Bengal famine

Digging Up British Empire’s Bloody Legacy in India

A new documentary, ‘Bengal Shadows’, revolves around the British empire’s role, especially that of former Prime Minister Winston Churchill, in causing and exacerbating the Bengal famine.

A new documentary, Bengal Shadows, revolves around the British empire’s role, especially that of former Prime Minister Winston Churchill, in causing and exacerbating the Bengal famine.

A sketch from the documentary Bengal Shadows. Courtesy: Joy Banerjee and Partho Bhattacharya

In a Brexit-scarred Britain, increasingly reminiscent of its days as a colonial power, a new documentary on the ghastly Bengal famine of 1942-43 is raising fresh, uncomfortable questions on the Empire’s bloody legacy. The documentary, Bengal Shadows, made by two Bengali-origin French filmmakers, revolves around the British empire’s role, especially that of former Prime Minister Winston Churchill, in causing and exacerbating the Bengal famine, which starved nearly five million people to death.

It held its first show in the United Kingdom last month, at a screening at the School of Oriental And African Studies (SOAS), University of London. The film has sought to tie in rare eyewitness accounts with historical research material and aims to pin the blame for the famine firmly onto the empire’s policies and Churchill’s decision making. With Britain increasingly showing signs of a growing nostalgia for its colonial past, this documentary is seeking to initiate a fresh conversation about the bloodied, little-known legacy that British colonialism has left behind in India. After last year’s referendum vote to leave the EU, there have been increasing calls to either glorify Britain’s colonial past or, ‘white-wash’ its past crimes. Since the vote, policymakers in the UK have been hinting that Britain would now develop a fresh focus on the Commonwealth and creating new trade partnerships with them. Internally, officials have dubbed this plan a way to create ‘Empire 2.0’. The UK’s International Trade Secretary Liam Fox even convened a first-of-its-kind meeting of trade ministers from across its former colonies earlier this year.

Last year, a poll by YouGov, an internet-based data analytics and research firm, found that 44% people it surveyed said that Britain should be proud of its colonialism. This was fresh on the heels of an ongoing, spirited global campaign ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ striking against the legacy of Cecil Rhodes, a British colonialist in Africa. The campaign seeks to decolonise education and rid it of institutional racism, with the statue of Rhodes as a British imperialist being its symbol across campuses globally, including at Oxford University in the UK. In the poll, 59% said that the statue at Oxford must not be taken down. Later, Oxford’s Oriel College decided that the statue would not be taken down. Last week, Oxford University courted controversy when it announced a research project named ‘Ethics & Empire’, which aims to look at the rights and the wrongs of British colonialism. Over 170 international academics from across the UK, US, India and South Africa, have signed a letter expressing their “surprise and concern” at the project.

The famine and the empire

At such a time, the documentary seeks to burst the bubble of a romanticised colonial past by drawing attention to the policies of the empire that led to the deaths of millions in the region. It seeks to interrogate the period between 1942 and 1943 in Bengal through the lives of eyewitnesses who saw the famine first hand. The documentary has eyewitnesses narrate sights of families selling their daughters in order to buy meals, women and children standing outside the homes of those better off, begging for the water in which rice was boiled.

The reasons behind the crippling famine, which affected the Bengal region, have been contested, with historians and scholarship being divided about the role of the British empire in it. Historians like Madhushree Mukherjee, author of the book Churchill’s Secret War believe that the empire and Churchill were culpable for their deliberate negligence in causing the famine and exacerbating it, while many others believe that the famine was caused due to external reasons and the empire was, at best, torn between keeping its war effort strong and providing relief to Bengal.

The famine’s reasons were complicated and manifold. A major reason was the cyclone of October 1942 which washed away the crop that year, leaving very little rice till the next harvest season, next year. With the advent of the Second World War and the onward march of the Japanese on the South East Asian frontier, the empire was increasingly nervous of a Japanese invasion of India, especially after Burma fell. That is when a cornered empire announced the implementation of the “scorched earth” policy, one where both, the military and civil administration was instructed to destroy all industrial, military and transport facilities along with means by which the enemy army can gain sustenance so that even if the area falls in the enemy’s hands, the enemy can’t do much about it. This would mean that water stocks and food should be kept to the bare essential minimum quantities that the local population would require. As Mukherjee writes in her book, this meant that since the rice crop was already harvested, the British administration ordered a forceful seizure and destruction of all rice storage.

Bengal Famine of 1943. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Mukherjee records how after the fall of Burma, a major source of rice imports, the empire insisted on exporting rice out of Bengal when it, in fact, needed imports for its own needs. In 1941, Bengal had imported 2,96,000 tons of rice while by next year, it would have to export 1,85,000 tons, leading to an acute shortage and a sharp rise in price.

That, and the subsequent response that Churchill offered when his then secretary of state for India Leo Amery urged Churchill and his war cabinet to send urgent relief to India. Churchill reportedly said that famine or no famine, Indians would ‘continue to breed like rabbits.’

However, there are others who see Churchill’s role in a much less critical light. For instance, historian Arthur Herman, who authored Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire & Forged Our Age, believes that while Churchill was indeed “callously indifferent” but goes on to state that it was, ultimately, his effort which led to the famine being broken.

