Bengal famine

Confronting ‘State Violence by Hunger’: The State Can’t Shirk Responsibility

Whether the misery inflicted by Covid-19 or by the Bengal famine in the 1930s, a state must gear up and provide for the welfare of the weakest. When they fail, we must call it what it is, violence by hunger.

However unconventional it may seem to say this, but Covid 2019 and the 1943 Bengal famine were both examples of violence by hunger by the state on poor and homeless people of India.

It’s important that influential people living in the West, particularly those born in India, know that the general lockdown imposed in India on 24 March 2020, to supposedly, fight the spread of Covid 19, rendered 300 million people jobless in Delhi and other towns.

Who were those people? They were the cursed breed of daily wage earners, called migrant workers. Such a loaded word! Every year, poor farmers from all over the country migrate to Industrial towns, looking for work. All they get is daily wage work as contractual labour in factories and workshops. They are ironically the bulwark of our Industrial production and urban services.

After a country-wide lockdown, they were not allowed to go home to their villages. No trains or buses were plying, and state borders within the country were sealed. Unbelievably, so desperate were they to get back that they travelled on foot for hundreds of kilometres. But they were turned back from the border of the next State. The claim of governments that they were stopped to prevent the spread of Covid-19 in the villages, defied logic. They had not yet contracted the disease. In fact, they got it only after losing their jobs and homes; when they were forced to take to the roads in hordes to get free food, given by private charities. A plate of khichri, doled out by the government, once a day, was not enough even for bare survival.

The 1943 famine of Bengal; in which more than three million Indians died, is an apt metaphor for this scenario. The famine was not caused by drought but by the deliberate policy of violence by hunger of the British government. Vital supply of grain was diverted from Bengal to the military and civil services needed for the war effort by the British. Even rice imports sent as aid were not allowed into Bengal. At that time an imperial government ruled over us, so we could call it genocide of an annexed people through what was, planned policy failure.

What happened in 2020, post Covid-19 was policy failure too which followed the same edict of violence by hunger. Only this time we had our own, not a colonial government, voted in by us, in a free country. So the violence by hunger was not against an annexed people but our own rural populace. The modus operandi was simple. Make no organised plan to deal with the repercussions of the lockdown on millions of migrant labourers; who were certain to lose their jobs and homes in the cities.

The lockdown was at last lifted on May 31, 2020 and workers were allowed to go back to their villages. But no amenities were provided for travel. Trains were not only few and far between, but irregular, delayed for hours for inexplicable reasons and believe it or not, even losing their way. People had to crowd at the stations for days, often without food and water. Casualties were a daily occurrence.

When the migrant workers reached home after arduous journeys, they were put into quarantine for 14 days. The conditions were beyond belief. They survived lack of food, water, ventilation and medicine purely because of their crazy will to reach home, even if to collapse with hunger and exhaustion there. Not that jobs were freely available in the villages! The only work available was under MNREGA, which offered a pittance in return for a full day’s work, and could only provide temporary relief.

The reason they had left their homes and families initially, was precisely because there were no jobs in the villages and farming could not support life. Now they were back in the same quagmire. They would be forced to migrate again and turn into contractual labourers. Thus, the Pandemic has left a far more enduring and life-threatening impact on rural India, much more than on the urban or Western world.

Looking ahead

The key question we need to ask in India is, do we have a planned solution for combating rural penury? Can we complete the work that Nehru set out to do but could not, because of inadequate development of small and medium sized industries in rural areas? The State has to make detailed plans for multi-linear development of villages. Whether it is productive farming, poultry or small industry; all of them require finance, which no small farmer has. As long as the public finance institutions believe in ‘outsourcing’, the farmers would remain at the mercy of loan sharks, charging high interest rates and possessing their land in case of default. The massive loan waivers worth lakhs of Rupees to big borrowers versus no mercy for small borrowers is just another example of policy geared to punish those with no cushion.

Private capital investment without the partnership of farmers would lead to unemployment and forced migration again and again. Unless we recognise the plight of rural India laid bare by the Pandemic, violence by hunger would remain a permanent aftermath of it and after the Pandemics to come. No doubt there would be many more.

Surely this should be a matter of priority for all of us; bureaucrats, politicians and policy makers, not just writers, recoiling from this genocide of another kind; State Violence by Hunger!

Mridula Garg is a Hindi writer and Sahitya Akademi award winner.

The Blame – and the Shame – of Three Million Bengali Dead

The BBC audio series ‘Three Million’ presents the famine as living history rather than a distant episode.

The Bengal countryside is “the biggest archive in the world”, comments a contributor to a new BBC audio series, ‘Three Million‘. The wartime famine which claimed so many Bengali lives happened in plain sight. True, that was 80 years ago, and almost all eyewitnesses and survivors are now dead; but there are still, in all likelihood, thousands living with indelible memories of that trauma.

Yet there is no monument or memorial anywhere to all those who wasted away. The story has faded just as those subsisting on rice water slowly shrank to nothing.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

The bald geo-strategic facts are well established. As the Japanese army advanced deep into Burma in 1942, the war cabinet in London worried that Bengal too might fall to the enemy. The British authorities introduced a policy of ‘denial’ – destroying stocks of grain and the small boats so essential to Bengal’s economy lest they fall into Japanese hands.

There was no absolute food shortage – yet three million, some say more, starved to death. From the viceroy’s residence, Lord Wavell stormed about what he described as “one of the greatest disasters that had befallen any people under British rule” with “incalculable” damage to Britain’s reputation. But London wasn’t listening. And there were no spare ships to bring in emergency food supplies.

Winston Churchill, Britain’s wartime prime minister, is often held to blame for the Bengal famine. This five-programme series doesn’t seek to convict him. But it does include telling testimony that in wartime he regarded the Empire as subordinate to the British homeland, and that he saw Indians as a sub-species.

Alongside the blame, there’s the shame. The British government must bear culpability. But it wasn’t Brits who hoarded the grain, took land from starving peasants in exchange for a small sack of rice, and bought young girls for a pittance for sex.

Class is another reason why the famine has been brushed away out of sight of the main historical narrative. If you were rich, you survived – there was food available if you could afford it. As ever, the poor and the marginalised bore the brunt – men often migrating to Calcutta and other towns in a desperate quest for work they were no longer strong enough to perform.

Kavita Puri. Photo: Special arrangement

The astonishing success of ‘Three Million’ is to present the famine as living history rather than a distant episode. It’s presented by Kavita Puri, one of the best documentary makers around. “The lived experience of the famine has not been well documented or remembered,” Puri told The Wire, “and I wanted to recover these human stories.” She does so with a sensitivity and compassion which never slips into shroud-waving sentimentality.

Puri talks to the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, then nine years old and living in Shanti Niketan and appalled by the emaciated people who passed by. “How much can I give them?” he asked his grandmother. The answer: just half a cigarette tin of grain a day. That memory shaped his life. Much of his academic career has been devoted to what causes famines and how they can be avoided.

Pamela Dowley-Wise, born in Calcutta in 1926, saw “dead people all over”, their carcasses preyed on by vultures. When the famine was at its most severe, as many as a thousand bodies a day were collected from Calcutta’s streets. The art historian, Partha Mitter, said that while his household had rice on the table every day, women would come to the gates pleading for a little of the water in which the rice was cooked.

Amid the tumult of war, the British authorities wanted to deflect attention from what they coyly described as the India food question. Ian Stephens, as editor of the Statesman in Calcutta, found a way around the wartime censorship. It applied to text not images. He sent his photographers onto the streets and on August 22, 1943, he published harrowing images of famine victims at the point of death.

Yet the Statesman never named the starving men and women whose photographs it published. They were emblematic of humanity but denied their individual humanity.

When Chittaprosad Bhattacharya’s intensely powerful drawings of the starving were published as Hungry Bengal – a book promptly impounded by the colonial authorities – he was sure to give his subjects the dignity of a name. A drawing of a corpse in Midnapore being worried by a dog is captioned: “His name was Kshetramohan Naik”.

Chittaprosad Bhattacharya’s ‘His name was Kshetramohan Naik’.

The BBC came under pressure at the time to downplay the gravity of the crisis. Puri uncovers evidence that it did indeed self-censor in its coverage of the famine. It’s taken an awfully long time, but these programmes at last make reparation for the BBC’s wartime failings.

The extraordinary achievement of this series is in recovering the voices of some of the non-privileged. In Cambridge, Puri came across long forgotten recordings of veteran Indian civil servants made in the 1980s. And we hear from a school teacher in his 70s, Sailen Sarkar, who has made it his mission to record the stories of village Bengalis who survived the famine.

The series would be stronger with more raw testimony of those who suffered hunger pangs. Puri planned to accompany Sarkar on one of his journeys – but her visa application was never approved. She is still hoping to make it to West Bengal and meet survivors.

There was one positive consequence of the famine. Its impact persuaded the first generation of post-independence politicians to strive to ensure that famine would never again stalk their nation. Broadly, that goal has been met: there has been no major famine in India since independence.

‘Three Million’ is available as a podcast from February 23 and will be broadcast on BBC World Service radio from March 2.

Andrew Whitehead is a former BBC India correspondent.

