Years later, the writer Mahasweta Devi would employ a maid named Hiron who spent much of her time crying, because during the famine she had left her daughter on the pavement to go search for food and never saw her again. It was also routine to see “dead people being picked up in government trucks, tossed in like logs,” Devi recalled. “Thok thok they would land, as if made of wood. I heard they were burned in furnaces of factories,” serving the war as fuel.
MANOS BANERJEE, A seventeen-year-old student, had been jailed for participating in the Quit India movement. After his release in the summer of 1943 he arrived in Calcutta to find beggars and corpses everywhere. Dumped in a crater excavated for the construction of a movie theater were dozens of corpses that filled the environs with a horrific stench. Some months later, as he marched in a protest to the governor’s palace, shouting slogans against the famine, communist thugs armed with lathis fell upon them from both sides. “A ‘comrade’ got my friend by the throat and was choking him,” said Banerjee. “I gave him a blow, then we ran.” A few of the demonstrators managed to break through the palace gate but came under police fire or were arrested.
Communists initially supported the Axis but had switched sides after Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941. (“Because Stalin and Churchill combined, that is fundamental,” one Bolshevik would explain to the famine commission. “Churchill as a comrade in arms is completely different from Churchill in opposition.”) Thereafter the Communist Party of India declared that it was fighting a People’s War against fascism and began to actively support the authorities. Communists were prominent among the intellectuals who chronicled the famine in art and literature, but they placed all blame for it on speculators and the Japanese. Consequently they stayed out of jail, prevented food stocks from being looted, suppressed protests, helped distribute whatever relief was available, and acquired political leverage in Bengal.25
THE POLICE WERE fully engaged in hunting down political subversives. At one point, the teenage courier Kanu Mahapatro realized that either the police or the Intelligence Bureau had posted men to watch the building in north Calcutta where he had stashed copies of Biplabi. The printed sheets were secreted in a room rented by Congress volunteers from Burdwan district (north of Midnapore). Fearing that a search was in the offing, Kanu decided to stage a move. Along with a friend, he approached two streetwalkers and asked them to pose with him as family.
The rebels from Burdwan provided pots, pans, brooms, pillows, and other household items. These Kanu piled onto a cart, with the newsletters hidden in a bedroll at the bottom. Acting the roles of a householder, his wife, and his younger brother and sister, he and the others talked and cursed volubly about water supply and other domestic matters as they pushed the cart past the watchmen. When far enough away, Kanu decided to stop and let the women go, and they asked what it had all been about. “When we explained who we were, they were in tears, so thrilled were they at having been able to help,” Mahapatro said. “They would have fallen at our feet if we’d let them. They wouldn’t take any money.”
The police had been overwhelmed by duties related to war and insurgency for more than a year, as Deputy Inspector General C. J. Minister of the Criminal Investigation Department would tell the famine commission. To begin with, he said, from early 1942 onward the police had had to help implement the rice denial policy, which required grain to be forcibly requisitioned from landowners and cultivators. Eventually criminals had come to realize that “they had a much greater opportunity than they had had before.” Armed robbery had skyrocketed, he continued, the reason being “the steady relaxation of police surveillance over known criminals.” After that, the Quit India movement had “inevitably absorbed the whole attention of the police who had no time left to take notice of anything else.” The Tamluk insurgency had proved particularly onerous.26
On top of that, many convicts had reportedly been released from prison. The authorities remained absorbed in curbing the activities of their political adversaries, while marauders, war profiteers, child traffickers, and hucksters of all kinds roamed free. Bengali society had descended into matsyayana, defined as a time when big fish ate little fish.
