by Yasmin Khan
Paradoxically, soldiers posted thousands of miles away were among the first to raise the alarm about the approach of the famine, or at least among the first to be believed regarding the gravity of the scenario unfolding in the distant villages. Sepoys received letters from their families stressing the rising prices, the terrible local conditions and the difficulties of getting hold of essentials, and censorship officers saw the contents of the letters. By 1943 the volume of letters reaching the Middle East had increased and many of these included a note of desperation and dire anxiety. As a Bengali from Ranaghat wrote, ‘Many people can hardly get one meal a day and are almost half clad. If the war goes on for another few months many will die of starvation … You can never imagine the plight of the people here and it is impossible for me to describe it adequately.’8 The military censor explained such letters as ‘exaggeration’ and often fell back on the old line that families were trying to get a greater remittance from their serving sons by writing about high prices. Yet as 1943 went on and many letters all repeated the same complaints while letters from Britons living in Bengal also described the horror and the shame of famine, it became readily apparent to Indian soldiers as far away as Egypt and Cyprus that India was facing an emergency. According to another censor’s report, the letters ranged ‘from the angry and frustrated to the hopelessly heartsick’. ‘Here in the cities it is hell’, wrote one correspondent to a serving soldier.9 The tables were turned and fears about the death of sons in battle were equalled by the soldiers’ own fears about their families facing high prices, malaria and even starvation back home. Enlistment in India was becoming one route of escape from the food crisis.
On 16 May 1943 an unnamed sepoy, somewhere in the Middle East, wrote to his brother back at home in Urdu. He described how, when newcomers and new recruits arrived from India, they told of the conditions back in the home country. They repeatedly reported the staggering increases in the price of food. ‘Whenever it happens, we are grieved so much that it cannot be described’, he wrote. News of the bleak economic picture in India ‘brings sadness to my heart’, wrote another sepoy from a transit camp the following day.10 An avalanche of letters was by now flowing to theatres across the Middle East reporting unimaginable prices, relatives struggling to make ends meet, and shortages of essentials like kerosene for cooking and lighting, oil, cloth and grain. ‘People are dying of hunger and if this goes on for another two or three months then you won’t find a single soul alive in our village. God knows when this wretched war will end’, reported a Marathi villager in September.11 A Bengali fitter’s wife from the devastated district of Midnapore in Bengal wrote to her husband, ‘People have no food to live on and no cloth to cover themselves with. It is beyond imagination and unique in the history of mankind … I am in a fix and don’t know what to do now. I don’t want to write to you in detail so as not to increase your agony.’12 Soldiers faced the pressure to return home where they could purchase grain at subsidised prices from control shops while their families were often unable to do so. Senior officers saw the agonies of their men and felt the discontent brewing among them.
Over the following weeks soldiers reported feelings of madness, helplessness, deep frustration, pain and exasperation. There was little comfort for men from poor rural districts, knowing that their families might be facing hunger or destitution, while they enjoyed army rations. ‘Don’t forget that here I eat 8 chapattis in one meal while you probably cook 8 chapattis for the whole family.’ Even the longing for home leave began to lose its appeal: ‘What is the use of coming on leave to starve’, wrote one soldier candidly.13 Long postal delays and unreliable news added to the soldiers’ angst. Military censors had become inured to the pleas in letters, believing that families exaggerated their circumstances in order to extract a greater slice of the ‘allotment’ – the remittance sent by soldiers back to their relatives. But as the year progressed it became clear that this was different to the usual pleas. Despite soldiers sending back more of their wages, the letters had a more desperate tone to them, and there were more of them. The officer censoring the letters initially removed anything too inflammatory, ‘deletions made wherever an alarmist tendency was noticed’, but as the crisis went on, the censor’s report admitted a large number of letters from all over India were ‘painfully urgent in tone’. An increase in pay was recommended (despite an increase less than a year earlier) for soldiers who were now sending back generous sums.14