Growing nostalgia for the empire?

The famine, however, has barely featured in the conversations around the effect of British colonialism on India. The documentary seeks to change that, significantly, at a very pertinent time for Britain. Subir Sinha, a senior lecturer in the development studies department at SOAS, believes that the context within which this film is located in today’s Britain is a crucial one to note. “The larger discourse in Britain is one where colonialism is being glorified, where there is a sense that, post-Brexit, Britain can fall back on its former colonies for a happy reunion.” Sinha believes that while this stems from the impression that Britain might feel ‘lost’ in finding its place in a post-Brexit world, the nostalgia for the empire has been a recurring theme in British politics. “From the Left to the Right, politicians of all ideologies have pursued this nostalgia as a political project. The only difference now is that the sense of the empire is coming back with exaggerated qualities of goodness.”

This has reflected in the political discourse as well. The foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, referring to British colonialism in Africa, said that the problem with Africa was not that the British were once in charge but that “we are not in charge anymore.” Last year, the trade secretary Liam Fox, now made in-charge of building trade links with former colonies, tweeted that the ‘UK need not bury its 20th century history.’

The famine as a war crime?

Chitta Kumar Samonto (left), Jhorna Bhattacharya (centre) and Manojaditiya Dasmahapatra – survivors of the famine, interviewed in the documentary. Courtesy: Joy Banerjee and Partho Bhattacharya

For both filmmakers, the culpability of the empire is unquestionable. Joy Banerjee, the co-director of the film, has a personal connection to the event. “My father was 20 during the famine and witnessed many starving and dying on the streets of Calcutta. My aunt also had similar experiences and she has narrated some of them in the documentary.”

Director Partho Bhattacharya believes that there is little doubt that the famine must be treated as a war crime and Churchill as a war criminal. “The British empire did everything to loot the food grains, destroy the region’s economy and social fabric, all for them to keep feeding their armies.” This documentary around the famine is the latest in a growing narrative of reigniting conversations around the brutish nature of British colonialism in India, after Indian MP Shashi Tharoor’s talks and his book An Era Of Darkness: The British Empire in India, which records the political, economic and social destruction that the empire deliberately caused in India.

Earlier this month, London Mayor Sadiq Khan added to this conversation when, on a visit to Amritsar’s Jallianwala Bagh, he called on the UK government to apologise for the mass killings of civilians by British Indian Army soldiers in 1919. Incidentally, in 2013, on a visit to the site in India, British Prime Minister David Cameron refused to issue an apology and stopped at calling the incident “deeply shameful“.

Britain has had a chequered record when it comes to dealing with horrors it inflicted during its colonial past. It has refused to apologise for most of its acts barring a few, like then British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s apology for Britain’s role in the Irish potato famine which led to over a million people starving to death between 1845-1855 in Ireland. In 2013, the UK formally apologised and agreed to compensate victims upto £19.9 million in costs to over 5,000 elderly Kenyans who were tortured and abuse by the hands of the British empire during the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s. This, however, was preceded by a lengthy court battle between victims and the British government.

Sinha, from SOAS, believes that there is a lot that Britain must be do for it to have an honest conversation about its past. “Currently, I am not sure if the average Brexit Leave voter is even a part of these conversations about its colonial past. The government must start with ensuring better, more honest schooling about Britain’s history.”

For the directors, though, this conversation is one that they are keen to have across the global. “We want the film to be screened across the world, so that this part of Indian history is not forgotten. People who suffered from colonialism are found beyond borders and hence, we want the film to go to all such places,” says Bannerjee. After the UK, the film has had a few screenings in major European cities. In January, the film will travel to India with scheduled screenings spread across the country. The directors hope to return to the UK and hold screenings and conversations on the subject.

Kunal Purohit is a freelance journalist based in London.

‘Manchester Is the Place’ and Six Other Reminders of What Verse Can Do For an Embattled City

A collection of poems written about cities under attack, about loss, hope and resilience.

Women pay their respects following a vigil in central Manchester. Credit: Reuters/Peter Nicholls

Tony Walsh on Manchester

On May 22, a terrorist set off a bomb at Ariana Grande’s concert in Manchester, England. The attack left 22 dead, including an eight-year-old girl. Poet Tony Walsh responded with a tribute to the city – on everything that made it special and would keep it going.

Pablo Neruda on Stalingrad

Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote an ode to the city after the Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany’s attempt to capture Stalingrad, now in southern Russia, in February 1943. More than a million died in the battle or went missing during the time that many see as the biggest and most brutal conflict during the Second World War.