London Calling: How does India look from afar? Looming world power or dysfunctional democracy? And what’s happening in Britain, and the West, that India needs to know about and perhaps learn from? This fortnightly column helps forge the connections so essential in our globalising world.

Remembering India’s First Modern Sculptor, Ramkinkar Baij

He broke free from the stultifying conformism of colonial and pre-modern studio sculpturing to encompass in his work the lives and struggles of plain, unremarkable human beings.

My memories of Ramkinkar Baij, such as they are, are interlaced with two things that one rarely associates with an artist. The first, curiously, is kerosene. And the second, somewhat less oddly, is summer, or rather, a hot summer day.

One afternoon in the middle of April, in 1973, my friend and I were walking around Santiniketan’s quiet Ratan Pally on some errand, when my friend nudged me and pointed at someone who was coming from the opposite direction. He was a bare-bodied, bare-footed man in a short dhoti and a wide straw topi, and slung from his right arm by a piece of rope was a green bottle that smelt strongly of kerosene as he passed by us.

I gasped as my friend told me who he was, for only the previous day I had seen some of the Ramkinkar sculptures that dot the Santiniketan landscape. The only other time I saw him was in late May or early June of 1975, when another friend and I, on a rickshaw from the Bolpur station to Santiniketan, caught a glimpse of Ramkinkar on a bicycle, the bottle of what I thought was kerosene slung from the bike’s handlebar this time. It was a murderously hot day, but Ramkinkar seemed to me to be in perfect harmony with his surroundings, much as his sculptures had always appeared to do with theirs.

The truth, though, is that Santiniketan had always treated Ramkinkar as a bit of an oddball. Here was a true bohemian who set little store by convention, whether in his art or in his life, and genteel Santiniketan found it hard to come to terms with him. Indeed, it is a safe guess that, had Rabindranath Tagore not been alive when Ramkinkar first came to Santiniketan, he would have found the place far less welcoming. Great artist and peerless teacher that he was, Nandalal Bose was yet a traditionalist, and here was a student who not only had begun to work in oil since his early teens but also appeared to have evolved an idiom of his own already.

Extraordinarily talented people seldom fit smoothly into rigorously formal training systems, as Rabindranath had known from personal experience, and, but for the poet’s active encouragement, Ramkinkar would probably have found himself at a loose end early on.

‘Sujata’ (1935) – one of Ramkinkar’s earliest forays into alfresco sculpting. Photo: Biswarup Ganguly, CC BY 3.0/Wikimedia Commons

A callow 19-year-old from rural Bankura, Ramkinkar had arrived in Santiniketan in 1925, quite fortuitously. But since he had been recommended as a student of Santiniketan’s Kala Bhavan (the Art school) by Ramananda Chatterjee, the legendary editor of both The Modern Review and the Prabasi (‘The Expatriate’) magazines, Rabindranath himself kept an eye on the artistic development of this great idiosyncratic talent.

Also read: Cutting Through Mountains to Build a Statue

Ramkinkar pretty much sailed through Kala Bhavan’s academic programme and later joined the same school’s teaching faculty, becoming, in a few years’ time, the chair of the department of sculpture. He had grown up watching the local craftsmen and image-makers of Bankura at work, learning how to make small clay figures with the same felicity as drawing and painting with whatever resources that came his way. And now, with his intellectual horizons widened immeasurably and his artistic imagination allowed full play, he turned his attention to out-of-doors sculpture, something virtually unknown in India outside of religious and colonial-heritage installations dedicated to gods or rulers.

One of his early works was a representation of the Buddha, of course, but the themes he readily engaged with nearly always revolved around ordinary people living their quotidian lives in unremarkable circumstances, their daily struggles, joys and sorrows, disappointments and triumphs.

Indeed, his 1935 sculpture ‘Sujata’ was also conceived as only a portrait of a Kala Bhavan student, though the later addition, at Nandalal’s instance, of an above-the-head receptacle – presumably containing a devotional offering of payasam – transformed the portrait into one of the famous Buddha disciple’s. What is extraordinary about this early work, though, is that it was visualised not only as a work of art in and by itself: it was executed as verily a part of a eucalyptus grove inside the Santiniketan campus where the depicted human figure seemed to blend seamlessly with the slender tree-trunks crowding around it.

Rabindranath must have liked it greatly, because he is understood to have suggested to the young artist that he ‘fill the campus with sculptures’. If Ramkinkar needed any encouragement to press ahead with his alfresco projects, here it was.

In turning determinedly away from mythological or religious subjects, Ramkinkar inevitably focussed on the community of Santhals inhabiting the villages around Santiniketan. Here was a community which had managed to preserve the integrity of its pre-modern lifestyle, though it was increasingly getting exposed to an industrial – or, at any rate, an industrialising – society. Ramkinkar once spelt out his admiration for the community with characteristic candour:

(If) I feel an attraction towards them, the main reason behind this is their life, (its) vigour and rhythm. Their movement and words are rhythmic. The same rhythmic quality is reflected in their households, their day-to-day activities. Their lives are not as coarse and dirty as our lives.

It is this ‘vigour and rhythm’, this conflation of easy grace and strong simplicity, that many of Ramkinkar’s sculptures so majestically capture. Two monumental creations – Santhal Family (1938) and Mill Call (1956) – stand out.

(From the left) Santhal Family and Mill Call. Photo: Wikipedia

Santhal Family (detail) Photo: Wikipedia

These are studies of human beings in motion – moving house with their meagre belongings in one case, and rushing to answer the call of the factory siren in the other. Acute observation, compassion, humour and a touch of pathos shape these creations, but the overriding sense is one of verve and sparkle, of grace and strength.

The idiom is uniquely Ramkinkar’s: it effortlessly melds modern western and pre-classical Indian sculptural values in equal measure. Of course, he had scarcely any option other than to strike out on his own, because there had been no significant Indian sculptural tradition before him – except the popular ones of memorial/religious sculptures – that he could have drawn upon with profit. And since he brought the first truly modern sensibility to Indian sculpture while still being firmly rooted in the soil he grew up on, he emerged as the first authentic exponent of modern Indian sculpture.

But while works like Santhal Family and Mill Call are invested with a strong lyrical content, Ramkinkar was equally adept in evoking a sense of wretchedness or stark hopelessness. The headless female nude in Thresher is captured in the act of harvesting corn – a potentially life-giving ritual whose purpose contrasts tellingly with the dreariness of the effort itself. The crippling human cost of the Bengal Famine of 1943 is adumbrated in this work. After all, hundreds of thousands of Bengal’s poor perished in that catastrophe – among them countless peasants who put food on privileged tables but starved to death themselves.

Also read: Man, Artist, Wound: Somnath Hore as I Knew Him

Few of Ramkinkar’s public sculptures were commissioned or sponsored work – except the Yaksha/Yakshi duo installed at the entrance to the Reserve Bank of India in New Delhi – and he had to make do with whatever resources he could mobilise locally through his personal efforts. This must have obliged him to use only inexpensive, locally available material, but his genius helped metamorphose this seeming handicap into an abiding strength.

Many of his sculptures were crafted with cement concrete – rather than stone or bronze or plaster of Paris, all expensive ingredients – combined with laterite pebbles, abundant quantities of which were available in and around Santiniketan then. His chosen medium gives his alfresco sculptures their distinctive texture and flavour. They look as though they have risen out of the ground, much like termite mounds seen growing out of Santinketan’s red soil. They are rugged, earthy, zestful – never unexciting or flat.

Ramkinkar built each sculpture around metal armatures – or bamboo-and-stick contraptions perhaps held together by a piece of rope – and threw clumps of the cement-laterite paste over them, which he shaped and chiselled away at as he went along. It was an extraordinarily demanding effort, for cement, unlike clay or plaster or wax, hardens quickly and is difficult to handle. And yet he fashioned out of this material numerous busts and portraits, often at incredible speed.

The Poet (1937). Photo: NGMA Delhi

Ramkinkar’s sculptures – much like his paintings – defy pigeonholing into a particular category: modernist, expressionist, cubist or abstract. He absorbed multiple influences, often many at the same time, and assimilated them so completely as to be able to fuse different approaches and styles effortlessly, often in the same work. Expressionism remains a strong undercurrent in his work, but his portraits and busts also reflect an abstraction of form accentuated by somewhat distorted anatomies, highlighting the essential characteristics that define the person being depicted.

The 1937 image of Rabindranath Tagore (see above) is an outstanding example. The poet’s face is profoundly unlike its habitual image, and yet the narrow head with a significantly elongated nose, the penetrating eyes, the receding hair that curls inwards and a beard that pleats well beyond the chins together leave the viewer in no doubt about the subject or the power of his presence. This is perhaps one of the first post-cubist character portraits done by an Indian sculptor.

‘Famine’ (1943) Photo: National Gallery of Modern Art

The minimalist creation Famine, on the other hand, reproduces with a fine weave of expressionism and symbolism the horror of the Bengal Famine. Bulging eyes on a bloated head perched on top of an emaciated body and spindly fingers clasping at an empty begging bowl create an image that haunts the viewer well after she is done viewing.

