As a prelude to what he envisioned as a full-scale campaign in the region, on August 3, 1943, Churchill had instructed his military chiefs to prepare for an occupation of islands in the Aegean Sea (which lies between Greece and Turkey). Australian wheat and the surplus ships would meanwhile be used to build up a substantial stockpile for feeding the civilian population of southeastern Europe—just in case these inadequately supported but prospectively heroic efforts in the eastern Mediterranean led to freedom for Greece, Yugoslavia, and other Balkan countries. By December, German forces would have routed the British Empire’s soldiers and sailors from their island outposts, in what Stephen Roskill, the official historian of the United Kingdom’s naval war, would describe as “the Aegean fiasco . . . a tragic, and one may feel a wholly unnecessary ending to a year which had brought important and long-awaited successes.”32
In the fourth part of his defense of the War Cabinet’s policy toward the Indian famine, Wilson stated that rice was hard to get hold of, and no grain other than rice would have sufficed to forestall mass fatalities. Some rice was actually available in 1943. That year, around 150,000 tons of rice were exported from Egypt, most of it going to Ceylon, and the United Kingdom imported 131,000 tons from unknown sources. British authorities would also turn down offers of rice for Bengal, as will be discussed in later chapters. And it was mistaken to maintain that starving Indians would eat only rice. This untruth appears so regularly in British accounts of the Bengal famine, in one of three forms—that Bengalis “would sooner starve to death” than eat wheat, had difficulty digesting wheat, or did not know how to prepare wheat—that it deserves special scrutiny.33
Wheat was one of the ancient crops of Bengal and is one of the nine plants symbolically offered to the goddess Durga. When Bengalis worship her in October, they eat a wheat paste as a sacral offering. They have no trouble digesting it; on the contrary, better-off Bengalis use cream of wheat to wean infants. Chitto Samonto said that rather than shun wheat, he and other villagers regarded it as a luxury food to be enjoyed at certain festivals. Those who could not afford to buy wheat would visit wealthier homes, where they would help prepare, and subsequently feast on, pithe (filled crepes) or luchi (fried bread). All that it took to make ruti, or flat bread, out of wheat flour was to knead it with water into dough, roll it out, and toast it.
However, when people have been starving for a long time, their bodies would have partially consumed themselves, rendering the intestines paper-thin. At that point in starvation, the ingestion of any solid food—including rice—could be fatal. Famine victims would not have possessed griddles, so the ruti would have turned out crusty and possibly risky to eat. But there was another option. Civil servant Olaf Martin, who was later pressed into famine relief, fed rescued orphans with a concoction of whole-meal wheat flour, butter, and molasses. “This was boiled up into a sweet porridge which all children would eat eagerly and digest easily,” he wrote in his memoir. “And about 10 days of this diet put them in a condition to eat ordinary cooked rice and vegetables. These children recovered very rapidly in our orphanages, mental and physical condition improving simultaneously.”34
Bengalis did have trouble digesting coarse grains, and relief workers came to believe that even the gruel made out of these was causing diarrhea. “One of the extraordinary features of Bengal is that although all this time they have been talking of shortage of supplies, they practically refuse to use either millets or gram [small chickpeas],” stated Robert Hutchings in 1944. “This year they have told me ‘For goodness sake stop sending millets.’ Now they say stop sending gram because we cannot use it. They are quite willing to take wheat.” The famine commission ignored such testimonies and thus abetted the they-won’t-eat-bread theory, claiming that commission members saw wheat rotting in warehouses because Bengalis did not want it. But that argument is inconclusive, because the Bengal government held stores of rice for the war effort that were also rotting.35
The only problem in feeding wheat to Bengalis was that the people lacked the means to grind it, which meant it would have had to be milled into flour before distribution. Australian wheat was mainly exported as flour, however; and in any case the Government of India had asked for wheat shipments not so much to feed Bengali villagers but to unburden the people of the demand to fill the stomachs of soldiers. Because of the wheat shortage, the army would eat 115,000 tons of rice during 1943—twice the quantity it had consumed the year before. An assurance of receiving enough wheat to feed the war effort might have prompted the authorities, if not others, to release to the starving some of the rice they had stockpiled.