Translated excerpt:

And you, Russia, you stern warrior
Not experienced the same whether you are now:
And loneliness and cold lying,
Rancor vows … Plagued your chest
Zillion bullets, tens of thousands of cores.
Already scorpion crawled fascist
For your walls, great Stalingrad
In an effort to sting you! .. Where are they,
Your allies in a giant battle?
New York dancing .. and London immersed
In a treacherous thought … Oh shame! –
I shouted to them. – My heart can not,
Can not our heart, no, it can
In the world to live, that looks so calm
On the death of his best sons!
Can it be you leave them in the fight?
Think again! Perish yourself!
We are waiting for! .. What you say something?
Or have you, that on the eastern front
Mountain rose corpses filling
All of your sky? But then a legacy
Will get you the hell! .. Or you want to
Drive to the grave life? .. Erase the smile
With faces stinking mud, blood
Cruel torment? We say, “Enough!
We are tired of your petty affairs,
We are tired of your meetings autumn,
Where ever preside umbrella
Though sleeping in the coffin sinister Chamberlain! ”
Second Front is not! .. But Stalingrad
You can stand at least a day and night
You tortured with fire and iron!
Yes! Death itself is powerless in front of you!
They are immortal, your sons …

Premendra Mitra on Calcutta in the Bengal famine

In 1943 Bengal, nearly four million people died of a famine created by the British colonial government’s policies of making farmers move from food crop to cash crops, and diverting food imports to British troops fighting in the Second World War in a world where trade had dropped substantially. Premendra Mitra poem Phyan (meaning rice gruel) brings out the image of men, women and children on the streets of Calcutta crying out for phyan during the famine.

On the city streets
Roam strange creatures,
Human-like, yet, not quite human,
Cruel caricatures of humanity!
Yet they move and speak,
Like debris they pile up by the road,
Sit, foraging food, on piles of garbage
Weary

And cry out for phyan.

Sankichi Toge on Hiroshima

On August 6, 1945, at the height of the Second World War, the US dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The explosion killed 80,000 people immediately, and tens of thousand died painful deaths in the years that followed from being exposed to the radiation. In this poem, translated by Karen Thornber, Sankichi Toge writes about memories that will never fade. An excerpt:

can we forget that flash?
suddenly 30,000 in the streets disappeared
in the crushed depths of darkness
the shrieks of 50,000 died out

when the swirling yellow smoke thinned
buildings split, bridges collapsed
packed trains rested singed
and a shoreless accumulation of rubble and embers – Hiroshima
before long, a line of naked bodies walking in groups, crying
with skin hanging down like rags
hands on chests
stamping on crumbled brain matter
burnt clothing covering hips

corpses lie on the parade ground like stone images of Jizo, dispersed in all
directions
on the banks of the river, lying one on top of another, a group that had crawled to
a tethered raft

Sinan Antoon on Baghdad

In his work, Sinan Antoon looks at an Iraq caught between wars, at cities that build themselves up only to be torn down again. An excerpt from Wrinkles: on the wind’s forehead –

3
the wind was tired
from carrying the coffins
and leaned
against a palm tree
A satellite inquired:
Where to now?
the silence
in the wind’s cane murmured:
“Baghdad”
and the palm tree caught fire

…
6
My heart is a stork
perched on a distant dome
in Baghdad
it’s nest made of bones
its sky
of death

7
This is not the first time
myths wash their face
with our blood
(t)here they are
looking in horizon’s mirror
as they don our bones

…

11
The grave is a mirror
into which the child looks
and dreams:
when will I grow up
and be like my father
. . .
dead

Zeb and Haniya on Lahore

On Easter Sunday in 2016, a bomber in Lahore killed 72 people outside a park, including many children. Musical duo Zeb and Haniya released a song, ‘Dadra’, as a reaction to the attack, talking about a city that is resilient “even in the darkest of times”. The song and the music video explore Lahore’s past, present and future.

Mahmoud Darwish on Jerusalem

As a city, Jerusalem knows conflict more than most. Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who wrote extensively on Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians,talks in his poem In Jerusalem about the conflicting narratives, both historical and religious, that shaped the city’s past and present. An excerpt, translated by Fady Joudah:

In Jerusalem, and I mean within the ancient walls,

I walk from one epoch to another without a memory

to guide me. The prophets over there are sharing

the history of the holy … ascending to heaven

and returning less discouraged and melancholy, because love

and peace are holy and are coming to town.

I was walking down a slope and thinking to myself: How

do the narrators disagree over what light said about a stone?

Is it from a dimly lit stone that wars flare up?

I walk in my sleep. I stare in my sleep. I see

no one behind me. I see no one ahead of me.

All this light is for me. I walk. I become lighter. I fly

then I become another. Transfigured. Words

sprout like grass from Isaiah’s messenger

mouth: “If you don’t believe you won’t be safe.”

Postscript: Although the Nazi bombing of the Basque city of Guernica in Spain in April 1937 during the Spanish Civil War led to a lot of poetry, the city’s destruction was most iconically memorialised not in words but on canvas, by Pablo Picasso.

Pablo Picasso, Guernica. Credit: pablopicasso.org

The painting, which Picasso finished in June 1937, now hangs in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.

The Role That Currency Played in the Great Bengal Famine of 1770

About 250 years ago, Bengal suffered a debilitating famine under colonial rule, partially brought on by changes in the colonial currency system.

