“I was married when I still had my milk teeth,” related Nayontara Bera, who had become Kangal’s child bride. Her father had been wealthy but gambled most of his possessions away. At her childhood home, her mother would seat the siblings for their scant midday meal and say, “Eat up what you have—what else can you do? Eight mouths you brothers and sisters are. They gave me here in marriage seeing your father has twenty-five acres, but he has destroyed everything.” Nayontara, then seven, would complain that she had been served too little food and would willfully refuse to eat. One day when her mother was away, an aunt talked to her father. Her relative in Kalikakundu was bringing up a little son alone and could use another pair of hands around the house. Could she have Nayontara? The father agreed, and the aunt talked the little girl into a trip.
“They said they’d take me to the fair, and to my mother, but they brought me here instead. I was crying for my mother. They gave me puffed rice and sweets to keep me quiet.” Nayontara was forced to stay and a year later was married to the much younger Kangal, with whom she would play in-between housework. “We’d get rice once in two or three days,” she related, weeping throughout the telling of her story. “My mother-in-law would go to people’s homes to make puffed rice and earn something. If we got an egg we couldn’t eat it—had to sell it.”
NEWSPAPERS IN CALCUTTA wrote horrified accounts of the moral degeneracy that the famine had induced. Mothers had turned into murderers, village belles into whores, fathers into traffickers of daughters. But why had the millions of starving people refrained from looting food from the shops, most of which were unguarded? Surely, opined some experts, it was due to that inexplicable eastern trait known as fatalism. The evidence suggests otherwise. Initially, what had kept the villagers from committing robberies was the ferocity with which they clung to their values. And by the time they became desperate enough to consider crime, most were too weak to strike at anyone who was better fed. Relief officer Binay R. Sen explained to the famine commission why there were no food riots in later stages of the calamity. “When there is a famine on that scale people are devitalised to such an extent that by the time they come to an area where there is supply they have no physical reserve left in them to take to violence,” he testified. One man reported seeing a beggar in Geokhali who grabbed a handful of kolai from a pile stacked in a storefront and stuffed it into his mouth: “The shopkeeper hit him, and he just fell there and died.”8
Hori Das of Kalikakundu remembered another man who had died for eating food that was not his own. “Binod Jana would steal others’ yams,” said Das. “He stole from Umesh Maity, got killed for it.” Hearing this story, Chitto Samonto nodded in agreement, and explained: “Perhaps they just hit him and he died. In those days everyone was so weak a slap could kill you.”
Hori Das’s sister Rasi had died on the night of the cyclone, buried under a falling wall. She was about eleven then, while her brother was two years older. Some days afterward the police came by, looking for fugitives. “They hit us, stomped their boots, demanded we show them where the Kuila boys were hiding,” Das said. Sepoys—whether soldiers or police he did not know—would often harass the family. They would take bananas and coconuts, and once forced him to throw a net into his own pond to catch a fish. “They took it, hit me with the gun, and went off.”
The family owned no rice land but had cultivated a wealthy neighbor’s fields. The landlord would put the entire harvest into his storehouse, and “we would have to borrow to eat,” Das recalled. But during the famine no one would lend rice, so Hori, his father, and his brother went to the gruel kitchen. “You were still hungry after you ate there,” said Das. “I looked for food all day. We ate leaves of all kinds, stems of yam, whatever. There was nobody to give us any work. Lots of land was left fallow that year.” What little food the family could find they would measure and divide up, with Das’s mother often abstaining from eating anything. Still, “my younger brother would complain that I got more and he got less. We all looked like skeletons anyhow.”