This time was hardest for those men from landless families: water-carriers, washermen, sweepers and cooks. They knew that their families were vulnerable to the smallest price fluctuations. Non-combatants were also less likely to get leave and could not afford to make a visit home. In one unit, at least sixty non-combatants had not been back to India or seen their families for four years. The wife of a water-carrier from Montgomery district, a popular recruitment ground in Punjab, wrote to her husband in September: ‘The family allotment has not been received for the last four months. Children are in great trouble. I have not a single pie to purchase foodstuffs. There is acute famine over here. The children are crying with hunger and I am bewildered with trying to feed them.’15 For these wives the absence of a letter or the failure to send a remittance was felt deeply. They wrote about the condition of their children and pitiable stories about the hardships of the youngest which touched a nerve with the men. For all ranks, news of children and instructions about how to best look after the children recurred as a subject of their letters. A subedar-major, writing in Gurmukhi script, told his wife, ‘It simply tortures me to learn that my children undergo such hardships’, when he learned that they were queuing for food.16
The steps towards famine occurred slowly but steadily. On 16 October 1942 a cyclone swept through districts of Bengal and Orissa, wiping out standing crops, livestock and paddy stores and causing loss of life. Shortages had already set in and now hit the price of rice – the lifeline of Bengal – so that the grain soared in cost. Shops and markets held paltry stocks of grain and there was no rationing system in place. People started to skip meals, to take inflated offers from money-lenders, to drink the water that their rice had boiled in as a substitute for a meal and to beg from their neighbours. They trekked long distances at the news of rumoured food only to find bare markets or to buy a small bag of poor-quality grains at sky-high prices. People started to wonder what they would feed their children, now that there was nothing at home. Children cried incessantly. Desperation set in.
Labourers without land or surplus began to arrive in Calcutta and other towns, in need of food. By January 1943 people in Calcutta were calling for rationing and by March, journalists from The Statesman newspaper were describing seeing ‘something akin to starvation’ in the rural districts of Bengal. An ill-advised and invasive ‘food drive’ by the provincial government, to try to ascertain quantities of stocks in the districts, drove more supplies underground and off the open market. By mid-May, the price of rice had nearly quadrupled in Calcutta. Yet, it was only in the summer, as the monsoon rains approached, when semi-naked, starving people were already falling to their knees on the pavements of Calcutta, that the government fully took stock of the tragedy that was unfolding. ‘I am sorry to have to trouble you with so dismal a picture’, wrote the obsequious Governor of Bengal, John Herbert, to Linlithgow on 2 July; ‘Bengal is rapidly approaching starvation.’17
The sight of the victims could no longer be avoided: hollow eyes in sockets, skin like paper and showing protruding bones, the dead and dying were now sometimes indistinguishable. Without healthcare, pure sources of water or basic sanitation, deaths from cholera, malaria and typhoid were rising. Families also fractured under the strain of impending death, with the sick, the aged and the weak abandoned or separated. Many starving orphans, mothers with babies and single women could be seen on the streets of Calcutta, as women tended to survive famine marginally better than men. At every turn both the elected government stumbled and central authority from Delhi and London fail
ed to apprehend the situation or to act before it was too late. When the rains came in August, flooding exacerbated the difficulties of the peasants, and high waters down the Damodar River flooded a large area of Burdwan district. By October one and a half million people relied on famine relief and the government started forcibly relocating the destitute in Calcutta to relief camps.
The wealthy came into closest proximity with the famine when they saw corpses outside their homes and workplaces or dodged stepping on the bodies of the dead and dying in the street. As the historian Janam Mukherjee has recently analysed, the disposal of corpses was becoming a pressing problem for the municipal authorities in Calcutta by this point, with councils resorting to mass burial pits or the throwing of bodies into rivers and canals, and the formation of the grisly-named Corpse Disposal Squad.18 Fuel shortages inhibited cremation, and so bloated bodies could be seen in waterways, while corpses rotted like carrion on the streets. Aruna Asaf Ali had her most terrible experience of underground life in Calcutta: moving around at night under the cover of the blackout, she stumbled over something in the road and found it was the dead body of a famine victim. This memory stayed with her all her life.19 The names or identities of the victims were difficult to ascertain; ultimately the authorities settled on identifying corpses simply by whether they were Hindu or Muslim, and relied on the assistance of religious organisations for disposing of the dead by cursory religious rites. This was an arbitrary practice and also an ominous harbinger of the way that society was becoming increasingly classified along religious lines in Calcutta.