A contemporary print of the Madras famine of 1877 showing the distribution of relief in Bellary, Madras Presidency. From the Illustrated London News, (1877). Image used for representation. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

“The lack of money is the root of all evil” – Mark Twain

History, they say, repeats itself. I hope this isn’t true, because history tells us of a terrifying episode some 250 years ago when the lack of currency was responsible, partly at least, for a massive famine that struck Bengal in 1770, claiming some ten million lives or a third of its entire population. Obviously, it is inappropriate, if not imprudent, to draw simplistic parallels between the situation then and the present currency shortage caused by the demonetisation of high-value rupee notes. Not only have options to hard currency and institutional environment undergone a sea of change over centuries, but in terms of impact, even the most pessimistic estimates only see a slowdown of growth rather than anything close to a famine-like situation. Nonetheless, it is interesting to recall history for a couple of reasons; first, to observe a certain commonality in the role money played in these episodes and second, at the margin, going by the several reports that have appeared in the last few days, there have been several instances of disruption, dispossession and even death.

Currency, as is commonly known, was for a long time inextricably linked to precious metals, primarily, gold and silver. For centuries, perhaps millennia, India had always received a steady inflow of these precious metals from its commodity trade surpluses with the rest of the world, which was converted into money or hoarded as jewellery and ornaments. The Romans, Venetians, Portuguese, Dutch and English were all at one point of time or another concerned over the export of their bullion and coin to India in exchange for oriental luxuries. In the seventeenth century, Surat alone is said to have received from its trade with the Persian Gulf about half million sterling per annum in specie. The export of bullion from England became the most scathing weapon in the hands of the bullionists – those who believed that wealth was defined by the amount of precious metals owned by a nation – against the East India Company. Nonetheless, as long as the Company was a mere merchant, it had little option but to conduct its trade on the basis of bullion and coin.

The Battle of Plassey and subsequent grant of diwani in 1765 to the East India Company changed all this. Post diwani, there was a sudden increase in the outflow of bullion from India to England, along with a sharp decline in silver exports to India. The table below gives us a quantitative picture of this dismal story. From an average of around £500,000 annually in the mid-18th century, export of specie by the East India Company to India collapsed to a trickle between the late 1760s and 1785; it rose gradually thereafter and was especially high during 1802–3 (£1,772,085) and 1804–5 (£1,952,651) when it became necessary for Marquis Wellesley to import specie to fund the Company’s aggressive territorial expansion plans in India.

Exports by the East India Company of bullion to India, 1708–1810 (in £ sterling)

Years	Bullion (£)	Average per annum(£)
1708/9 – 1733/4	12,189,147	420,315
1734/5 – 1759/60	15,239,115	586,119
1760/1 – 1765/6	842,381	140,396
1766/7 – 1771/2	968,289	161,381
1772/3 – 1775/6	72,911	18,227
1776/7 – 1784/5	156,106	17,345
1785/6 – 1792/3	4,476,207	559,525
1793/4 – 1809/10	8,988,165	528,715

Credit: William Milburn, Oriental Commerce, 1813.

The decline in specie imports in the last quarter of the 18th century was not because exports from India were not in demand in the West; rather, it was the right of diwani that ensured the revenues of Bengal passing into the Company’s coffers. It then became possible for the Company to utilise the large annual revenue surpluses for purchasing commodities to be exported (called investments), doing away with the necessity of importing specie.

W.W. Hunter, historian and member of the Indian Civil Service, describes how revenues were channelised to investment. In Birbhum district, out of £90,000 collected through taxes and duties a net surplus of some £60,000 was employed for the purchase of silks, muslins, cotton cloths and other articles to be sold in Leadenhall Street, the headquarters of the Company. In short, the revenues of Bengal supplied the means of providing the expenditure for purchases in Bengal, reducing the net annual influx of specie to a pittance.

Hawala of another kind

In his classic work, The Principles of Money Applied to the Present State of Bengal, published in 1773, James Steuart cites several other reasons that further fuelled the scarcity. The relatively undervalued silver in Bengal proved a profitable source to finance the growing tea trade with China. Within a span of just three years, some £720,000 of specie was sent out of Bengal to China. The widespread corruption and plunder by the servants of the Company not only transferred the wealth of the country to these individuals but was also sent out of the country through ingenious means. These included the purchase of diamonds and the private funding of the China tea trade of the Company and even of other foreign trading companies. The French and Dutch, who would earlier bring in a large quantity of specie, were now able to borrow funds in India from Company servants to finance their trade with China. The servants looking for ways to remit their wealth were repaid by the foreign companies in Europe using the proceeds from these sales. The annual tribute paid to the Mughal Emperor in Delhi also added to the specie outflow from Bengal. Finally, the necessity to fund expenditures (including military) in the other presidencies of the Company, namely Madras and Bombay, also meant the substantial export of specie out of Bengal.

The governor of Bengal, Harry Verelst, estimated the deficiency of import of precious metals into Bengal for the years 1757–66 to be about £8 million. When other forms of remittances from Bengal were added to this, including the king’s tribute, the actual outflow of specie could have touched some £13,000,000. He remarked that this was, “a sum so immense as will scarce gain credit with those who have not been at the trouble of examining the particulars”. While a combination of easy money and scientific discoveries set off the industrial revolution in England in the second half of the eighteenth century, Bengal, at about the same time, receded into misery – the shortages in specie import added to the woes created by the vitiated currency system that was implemented at the beginning of the 18th century with the decline of the Mughal Empire.