KRISHNA CHAITANYA MAHAPATRO, or Kanu for short, was the seventeen-year-old courier of the Tamluk government. While in Calcutta he would distribute copies of Biplabi, and from time to time he would travel from the city to hideouts in Midnapore. One day, carrying a consignment of sensitive documents, Kanu started off for his home village of Donipur, near Tamluk. From Calcutta he took a train and a bus to Tamluk, reaching the town at 9.30 P.M., and began to walk the remaining five miles along the banks of the Rupnarayan River to his house. He had to keep hiding behind shrubs or trees, because soldiers seemed to be everywhere that night, and his white city clothes made him conspicuous. Around midnight a farmer came up to him. He must have guessed who Kanu was, for he had a warning. Just ahead, where the road bifurcated, one branch crossing the river by a bridge—the very route that Kanu would have to take—a group of soldiers was camped. “It was dangerous on the road too, with the military roaming around,” Mahapatro recalled. So the farmer invited him to spend the night at his hut.
“He was clearly very poor,” Mahapatro said. The one-room shack was made of mud plastered onto slivers of bamboo: it was not even a real mud hut whose thick walls would stand strong against wind. The roof was constructed out of leaves and extended some ways in front of the hut, sheltering a kind of yard. A bamboo screen split the yard: on one side stood a cow, and on the other hung a hammock where Kanu was to spend the night.
“I sat on the hammock, but I saw that he was restless, hovering around,” Mahapatro recalled. “Won’t you eat something?” his host asked. It was the famine time, and the youth could see that the farmer was too poor to have anything in the house. “In those days the people in our villages were very hospitable to us—they loved us,” Mahapatro explained. By us he meant the members of the renegade government. “Whatever the villagers had in the house—some fermented rice, some puffed rice—they would offer. But he was so poor he had nothing.” Kanu asked him not to worry. It was the middle of the night; he should just go to sleep. The farmer went inside, but soon emerged. “Babu, you had nothing. I’m feeling bad,” he said wringing his hands. Kanu tried again to reassure him, but to no avail. In a little while the man got a small brass pot out of the hut, washed it in a nearby pond, and milked the cow. “Please have at least this,” he offered.
“I drank the warm milk, and his love brought tears to my eyes,” Mahapatro said. Early the next morning he saw that inside the house the man’s wife and a child, three or four years of age, had been sleeping. “If he’d been caught sheltering me, they would have been in real danger.” The farmer walked to the riverside to see if the military camp was still there. He returned to say that the coast was clear, and the young courier left.
WHAT WAS IT like to have no real food in the house, day after day for more than a year? Bengalis commonly use the phrase payter jala, meaning burning of the belly, to describe hunger. One stage of starvation appears to be a kind of physical torment—not nausea, not pain, but a violent craving. The things that famine victims have been known to ingest demonstrate that the suffering of acute hunger easily beats the misery of nausea. A schoolteacher in Mohisadal reported seeing children picking and eating undigested grains out of a beggar’s diarrheal discharge. Hunger can also eclipse all fear of pain: during the wartime American study of conscientious objectors enduring profound hunger, one subject found starvation so hard to endure that he chopped off three fingers with an axe in the hope of getting out of the experiment. Elie Wiesel, a chronicler of the Holocaust, wrote of being “tormented with hunger” and witnessed a starving man plunge his face into a cauldron of steaming soup, which killed him.9
Almost everywhere in the world, famished people have resorted to eating human flesh. Amazingly, not a single case of cannibalism was reported during the Bengal famine of 1943, although tens of millions of villagers suffered from acute hunger. A religious lawmaker named Manu, writing in about the second century A.D., had forbidden Hindus to eat human flesh even for self-preser
vation—but neither did Muslims resort to it, although they were poorer than Hindus and perished in greater numbers. Chances are that Manu’s text and other scriptures merely codified a prehistoric taboo that still persists in rural Bengal. Indeed, given the frequency and intensity with which famines hit nineteenth-century India, accounts of anthropophagy are so rare that they point to a prohibition that prevailed across the subcontinent. (One such act was reported during the famine of 1770, but it occurred in a city, where moral codes seem always to have been more pliable than in villages.)10
How could a deeply ingrained culture prove so powerful as to overcome the animal instinct to preserve one’s life? The question remains a mystery. George Orwell would write of Gandhi: “There must, he says, be some limit to what we will do in order to remain alive, and the limit is well on this side of chicken broth.” Gandhi was possessed of phenomenal will power, as evidenced by his twenty-one-day fast—but the tens of millions of famine sufferers in Bengal also accepted as a moral norm that they would go only so far to stay alive.11
