indian press,
but not reported in the UK press as far as I can discover) were that the
UK Treasury placed an embargo on any press report until after the coins
had been melted.

3)  Bengal’s monetary system differed from the rest of India for perhaps
a thousand years before this event, in that the population almost never
got a state issued circulating copper coinage. Energetic defenders of
peasant emancipation like Sher Shah and Akbar both attempted but failed
to rectify that situation back in the 17th century.

I do not know if these three matters are related to each other, nor how
they relate to Patnaik’s criticism of Keynes.

I long wondered if money changers themselves were hoarding copper coin -
seeking super normal profits.  But since 2015 a new possibility occurs
to me - that since the circulating silver currency itself was being
physically sucked out of the Indian economy, the existing copper coinage
might become inadequate - being pushed into doing double duty to fill
the gap.

Any thoughts/criticisms welcome

Rob Tye

PS  that copper coin might be pushed into doing double duty by a flight
of silver was postulated recently by Nick Mayhew, regarding English 18th
century affairs.