Calcutta (19 page)

A man is less likely to starve under famine conditions in Bengal than in some parts of India. If the devil wished to lay the largest odds on a human being rotting to death with no food in his belly he would set him down in the middle of the North of the sub-continent, where quite regularly the two vital monsoons from South-west and South-east fail to meet and spray all the land with water. But Bengal is bad enough. There have been
periodic years of starvation stretching back into its ancient
history
. Of the twenty-two famines that occurred in various parts of India during the age of British trade and rule, Bengal experienced seven, either alone or in company with some other area.
Probably
the worst it has ever known was the famine of 1770, which is supposed to have annihilated a third of its population, so many millions of people that the figure means nothing at all to an occidental except another unbelievable eastern statistic. There were other famines in 1783, in 1866, at the turn of 1873 and 1874, in 1892 and in 1897. Then came 1943, which Bengal had to itself, and even now no one is quite sure how many people lost their lives in that disaster. Communist party literature puts the deathroll at twelve million, which will be a gross
exaggeration
. A year after the event, statisticians at Calcutta University were committing themselves to three and a half millions;
certainly
no one in Bengal believes the official inquiry commission’s final estimate of one and a half million to be anything like realistic enough. Whatever the truth of the catastrophe, it scarred the soul of Calcutta in a way that partly explains some of its history since.

There was a war on, and for most Indians, Bengalis as much as any, it was a war being waged by and on behalf of the British, not them. The Bengali hero Subhas Chandra Bose, indeed, had been in Berlin and was on his way to Tokyo to organize an Indian National Army, and before the year was out he had declared war on the Allies himself in the name of a Provisional Indian Government. The majority of Indians were ranged against Bose largely because there was a King Emperor in
London
with his cousin Mountbatten commanding an enormous military machine from Delhi and his general Slim manoeuvring a Fourteenth Army nearby in Burma. In the circumstances, it was a little difficult for Indians not to acquiesce in the martial directives of their masters. By the middle of 1942 almost the whole of Burma had been in Japanese hands and the British had neither the energy nor the inclination to spare for anything other than fighting the Japanese back.

Several things made the famine happen. There had been a long run of indifferent rice harvests and, except for 1937, Bengal had
needed to import rice every year between 1934 and 1941. One source of outside supply, Burma, was now cut off. There were sixty million Bengalis and nearly forty-six million of them were peasants depending upon a pitiful agriculture for their
livelihood
. A government which could wage war carefully and
sometimes
effectively was much less capable in accounting for the needs of the people in the territory it was defending. The official records of recent rice crop yields were hopelessly unrealistic, giving no clear sense of how much might be expected from a subsequent harvest or any idea of what the requirements from outside might be if there should be a total failure. Official policy did little more than to stockpile huge quantities of food in the factories of Calcutta for the use of munition and other war workers. There had been a flood and a cyclone in 1942 which had quite destroyed the aman crop – the winter paddy harvested
between
the end of November and early January – around
Midnapore
and throughout the 24 Parganas; and all over Bengal the aman crop was desperately poor. So the peasant farmers began to stockpile, too, keeping from the market a third more than they usually did. And when famine had actually begun, it was made worse than ever by Government policy. In April 1943 a Boat Ordinance required every craft in Bengal to be registered under military supervision, to prevent an important means of local transport from falling into enemy hands: the result was that twenty-five thousand boats at once went out of commission, preventing the cultivation of delta lands and fishing in the estuary of the Hooghly. And in the first seven months of 1943, some eighty thousand tons of food grains were exported from the province. Something like that had happened in the famine of 1873, when one million tons of rice and ninety thousand tons of wheat were exported on the orders of the Viceroy and the Secretary of State in London, in spite of pleas by the
Lieutenant
-Governor of Bengal, Sir George Campbell, that the food should remain in India.