I had begun by recalling my personal memories of Ramkinkar Baij. Let me end with two glimpses of what posterity, in India, has chosen to do to his legacy. In December 2015, on a day trip to Balaton from Budapest, I made what I then thought was a startling discovery but later realised was stale news. Balaton is central Europe’s largest freshwater lake and a splendid all-season tourist destination, but to me, an Indian, it recommended itself on another count – its association with Rabindranath Tagore. In a heart sanatorium in the charming lakeside town of Balatonfured, the poet had spent three weeks in October 1926, convalescing. He had been taken ill in course of a long and gruelling tour of Europe that covered Scandinavia to Italy to Hungary.

The rooms of the hospital the poet stayed in have been preserved as a memorial to Rabindranath, and there is a lovely ‘Tagore Promenade’ on the lake-front made up of two rows of linden trees, the first of those trees having been planted by the poet himself, as a tribute to Balaton, after he got back his health.

The Tagore bust that offended genteel sensibilities. Photo: National Gallery of Modern Art

I loved the place, but wondered why a very ordinary-looking Tagore bust had been placed in the middle of the promenade. Oddly, the bust sat on a pedestal that seemed to lean a little to the front. I forgot all about it, however, till I reached the sanatorium/museum when I found, sitting on a desk inside the room the poet had occupied, Ramkinkar’s magnificent 1940 study of Rabindranath.

It is a remarkable study, for it is the image of a pensive old man whose deeply-lined brow bears witness to tragedy and pain, not an image exuding Olympian equanimity. Why was this masterpiece lying cooped up in a room even as a perfect mediocrity stood outside in full public view, claiming to represent India’s greatest poet?

It turns out that it was, indeed, the Ramkinkar bust that had first adorned the promenade, and a slightly tilted pedestal had been chosen to accommodate its unusual bearing. However, sundry Indian VIPs (mainly politicians but also, sadly, some well-known Tagore aficionados) clamoured in later years for its banishment, averring that it was ugly, and by no means an ‘authentic’ image of the sage-like poet.

The controversy raged for many years before it finally smoothed the way, in 2005, for the non-descript academic sculpture to make its appearance, relegating a wonderful work of art to the obscurity of a closed room. I, an Indian, had to hang my head in shame in far-away Hungary that day.

Cut to Ramkinkar’s own Santiniketan, where, in January 2017, my wife and I were visiting after many years. One afternoon we were walking around the Kala Bhavan complex, trying to figure out how much the whole place had changed since we had been there last. It was then that our eyes fell upon an extraordinary scene: a portrait of Ramkinkar in a rubbish dump. The bust looked suspiciously like the copy of a famous study by a reputed artist, but that was hardly the most striking thing here.

Ramkinkar bust in a rubbish dump in Santiniketan. Photo: Author provided

What really stood out was the supreme unconcern with which Santiniketan had come to treat the memory of arguably its greatest plastic artist, a titan who, in his time, had spurned fame and lucre so that he could go on living, and working, in peace in the place he had made his home.

No question that India was well on its way to becoming the Vishwa Guru.

Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com

In a Country That Worshipped Tigers, Whence the Idea of ‘Man-Eater’?

The storied trajectory of the ‘man-eating tiger’ in the colonial imagination shows how the names we use, and the stories we tell to breathe life into these names, matter.

Shortly after the first anniversary of the killing of tigress T1, a.k.a. Avni, the National Tiger Conservation Authority decided to drop the colonial category of ‘man-eater’. Tigers suspected of attacks on humans will instead be called ‘dangerous’.

How is a dangerous tiger different from a man-eater? How will the change help, and just what makes the category of ‘man-eater’ so irksome? The answers lie in the accounts of British colonial sportsmen and officials. In the colonial imagination, the ‘man-eater’ morphed from a metaphor of Oriental despotism into a metonym for the alleged criminality of big cats. By casting tigers as man-eaters, colonial officials sought to legitimise their control over the subcontinent’s wildness.

In the court of Tipu Sultan, the tiger was a complex symbol of kingship where plural faiths converged. In Mysore, close to Tipu’s capital, the idol of Durga as Chamundi rides a tiger. Residents of the surrounding villages venerated, Huliamma, the tiger goddess, while the worship of martial pirs invoked the forest. Such worship has been alternately described as shakti and barakat, both of which were thought to embody the tiger. But the British erased this symbolism and turned the tiger into an exemplar of depravity.

The story of Tipu’s tiger is a good example. Tipu’s tiger was displayed in a museum in the imperial metropole and featured widely in early 19th century guidebooks. His playful mechanical tiger, shown devouring a British soldier, was used to instruct visitors about alleged viciousness of the East. Playing with the contraption allowed English visitors to vicariously participate in empire-building. They could even operate a crank that produced moaning sounds (for the human) and roars.

The man-eater as criminal

The man-eater haunted the colonial imagination well after the lore of Tipu’s tiger died down. The story of a man-eater in Bengal, first reported in 1793, became a classic in the genre. A tiger attacked a party of soldiers of the East India Company while they were hunting deer on Sagar Island, and the son of Major Hector Munro was mauled to death. An English captain who witnessed the event wrote:

The human mind cannot form an idea of the scene; it turned my very soul within me. The beast was about four and a half feet high and nine feet long. His head appeared as large as that of an ox, his eyes darting fire, and his roar when he first seized his prey will never be out of my recollection.”

The telling and retelling of stories like this one sanctioned the official classification of the tiger as a scourge.

In fact, the implicit correlation of tigers with man-eating laid the groundwork for colonial hunting policies. The British effort to exterminate tigers was driven partly by a desire to push the forest back and enhance agrarian revenues. Mahesh Rangarajan has argued that after the Bengal famine (1770), when large tracts of land lay uncultivated, “fewer tigers meant more cultivation and more revenue, their elimination a blessing of imperium after the elimination of an Oriental despot’.”

In the writings of Thomas Webber, a forest officer in the mid to late 19th century, a slew of derogatory epithets cloaked the tiger: “terrible destroyer”, “scourge of mankind”, “ravenous monarch”, “terrible in his nature”, “cunning” and “guileful”. Webber went so far as to suggest man-eaters were a subcaste of tigers in general. In his reckoning, lazy tigers began by hunting cattle and then turned to man as a “smaller victim more easily slain and tasty, and light enough to carry off as a cat does a mouse”. He contended there were sub-castes of man-eaters among tigers, showing how attitudes towards the tiger echoed the racial logic of colonial law. “Recalcitrant wild animals” were thus classified much like criminal tribes, thugs and dacoits.

After criminalising the tiger, the initial vulnerability of English soldiers in the Indian forest gave way to large-scale hunting operations. The colonial hunt was staged as a performance with three actors: the tiger as criminal, the native as victim and the colonial sportsman as heroic saviour.

Sometimes, this script was gendered in humorous ways. In a rare account of a European party’s encounter with a tiger in the Sundarbans, Thomas Pennant commended the steely character of an English lady who “observed a tiger preparing to take its fatal spring and with amazing presence of mind laid hold of an umbrella, and furling it full in the animal’s face, terrified it so that it instantly retired”. In the coolly executed act of unfurling her umbrella, the Englishwoman reversed the roles of terrorised and terroriser. Whereas the “weak and timid” Bengali peasant supposedly fled in cowardice, Englishwomen could stand their ground while only the Englishman was brave enough to reduce the hunter into the hunted.

The man-eater as errant gentleman

In the early 20th century, Jim Corbett reframed the tiger as the sportsman’s counterpart in nature. He argued that “the jungle folk, in their natural surroundings, do not kill wantonly”. In his first work, the Man-Eaters of Kumaon (1944), Corbett even described the tiger as “a large-hearted gentleman with boundless courage”, and cautioned that if “he is exterminated, as exterminated he will be unless public opinion rallies to his support, India will be the poorer by having lost the finest of her fauna.”

In Corbett’s account, man-eating was explained as a disease with a personal history. So the human loss inflicted by man-eaters didn’t keep Corbett from sympathising with the vulnerability of an old tiger blinded by a porcupine attack or a maimed tigress having cubs to fend for. Personifying the tiger in this manner allowed Corbett to rationalise man-eating and encouraged him to face the tiger as a worthy opponent. Comparing the tiger to a “gentleman” seemed to have allowed him to enact both meanings of the word ‘sportsman’: a hunter as well as someone who engages in fair-play.

However, Corbett’s evaluation significantly obscured how colonial forestry had changed the nature of human-animal interactions in the subcontinent. By the early 20th century, the field/forest demarcation and large-scale hunting had transformed India’s socioecological world.

In the Himalayan foothills, for example, deforestation accelerated during the second half of the 19th century with the rising demand for railways. Successive Forest Acts in 1865 and 1878 empowered the state to appropriate and manage timber. The government prohibited local communities from hunting and collecting produce in state-protected forests. The effects of state forestry were also visible in an increasing incidence of attacks by wild animals.

These policies prompted uprisings in Kumaon and Garhwal in the early 20th century. Politically engineered ecological disruptions were not lost on anti-colonial activists. The 1921 report of the forest grievances committee in Kumaon complained that official restrictions on local techniques of hunting and denying gun licenses to villagers was leading to increasing attacks on people and livestock.