The declining specie inflows into Bengal, combined with a corrupted administrative apparatus, dragged Bengal into an economic abyss and ultimately, famine. Hunter’s descriptions of this catastrophe are heart wrenching:

All through the stifling summer of 1770 the people went on dying. The husbandmen sold their cattle, they sold their implements of agriculture, they devoured their seed-grain, they sold their sons and daughters, till at length no buyer of children could be found, they ate the leaves of trees and the grass of the field and in June 1770 the Resident at the Durbar affirmed that the living were feeding on the dead. Day and night a torrent of famished and disease-stricken wretches poured into the great cities. At an early period of the year pestilence had broken out. In March we find smallpox at Moorshedabad … The streets were blocked up with promiscuous heaps of the dying and dead. Interment could not do its work quick enough even the dogs and jackals, the public scavengers of the East, became unable to accomplish their revolting work, and the multitude of mangled and festering corpses at length threatened the existence of the citizens.

There may have been several root causes for the Great Famine of Bengal. Utmost, of course, was the Company’s ruthlessness in the collection of land taxes and that too in cash. But the one definitive factor which exacerbated the destruction wrought by the Bengal Famine of 1770 was the prevailing confusion in the currency system along with an absolute shortage of currency for trade and commerce. Money for day-to-day transactions became scarce. In rural Bengal, rupees alone had amounted to about two-thirds of the currency. Money became so dear that prices of all other goods slumped; the scarcity of money was accompanied by deflation. Artisans, weavers and workers were thrown out of work due to the slump in demand. The credit market collapsed beause of the creditors fearing that they would be repaid in overvalued gold. Without credit and in the absence of traders, equalising supply and demand became difficult and had a destabilising effect on the economy.

“At present the distress is so great”, wrote the English inhabitants in 1769, published later in the Calcutta Review, “that every merchant in Calcutta is in danger of becoming bankrupt, or running a risk of ruin by attachments on his goods.” Hunter mentions that merchants deserted their trade and began “locking up their fortunes in their treasure-chests.” But it is in the work of Verelst that we find a petition of the Armenian merchants settled in Calcutta, which captures the then prevailing situation, starkly, “the necessity of coin now felt in this capital, amongst the many intolerable evils arising from it, affects every individual to that degree, that the best houses, with magazines full of goods, are distressed for daily provisions and that not only a general bankruptcy is to be feared, but a real famine, in the midst of wealth and plenty.” As one present-day historian, Richard Stevenson, put it, “The Famine of 1770 was a simple famine. The British had removed a large fraction of the coinage, evidently, which destroyed the mechanism of the exchange of goods. It is difficult to buy food when there is no money.”

But I must mention a grimly insightful comment by the French scholar, Abbe Raynal that caught my attention while scrutinising some historical records: “all the Europeans, especially the English, were possessed of granaries, and these very granaries the famishing natives respected. Private houses were so too. There was no revolt; no murders; not the least violence prevailed. The unhappy Indians, resigned to a quiet despair, confined themselves to the request of that succour they did not obtain, and peaceably waited the relief of death.”

On seeing the defenceless expression on an old woman’s face when the bank announced it had run out of cash, I realised why Raynal may have thought it significant to have recorded this observation some 250 years ago.

Portions of this essay were extracted from the author’s book, In Search of Stability: Economics of Money, History of the Rupee

‘Painful Sights’: Chittaprosad on BJP Icon S.P. Mookerjee’s Bengal Village

‘The riches piled here, an insult to hungry thousands around’, wrote the celebrated artist after visiting the Hindu Mahasabha leader’s home in 1944.

‘The riches piled here, an insult to hungry thousands around’, wrote the celebrated artist after visiting the Hindu Mahasabha leader’s home in 1944

The artist Chittaprosad toured Bengal during the famine years of 1943-44 and wrote a series of articles, complete with drawings, on the suffering he was witness to. These were published in Peoples’ War, the newspaper of the Communist Party of India. One of the articles described the shocking situation in Jirat, the home village of Syama Prasad Mookerjee, leader of the Hindu Mahasabha (which had opposed the pro-Independence ‘Quit India’ movement) and future founder of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh – the precursor organisation of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

On July 5, 2016, the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library is organising a seminar on ‘Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee’s Vision of India’ to coincide with his 115th birth anniversary. The chief guest is Mahesh Chandra Sharma, culture minister in the Narendra Modi cabinet.

The Wire is republishing extracts from Chittaprosad’s account of his visit to Jirat village in August 1944 for the glimpse it provides into Hindutva icon’s ‘vision of India’.

If there is any Bengali who has shot up to become a national figure in the last two years it is Dr Shyamaprosad Mukheriee. And why not? He is the son of Ashutosh Mukherjee, one of the builders of modern Bengal, who fought the governor to make Calcutta University an international centre of culture and learning. Shyamaprosad become a national figure overnight when he resigned in protest against Amery’s rule in Bengal in 1943. His was the strongest voice against the Bengal governor in the worst days of the Bengal famine. Lakhs of rupees poured into his Bengal Relief Committee from the four corners of India. Has this man who was given lakhs to save Bengal kept the light burning in his own village? This is what most people would like to know.