In human terms the blame for 1943 was not entirely British, though it has been seen as such in Calcutta since. The British did nothing at all to relieve the disaster until Lord Wavell became Viceroy in October, when he immediately visited the city and at
once ordered the army to intervene. But from start to finish there had been a Provincial Government sitting in Calcutta, Indian almost from top to bottom, and it had performed no better. At a food conference in Delhi in December 1942, when the local aman crop was clearly heading for trouble, the Prime Minister of Bengal, Mr Fazlul Huq, had said ‘We do not require for the next few months any rice, even though we are in deficit.’ For months to come his ministers were making similarly
reassuring
noises; on 9 May 1943, the Food Minister of Bengal, Mr H. S. Suhrawardy, declared that although the province was undergoing certain difficulties due to hoarding and profiteering, there was sufficiency of foodgrain for the people of Bengal. A few days later he told an audience in one of the richer suburbs of South Calcutta to go forth and preach the various evils of over-eating. Profiteering there had certainly been for nearly half a year by then; prices had been soaring since the start of January and by the time the Food Minister spoke they had risen 600 per cent. And in April a post mortem on a man found dead in the street had discovered that his stomach contained nothing but undigested grass. Quite suddenly, it was noticed that there were possibly more destitutes than usual in the city though, Calcutta being what it was, some people could forgive themselves for not having observed this sooner.

They were, in fact, by then entering the city in staggering mobs. A lot of them began to crowd together for shelter under railway sheds at suburban stations. A lot more began to line the pavements in exhausted family groups. A reporter described how one family had settled on Lower Circular Road, the husband lying inert while the three children watched their mother
cooking
some vegetable peelings. ‘The wife looked slightly better than the husband but … I could count her ribs from a distance of ten feet. The intestines seemed to have disappeared altogether from the abdomen. She was not more than twenty-five years old yet there was no womanly breast. Only two nipples dangling from two parched sheets of skin, from which everything else seemed to be dried up … One of the children, a girl, had swollen limbs. In some parts of the legs the skin had cracked and a liquid discharge was slowly trickling out. Her face was writhing
in pain but she had not even the strength to cry.’ Among those who came to Calcutta was Jagaddhari Haldar, a man of sixty from Basar Gopinathpur in the 24 Parganas. The cyclone and flood of the previous October had destroyed everything he
possessed
; it had swept away his house, his foodgrains, his animals and his utensils; it had drowned his wife, his mother, his younger brother, his sister-in-law, his three nephews and his two nieces. He had survived by climbing a tamarind tree, and since then he had been roaming the land looking for food. A few yards from him on the pavement was Sarathi Bagdi, a young mother from Sarkerchak, also in the 24 Parganas. Her husband had died of dysentery, so she had come to the city with her son, aged seven, and her daughter, aged one. She had left them on the street while she went round a corner to urinate and when she returned they had disappeared. When the reporter found her, ten days later, ‘we offered her food but she merely went on weeping’.

Where people like these had not lost everything in the cyclone and the flood, they had sold all they possessed before coming to Calcutta. They had first sold their ornaments for less than the lowest market price. Then they had sold all the parts of their homes that anyone would buy; the doors, the window sills, the corrugated iron sheets of the roof. This had brought them a little food and time. But then they had started to eat wild roots and leaves. In Howrah, by now, heaps of snail shells were to be found in front of almost every house. There was much worse than that to come. In the villages of Bengal, widows who had lived for years with brothers and their families were being asked to leave and fend for themselves. Husbands were forsaking wives and wives were abandoning sick husbands. Parents were stealthily leaving immature children to their fate and drifting off to look for food. Mothers were leaving babies at the gates of wealthy men.

In Calcutta, children were wandering from door to door
crying
‘Mago! Ekthu phan deo’ (Mother! Give a little gruel). Charitable institutions began to set up street kitchens and they would give the hungry a ration of gruel on leaves; when the gruel slopped off onto the ground the people would throw
themselves
after it and lick it up. The Government set up a kitchen,
too, but it offered only bajra, a coarse grain that was too heavy for starved stomachs and produced bowel complaints. People began to eat dogs and they began to scramble among the refuse heaps for scraps, even when these were mixed up with discarded surgical dressings thrown out by the hospitals. Their hunger had become so terrible that religious taboos were
forgotten
or ignored; orthodox Hindus, who will never normally accept anything to eat or drink from anyone of another faith, were taking food from the hands of Muslims; and Muslims were receiving succour from Hindus.