A MADAM NAMED Durga made her fortune at the famine time. A ravishing beauty, tall and very fair of skin, she used to live with a seth, a powerful businessman from western India. He did not allow Durga to sell her own body; instead, she used his money to buy girls who could not get enough to eat. Famine had brought into the market females of diverse classes and castes, some of whom would normally have been cherished as daughters or wives, and who could earn large profits for brothel owners. (In the previous century, historian William Hunter had noted that famine boosted the slave trade: “Infamous women went about buying up beautiful girls.”)27
In the old days an upper-class prostitute, as Durga had once been, would hide her face behind a fold of her sari when first encountering a potential customer. Instead she would display the heel of her foot, bordered with red paint and adorned with an anklet, so that a customer could judge her youth and class. As a madam, though, Durga dispensed with such niceties. “If you didn’t get undressed right away she’d threaten to put a broken bottle up your insides,” reported Kohinoor Begum, one of her former slaves. The madam would live into the twenty-first century, dying at the age of 103 and bequeathing cars, jewelry, and five brothels to her sons.
Women also sold sex of their own accord, in order to provide for themselves and their families. Historians Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper have written that, unlike the Japanese and their comfort women, the British did not need to use overt coercion to provide entertainment for their soldiers: “Free enterprise did it all for them.” Officially sanctioned brothels enabled at least one enterprising military officer to put away a stash for retirement.28
DURING THE 1943 famine, ten-year-old Monju Patro lived with her parents and three siblings in a two-story mud house in a Midnapore village. She would line up her mug at a gruel kitchen, but sometimes it would remain empty. Her mother husked rice for a better-off family, bringing home for the children the broken rice she got in return, as well as the puffed rice they gave her for breakfast. “I never saw her eat,” Patro said.
A neighbor had been working on the girl for days, telling her that he would get her a job in a babu’s home. “I didn’t listen,” Patro related. But one day, while she was play-cooking with other children—using utensils, rice, and vegetables they had fashioned out of mud—the man drew her aside and said, “Come along, I’ll buy you sweets at the train station.” The girl had eagerly assented. She was wearing her only dress, “a pretty frock made of flannel—my father had given it to me for Durga Pujo,” and her drawstring underpants.
When they reached the railway station, after a long trek, the man had bought her two or three rosogolla, cheese balls in syrup. “I was so absorbed in eating that I never realized he was putting me on the train,” Patro recounted. Calcutta, which she had never seen before, had dumbfounded the young girl. The neighbor left her with a woman, who gave the girl a ruti (flat bread): “I was thrilled to get to eat.” Then she cried, wondering why the man was not coming back to take her home, but to no avail. She would spend the next years drawing water, sweeping, and mopping for the madam.
After Monju menstruated, the madam said that she would arrange her marriage. “I still didn’t understand,” Patro recalled. “I was weeping because it didn’t feel like a real wedding. Where were the guests, the music, the turmeric ceremony? She gave me something to drink, my head spun, and I went to sleep. When I woke up I was paining all over, I couldn’t get up. I never saw the man.” Following that initial rape, she had been made to stand on the street, wearing colorful print saris, in front of 14 Maniktola Lane—an address that, judging by her precise and bitter enunciation of it sixty-three years later, was tattooed onto her brain. “I never understood who it was I serviced—they spoke all kinds of languages. I never saw the money.” Life in the brothel had been a miasma of terror. Early one mor
ning Patro watched, through a slit that served as her window, as thugs in the lane below strangled a customer for his watch and wallet. Another time a gangster forced his way in and, laying a sword on the bed between two women, raped them all night long. “We saw a prostitute cut up and stuffed into the gutter,” Patro remembered. “Couldn’t do anything.”
Patro eventually fled the madam, running off with a man who had fallen in love with her. She continued to sell her body, because they needed the money. Her boyfriend was a chef, but after he broke a hand he could not earn much, so they had returned to Sonagachi, Calcutta’s main red-light area and fetid slum, where they lived cheaply. Years after her children were grown, Patro complained that they neglected her. “One son is a cook and lives far away,” she said. “He took everything I had.” Patro still remembered the faces of her own parents, whom she had never seen again. “Where will I find them now?”