Nor did the vast majority of people eat dogs, cats, or other creatures forbidden by custom, but that was probably because the starving were too debilitated to catch any prey. One man in Mohisadal described passing on a road a group of old people whose feet had gotten stuck in the mud—and who had consequently died there. Instead, it was humans who became prey. By a roadside near Dacca, a nun found a groaning woman, her ravaged eye-sockets full of maggots: they had consumed her eyes while she had lain there, too weak to move away. “It was not an uncommon sight at Contai to see dogs and vultures waiting beside dying children for their share of human flesh,” commented another observer. The scavengers were not usually so merciful as to wait for death. On the contrary, the uncommon physical weakness of humans provoked the usually inoffensive village dogs to morph into creatures of nightmare. They wandered in packs around the countryside, snatching babies, attacking and bringing down the feeble, gorging on them while they still lived, and tripping brazenly in and out of homes as they searched out cozy corners in which to gnaw the body parts they carried in their mouths.12
Despite the horrific ways in which they met their ends, those Bengalis who perished of hunger in the villages did so in obscurity, all but unnoticed by the national and international press. Not so their relatives and neighbors who trekked to the cities. Accounts and photographs of the skeletal figures who swarmed into Calcutta to fall and die on its pavements would travel around the world, prompting offers of relief from several Allied countries, as well as from an Axis collaborator.
CHAPTER EIGHT
On the Street
“The food is good here,” Clive Branson had written to his wife in March 1943. “I shall have to take great care not to grow into a tub.” But an Indian who had tried to steal a head of lettuce, apparently from the vegetable patch of a European residence, was wounded by a bullet, which led a sergeant major to opine, “Pity it didn’t kill the bastard. One out of 400 million wouldn’t be missed. Shoot the bloody lot of them.” Branson was relieved to find that for once he did not have to argue against the sergeant major; two officers did instead.1
Branson was still stationed in western India. “You have no idea how deeply angry the men are at the fact of thousands of soldiers sitting around both here and at home,” Branson complained. He sketched with charcoal, scrutinized the papers, got reprimanded for his subversive letters, and fended off bouts of depression. He was among the few in his unit who truly wanted to fight fascism but was not promoted to officer, Branson suspected, because of his anti-imperialism. The papers were full of the famine in the east. Why could a government that had dealt so easily with Congress protestors not arrest speculators, he wondered? Six students who had handed a hoarder over to the police had themselves been arrested, while the offender had been advised to “quietly remove his stocks.” And the army had been called upon to quell food riots. “The ordinary, decent people in England must do something—this is their Empire,” Branson wrote.2
Rather to his surprise, in October he was given his stripes and put on a train toward Bengal. Branson surmised that he was being sent away because his views made his superiors uncomfortable. At a party just before he left, an officer who had never deigned to speak to him came up and said that he’d hated reading Branson’s letters home. (He was a censor.) The only people sad to see him go were the Indians—an artist who had become a friend and whose wife baked cakes for Branson’s journey, and a boy who had served as his factotum and who upon his departure garlanded him with flowers.3
The ride was pleasant enough, until the train entered Bengal. “The endless view of plains, crops, and small stations, turned almost suddenly into one long trail of starving people. Men, women, children, babies, looked up into the passing carriage in their last hope for food. These people were not just hungry—this was famine. When we stopped, children swarmed round the carriage windows, repeating, hopelessly, ‘Bukshish, sahib’—with the monotony of a damaged gramophone. Others sat on the ground, just waiting. I saw women—almost fleshless skeletons, their clothes grey with dust from wandering, with expressionless faces, not walking, but foot steadying foot, as though not knowing where they went. As we pulled towards Calcutta, for miles, little children naked, with inflated bellies stuck on stick-like legs, held up empty tins towards us. They were children still—they laughed and waved as we went by. Behind them one could see the brilliant fiendish green of the new crop.”4
AMONG THOSE ON the move was Chitto Samonto of Kalikakundu. His brother had gone to Howrah, a congested city across the river from Calcutta, to look for work, but had not returned. His mother had become so anxious that she had sent Chitto after him. From somewhere she had produced three-quarters of a rupee to pay for the ferry from Geokhali to Howrah, along with the address of a merchant from whom his brother had hoped to get a job. Samonto had a motive for the trip beyond finding his brother: “I also wanted to see if I could get anything to eat in the city,” he confessed.