Moreover, the colonial assault on ‘wild vermin’ had resulted in the loss of over 80,000 tigers and 150,000 leopards between 1875 and 1925. Corbett point out causal connections between the increase in tiger attacks and the increase in bounty hunting. He further rallied to establish a separate game reserve in the region. While his stance marked a departure from late 19th century calls to hire paid tiger-killers, his approach continued to have much in common with older notions of paternalistic colonial control over nature. He was deeply suspicious of independent India’s ability to protect the tiger.

Addressing his ‘friends’ in independent India, Corbett wrote, “A country’s fauna is a sacred trust and I appeal to you not to betray this trust.”

* * *

The storied trajectory of the ‘man-eating tiger’ in the colonial imagination shows how the names we use, and the stories we tell to breathe life into these names, matter. For this reason, we shouldn’t stop with rejecting the colonial category of man-eater nor should we uncritically extol the animal-loving instincts of the subcontinent’s precolonial past. Upper-caste love for nature has long coexisted with – if it hasn’t complemented – the hateful treatment of fellow human beings.

Consider Annu Jalais’s insightful study of Scheduled Caste partition refugees’ accounts of ‘man-eaters’ in the Sunderbans. Bengali refugees in the islands affirmed that tigers became man-eaters following brutal police firings at Morichjhanpi in 1979, which killed 36 people. To the refugees, the massacre proved that the government and Bengal’s upper-caste elite were more concerned with tigers than with nimnoborger lives. “Islanders believed that they had become ‘just tiger-food’ for Kolkata’s bhadralok,” Jalais writes. To make room for both tigers and humans, beyond doing away with the category of ‘man-eater’, it matters whose stories about animals we choose to tell.

Nivedita is interested in the politics of the past and the promise of the future. She would like to thank the community of researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she is pursuing a PhD in history, for their encouragement.

Did the Victims of Jallianwala Bagh Deserve Pity – or Justice?

Why did the 1919 massacre not produce new laws and reparations? Any minimal justice would have created guarantees against such violence being reenacted today.

The history of decolonisation in India is not marked by as much by acrimony as one would expect. Consider the relations between the country that gained independence and the departing colonial power; consider how some Indians remained eternally grateful to Britain for giving India the rule of law.

Some urged the British to stay on till the country was at peace with herself. Yet others wished that the departing power had resolved every detail, particularly in relation to the two warring successor states.

Independence from the rival religious community was as important as was independence from colonial rule. Many, in this process, forgot 200 years of infamy they suffered, the lives that perished, the poverty that prevailed; not to mention the numerous rebellions that broke out.

They wished to forget and forgive. Still, a sense of agony and anxiety prevailed alongside joy and relief.

Also read: Apologies Cannot Eclipse Jallianwala Bagh

Amid such contrary pulls and tensions, where does the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre (resulting in nearly 1,000 deaths, according to the Congress, and 380 deaths, according to official records) stand? Did the question of justice or retribution come to the fore? No doubt some, even among us, thought the people assembled in Amritsar’s Jallianwala Bagh were insurrectionists. That a declaration of independence was imminent.

This explains the delayed response to the massacre. There was, of course, the colonial regime’s draconian restrictions preventing news from travelling to the rest of the country.

In many ways, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre was a preview of what was to happen in Kenya in the Mau Mau rebellion, in which the British killed a large number of Kenyans, the deaths ranging from 20,000 to 150,000.

Rabindranath Tagore returned his knighthood to protest the massacre on the grounds that such mass murderers were not worthy of conferring titles on anyone. The event was decisive in accelerating militant mass struggles to end the British rule.

The point then is, given its infamy, why did Jallianwala Bagh massacre not yield a call for justice, reparation and an appropriate jurisprudence?

Why did the laws not change? How was the massacre reduced, to borrow words from Hannah Arendt, to a case of the “banality of evil”? In what fundamental ways did colonial patterns of rule continue?

Interview | Why the Context of the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre Is So Important

Perhaps what we have here isn’t so much a question of philosophy as it is of law and politics. Perhaps we shall see that the idea of transitional justice is too innocent a notion that ignores complications of major injustices, such as colonial injustice of the past.

Perhaps our idea of justice is too weak to do justice to the past, too lazy to dig deep into the fault-lines. Yesteryears’ battles mining today’s war fields perhaps render any legal resolution impossible.

Visiting India in 1997, the Queen of England, made it a point to visit the site of the massacre in Amritsar. She visited the site despite the Indian government advising her against it, in view of the strong feelings such a visit could evoke. The Queen, along with her entourage, nevertheless visited the massacre site. Her husband asked a pointed question about the correctness of the estimate of deaths. But the royal couple did not apologise for the massacre. As one British newspaper put it, British monarchs were “not in the habit of tendering apology where they go.”

The British ruler expressed remorse and “sadness” over the Jallianwala Bagh incident. The Queen urged that forgetting the sad moments, we remember and “build” on the “glad” moments.

The royalty also made an appearance at the Golden Temple in 1997. The temple’s priests and holy men left no stone unturned to make the Queen feel at ease. It seemed the Queen’s visit restored the dignity of the slain and their families.

Then prime minister I. K. Gujral appealed to Indians to not continue with their recriminations – to draw the curtains over the questions of guilt and responsibility.

Was the welcome accorded to the Queen a “colonial hangover”, as one commentator put it? Or was it a replay of the country’s internal fault lines? In the background of the Golden Temple incident in 1984, it could be claimed that the Queen’s visit had avenged the indignity of Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

Yet it was not perhaps such a simple comprador versus patriot case. We all know how the two parties that currently dominate politics in Punjab quarrelled with each other about the roles of historical characters of that time; characters whose legacy or burden is carried by their successors in both parties concerned.

Also read: Jallianwalla Bagh Aftermath: An Eyewitness Account of the Congress Inquiry Report

It must be remembered that landlords, nabobs, rai bahadurs, big pleaders, judges, big civil servants, and other men of substance had not taken kindly to militant nationalists including revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh. Nationalists too had their role in crafting the narrative of dishonour, compromise and collaboration.

In 1857, the country awakened to mutiny, but only in some areas. Men of substance in many areas collaborated with the colonial regime. Within the same social group, some rebelled, others stayed loyal to colonial rulers. No group or population can claim hegemonic claim to national glory. Neither can any party, region, or even religion. Such claims were quickly challenged by other groups. The skeletons in the cupboard were too many to be sorted out. Not only politics, even memory and legacy of honour has to be federal in nature.

Bullet holes in the wall at Jallianwala Bagh. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

It should not be surprising that Jallianwala Bagh massacre has not shamed the country’s ruling classes or jolted the structures of governance. We still come across the same trigger-happy forces enforcing law and order; the same reliance on people with guns and tanks; the same proclivity to control information; the same attitude to subjugating society, and putting down any sign of protest as an act of insurrection.

Also read: Why Popular Local Memory of Jallianwala Bagh Doesn’t Fit the National Narrative

Strategies such as seeking accountability and truth, working towards reconciliation, ensuring retrospective apology, may not offer genuine homage to the victims of the Jallianwala Bagh. We all know how truth and reconciliation healed South Africa.

Let the curtain not come down prematurely on the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Let the violence continue to shame its perpetrators. Justice is often minimal, historically produced. Any minimal justice would require guarantees against re-enactment of such violence.

There has to be joint custodianship of those offering such a guarantee. There is, at present, no law that codifies the notion of minimal justice. Until such time that we have such laws, we should have a sense of shame and awareness of the fault lines which produced such an act of violence.

Ranabir Samaddar is Distinguished Chair in Forced Migration studies, Calcutta Research Group. He can be contacted at ranabir@mcrg.ac.in.

Apologies Cannot Eclipse Jallianwala Bagh

Will an apology bring the erstwhile British empire to its knees? It is just symbolic and a footnote in history books.

The remembrance of Jallianwala stands for much more than the brutal murder of hundreds. The figures are disputed. The British admit to the death of 379, with 1,100 wounded. The civil surgeon registered 1,526 casualties. Indian sources claim a 1,000 dead. The figures are unimportant, the facts clear.

Brigadier Dyer open fire on a trapped crowd protesting the Rowlatt Act, which imprisoned people without offense or trial. Following the massacre, Tagore returned his knighthood. Future Nobel winner Kipling defended Dyer.

Lt Governor of Punjab Michael O’ Dwyer, an imperialist racist, had connived with Dyer. Later, with Lord Chelmsford’s approval, O’ Dwyer imposed martial law in Amritsar. The House of Lords initially approved, but on July 8, 1920, the House of Commons voted 247-37 against Dyer. The six volume Hunter Commission (1920) condemned Dyer for “error”, while the dissenting members stated that the killings went beyond error, totally lacking justification.

Eventually, Dyer was relieved of his command, the recommendation for a CBE for the Third Afghan War cancelled. He died in 1927 of jaundice and arteriosclerosis. O’ Dwyer was assassinated by Udham Singh in Caxton Hall. He was hanged at Pentonville jail.

Misplaced apology

Somehow, we keep insisting that the British should apologise for this mass murder. The insistence on apology is totally misplaced. Jallianwala Bagh is symptomatic of the actions of the British Empire in all its domains.