AN ALTERNATE VIEW of the August meeting on famine relief can be found in Amery’s diary. After propounding the urgent Indian need for food “in as strong terms as I could,” he fended off a counterattack. According to Amery, the War Cabinet treated the demand for rice “as a bluff on India’s part aimed at loosing existing hoards with less trouble than by other methods, while the discussion rapidly developed into an attack on India’s failure to deal with the inflationary position.” The S branch regarded inflation as an instrument by which Britons were “being exploited” by Indians. Because the real value of the rupee had fallen steeply since 1940, when it had been pegged against the sterling, Cherwell believed that the money being expended in India was buying less than it should, which left the sterling debt three times too high. Amery, in contrast, held that the enormous demand for Indian goods would normally have led to the rupee rising in value instead of falling: had it not been pegged down, the sterling debt would have been three times greater than its already high amount. He pointed out that “nothing could counteract the immense amount of our purchases, not repaid in any amount by consumer commodities. I fought hard and expressed myself very freely about the nonsense talk by Professor Cherwell whom Winston drags in on every subject and who obviously knows nothing of economics, but, like Winston, hates India.”36
By then, the prime minister’s several sources of anger with Indians had fused into one fury. In May 1943 he had accused Field Marshal Wavell of “creating a Frankenstein by putting modern weapons in the hands of sepoys” and had brought up the specter of 1857. In June he had warned that native troops might “shoot us in the back,” demanding that suspect peoples, including Bengalis, be purged from the Indian Army—an action that had turned out to be unfeasible. The prime minister “hates India and everything to do with it,” Wavell observed in his diary on July 27, after witnessing an outburst in the War Cabinet. “Winston drew harrowing picture of British workmen in rags struggling to pay rich Indian mill-owners; and wanted to charge India the equivalent of our debt to her for saving her from Japanese invasion.” The field marshal pointed out that “India had defended us in the Middle East for the first two years of war” rather than the other way around. Amery, for his part, noted that it was not a good idea “when driving to catch a train for life or death, to lean through the window and tell the taximan that you do not mean to pay the fare at the station because you have a moral counter-claim against him.” Because it was patently counterproductive to seek a revision of the financial agreement at that juncture, the prime minister had been frustrated in his resolve to abolish the balance owed to India.37
It became clear during the August 4 meeting on famine relief that the sterling debt was still embedded in the lion’s paw. Instead of sending relief, the War Cabinet recommended “forceful propaganda” and curbs on inflation as measures against famine. It also used the session to set up a committee for studying Indian inflation and finding ways to reduce the sterling debt.38
Lawrence Burgis, a secretary who attended that meeting, took sketchy notes that point to yet another factor prompting the denial of relief. After Amery spoke of the famine, Churchill’s associates questioned the necessity of meeting the Indian demand for wheat. Leathers argued that Ceylon’s needs should receive priority, while Cherwell suggested an attempt to “bluff Indian hoarders” by announcing that enough grain was being imported to bring
prices down. Sir Percy James Grigg, the secretary of state for war, said that bluffing would not help—in his view, not even the half-million tons of wheat that the viceroy sought would actually help, because the shortage was of rice. (Grigg appears to be the source of the myth that wheat would not suffice to thwart the famine.) Churchill opined that the food crisis pointed to the “failure of Indians” in higher echelons of government. At least the essential war workers should be fed, he felt; but although shipping 50,000 tons posed no difficulty, sourcing wheat from Australia could be a problem. As for barley from Iraq, India could have “as much as [possible].”39
That fall, Ceylon and the Middle East were to receive each month 75,000 tons of Australian wheat to meet the regions’ continuing needs, according to the Ministry of War Transport. In addition, building a stockpile required “to meet potential demand for re-occupied S. Eastern Europe” would consume 70,000 tons of wheat by the end of October and a further 100,000 tons by the end of 1943. Churchill must have had the Balkan stockpile in mind when he commented on the necessity of conserving Australian supplies: because Europeans, if and when they were liberated, would need wheat, Indians would have to make do with barley. Cherwell, Leathers, and Grigg must also have known that the surplus shipping and Australian wheat were to be used for building the Balkan stockpile, and could not be spared to relieve famine in India; these most loyal of Churchill’s aides were no doubt looking for reasons to reject the viceroy’s request.40
