London, Jun 16 (PTI) The National Portrait Gallery in London has defended “freedom of artistic expression” after Winston Churchill was accused in a video installation of deliberately starving Indians during the Bengal famine under British colonial rule.
The gallery’s ‘Artists First: Contemporary Perspectives on Portraiture’, which went on display in September last year, hit the headlines this week when some sections of the UK media highlighted claims relating to Britain’s wartime prime minister.
Jamaican heritage British artist Helen Cammock’s film ‘Persistence’ references Churchill as being behind the “wilful starvation of the Indian population” during the famine in 1943. “At the National Portrait Gallery, in addition to our own permanent collection displays, we also give opportunities to artists to create works of art in response to our collection,” the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) said in a statement.
“This work by Helen Cammock, which was commissioned in 2023 and has been on temporary display at the NPG since September 2025, is created and narrated by the artist and includes her personal reflections on historical and current events.
“We support freedom of artistic expression while not necessarily endorsing the opinions expressed by any of the artists shown at the gallery,” it stated.
Cammock’s narration suggests that starvation was used as a “weapon of war”, echoing the views of some authors that the millions of deaths in Bengal in the 1940s were preventable and the result of a man-made crisis.
Lord Andrew Roberts, a biographer of Churchill, has written to the NPG board defending the Conservative Party grandee and dismissed the video installation as an “ideologically motivated rant”.
“The accusation that it (starvation) was deliberately visited upon Bengalis by Churchill is foul and vile. It is also historically ludicrous,” he said, in the letter signed by several fellow House of Lords peers, including Churchill’s grandson Lord Nicholas Soames.
He claims that Churchill directed that “every effort must be made”, even by the diversion of shipping needed for the ongoing Second World War, to “alleviate local shortages” in Bengal.
Meanwhile, the ‘Artists First’ installation is on display at the NPG near Trafalgar Square until August.
“It’s a really quiet film. It’s designed to feel intimate, almost like a one-to-one conversation with a viewer, so there’s a great use of close-up shots. I look at texture and colour, asking objects to represent stories and ideas,” says Cammock, in an audio clip about her installation.
“I guess I would like visitors to be sitting in a gallery that has had a particular focus on important sitters, and I’m asking questions about who has value and who has worth. I want people to go away feeling touched by that conversation in some way,” she adds.
Also exhibited are South African artist Ravelle Pillay’s figurative works that explore the colonial structures that influence historical narrative, tracing the indentured migrant worker journey from India to Africa. PTI AK GRS GRS GRS
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