What do we expect the British to apologise for? Colonial and imperial rule? That they will not do. For them, Jallianwala Bagh was an ‘aberration” which would be healed by time. This was certainly the attitude of Queen Elizabeth on October 13, 1997 at a banquet in India, even if she laid a wreath and observed a 30-second silence at Jallianwala itself. It is reported that Prince Philip thought that the death of 379 people did not appeal to the conscience as the demise of 2,000 might have done.

In February 2013, British Prime Minister David Cameron called the massacre “a deeply shameful event in British history”. In 2019, Theresa May apologised. London’s mayor Sadiq Khan said in 2017 that the British government should apologise.

But the question is whether an apology is an answer to close controversies over Jallianwala Bagh. Prime Minister I.K. Gujral thought it was not necessary for the queen to apologise. Shashi Tharoor thinks it is.

Why are we so insistent on an apology? Will it bring the erstwhile British empire to its knees? The very concept of an apology is not to be trifled with. It is just symbolic and a footnote in history books.

Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron (R) makes a joint appearance with Mayor of London Sadiq Khan (2nd L) as they launch the Britain Stronger in Europe guarantee card at Roehampton University in West London, Britain May 30, 2016. Credit: Reuters/Facundo Arrizabalaga

Former Britissh PM David Cameron (R) and Mayor of London Sadiq Khan. Credit: Reuters/Facundo Arrizabalaga

Memory should be kept alive

The memories of Jallianwala have to be kept alive, lest apologies eclipse the event. To simply ask for a formal apology is to disgrace memories of an atrocity. It looks as if Indians ask or beg for an apology and British leaders give it. Indeed, Queen Elizabeth’s stated view was that there was bad and good, let us forget the bad and move on with the good.

As for British politicians, we will never know whether such apologies are only to appease the subcontinent emigrants to Britain, whose vote they seek. The realities of truth will enable us to understand the true weight of apologies and their discontent.

As soon as we accept that Jallianwala Bagh was an unfortunate aberration, we support the empire and what it stood for. The British policy of controlling media and punishment for sedition stalks its history. Recall Napier’s message to the queen after the conquest of Sindh: “Peccavi” – a pun saying “I have sinned/sindh”.

Macaulay’s famous Minute spoke colonial condescension to condemn oriental learning and desired create brown Englishmen schooled in English. From 1857 to 1947, the Empire did not ease up.

Also Read: Study Says Winston Churchill’s Policies Caused the 1943 Bengal Famine

Diversion of food for World War II caused the Bengal famine of 1943. Even before 1919, Dadabhai Naoroji revealed the exploitation of India for British prosperity and William Digby condemned the thought of a “prosperous” British India. Reputedly, by that time, Indians had already made the demand for freedom and against the indignities of the empire.

Apology will not redeem the empire. Nor should an opportunity be given to do so.

Bullet holes in the wall at Jallianwala Bagh. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Not just an Indian issue

Jallianwala Bagh is not just an Indian issue, but also affects the history of the entire sub-continent, if not the world. Historical events are made by continuously stoking memory into consecration. In England, 1066 is a historical event of when their history began. Caesar crossing the Rubicon is treated as a historical event as he brought troops into Rome.

1947 is a historical event for the sub-continent. Jallianwala is a historical event. We must be clear of what it stands for. The British would be quite happy to apologise and consign it to the dustbin of history.

For Indians, it must represent all the inequities of the Raj, and colonialism and imperialism throughout the world. No apology is enough to transgress memory. Jallianwala Bagh represents imperial atrocity and genocide across the ages.

Also Read: ‘Theresa May’s Words Too Little Too Late’: Rakhshanda Jalil on Jallianwala Bagh

I am not suborning history, but just consecrating facts for what they represent. Today, the forces of the Sangh (which made little contribution to the freedom movement) want to angle history from a Hindu point of view in ways to support hate for other communities. That is not my intention here. There is a huge difference between the British empire exploiting India and rulers from the Aryan onward, who assimilated and remained in India.

Pre-British history teaches lessons about how India became a unique multi-cultural civilisation. The coin of history has many sides, but Jallianwala Bagh represents only two: the might and atrocities of the empire on the one side; and vicious exploitation by the British on the other.

History must be founded on truth. History will not redeem itself by idle apologies, but by a constructive understanding of the future for all of us.

Jallianwala Bagh is not to be forgotten, nor etched out of history by apology.

Rajeev Dhavan is a senior advocate in the Supreme Court.

Study Says Winston Churchill’s Policies Caused the 1943 Bengal Famine

Researchers in India and the US used weather data to prove the now-infamous accusation as the rain levels were above average in 1943.

Few statesmen have the reputation of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders Europe has ever seen.

Yet that reputation has not remained untarnished, particularly for the role he and his wartime cabinet played in exacerbating the Bengal famine on 1943 which killed three million Indians.

The now-infamous accusation has now been confirmed to be true by a new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, where researchers in India and the US used weather data to gauge the amount of moisture in the soil during six major famines in the subcontinent between 1873 and 1943.

According to the study, the famine was caused by Churchill’s policies and not a drought. The researchers found that five of the famines were largely caused by droughts, but in 1943, at the height of the Bengal famine, rain levels were above average.

Also read: Digging Up British Empire’s Bloody Legacy in India

“We find that a majority of famines were caused by large-scale and severe soil moisture droughts that hampered the food production. However, one famine was completely due to the failure of policy during the British era,” the study’s abstract reads.

“There have been no major famines since independence,” Vimal Mishra, the lead researcher and an associate professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, told CNN, “And so we started our research thinking the famines would have been caused by drought due to factors such as lack of irrigation.”

Willoughby Wallace Hooper’s photos of the famine. Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Wellcome Library Image Catalogue/Public Domain

In 1896-97, for example, an 11% deficit measured across much of north India, alongside food shortages across the country, killed an estimated five million people.

But in 1843, rain levels were above average, the study found.

“This was a unique famine, caused by policy failure instead of any monsoon failure,” Mishra told The Guardian. Policy lapses such as prioritising distribution of vital supplies to the military, stopping rice imports and not declaring that it was actually a famine were among the factors that led to the magnitude of the tragedy, he added.

Mishra, co-authored the study along with Amar Deep Tiwari, Saran Aadhar, Reepal Shah, Mu Xiao, D.S. Pai and Dennis Lettenmaier.

Also read: Past Continuous: The Deep Impact of the Bengal Famine on the Indian Psyche

It was the lack of food supply that led to the death of the estimated three million. The study points out that policy could have been used effectively – during the 1873-74 famine, some 25 million people were affected, yet the mortality rate was low as the then Bengal lieutenant governor, Richard Temple, imported food from Burma (now Myanmar) and distributed food and relief money, saving countless lives.

For having done so, the British government had actually come down hard on Temple for having diverted resources to save Indian lives.

According to the study, another factor that exacerbated the mortality count of the 1943 famine was the Japanese capture of Burma.

Churchill’s Secret War
Madhusree Mukerjee
Basic Books, August 2010

In 1981, Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen had argued that there should have been enough supplies to feed Bengal in 1943.

Amartya Sen received his Nobel prize mainly on the strength of his work on famines and the book Poverty and Famines, which had a chapter on the ‘Great Bengal Famine’, began with the following premise:

“Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat. While the latter can be a cause of the former, it is but one of many possible causes. Whether and how starvation relates to food supply is a matter for factual investigation.”

More so, Madhusree Mukerjee’s book, Churchill’s Secret War, published in 2010, noted how the famine was caused by heavy exports of food from India.

In the book, Churchill has been quoted as blaming the famine on the fact Indians were “breeding like rabbits”, and asking how, if the shortages were so bad, Mahatma Gandhi was still alive.

In a review of the book for TIME magazine, Shashi Tharoor wrote:

Mukerjee delves into official documents and oral accounts of survivors to paint a horrifying portrait of how Churchill, as part of the Western war effort, ordered the diversion of food from starving Indians to already well-supplied British soldiers and stockpiles in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, including Greece and Yugoslavia.

India was not permitted to use its own sterling reserves, or indeed its own ships, to import food. And because the British government paid inflated prices in the open market to ensure supplies, grain became unaffordable for ordinary Indians. Mukerjee’s book depicts a truth more awful than any fiction.

Tharoor’s own book Inglorious Empire also chronicles the havoc wreaked by the British empire in India. In a speech at Oxford in 2015, Tharoor had spoken about Churchill’s role in the death of millions in India:

“This is a man the British would have us hail as an apostle of freedom and democracy, when he has as much blood on his hands as some of the worst genocidal dictators of the 20th century.”

Joseph Lelyveld, when reviewing the book for The New York Review of Books, wrote:

‘One primary cause’ is not the same as ‘the primary cause’ but it comes close enough to provide scaffolding for her accusatory title. Probably it’s true that fewer Bengalis would have died had Churchill approved an emergency request from his own officials in India in July 1943 for shipments of 80,000 tons of wheat a month to Bengal for the rest of the year. Whether his failure to do so amounts to a “secret war” is another question.”

Changes in policy would have made a world of difference though, as India has proved since its Independence. As the study notes:

“Expansion of irrigation, better public distribution system, rural employment, and transportation reduced the impact of drought on the lives of people after the independence.”