Some wealthy Bengalis hardened their hearts in the face of such overwhelming calamity, turning away from the death around them. One of the most disturbing photographs of the famine shows a prosperous thoroughfare: a well-fed man in crisp white clothes turns his back while a skeletal woman, almost naked, her hands clenched to her face, dies on the pavement at his feet. One trader made an application, in the midst of the famine, for an import licence for ‘cigarettes, dried fruits, olives, olive oil and tinned foods etc’ from Turkey, just a glimpse of the alternative epicurean delights available in Calcutta for those with purchasing power.20 Flourishing hotels revealed the stark differences of income in 1943. Just beyond the grand staircases and entrance halls of the hotels, an emaciated famine victim might lie on the street, facing death. The social gulf became inescapable, as guests enjoyed sumptuous meals, dancing or chatting to the accompanying tinkle of a jazz piano. Expensive hotels thrived, kept afloat by military spending. ‘In some of the big European hotels, seventeen-course dinners are being served to-day while lean, emaciated faces can be seen staring wistfully through the windows’, reported Jyoti Bose.21 The profiteering of the wealthy was censured: ‘They were the ones who could buy at any price anything from a pin-up to a prostitute, create an artificial scarcity, let the market soar and then sell out or lease out in a rising market.’22
Then and now, the horrors of the famine elude full understanding. The pain of the sufferers is simply beyond our comprehension. And many contemporary onlookers were frozen by their own sense of ineptitude, lack of power and the sheer scale of the suffering. The individual man, woman or child at the heart of each story slinks into the margins and melts away from view. The voices of the famine are still muted in the historical record. Compared to the bloody recollections of the Partition four years later, the famine victims have often remained undifferentiated, pitied but lacking distinctive faces, personalities and desires. Certain voices always sound loudest in the archives and memoirs: journalists, bureaucrats and businessmen. But these people were less directly afflicted by famine. The experiences of the famine victims could not be easily hitched to national narratives, nor their case taken up by agonistic political leaders.
Nonetheless, many witnesses reeled with shock and outrage, and their words are often a powerful testament: ‘The impression it made even on me will persist throughout my life. I said “even on me” because I thought I was a sophisticated hard-boiled egg and could take a detached view of things’, wrote Satyen Basu, who had returned to India after taking part in the campaigns in North Africa and after captivity as a prisoner of war. ‘But witness a baby barely two years old lying in the lap of his brother of about six, both so devitalised that they are not able even to move from the street corner and biding their time to be shifted by somebody, sometime, alive or dead.’23 He went on to describe travelling to Chittagong by river: ‘Human corpses were floating past us, entangled in water hyacinth and preyed on by vultures.’24
People were stunned into silence or bewilderment by what they saw, and this silence continues to haunt the historical record. Politicians, either in prison, or reluctant to become involved by association, stayed strangely mute about the famine. While some Bengali and English language newspapers bravely endeavoured to tell the world about the tragedy unfolding, the Governor of the province continued to downplay the famine and to cast aspersions and blame. Propaganda and global image remained the priority: ‘I hope we can get out some effective propaganda to counteract the present unhelpful tales of horror in the Press which manifests itself largely in photographs which might have been taken in Calcutta at any time during the last 10 years’, he wrote in response to the disturbing photographs of men, women and children in their final hours of life.25
The one question that lingered, however, was ‘why?’ Why had this tragedy taken place? Were human errors culpable for death on this scale? Could it have been prevented?