PUSHPO ODHIKARI ALSO came from Midnapore but forgot the name of her village. At the famine time she had been about eight; she had a brother and a sister, and her parents were old. “My mother couldn’t feed me,” she remembered. “If we ate in the morning, we couldn’t eat in the evening.” One day, while she was playing with other boys and girls, cooking up a banquet out of mud, a stranger wearing a dhuti and vest had approached them. He offered to find her work in a babu’s house, where she would eat well and even earn money to send home to her parents.
Pushpo was hungry. “I said to him, ‘I’ll just run in and tell my mother.’ He replied, ‘Don’t bother, I’ll tell them later.’” As had happened to Monju Patro, the man had given her sweets at the train station, brought her to Calcutta, and sold her to a madam who had first made the girl work as a maid. After Pushpo menstruated the madam put her in a room with a young man, left the door open a crack, and sat herself on a stool outside, to intimidate the child into cooperating.
After four years of prostitution, “when I got smarter,” Pushpo ran off. Not knowing any other trade, she continued to work the streets of Sonagachi. She fell in love with a chauffeur, but he would beat her when she did not give him her earnings. Odhikari’s son had died young. Her daughter had fortunately escaped prostitution by working as a maid in a rich household—so rich that they had security guards at the entrance. Speaking in old age of her own survival in the slums of Sonagachi, she said, “I’ve spent my entire life in this Hell.”
BOTH THE ORPHANAGES and the brothels saved the lives of some thousands of the millions of children under ten who suffered from the famine and represented almost half the refugees on Calcutta’s streets.29
Stationed in a Bengali town that he did not name, Clive Branson went out one evening to buy underwear and to eat in a restaurant. The food was very good and the prices astonishingly low. But walking back along the dark streets, he heard someone “sobbing her heart out” and found a little girl lying on the edge of the pavement. He gave her a few coins and tried to speak to her. Some locals gathered, explaining matter-of-factly that she was one of the starving. “At that I lost my temper completely, and told them they should be bloody well ashamed to walk past a child in her state,” he related. Branson made some of them carry her to a relief center. “The whole incident upset me so much that I cannot face going into the town again, because being in the army I don’t know what I can do to help these creatures.”
Another soldier, William A. Barnes, wrote in his diary: “I have heard many homeless little children of between 5 and 10 crying bitterly and coughing terribly outside my room in the Rest Camp at Chittagong at 3 & 4 in the morning in the pouring monsoon rain. They were all stark naked, homeless, motherless, fatherless and friendless. Their sole possession was an empty tin in which to collect scraps of food. We were strictly prohibited from helping any of these refugees in any way, under heavy penalties. Many could not endure to see this suffering, though, and did help surreptitiously.”30
Sergeant John Crout recalled that famine sufferers surrounded his army camp, because they were given the leftovers of military meals. A guard patrolled the edges of the camp to make sure any bodies were promptly removed. Once he was badly shaken by the sight of a girl, not yet dead, whose arm had been torn off and devoured by a jackal. Even battle-hardened soldiers were unnerved by such things, Crout said.31
Unsettling sights and sounds were all too common. The Hindustan Standard reported on November 15, 1943, that a stranger had guided three nuns in Islampur in eastern Bengal to an abandoned stable by a riverside. “There to their utter horror, they found about 20 babies laid in rows on the dark and unclean floor of the stable. Some of the babies were crying in agony for food, some gasping for breath and the rest in a state of utter exhaustion and stupour. On enquiry they learnt that the mothers of the babies, no longer able to carry them on their arms in their trek through the city in search of food, had left their dear little ones behind hoping to return after the day’s wanderings to their babies with food for them.” The odds that a mother would make it back to her baby were slim. On November 21, a doctor described women at a gruel kitchen, also in eastern Bengal: “mere skeletons covered simply with skins; some gasping for their last breath in my presence; mothers hugging their dying and dead children unable, having no strength, to weep or cry; some practically in delirium”—calling for food, only to expire within minutes or hours of eating.32
IN THE THIRD week of September a temporary governor, Thomas Rutherford, arrived in Calcutta. The “scenes are pretty ghastly,” he reported to Viceroy Linlithgow, but he added that native ministers were being “obstructive about forcible removal to outside camps of hordes of destitutes in Calcutta.” When he met the new governor, civil servant Olaf Martin was astonished to realize that he had no idea of the extent of the catastrophe. Rutherford insisted that only the few thousands who fouled the city streets were starving, whereas in fact they were just a symptom of the famine stalking almost all of Bengal’s villages. Even after touring Midnapore, Rutherford assured Linlithgow that the “majority of starving are the parasitic beggars and old people hitherto maintained by private charity.”33
The new governor seemed to have believed the official line that ordinary cultivators were causing the shortages by withholding grain from the market. These secret hoards should have kept villagers from starving, he and other officials were convinced, so the dead and dying had to belong to a small, and hopefully irrelevant, section of the population.