Even in Prose, Subhash Mukhopadhyay Yearned for a More Equal World

Subhash Mukhopadhyay was not just a poet who also dabbled in prose, but a consummate artist equally at home in several prose genres.

Some months ago, I received a mail from Sergei Serebriyani, Russian author-translator, asking for some details about the poet Subhash Mukhopadhyay. I said ‘poet’, but Serebriayani’s questions referred primarily to one of Subhash’s prose writings – Hungras (‘The Hungerstrike’), a Bengali novel first published in 1973.

It turned out that Serebriyani was to present a conference paper on the thematic parallels between that novel and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s celebrated One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. I later found out that he had translated into Russian two of Mukhopadhya’s major works in prose – Hungras and Ke Kothai Jai (‘Everyone for their own Destiny’) – in 1977 and 1981 respectively.

My answers to his questions, about how widely Subhash’s prose was read these days in West Bengal and how many Indian languages Hungras has been translated into, must have surprised and disappointed him. But he sought to reassure me that, in Bangladesh (where Serebriyani happens to go often), Subhash Mukhopadhyay continued to be read with great interest; indeed, that new editions of his prose writings continued to appear in Dhaka fairly regularly.

I mention this interaction to highlight the fact that, while in Subhash’s home country, interest in his prose is marginal at best, many readers and commentators in other countries continue to engage with the entire body of his creative work, and not with his poetry alone.

Not many readers in India would know today that the range of Mukhopadhyay’s prose writings was strikingly wide, or that his first literary efforts had made prose their vehicle. Indeed, that his prose writings are so far from being a mere extension of the world of his poetry – as happens not infrequently with major poets – that, by overlooking them, we risk knowing Mukhopadhyay only partially at best. They also remain unaware that exploring the many linkages between his poetry and his prose – linkages that operate at multiple levels – can be such a richly rewarding experience in itself.

Pre-partition Bengal

Subhash published his first book of poems, Padatik (‘The Foot Soldier’) when he had just turned 21. But he had been writing prose since school and, in the early 1940s, started working as a journalist for the Communist Party of India’s Bengal mouthpiece Janajuddha (People’s War).

His work took him to pre-partition Bengal’s far corners – the rugged Garo hills in the north as well as south Bengal’s flood plains, around Kolkata’s industrial ghettoes, but also into the tall grasslands and Sal forests of Dooars.

These were turbulent years. The freedom movement was reaching its crescendo; the escalating World War was turning Bengal’s small towns and sleepy villages upside down, with Allied troops setting up camp in every nook and cranny; there was a new-found daring in labour militancy; and, on all sides, there was desperate poverty although the immensely fertile Gangetic plains yielded up golden harvests of paddy year after year.

Then came the crippling Great Bengal Famine of 1943/44 – a tragedy without equal in living memory. Three million women, men and children starved to death, many more were maimed in body and mind for the rest of their lives. For the young communist activist, this was a shattering experience, but it also steeled his resolve to join the battle to change the world. His reportage of these years later shaped his first book of prose, Amar Bangla (‘My Bengal’), which came out in 1951.

Also Read: Subhash Mukhopadhyay’s Poems Anticipated the India of Today

Freedom had arrived in the meantime, Janajuddha made way for Swadhinata (Freedom), and Subhash had just emerged from a nearly three-year-long prison term in independent India. These years in different jails in Kolkata and elsewhere find echoes in his many later works, most immediately in Jakhon Jekhane (‘Whenever, Wherever’, 1960), his second book of reportage-based prose.

Though he had come out with two more books of verse – Chirkut (‘The Parchment’) and Agnikone (‘The Abode of the Fire-God’) before 1951, he did not publish a single new anthology of his poetry between 1951 and 1960, though as many as seven books of prose came from his pen in this period.

They included Bangalir Itihas (‘History of Bengal’s Society and Culture’) a virtuoso adaptation, for youngsters, of Prof Nihar Ranjan Roy’s eponymous masterpiece, a treatise on how language evolved as the foremost means of human communication, a biography of Jagadish Chandra Bose, and a Bengali translation of Bhabani Bhattacharyya’s celebrated novel So Many Hungers.

In later years, Subhash Mukhopadhyay repeatedly returned to the reportage mode: Dak Banglar Diary (‘An Itinerant’s Diary’, 1967), Naroder Diary (‘Narada’s Diary’, 1969), Kshoma Nei (‘There’s No Forgiving’, 1971) and Abar Dak Banglar Dake (‘Bengal Calls Again’, 1981) are notable works of this genre.

These comprised not impressionistic sketches drawn by a poet alone. Often, they were detailed studies of how Bengal’s (or West Bengal’s) political economy evolved, how it struggled to cope with the tasks of reducing hunger and want, and how communities took on state repression and unbridled economic exploitation.

A sketch from artist Chittaprosad’s album ‘Hungry Bengal’ depicting the famine. Credit: Chittaprosad

A variety of style

Kshoma Nei is a narrative built around the resistance against genocide in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1971, an angry narrative that invited the ire of a well-known Bengali authoress who accused Subhash of hate-mongering and incitement to violence, accusations that the writer angrily, very publicly, repudiated.

Hungras (1973), Ke Kothai Jai (1976), Ontoreep, ba Hansener Asukh (‘Hansen’s Disease’, 1983), Comrade, Kotha Kao (‘Comrade, Speak Up’, 1990) and Kancha Paka (‘Raw and Ready’, 1989) are, however, best described as novellas/novels. They span a fascinating range of themes: a long-drawn-out hunger strike by political prisoners seen through the eyes of two different protagonists in parallel to each other; a young couple, disenchanted with social revolution, rededicating themselves to social change in the course of a train journey where an elderly co-passenger, a battle-scarred old-school communist, recounts his hopes and his disappointments to them; a colony of lepers abandoned to their ‘fate’ where a newly-arrived patient, a one-time political radical, tries to come to terms with his future; an industrial township torn between conflicting loyalties coming apart in the end; ‘reminiscences’ of a rootless wanderer who doesn’t know where he belongs and yet becomes part of a bustling community living at life’s margins.

Subhash works with different narrative styles in these books. Some of the stories are told as conventional third-person accounts, some speak in the first person while some others employ a mix of both voices. The common thread that runs through these diverse tales is that of compassion intertwined with a yearning for a less unequal world. In this, these stories link up unmistakably with everything else that Subhash Mukhopadhyay ever wrote as an adult – whether in verse or in prose.

Also Read: ‘Flowers of Stone’: Intimations of Loss and Triumph in the Poetry of Subhash Mukhopadhyay

And yet, he was far from being a doctrinaire communist. After Stalin’s death, Subhash wrote an eulogy which does not ring very convincing today, but he also translated into Bengali Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich at a time (in 1965) when the Soviet Union still denounced Solzhenitsyn as a renegade. (Dr Serebriayani tells me how the Soviet authorities were scandalised to hear that Subhash Mukhopadhyay, the Lenin Peace Prize-winning communist intellectual with a large readership in the USSR, had had anything to do with Solzhenitsyn.)

With equal elan, he translated the Rosenberg letters, Hugh Toye’s The Springing Tiger, Anne Frank’s Diary, Azad’s India Wins Freedom and Sher Jung’s Tryst with Tigers. Even when he wrote frank travel diaries – Vietname Kichhudin (‘Travelling around Vietnam’,1974), for example – they were in a crisp, lively idiom that has come to be identified as his signature style. His politics essentially remained the same throughout – though his political affiliations changed colour in the later years – but his cultural tastes were always eclectic, not hidebound.

Let us end with an excerpt from Amar Bangla (‘My Bengal’), his first-published book of prose. This is the book’s concluding piece, called Haat Barao (‘Lend Him Your Hand’):

The Teesta is a river that barely wets your ankles in winter. If you turn your head back as you walk across it, you will see the great hulk of a giant hunched over his knees, his back pressed against the sky. In truth, it is not a giant, it is the Himalayas.

And, in a little village in Nandigram that no one seems to have heard of, what do you see on the far horizon, beyond the rows of salt-eaten palm trees? Something that is first only a tiny dot but keeps growing bigger and bigger, till it is as tall as a palm tree? The mast of an approaching ship. And beyond the sand dunes in front, the vast sweep of the blue ocean. The Bay of Bengal.

This, then, is my Bengal, stretching from the mighty Himalayas to the endless sea: the mountains are its watch-tower, the ocean the moat protecting it.

The train to Faridpur was a long time away yet. I was sitting in the Rajbari market yard, waiting for the train. It was a mist-laden early morning during the time of the great famine of the forties. A little distance from us, beside the army camp on the road to the train station, I spotted a weird creature. It was approaching us slowly, on all fours. It didn’t look like any animal I had known before. Its two eyes glinted even through the fog’s veil. Had I been alone, I might have blacked out from fear. Because there was something in those eyes that chilled you to the bone.

The creature came closer. It was picking out clumsily little somethings from the dust, eating them. Its flaring eyes were searching for something in the mist. Its two front paws looked quite like a man’s hands. Only the fingers seemed to be scrawnier, longer. It had no hair on its body. What animal was this?