That is why I, a humble Bengali artist went, on a pilgrimage to Jirat in Hooghly district – the home of Ashutosh and Shyamaprosad. One day, early in June, I took a train to Kharnargachi (only 40 miles from Calcutta) and walked the last few miles to Jirat. On the way, I cut across six or seven villages in the Balagor area and what I saw was terrible. It is one whole year since the terrible river – the Behula – which cuts this area into two, flooded its banks and left almost all the villages caked in fertile mud from the river-bed. Huts were swamped and bodily blown off in the storm. Dhan-golas (paddy-stacks) were ruined in every village. Six villages were under water for 12 days and 7,000 villagers had become destitute. That was last year. Had last year’s curse become this year’s blessing? Had this rich, fertile soil from the river’s bed been dug up this year to make the area into a garden filled with tall paddy-stacks? Not at all! The peasants didn’t get a chance to dig up the soil. Soon after the flood-havoc, famine gripped all Bengal, and Balagor had to import rice at fantastic rates because the floods had destroyed her own rice. So the peasant used up the Rs. 10 Government loan he got for rebuilding his hut to buy a handful of rice. When the Rs. 10 went, there was nothing left even to buy rice with, let alone seeds and ploughs for the new crop.

The poor have to live on mangoes

Chittaprosad

So I did not see smiling paddy-fields, but barren earth, scorched in the sun, cracking up – dotted with tufts of grass and weeds. Same better-off peasants had planted jute here and there – but the monsoon came late this year, so the jute got scorched in the sun. They told me, too, how the late rains finished off the rabi crops of potatoes, onions and the like, grown for the Calcutta market. Mango trees are tall and ancient: the floods could not uproot them. That is why, 25% of the Balagor families are living on mangoes and mango stones only. A mango is eatable, but by itself it is not human food. That is why, wherever I went, I saw cholera, malaria, smallpox and skin- diseases playing havoc. In Rajapur village, for instance, only 6 out of 52 families are left and they too are suffering from malaria and food and cloth shortage. It was the same in every village to which I went. How much had Dr. Shyamaprosad done to help these villages next door to his own, I asked people right and left. But the plain fact is that I never heard a good word said about him in these villages.

They told me how the government had opened gruel kitchens in one village, where 400 people were fed daily for two months. How the government had given 15 annas to each family and a handful of chura per head in the same village. After this the Union Board also gave 14 pice to every man, 10 pice to every woman and 5 pice to every child. They spoke well of the Students’ Federation and the Muslim Students’ League, which gave cloth, 12 maunds of seeds, plenty of vegetables and a donation of Rs. 5 per family in some villages, just after the flood. The Communist Party, too, had twice given out a pao (¹⁄₄seer) of rice and a pao of flour per head. The Dumurdaha Uttam Ashram distributed Rs. 2 per household and 8 seers of atta at controlled rates for three months. In short, every one had tried to help, except the biggest man and the strongest organisation in the district – Dr. Mukherjee and his Hindu Mahasabha. I put the question point-blank to a prominent villager in Srikanti village: what did the Bengal Relief Committee do for them? He had not heard of the Bengal Relief Committee or of Shyamaprosad…. but he understood at once when I mentioned Ashutosh. ‘No we got nothing from them’ was his answer. After that, I stopped talking about Shyamaprosad till I got to Jirat

But the closer I got to Jirat, the more I realised the plight of these villages next door to Jirat. In one word, I saw what happened to a village when its natural leader leaves it in the lurch. Shymaprosad does not help them and no one else is big enough in these parts to help them. So scoundrels and thieves steal whatever help, in the shape of food, cloth, medicine, trickles in from outside. For instance, everyone in Srikanti village was bitter about one such man (I refrain from giving his name), a real cut-throat who was in charge of the Union Board’s relief activity now. He doled out rice to his own favourites at the rate of 1¹⁄₂ seers a week. But when the kisans of Kadamdanga went to him for aid, he made a neat offer to them: you can’t get rice from me for nothing, you know! Work without pay in my fields, I will sell you rice at controlled rates. The whole village raised a howl over this, but even then he was given 15 pieces of cloth by the Union Board, to be given to 83 families in three instalments. He went back to his old game: he sent the village folk back empty-handed, and made a present of the entire stock to his favourites.

One family becomes boss of them all

With these stories ringing in my ears. I stepped into Shyamaprosad’s own village at last and went straight to Ashutosh’s ancient mansion. A distant relative of Ashutosh’s, a certain Goswami, had named the old house ‘Ashutosh Memorial’. But I found a sad, decayed, broken-down memorial to the Royal Bengal Tiger,’ (the popular name by which Ashutosh was known), the proud builder of modern Bengal – who was a giant of a man and planned and built in a big way. I have made a sketch and you can see for yourself that the stately mansion with its strong columns of classic design is falling to pieces. Half of the wide terrace has collapsed—the bricks are coming loose in the other half and dropping off. Moss and wild weeds choke the windows-sills and have grown into the cracks which have split the columns from top to bottom.

