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  Not all the genteel poor are refugees. Most of them have been born here, have been given a fingerhold upon a Bengali’s greatest prize, which has always been education. They have been taken into the university and they have been spewed out again at the other end of it upon a labour market which has not for fifty years been capable of absorbing all their qualifications. Even Lord Curzon used to nag about that. At Dum Dum there is a beaming little man, maybe thirty years old, whose job it is to lead certain visitors from overseas out of the Customs hall and across the passenger concourse to where their airline bus awaits them outside, making quite sure that their baggage follows them intact. He is employed to do this and nothing else by the State Tourist Bureau. And if he discovers immediately that the traveller he has just picked up in Customs is disposed to be friendly, he will offer to be of service at any time he can possibly be helpful in Calcutta. He will casually hint that he has many times thought how splendid it would be if he could make his way to England and perform some more useful task there. And then, amid mutual smiles, best wishes and shaking of the hand, he will remember on the steps of the airline bus to present his card to the visitor. It identifies him as Gour Kanjilal, Master of Arts (Hons), tourist officer; and very thankful indeed to have a regular and secure job in the service of the nation and the foreigners.

  Had he been luckier in his vocational search he might have become a teacher; in which case, being a graduate, he would have welcomed a report by a pay commission in 1970, suggesting that his salary for primary school work might be raised to Rs 300 a month, or in a higher secondary school to Rs 350; with Rs 350 at that time being the equivalent of £19.50, or rather less than 50 American dollars. And though it is true that in Calcutta you could then buy onions for 50 paise a kilogram, a dozen eggs for Rs 4, a very small chicken for Rs 2.25 and baby hilsa caught in the estuarine waters of the Ganga for Rs 5.50 a kilogram, it was also true that an everyday sari for your wife would cost the best part of Rs 30 and an attaché case of papier mâché, whose handle came away the moment it was picked up full of clothes, anything up to Rs 75. Nor was any teacher or well-educated airport courier absolved from the need to queue at the ration shop for the weekly allowance of rice and grain and sugar; only people much more prosperous than they could afford the prices fixed and schemed upon the city’s ever ready and highly stocked black market.

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  The supply of any food in Calcutta is liable to run short at almost any time and even the rich are apt to bump into restrictions when they eat away from their carefully-planned and well-provided domestic pantries. A man taking his lunch at a middle-class restaurant like the Kwality in Park Street, and ordering mutton korma, is likely to be reminded that this is Tuesday and therefore a meatless day; on seeking prawn curry forty-eight hours later he will possibly be told that fish is off, it being Thursday, of course. There are maybe a thousand ration shops for rice and grain in the city because these are the basic foodstuffs for almost all its people and because if there were not a little to give to everyone each day there would be starvation for most and more corpses than usual upon the streets within a week. And lodged in everybody’s consciousness, located somewhere in many people’s memories, is the frightful time when this has happened and when famine has been declared.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Cholera now came in the wake of famine and in one week, in the district of Naogaon alone, one thousand people died of it; yet in the same few days, on 21 October, Mr Amery was telling Parliament that there was no shortage of medical supplies and no widespread outbreak of disease. Within three weeks it was announced in Delhi that 2,233,000 people queued each day at feeding centres throughout Bengal; in Calcutta, hundreds fought each other beside a row of dustbins which contained nothing but particles of refuse and putrid food. On 4 December, Major-General D. Stuart made a radio broadcast in which he admitted that ‘The reports you have seen in the newspapers of the numbers requiring medical treatment and clothing are not exaggerated … In the first place malnutrition coupled with the advent of the cold weather and shortage of personal clothing and blankets, has made a large percentage of the poorer people easy victims to malaria, cholera and pneumonia, which are rampant throughout a large number of civil districts.’ It was impossible, by now, for anyone in India to ignore or dilute the truth, and nobody was trying to any more, though the figures which demonstrated the full extent of the disaster did not begin to appear for some months yet. It was the end of March 1944 before the news agencies reported that in Dacca, 22, 866 people had died in January, compared with 7,194 in January 1943.