I shuddered as it came near me. Man—the son of god. It was a boy twelve or thirteen years old, with not a stitch of clothing on him. His back was broken. He couldn’t walk any more. So he crawled about on his hands and feet. In the market yard he picked up grains of rice and gram from the dust and ate them.

I ran away from him to the railway station. But even today those two burning eyes fix me in their maddening gaze now and then. As I look out on the wide and deep rivers that dispense bountiful harvests all round, I hear him breathe hard. With his wasted, spindly fingers, he is pointing at those murderers who in towns and villages and cities and ports are fastening the noose of death around the necks of the living. Who won’t let men live a life fit for men.

Those two blazing eyes seek peace. Let there be peace all across Bengal, in her green fields rippling with golden corn, in the farmer’s barns bursting with paddy. Let peace twine hands with countless men rising in protest in factories and mines. No more war, no more death from starvation. Let there be a life of freedom, of happiness, a new life built by millions of strong, willing hands. A life of peace.

Amid the darkening shadows of war and famine, those two blinding eyes watch over this land that stretches from the Himalayas to the seas. They are the eyes of someone who is struggling to get up on his feet. Give him your hand. Help him stand up again.

Nothing quite like this had been attempted in the Bengali language before. Subhash just turned 27 when he wrote this piece. The audacious simplicity of prose has intensely lyrical underpinnings, something perhaps only Tagore had achieved in his 1940 memoirs, Chhelebela (‘My Boyhood Days’).

Anjan Basu has published a book of translations – As Day is Breaking – from the work of the Jnanpith Award-winning poet, Subhash Mukhopadhyay. Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com

Past Continuous: The Deep Impact of the Bengal Famine on the Indian Psyche

A fortnightly column reflecting on chapters of the political past that are relevant today.

The noted filmmaker, Mrinal Sen, reminded me of my ‘second-hand’ experience of a tragic episode in Bengal’s history. It was the early 1980s and I, along with a friend, was on my maiden interview which at that point I did not know would initiate me into a lifetime in journalism. At the end of our conversation on his cinema, when conversation turned to the personal, Sen learnt I was a probashi Bengali.

His words of advice turned into a continuous lesson – “try understanding Bengal’s three traumas and you will know more about your sub-conscious – Bengal partition, Bengal famine and turbulent Bengal of 1960s and 1970s or events following from the peasants’ uprising in Naxalbari.”

Since then, I never tired reading about these episodes and every time a ‘conclusion’ was reached, a new perspective would be discovered.

With time, as I discovered passion for history – a subject our school forced us to turn away from for offering only the science stream after middle school – I felt Sen would have made me wiser if he had added a fourth episode – the Battle of Plassey. I am sure readers would have their own takes and may suggest other essentials to better comprehend Bengali sub-national consciousness and identity. Other sub-nationalities too may look into their histories to bookmark watersheds from the past, specific to their states or regions.

Although the Bengal famine wrought havoc on people of the province for three years beginning 1942, it is most commonly referred as the Bengal famine of 1943. This year then marks 75 years since the tragedy that killed an estimated three million people. The second-hand experience which I mentioned previously, stemmed from my father being a young boy at that time.

Although he was privileged enough to avoid being part of the hordes that thronged – bowl in hand, to government grain shops much before these opened, at an early age he learnt what scarcity was. My father’s privileges, however, were lesser than the other Sen who gets mentioned in this piece – the economist with the first name of Amartya, and the one who stood with cigarette tins filled with rice to hand over to the hungry when they lined past his grandfather’s house. But my father’s tales and lessons inculcated the lifetime habit of not wasting food, especially cereals or ann as they say in Hindi.

It is not that he unilaterally decided one day that it was time to ‘educate’ his only born. Instead, the question regarding this was posed by me when I returned one summer from a sojourn at grandparents’ in Varanasi. On a rare brawl I picked up during the visit with a neighbouring boy, I was called to shut up because I was a bhooka Bangali. Because my grandfather was rather non-communicative when I reported the incident, I waited to ask my father.

He explained that possibly the slur had its origins in the famine – he provided in-depth account of this – when famished and skeletonous people fled Bengal in thousand. “Naturally, they were hungry,” he said and also detailed how the Indian People’s Theatre Association, with which he was associated briefly, had choreographed the famous musical composition – Bhooka Hai Bangal which found mention even when the government issued a commemorative postage stamp to mark IPTA’s golden jubilee. “Some people possibly still use the phrase as abuse because it remains in their collective memory just as this conversation will be remembered by you,” my father explained although using much simpler words and sans jargon.

Amartya Sen received his Nobel prize mainly on the strength of his work on famines and the book Poverty and Famines, which had a chapter on the ‘Great Bengal Famine’, began with the following premise:

“Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat. While the latter can be a cause of the former, it is but one of many possible causes. Whether and how starvation relates to food supply is a matter for factual investigation.”

In several other papers, essays and books he reiterated that a majority of famines do not have cause and effect relationship with reduced availability of food due to drought and floods. Sen’s argument to the contrary, was that famines occur despite food being adequately available and because there is disbalance in the consumption pattern. More food, he argued, was available to one section – for a variety of reasons – and the other group is literally starved of supplies.

If the hypothesis is true, then it should be possible to prevent famines. Or even reverse these by a series of steps which could include seizing traders’ excess stocks, limiting supply to the rich and ensuring the poor get enough to eat. In today’s parlance, all this could have been done in 1943 by a series of what are now called ‘executive orders’. But these were not issued!

Sen argued in his other works that food availability in 1943 was “at least 11% higher than in 1941 when there was nothing remotely like a famine”. His theory was war economics was the principal reason behind the ‘man-made’ famine. The Second World War generated jobs in thousands and because they were well-paid, in their new-found affluence, the burgeoning middle-class consumed more than what was needed thereby raising demand by cutting into supply.

On the other hand, while this minuscule minority secured plush jobs, the multitudes who before the war earned only what was sufficient for bare survival, lost employment as nature of economy changed.

Even though there was enough food in the country, disaster struck because the poorest in Bengal could no longer buy food as they had no employment. Even those who retained jobs, could not purchase food as prices had soared and what was within reach previously was now beyond their ambit.

Sen also is known for possibly one of his most significant statements: “No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy” because political parties ”have to win elections and face public criticism, and have strong incentive to undertake measures to avert famines and other catastrophes.” He added that “famines are, in fact, so easy to prevent,” and going on to state “that it is amazing that they are allowed to occur at all.”

Despite his argumentative proposition, governments in independent India have continued to show a consistent preference to keep those at the bottom of the economic strata on the edge of malnutrition. P. Sainath’s Everybody Loves a Good Drought remains a lasting contribution deprivation and neglect live side by side.

But for every viewpoint there is also a counter to it and the same data set can be viewed alternately. Several years ago, Madhushree Mukherjee, who has a second-hand experience of the famine similar to mine, wrote the well received, albeit contentiously, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II. Unlike Sen, who did not find a villainous character in any individual wielding power, she held just one person responsible for the famine: Winston Churchill.

He was, she argued, responsible for decision that “would tilt the balance between life and death for millions”. She argued her point from another perspective – “one primary cause”, she contended, was the British premier’s keenness “to use the resources of India to wage war against Germany and Japan”. Whatever else may have been her indiscretions, but the one that Mukherjee would find tough to live with was picking a quibble with the economist Sen.

Joseph Lelyveld, when reviewing the book in prestigious The New York Review of Books, refrained from demolishing the book because of her ‘blasphemous’ accusation, but nonetheless began with a simple argument:

‘One primary cause’ is not the same as ‘the primary cause’ but it comes close enough to provide scaffolding for her accusatory title. Probably it’s true that fewer Bengalis would have died had Churchill approved an emergency request from his own officials in India in July 1943 for shipments of 80,000 tons of wheat a month to Bengal for the rest of the year. Whether his failure to do so amounts to a “secret war” is another question.”

The review, sparked an intellectual tempest at the least, as Mukherjee responded to Lelyveld’s comment that she failed in discussing Sen’s claim that that Bengal had enough grain in 1943. Kolkata’s The Telegraph gleefully reported the exchange which was published in NYRB between Mukherjee and the reviewer on the one hand and the fact that Sen to had been drawn into the conflict, this time as an economist who “misquoted the government’s estimate of the rice shortfall as a mere 140,000 tons (instead of the 1.4 million tons stated in the document he cites) — which led him to mistakenly claim that the authorities could not have predicted famine.”

Eventually, the matter remained unsettled and The Telegraph let Ramchandra Guha have the last word in its story: “I think the Bengali intellectual never lost the appetite for debate or quibbling.” Mukherjee has however not given up. A new edition of her book is out to mark 75 years of the Bengal famine and she gets readers to see more of the ‘beastly’ Churchill.

An occasion like this has capacity to induce taking sides. Many have gone along with Mukherjee in vilifying Churchill while others have not – saying that one man cannot be blamed for three million deaths.

That debate apart, there is little denying the deep impact of the tragedy on the Indian psyche, whether they experienced the famine first-hand, second-hand or even have learnt about from remote sources. Mrinal Sen had briefly talked about his film Akaler Sandhane – in the genre of film within a film – and held forth on how even the making of a film on the famine could affect the previously unconcerned crew and cast.