Syama Prasad Mookerjee. Credit: shyamaprasad.org

In these ruins, Ashutosh’s sons have given a sop to those who hold their father’s memory sacred by putting up a ‘Ashutosh Sntriti Mandir (Ashutosh Charitable Dispensary). The sour-faced doctor in charge told me that he keeps the dispensary open three hours every morning and 30 to 40 patients come daily. But I went two mornings running and never found it open for longer than one hour. I looked for 30 to 40 patients, but found only 10 or 12—when hundreds are down with malaria all round. There was something unspeakably sad and uncanny about the whole place and it have me the creeps…

Paternal legacy not enough

Just, when the floods were knocking down every house in Balagor, the sons of Ashutosh took it into their heads to build a brand new mansion. Old Ashutosh’s house was apparently not good enough for them. I could not get over Shyamaprosad building a brand new mansion in the middle of the famine while his father’s house fell to pieces like every other house or hut for miles around. I went to see the hateful, vulgar, new garden-house. The house is known all over Balagor as the only new house built in the last year and as the only house with two dhan-golas stacked with paddy. Only the out-houses have been put up as yet. There are expensively-furnished sitting-rooms and guest-houses on either side of the gateway. There are strong iron gates and iron gratings on the windows to protect the richest spot in Balagor. There is a well-laid-out garden with a green-house.

The whole place looks like an oasis in a desert. Picknickers from the Mukherjee family motor down from Calcutta on holidays to bathe in the Ganges and drive away again. This vulgar new house of the sons is an insult to the stately old mansion of the father which is falling to pieces. The riches heaped here are an insult to the hungry thousands around! I fled from the house in disgust, but even then I did not hear the end of the story.

The talk of the Balagor villages is of a new haat (market) in Jirat – opened by Shyamaprosad with pomp and ceremony in one of his two visits home in the year of famine. All honest folk swear at this haat. Why? Because Balagor already had a haat of long-standing in Sijey village, not far from Jirat. One haat was enough. The point was to clean up profiteering in it and the village-folk a square deal. Instead of doing this Shyarmaprosad set up another haat at Jirat to meet on the Wednesday traditionally fixed for the Sijey haat. This was a clear move to break the Sijey haat – so almost every villager thought…

The reality of Mahasabha relief work

With this kind of profiteering going on in broad daylight in the haat opened by Shyamaprosad I didn’t expect to be impressed by the relief activity of the Hindu Mahasabha in Jirat village. But I went along all the same, because Jirat is the only village where people seem to have heard of relief work by Shyamaprosad. I found this relief work to be as much a racket as the haat and the ‘charitable dispensary’. Once a week, it seems, 28 seers of atta and 28 seers of rice used to be distributed by the Hindu Mahasabha through 4 relief centres. Apart from this, Shyamaprosad’s two brothers set up a shop and sold rice at half the market-price. But this did not help anyone because the market rate at that time was Rs. 40 per maund! That is why the poor peasants and fishermen of the village told me, ‘all charity was for the babus. Charity bought at Rs. 20 per maund was too expensive for all except a handful.’

The rich have thus made themselves hateful in Jirat – and Shyamaprosad is hated and feared more than anybody else.

This is roughly what I found out in Jirat, Shyamaprosad’s home village. I have been to many villages in Bengal which were homes of our great men – nowhere have I seen so much hatred and bitterness against the rich and specially against the biggest man of the village.

But on my way back, I found out something more for which I was not prepared. lt seems a whole generation of middle class youth have taken to brazen-faced lying to glorify their leader’, Dr. Shyamaposad Mukherjee! Everyone in Balagor and Jirat itself had told me that Shyamaprosad had not come to Balagor more than twice in the last two years – once during the famine, and again to open Jirat haat. And yet, a doctor I met in the neighbouring village of Kasalpur told me that Shyamaprosad was coming and going from Calcutta all the time – four times in the last two months. There is a man who loves his village! Birnalendu Goswami, who controlled rice and flour distribution at the Jirat relief centres, told me that he gave out relief only on Sundays. But a young high school student who was proud of the Hindu Mahasabha told me that 24 students worked daily at the relief centres to feed 100 to 150 mouths daily!

The rich have thus made themselves hateful in Jirat – and Shyamaprosad is hated and feared more than anybody else. But at the end of my visit, I heard a few words which showed that the ancient civilisation of Bengal and the spirit of Ashutosh still lives, in spite of Shyamaprosad and all his doings. It was evening and the boys and girls had gathered in noisy groups under the trees in front of the school-house which has been locked up. Somebody started cursing. At once, an old man barked: “Who is using bad language? Have you all become animals or what?” ‘How can they be human when even the school has closed down?’ answered somebody. Then they approached my guide, a kisan worker and said: ‘Give us a school-master, please! We shall starve and give him our own food. Kerosene costs ten annas a pint, but we shall pay for it somehow, For God’s sake! Let the school start again, if we don’t … civilisation will go out of Ashu’s village and our children will grow up hooligans.’ What an iron will to live and labour! They will live and fight as the Royal Bengal Tiger fought – in spite of Shyamaprosad!