Churchill did say that if the situation in India got worse Amery could bring it up again. The next day, August 5, the prime minister boarded the Queen Mary for a conference in Quebec. The following week, a committee disbursed the shipping in the Indian Ocean for the next two months. In September, ten vessels would be required to load in Australia with wheat flour, and two with other foodstuffs, but none would be going to India. In October, ten vessels would have to load in Australia with wheat and other food, but again none would be destined for India. War-related cargo would instead fill the ships traveling to that colony. As for the Iraqi barley, at most 30,000 tons could be transported per month; negotiations on price, being the province of Lord Woolton, were incomplete when the War Cabinet again discussed the famine on September 24, 1943.41
As long as food could be exported from India for use in the war theaters, the imperial administration had exported it. But while the colony itself suffered from famine—in no small part because of the scarcity and inflation resulting from such extractions of supplies—shiploads of Australian wheat would pass it by, to be stored for future consumption in southern Europe. “India’s need is absolutely urgent and immediate,” Amery would remonstrate in late October. “Relief for the Balkans, badly needed as it is, cannot be delivered in any quantities for many months to come for the simple reason that the enemy still control the situation. As for depleting our stocks here to danger point, that is a pretty remote consideration, especially now that we have got so effective a whiphand over the U-boats.”42
IN MARCH 1943 the Bengal government had extended over several districts the relief operations originally intended for cyclone victims. “A large famine relief organization could not however be set up without a great deal of publicity,” explained Nihar Chandra Chakravarty, a civil servant employed with the effort. “This publicity could not very well be done when propaganda was being made that there was no fear of serious shortage for keeping up the morale of the people.” The Government of India surely knew of the dire situation, he testified, because in July a minister had written to New Delhi warning that “we were going to starve by the millions.”43
With the Department of Civil Supplies keeping all the grain it could get hold of, or distributing it to priority industries, little was left for even these circumscribed relief operations. Around July or August, Chakravarty and others “had the feeling that it might not be possible to save all people,” as he said later to the famine commission. “We simply wanted the people to keep going on, on something like half or one-fourth ration for a few weeks,” until supplies arrived. As a result, the gruel offered at the relief kitchens got thinner, so that a pound of rice a day was feeding three people. Sometime after that, the portion was further reduced, to four ounces per person per day. That came to 400 calories, at the low end of the scale on which, at much the same time, inmates at Buchenwald were being fed.44
CHAPTER SEVEN
In the Village
“In Sapurapota village of the 17th Union of Panskura Thana a Muslim weaver was unable to support his family and, crazed with hunger, wandered away,” recorded Biplabi on August 5, 1943. “His wife believed that he had drowned himself in the flooded Kasai River. Being unable to feed her two young sons for several days, she could no longer endure their suffering. On 7/23 she dropped the smaller boy torn from her womb, the sparkle of her eye, into the Kasai’s frothing waters. She tried in the same way to send her elder son to his father, but he screamed and grabbed on to her. The maddened mother had lost all capacity for love and compassion. She discovered a new way to silence her child’s searing hunger. With feeble arms she dug a small grave and threw her son into it. As she was trying to cover him with earth a passerby heard his screams and snatched the spade from his mother’s hand. A kagmara (low-caste Hindu) promised to bring up the boy and the mother then went away, who knows where. Probably she found peace by joining her husband in the Kasai’s cold torrent.”1
Such killings were not rare. “Kironbala the Acharjo girl threw her baby into the canal,” attested Bhawbanibala Samonto of Kalikakundu. After Kironbala’s husband died, she had returned to her father’s home with her one-and-a-half-year-old girl. Dependent on her father and hungry, Kironbala had gotten angry over some careless words. She dropped her toddler into the water and came home. Her father went to look for the child but the tide had come, and he returned empty-handed.