But when he finally located the merchant’s house, the person who opened the door said he had never heard the brother’s name and shut the door in Chitto’s face. “They treated me like I was a good-for-nothing,” Samonto said indignantly, and did not even offer him a glass of water. It was the time of Durga Pujo, or festival of Durga—a year had passed since the terrible cyclone. The merchant had an altar by his house, and Chitto spent that night at the feet of the goddess, along with many homeless people. For the next five or six days he wandered the streets looking for his brother. Discussing his sojourn decades later, Samonto would only reluctantly reveal how he had managed to eat: by begging. “Many people were surviving that way,” he said, but the humiliation still smarted.5
He did not have the money to return home. Eventually Chitto decided to visit an uncle who worked at a village some eight miles from Howrah. He trudged along the Grand Trunk Road under a blazing sun, reeling with hunger and exhaustion, and was thrilled to find that at the temple of Belur the monks were running a gruel kitchen. After eating his fill he went on to his uncle, who earned a meager living building bamboo huts with tiled roofs. The uncle fed Chitto for a few days and then gave him the fare for the steamer to Geokhali. “My mother was overjoyed to see me,” Samonto said. Her joy overflowed when a few days later his brother also returned—having failed to find work or any real food.
Asked if he had seen the awful sights that were reported in the metropolis, such as a baby trying to drink from its dead mother’s breast, Samonto looked away. “There were such scenes here too,” he said sternly. “The people who went to the city came from places like this. They were hoping they would get food. But there too they suffered, gained nothing.”
“WE WOULD CLOSE doors and windows when sitting down to eat,” said Calcutta resident Gita Mukhopadhyay, who was then a college student. “Phyan dao ma”—give me phyan, mother—“they would call, I’ll never forget it.” On her walk to college or back, Mukhopadhyay would often pass a baby on the pavement, l
ying abandoned “like a stray cat. Our elders would say, ‘Don’t pick it up, you’ll get involved in a police case.’” “WE SAW WAVE after wave of women and children coming, and some old people. They came along the road, falling, limping, getting up, falling again,” social worker Ashoka Gupta related. “There was a hospital behind our house, and every morning some mothers would have left their babies on the steps, in the hope that they would be saved.” Gupta’s husband, a civil servant, had been posted to Bankura in southwestern Bengal in the fall of 1943. The region was hit not by denial or cyclone but by acquisition of grain for the war effort: the villagers had eagerly sold whatever rice they had at the high prices they were offered and could not buy any of it back.
Gupta was then a housewife, but faced with “such a terrifying reality” she could not remain aloof. She enlisted friends in the All India Women’s Conference, obtained rice through government connections, and started a relief kitchen that fed a hundred people once a day. Later Vijaylakshmi Pandit, sister to Nehru, visited and promised to help with funds, leading the women to found orphanages to rescue as many of the children as they could.6
“We discovered that whenever we also let the mother stay, the child survived,” Gupta said. “I saw one mother feed her baby with such infinite patience, drop by drop, a sugar and salt solution. She saved the child.” Dehydration was a major problem; people who had taken to the road had few serviceable utensils or containers. According to Gupta, they would try to carry water in cupped hands or leaves, or in rags stretched tight, back to loved ones who had fallen by the wayside—but it would all dribble through. After a woman’s own child was safe, Gupta would give her others to nurture: “We found that those who could save their own children could save others’ children, too.”
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