In July a member of the provincial assembly asked that Bengal should be declared a famine area, to obtain outside relief, and Mr Suhrawardy said that this was not necessary. He could, after all, see plenty of food in the shops of Calcutta and it is very strange that the starving people seem to have made no attempt to raid these places. There were soon to be a hundred thousand of them in the city. In August came the first reports of people selling their children in the villages. At Khulua a woman
disposed
of her daughter for Rs 15 after the father had gone
looking
for food and never returned. At Burdwan a three-month-old girl was traded for Rs 5 at the same time. In Malda, Bhogurdi Mandal was charged with murdering his only son Mozzaffar, aged three, because he could not feed him or anyone in his family; none of them had touched food for most of the week
before
he killed the boy. In Calcutta someone spotted the body of a child, partly eaten by dogs, on the pavement in Cornwallis Street. Only two or three weeks before, in Delhi, the Home
Secretary
to the Government of India, Mr Conran Smith, had told the Council of State; ‘I may say that the Government of India view with misgivings the tendency in some quarters to
overdramatize
the situation, possibly with the best intentions, and they have no hesitation in condemning the tendency in other quarters to exploit the situation for party political and sectional ends.’ At the beginning of July the Secretary of State for India, Mr L. S. Amery, had been telling the House of Commons in London that ‘There is no overall shortage of food grains, India has harvested a bumper crop of wheat this spring. There is, however, grave maldistribution.’

In Calcutta by then the newspapers had been reporting what they could discover of the horror for nearly two months. They were beginning to turn up some appalling figures. In the village of Contai, 500 people died on the streets between July and
September
; in Burdwan, 97 died in August; between July and
November
, 2,000 were to perish in Satkhira. On 9 September, the Government of Bengal stopped supplying the papers with
relevant
figures but the public clamour was such that the service was resumed two days later; but from now on the journalists were forbidden to use the word ‘starvation’; instead, people dying of hunger had to be called ‘sick destitutes’. On 28 September, 325 sick destitutes were admitted to hospitals in the city, where they died of their sickness. On 27 October, an unofficial relief organization disposed of 170 corpses that had just been sick and destitute. The next day a Bengal Destitute Persons (Repatriation and Relief) Ordinance was passed, and between 30 October and the following January the police cleared 43,500 starving people from the streets of the city, and sent them back into the country. Only just in time to strike a note of sympathy, Mr Suhrawardy had on 10 October finally announced that ‘Bengal is in the grip of an unprecedented famine’.

The nightmare was not nearly over. In October the burning ghats by the Hooghly were stacked for days on end with bodies for cremation. And from Dacca a news agency reported that ‘Recently, a famished fisherman who was reduced to bone and skin, came from the interior and took gruel in the free kitchen of the union. He lay down nearby. In the morning the people were shocked to see that a portion of his body had been
devoured
by jackals. His life was still not extinct. It is believed that when the jackals attacked him at night he was too weak to resist or call for help. He died later.’ In London Mr Amery was now telling the House of Commons that he understood the death rate in Bengal to be a thousand a week, though ‘it might be a bit higher’. It was, in fact, something like eleven thousand a week at that time and, in Calcutta,
The
Statesman
said almost as much in a leading article: ‘All the publicly available data
indicates
that it is very much higher and his [Mr Amery’s] great office ought to afford him ample means of discovery. The
continuous 
appearance of effort on the part of persons somewhere within India’s Governmental machine, perhaps out here,
perhaps
in Whitehall, to play down, suppress, distort or muffle the truth about Bengal, is dragging the fair name of the British Raj needlessly low.’ It would have cost something for a newspaper with
The
Statesman
’s background to publish that, for the British in Calcutta were still a proud and arrogant people. There is no sign at all that they took any comfort from the knowledge that at this moment some Indians were behaving even more
miserably
than the worst of their own countrymen; for there were food profiteers who were mixing ground stone and dust with rice, who were putting plaster of Paris in wheat flour to give it whiteness and weight.