Often, the murderer—or mercy killer—was the father. A “man with a female child requested everybody he met to buy the baby. As nobody agreed to his proposal, the man threw the baby into the well and fled away,” reported the Hindustan Standard on November 28, 1943. Another newspaper mentioned that Bhogurdi Mandal of central Bengal was tried in September and sentenced to deportation for life (presumably to a penal colony on the Andaman Islands) for killing his three-year-old son Mozaffar, whom he could not feed. Biplabi wrote that on September 15, Gyanendranath Panda of Chongra village, having become crazed with hunger, slew his father, mother, grandmother, grandfather, wife, son, and daughter—everyone in the house. Suicides were so common that the newsletter took to listing these by name, place, and rough date, providing no further details. Another press report related that on October 22, in a suburb of Dacca, a fisherman, his wife, and their small daughter threw themselves in front of a train. The child miraculously survived, but what then became of her was not stated.2
The effect on the psyche of prolonged hunger is profound. An American experiment that enrolled conscientious objectors to World War II in a study of starvation revealed that it leads to an obsession with food, intolerance for loud sounds, and sudden bursts of irrational rage. A parent in such straits may well be impelled to do violence to an importuning child. An anthropologist in Calcutta at the time described a mother and son who had received some morsels from a relief kitchen. After eating his portion the boy took a piece of potato from hers, and she began to beat him so mercilessly that the onlooker had to intervene.3
Stories of abandonment during the Bengal famine—of a small child found wandering alone in a field, or of a woman who continued to eat at a relief camp while her baby died untended in her lap—are also common. An actress in Calcutta reported that once when her cook poured onto the pavement some phyan, the starchy water in which rice had been boiled, a shriveled-up woman who nevertheless seemed young caught it in her clay pot. Her four children ran up, but the mother ferociously slapped them away and drank up most of the phyan in quick gulps. Then she stopped and looked into the pot, which she must nearly have emptied, peered up at h
er crying children, and, horrified at what she had done, burst into sobs. At Faridpur in eastern Bengal, some workers were removing a corpse when a woman huddled nearby threw a bundle in their direction, saying, “Take that also.” It was the body of her child.4
FAMILIAL BONDS DID, however, persist even amid calamity. The husband of Fatema Bibi had plied a ferryboat on a river not far from Kalikakundu, but died of vomiting and diarrhea sometime after the 1942 cyclone. She was then perhaps sixteen and had a baby, Sopi. Her mother had died long before, but Fatema brought Sopi home to the Muslim hamlet of Kalikakundu. The famine then took her father and elder brother, leaving her with a younger brother to bring up alongside her son. Asked sixty-two years later how she and her son had survived, she replied simply, “I lived by looking at his face.” She made it through for her son’s sake, by working as a servant and begging to bring home what food she could. “It was a very hard time,” she said and stopped, too overcome with emotion to elucidate.
Abdul Rahman was thirteen or fourteen at the time of the famine. Telling his story six decades afterward, he recounted how he had trailed along with an elder brother the day everyone converged on the Mohisadal police station and was lucky to escape the bullets. Later he ate at a nearby soup kitchen, along with perhaps a thousand others, many of whom came from far away. But no one could get more than a ladleful. “It was a thin gruel. How could it be enough?” he asked. “Even that some people would divide up and eat. Lots of people died. Sheikh Khurshed, Intiaz, Latul . . . and many children. We couldn’t bury them or anything. No one had the strength to perform rites. People would tie a rope around the necks and drag them over to a ditch.”
Churchill's Secret War Page 20