Even Satyajit Ray made Asani Sanket, depicting the life of a young Brahmin couple in a village during the famine. The two films remain testimony to the profound influence of the events of 1942-44. In an iconic shot of Sen’s film, Smita Patil is shown staring into the blinding sky in search for a speck of cloud. But then, in his rush to make his film, Sen possibly stuck with traditional belief that a famine occurs when the rain gods turn disfavourable.

To go back to the point I made initially – every time a ‘conclusion’ is reached, please look for a new perspective. Seventy five years after the famine, it would be fitting for us to think of more ways to understand what happened, how and why. It is also time to write more stories and make more films, not just on this episode, but on all those that have contributed to the making of the contemporary Indian mind.

Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay is a Delhi-based writer and journalist, and the author of Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times and Sikhs: The Untold Agony of 1984. He tweets @NilanjanUdwin.

Past Continuous: Why IPTA Has a Special Place in India’s Cultural History

A fortnightly column reflecting on chapters of India’s political past that are relevant today.

A question the other day by a younger fellow journalist, who did not enter this profession after ‘flirtation’ with the political process in youth, like many of this writer’s generation, and yet retains a fundamental humanism in his outlook, is the trigger for this piece. He asked: “Why are right-wingers generally not sensitive artists?” He meant to ask, why in recent years, had no sensitive piece of literature, cinema, theatre or even music come directly from the right-wing or even its supporters? In reply, as I said, what constitutes sensitivity is subjective.

Someone may opine that Padmaavat is a great film which ‘corrects’ history and sensitively portrays the predicament of a queen who is left with no option but to commit jauhar. Others may argue that it typecasts a Muslim king, presents him as a violent person driven by lust, who uses sexuality as a tool of political subjugation. Yet others may consider the film nothing but a romanticised account of mass suicide (jauhar) by women. What may be sensitive to one, may not raise goosebumps in the other. Even if one were to replace ‘sensitive’ with ‘social commitment’, differences will persist over what constitutes allegiance to the collective. Yet, when art and culture transcend the individual ‘creator’, express concerns which common people relate to and when such art and culture inspire people who are struggling for social betterment, such artists can be dubbed ‘people’s artists’.

Seventy-five years ago, several years after a ginger start was made by a group of writers who organised the first Progressive Writer’s Association Conference in 1936, when the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) was formally inaugurated in 1943, no one imagined the deep impact it would leave on successive generations of artists. The thought came to mind while reading a recent article which explored music maestro Ilaiyaraaja’s recent decision to be less reticent than in the past. As one went through the piece, his symbiotic relationship with another maestro, Salil Chowdhury, and through him, IPTA, emerged vividly. This underscored once again the special place that IPTA has in India’s cultural history.

The formation of IPTA in the year following the launch of the Quit India Movement (1942) was no coincidence. The period was vibrant and the nationalist movement was sensing that its objective was within reach. Those artists who felt the need to be part of the political process and play a role in India’s independence movement, chose to use creativity to strengthen and popularise nationalism. IPTA gave formal shape to this sentiment, arguing in favour of the need for artists to stop limiting themselves to ‘art for art’s sake’. Be in cinema, theatre, literature or non-performing arts, this was globally the period of social realism, when it was felt that art and culture could not remain alienated from life, but must mirror it. The assemblage which came together, consisted of people from multiple arenas of creative pursuits and filled the long-felt need for artists to play a significant role in strengthening progressive forces.

Poet Kaifi Azmi with his comrades headed for a conference of Progressive Writers’ Association. Credit: Twitter/Syed Ahmed Afzal

Cultural awakening of the masses was on this group’s agenda alongside the commitment to integrate cultural tradition with modernity. Dedicated to taking theatre to the people – and not just by use of folk forms – the IPTA pursued the objective of raising socio-political awareness and forging national integration. As nationalist politics acquired new vibrancy in India, it was no time before IPTA became an integral part of the anti-colonial struggle and marked its presence across the country with its people-centric programmes that eulogised working class struggles while endorsing nationalistic aspirations of people.

IPTA was unabashed about the Marxist leanings of most of its founders and stalwarts. The collective had flowed out of the confluence of progressive writers and at its second conference, writer Mulk Raj Anand unabashedly saw himself and his colleagues as “a generation of declassed individuals” who saw the crisis in culture “brought about by the breakdown of our social values, cultural codes and grammar”.

However, he effused confidence that political movements would play the role of liberalisers and this would instil confidence in his group pursuing “a more revolutionary ideology in all spheres.” Despite clarity about political alignment, IPTA was not ideologically sectarian and provided space to those holding milder political views, including even the likes of theatre and film personality Prithviraj Kapoor. It is evident that in its initial years, no progressive cultural group, eschewed the popular genre.

As progressive writers initially formed themselves into a group in London and comprised expatriate Indian students, there was an element of anti-fascist thought from the onset. These writers, for instance Sajjad Zaheer and Anand, were also part of the World Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture, held in Paris in 1935, which was organised by, among others, Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland and Thomas Mann. The group that engaged with their European peers was clearly distinct from those Indians, Hindu Mahasabha leader BS Moonje for instance, who were at the same time engaging with European fascists. In many ways, Moonje’s interactions and the influence he had on generations of Indian right-wingers offers an explanation for the different emphasis on contemporary artists aligned with the ruling establishment.

What made IPTA and other progressive cultural activists distinct from those who eventually spearheaded the Indian Right was their simultaneous commitment to India’s “ancient culture (which) cannot be allowed to die” and recognition that “art can and should flourish not as a weapon of luxury but as a means of portraying life and reality of our people, of reviving their faith in themselves and in their past, and of rousing them to the will to live and the will to be free.” The Annual Charter in 1946 further acknowledged that “art and literature can have a future only if they become the authentic expressions and inspirations of the peoples’ struggles for freedom and culture.”

Despite no overt alignment with any political party, IPTA was closely connected with vanguard organisations of the working class – be it peasants’ or workers’ bodies. Quite often, IPTA and its members would act as canvassers for such proletarian bodies. Members of the IPTA also took the lead in establishing cultural wings of these mass organisations. But above all, IPTA acted as a collective where ideas were exchanged and collaborations between writers, actors, filmmakers, theatre directors became the norm and not the exception. IPTA’s members went to mount landmark theatre and classic films.

A scene from the iconic Bengali play Nabanna on the Bengal famine. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

While Nabanna (‘New Harvest’, depicting the agony of the Bengal Famine, whose 70th anniversary is being observed this year) by Bijon Bhattacharya and Naba Jiboner Gaan (Song of New of Life) by Jyotirindra Moitra were among the early progressive plays, K.A. Abbas’ film, Dharti ki Lal (Children of the Earth), was among the first realistic films in India. Significantly, Balraj Sahni was launched as an actor in this film which articulated the feelings of dispossessed peasants.

Most IPTA plays, or films made by its members, in some way or the other vividly portrayed the stark reality and life of the toiling masses. Listing landmark plays, films and artwork inspired by activities and associations with IPTA is a subject for numerous pieces like this one, maybe even several books to add to the many that are already there.

IPTA was active in the final years of the freedom struggle and when the tragedy of partition wreaked havoc, it joined forces with other progressive organisations to campaign for peace. IPTA, in the form it existed in the 1940s, dispersed after India attained freedom. Its members, however, formed many organisations – many were even named as regional units of the parent body – in various parts of the country and carried the legacy forward. Many of these remain active even now and some IPTA chapters have been marking the 75th anniversary since 2017.

But more significantly, as the communist movement split, many other cultural organisations came up. Some of these like Jana Natya Manch, closely identified with Safdar Hashmi, functioned with greater coordination with the parent party. Till Hashmi’s brutal assassination in January 1989, few imagined that street theatre or progressive cultural organisations could pose such a threat to vested interests that they would snuff out the life of cultural activists. The incident evoked widespread condemnation and forced even the most apolitical of artists out on the streets in anger.

Cultural activism has borne the brunt of increased communalisation in the past three decades. Yet, it is difficult to imagine that the culture of protest has evaporated. Even during the Emergency (1975), poets, songwriters and theatre artists were at forefront of protests. The rousing lines of revolutionary poet, Dushyant Kumar, still remain a manifesto for many. For it to have mass appeal, culture must retain its rebellious nature. Writers, poets and other artists become co-opted the moment they lose the spirit to question and becoming comfortable with status quo.

In the famous song, Ami Shunechi Shedin (I Overheard the Other Day), Bengali songwriter and singer Moushumi Bhowmik addresses an imaginary (or known) group that retains radicalism.

I heard you all still dream

Still write fables

And sing to heart’s delight.

I heard you are still agonised with

Struggles of life and death of people

And that your love

Still flowers as a rose…

IPTA in its old form may have passed into history but in the 75th year of its foundation, nothing can be more apt for another cultural movement, more diverse and vibrant to pick up a few leaves from its pages. Indians have been over the past four years been reminded time and again of the irrelevance for posing questions. This process, however, cannot be allowed to end and who can communicate this better to people than one who can play with the chords of emotions?

Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay is a Delhi-based writer and journalist, and the author of Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times and Sikhs: The Untold Agony of 1984. He tweets @NilanjanUdwin.