* * *
Histories of the famine have always acknowledged the war as the backdrop to 1943. For contemporaries, the war and the famine were completely entwined, two interlinked horrors which had destabilised life and broken down the moral economy of the Bengali peasant. The first time that the Governor of Bengal mentioned the word ‘starvation’ to the Viceroy was in the context of wartime security, complaining that ‘masses of beggars are boarding trains without tickets in the search for places where food may be available. They are a particular nuisance in areas where troops are concentrated … apart from being insanitary, [they] constitute a danger to security.’26 At every turn, for the Raj, the preservation and prosecution of the war was the most important consideration. The trains that carried grain out of Bengal and up to the soldiers stationed in the north-east were therefore protected by security guards. For the famine victims themselves, the war was often cited as the cause of their plight; there was even a rumour doing the rounds at the time that the famine had been sent to punish Bengalis for lack of support for the war effort.
There can be little doubt, in a general sense, that the war had distorted local markets and that, whatever the direct causation of famine, which has been the subject of complex debates, the fears of bombing, rations for factory workers, the severance of rice supply from Burma, military demands and the general war economy were inextricably linked to Bengal’s trauma in 1943. Yet, at the time, India was not regarded as an official war zone, and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) established in 1943 to help civilian victims of war did not consider Bengal within its remit. Bengal was caught at the administrative interstices of war; between civilian and military control, between a troubled provincial government and a national government that was too slow to recognise the crisis.
Controversies continue about the actual available food in Bengal in 1943, the role of hoarders and traders who sold the rice on at avaricious prices, and the speculators and agents who drove food upwards in price. Historians have debated the role of the provincial government, the shortages of shipping and the callousness of a government in London far more concerned with keeping people fed at home and with winning the war than with the death of Bengalis.
Some decades since Amartya Sen published his classic work on food availability decline, scholarly controversies about the famine’s causes still rage on.27 He argued that the hoarding of food by black marketeers and more affluent traders and the inequitable distribution of food in Bengal were to blame, rather
than a sheer absence of food. The nub of this debate turns on whether there was enough food in Bengal in 1943 or not, on whether those with more stocks had held them back and hoarded rather than delivering them to market. Others have fiercely defended the idea that there simply was not enough food available, and that attempts to dig out the secret hidden hoards came to nothing because there was just not enough food obtainable in Bengal in 1943, hidden or not. The government itself suspected the role of hoarders and arranged inspections in order to root out the hidden mountains of grains, suspected to be locked away in godowns, shops and private homes. In fact, this campaign found far less hidden stock than expected. The figure of the unnamed ‘hoarder’ became a bogeyman of the colonial state, and was also cited by provincial ministers as a culprit, but in reality this idea was heavily contested even at the time. ‘Statements that people have concealed foodstuffs in jungles or removed them by boats are utterly incredible’, declared the Amrita Bazaar Patrika newspaper. ‘Bengal is faced with famine.’28
A range of other causes has to be factored in, beyond these crucial, but somewhat narrow, debates over supply: cover-ups and tardy responses by the British, poor leadership, press censorship and propaganda which consistently masked the scale of the problem unfolding, and a breakdown in communications and in the ability to distribute food by rail, road or boat. Some officials doggedly pursued ideas which would prove fateful. Some officers simply could not cope. One ICS man, Lionel Pinnell, who had played a leading role in the denial scheme and in managing civil supplies, had a nervous breakdown and resigned after realising that his anti-hoarding campaign was not yielding results.29 The Governor of Bengal, John Herbert, resigned and three months later died. The lack of international relief or rapid assistance from Britain and the intersection with wartime shipping priorities and delays created a black hole. Scarce resources were still being diverted to essential factory workers and to the troops. In Bengal poor diet and mono-crop culture (almost complete reliance on rice, comparable with the Irish reliance on the potato a century earlier), the lack of medicines and hospitals and the spread of disease all compounded people’s vulnerability.