A video installation by Helen Cammock at the National Portrait Gallery has come under fire for criticizing the role of Winston Churchill in the Bengal Famine of 1943.
Titled Persistence (2025), the 40-min video is a video essay on the various portraits at the National Portrait Gallery. Cammock, who won the Turner Prize in 2019, examines the popular and lesser-known perspectives on those paintings. One such portrait was of Oliver Cromwell, where Cammock commented on the famine he brought on the locals while conquering Ireland, adding “a little like the wilful starvation of the Indian population by Winston Churchill.”
While the video work has been on display for 9 months, the backlash erupted only recently, when the British newspaper The Telegraph wrote a critical piece on the work. Writing for the newspaper, Craig Simpson said that Persistence “criticises a number of national figures depicted in the taxpayer-funded gallery, and incorrectly claims that Churchill ‘wilfully’ inflicted mass starvation on Indians” and that it “suggests that Churchill used mass starvation as a weapon of war.” Another signficant backlash came from Baron Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill’s biography in 2018, who wrote a letter signed by 50 dignitaries to the National Portrait Gallery.
The Bengal Famine of 1943, pertaining to regions of modern day India and Bangladesh, is considered one of the worst man-made disasters in modern history. Unlike a natural famine, the Bengal Famine was exacerbated by British policies during World War II. The British collected entire harvests for rationing of troops in the European theatre, and only paid the locals monetary wages – which soon became useless due to lack of grain reserves and extreme inflation. An estimated 800,000 – 3 million people died in a short time during the event.
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Supporters of Winston Churchill have historically either denied his involvement in the famine at all, or called it a necessary step to ensure sufficient rations for the fighting troops. However, most historians, scientists, and anthropologists have laid the blame on Churchill’s policies. This includes a 2019 scientific study that concluded that Churchill’s policies were a significant factor in causing the Bengal Famine.