In truth, the worst of the hoarders were allies of the government. The administration in Bengal had issued five thousand licenses for grain procurement, and licensees could store rice with impunity. As a result, Barnes complained, “the big merchant, largely responsible in many instances for the slow and agonising death of hundreds or thousands of his fellow-countrymen, careened merrily on, unassailable and untouched in mere virtue of his wealth and connections, cornering ever more waggon-loads of life-giving produce, holding up distribution, forcing up prices, securing more Government contracts.” And whereas natives “hoarded,” which was at least in principle a penal offense, white men “stockpiled”—which was not only legal but recommended. British business houses were advised to store at least a month’s supply of rice for their laborers. One Mr. Parker, a merchant who served on Bengal’s legislature, admitted to having kept much more than he needed.34
That autumn, parts of Bengal that had a perennial water supply harvested a minor crop of rice. The famine commission found that the Bengal administration purchased 370,000 maunds of it in a central district, Jessore, and heaped it onto a railway platform there. The district magistrate, who was determined to preserve the stockpile, did not release any of the grain “except for small quantities in October and November, 2,400 maunds in December 1943 and about 12,000 maunds in January and February 1944,” the commission stated. That is, a tiny portion of the hoard was made available for famine relief—but only after the winter harvest, reaped in late December, had reduced the necessity for stocks. Some 90,000 tons of grain were also stored under tarpaulins in the Royal Botani
cal Gardens near Calcutta. Although it was pressed by legislators, the administration refused to yield its stores to the starving.35
In 1944, witnesses testifying before the famine commission charged that part of the rice secreted by district officials had rotted and was being surreptitiously disposed of. According to contemporary accounts, the public was allowed to scavenge from the government’s dumps, such as the one in the botanical gardens, only after much of the contents had decayed. Rumors also abounded of the police and military having thrown rotted rice into canals.36
FOR MORE THAN a year Asok Mitra, the civil servant in charge of Munshiganj in eastern Bengal, had watched the suffering increase. In August 1943 he sensed that the people were finally collapsing under the strain of starvation. “Of the people I saw on the streets, more than half had blank looks, their faces and eyes were shrunken, and their skin stuck to their bones like paper. They took a long time just to focus their eyes.” Their joints poked out, and the hair on their bodies stood straight up, Mitra wrote, like “big black pins.” This marker of terminal starvation, sometimes described as growth of fur, was also noted in previous Indian famines and in the Irish famine.37
In late September, Mitra heard that the government in Calcutta was making some of its stocks available for famine relief, and he visited the district magistrate in Dacca to see if he could get any. By the stately stairway of his superior’s office he found a giant signboard, one side of which announced that the sahib would be in between 11 A.M. and 12 P.M. but would not see anyone, and the other side of which stated that he would not be in at all. Mitra finally located the district magistrate at a club, pouring himself a second pink gin before lunch. He graciously offered his subordinate a drink, but refused to discuss rice.
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