The Wire would like to thank Ram Rahman and Sahmat for making the text of Chittaprosad’s article and the scans of his drawings available.

British Museums Have Long Overlooked the Violence of Empire

The Tate’s latest exhibition, Artist and Empire, is long overdue.

Fante Artists, Gold Coast, Africa, Asafo Flag 3, c.1900-40. © Pebble London Collection

It took Britain a century to conquer most of the Indian subcontinent, which it then dominated for a further century. The subcontinent also witnessed a partition that led, by a recent estimate, to over three million deaths, and the largest mass migration of human beings in global history. The violence of colonialism is palpable even in the most cursory rendering of India’s past. But scholars have only recently begun to examine the many forms such violence takes, the rationales behind them and their impact on Indian bodies and minds.

When the violence of South Asia’s colonial history appears in academic scholarship, it largely does so only in certain forms: narratives of rebellion and resistance, religious or ethnic violence, and cataclysmic events. Framing violence in this way displaces it onto the colonised and underestimates the endemic, everyday forms of violence through which colonialism operated. Such erasure is not unique to Indian history. It merely illustrates the ways in which violence has been written out of the history of Britain’s imperial past.

Indeed, the past decade has witnessed renewed attempts to “whitewash” Britain’s imperial exploits. In 2012 it was revealed that thousands of documents detailing acts of violence committed on colonised peoples in the final years of British rule had been either systematically destroyed or ferreted away in a secret Foreign Office archive. These revelations were to a large extent ignored or downplayed by the mainstream media.

Looking the other way

Such processes of silencing ensure that belief in a benign and benevolent imperialism remains predominant in Britain. The idea that the purpose was not to appropriate land, labour and goods but to impart the benefits of British civilisation to peoples deemed in need of it is far from rare. As journalist George Monbiot has observed in his struggle to explain the reason for Britain’s amnesia in regard to the violence of its imperial past:

The myths of empire are so well-established that we appear to blot out countervailing stories even as they are told.

The reality of empire, remains, therefore, “untroubled by the evidence”.

Museums and public galleries have played a key role in such a process of silencing. This is in spite of the fact that many of the non-Western collections in them were acquired through colonial conquest, exploitation and looting.

Although some British museums have begun to make colonial histories apparent in their displays, many still erase them by presenting objects with contested histories as examples of “art” or as representative ethnographic “types”. Such public museum spaces also legitimise and aestheticise violence by encouraging visitors to view mutilated deities or headless torsos as artistic masterpieces to be admired and coveted.

Such processes hinder our understandings of the nature of empire and its impact on both colonisers and colonised. This is a particularly pressing concern in light of both the global escalation, since the late 20th century, of new modes of violence, ranging from new neo-imperial wars and regimes of occupation, to the deployment of new technologies of violence, such as drone attacks and private security forces (David Harvey and others have referred to this as the “new imperialism”) and of the rise of ethno-nationalist and religious fundamentalisms.

The perpetuation of such myths also prevents a reckoning with Britain’s imperial past. For a nation state that was forged, in large measure, through empire, and whose identity has been considerably challenged by its demise – most recently by the Scottish referendum on independence and the ongoing debate about Britain’s place in Europe – such a reckoning is, undoubtedly, long overdue.

Artist and empire

Art is, perhaps, one of the best mediums through which to attempt such a reckoning. And so Tate Britain’s latest exhibition, Artist and Empire, could not be more welcome. Not only is culture vital to the construction and maintenance of imperial and colonial regimes, but as Paul Gilroy observes in his preface to the exhibition catalogue, it can:

Help to reconcile the tasks of remembering and working through Britain’s imperial past with the different labour of building its post-colonial future.

It therefore has the ability to alter Britain’s understanding of itself.

The Tate exhibition is well aware of the challenges of remembering and representing empire. It reveals the way that art operated as a form of cultural imperialism by incorporating a wide range of images and objects produced by both British artists and artists from former colonial contexts – from iconic imperial paintings to maps, photographs, and artefacts. But the show also avoids over-simplifying what exhibition curator Alison Smith terms “the tangled histories embodied by objects”.

It also makes the bold move of expanding the time span of the exhibition to the present. This avoids not only imposing an artificial boundary as to when the Empire ended (if, in fact, we can say that it actually did) but encourages reflection on the legacies of empire in contemporary culture, politics and public debate in both Britain and its former colonies.

But when it comes to violence, the exhibition falls down. While it reveals the provenance of stolen or looted objects and images, it contains few visual representations of violence. Such images do exist, but they aren’t featured here.

What about, for example, the haunting paintings of renowned Bengali (later Bangladeshi) painter Zainul Abedin of the estimated 1.5 to 4 million victims of the 1943 Bengal famine? Or the ostensibly “anthropological” photographs that document the myriad ways, physically, mentally, and emotionally, in which colonised bodies were violated? The exhibition does contain some images of caste in colonial India, but could have gone further.

Such engagement is important, because for Britain to truly reckon with its imperial past, we need to understand much more about the violent nature of that past.

Artist and Empire is at Tate Britain from November 25 2015 to 10 April 10 2016.

Deana Heath, Senior Lecturer in Indian and Colonial History, University of Liverpool

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.