In the end, it is not so much racism as the imbalance of power inherent in the social Darwinian pyramid that explains why famine could be tolerated in India while bread rationing was regarded as an intolerable deprivation in wartime Britain. Cherwell, for instance, did not think much of the British working class either, but he was deeply engaged in feeding it and placating it. Economist Amartya Sen observes that famine has never occurred in a functioning democracy—a form of government that inverts the traditional power structure by making rulers accountable to those whom they rule.
21
If Cherwell lavished attention on British civilians, that was no doubt because all of his considerable power derived from his friendship with Churchill, whose own power and popularity would be tested in postwar elections in the United Kingdom. References to public opinion are frequent among the S branch papers. While urging the shipping cut to the Indian Ocean, for instance, the Prof had warned of “political repercussions” unless his advice was heeded. Remonstrating against promises of food for postwar Europe, he had asserted that if these pledges were “fulfilled at the expense of U.K. rations we shall be blamed at home.” During the war, Cherwell protected Churchill’s domestic flank with the single-minded devotion and ferocity of a guard dog. Indians did not vote in British elections.
22
The central evil of imperialism is the inability of subject peoples to hold their rulers accountable—and all the rest, even the racism, may flow from that essential powerlessness. In her classic treatise on totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt distinguished between “race-thinking,” the categorization of humans by perceived characteristics, and racism, the ranking of these categories into high and low. She argued that racism was a direct
consequence of imperialism, which “would have necessitated the invention of racism as the only possible ‘explanation’ and excuse for its deeds, even if no race-thinking had ever existed in the civilized world.” The British imperial need to demonize Hindu males vanished overnight with India’s independence—which points to the accuracy of Arendt’s observation.
23
ONE PERSON WHO emerges from the famine with remarkably clean hands is Leopold Amery. True, he had urged ruthlessness in implementing the War Cabinet’s scorched earth policy, had initially hoped that the viceroy would muddle through without grain imports, and had relayed Churchill’s demands for continued rice exports from India. And given that Amery appears to have orchestrated a cover-up—by, for instance, ensuring that the famine commission would refrain from discussing shipping constraints, and (probably) issuing the order to destroy certain India Office documents relating to grain exports from the colony—it is imaginable that in some other way, which may never be known, he had aggravated the famine. But after mass starvation was reported to the government, he did urge upon the Ministry of War Transport and the War Cabinet the necessity of sending grain.
Amery’s willingness to endure opprobrium for the Bengal famine may have been a form of atonement for the actions of his son. John Amery had been in France when the Nazis invaded, and after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union he had gone to Berlin to offer his help. Convinced that the United Kingdom should oppose the Soviets instead of aiding them, he had tried to recruit his countrymen to what he called a British Legion of St. George that would fight the Russians on the eastern front.
John Amery was captured in April 1945 and brought back to England for trial. He protested that he was an anti-communist rather than a Nazi, but he pleaded guilty to treason, apparently to spare his family further pain. He was executed that December. At the time his father circulated among friends a poignant note explaining why John had acted as he did. He had spent so much time on the Continent that he thought himself more European than English. He was also rather
psychologically disturbed, had a broken marriage, suffered a bankruptcy that he blamed on Jewish bankers, and claimed to have seen atrocities in Spanish concentration camps that had given him a horror of communism. Amery gave him this epitaph:
24
At end of wayward days he found a cause.
’Twas not his Country’s—Only time can tell
If that defiance of our ancient laws
Was treason—or foreknowledge. He sleeps well.
Leopold Amery’s patriotism was never in question, but the stanza perhaps hints at his own subterranean affinities—in particular, his deep empathy for Jews, which motivated at least in part his lifelong support for the cause of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. After his tenure as secretary of state for India ended in 1945, Amery never returned to political life. Behind the scenes, he continued to urge that Britain discourage a partition of India. A secret patron of Israel, he visited that new nation in 1950, where President Chaim Weizmann received him. Amery also embarked on an autobiography. He had written three large volumes without getting much into discussions of the war when he died in 1955, at the age of eighty-one.
25
IN THE SPRING of 1949, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru declared that India would like to remain within the Commonwealth. To Churchill that meant that the British Empire might endure in spirit, and it thrilled him. Meeting Nehru in London, he said with emotion that he had done him great wrong, hailing the Indian leader as a “prodigal who has returned to the fold of the family.” Nehru was on his way to Washington, D.C., and Churchill said he would have liked to introduce him to America as having “conquered two great human infirmities: you have conquered fear and you have conquered hate.”
26
Churchill was clearly thinking of himself. A “tyrant” when at the top of a wave, as Beaverbrook had once observed, after the wave crashed he could be a remarkably introspective man. “Now the arrogance and
self-assertion have gone, and there is left a deep humility,” Moran had observed of him after the Tory loss in postwar elections.
27
The war memoirs turned Churchill into a hero, and in 1951 he was elected prime minister. In that capacity he had cause to interact further with Nehru, with whom he had something in common: they were both graduates of Harrow. These encounters prompted Churchill to revise some more of his long-standing prejudices. “When you learn to think of a race as inferior beings it is difficult to get rid of that way of thinking; when I was a subaltern the Indian did not seem to me equal to the white man,” he confided to his doctor.
28
In June 1953, after witnessing the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, Churchill found himself standing next to Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, while they both waited for their cars to drive up. “You must have hated the British for the treatment meted out to your father,” Churchill said. “It is remarkable how he and you have overcome that bitterness and hatred.”
“We never hated you,” she responded.
“I did, but I don’t now,” he replied.
29
Not long after, Churchill suffered a debilitating stroke. Believing that he was about to die, he told Moran, albeit with a great many reservations, “that he had been wrong about India.” What exactly he regretted, the doctor’s account gives no clue.
30
Lord Cherwell suffered no such qualms. He continued to complain bitterly to friends that Indians and Egyptians “had defrauded us” during the war. After Churchill became prime minister for the second time, Cherwell moved into 11 Downing Street, from where he could stroll into Number 10 through an interconnecting door. He was the prime minister’s adviser on nuclear warfare. From time to time, with what economist Roy Harrod called an “expression of extreme severity,” the Prof would express his profound dismay at the demise of the colonial system. He hated the cold of winter and longed to retire to a warm place, such as Jamaica, but he was deterred by his phobia of blacks. Eventually he returned to Oxford to live in his former rooms and in 1957 died in his sleep.
31
Churchill lived for seven years longer, slipping inexorably into the sort of depression that had beset him previously in his life. He would sit for hours in front of a fire brooding on the past. “If Winston has believed in anything at all in the course of his long life it has been in the British Empire and all that it stands for,” Moran wrote. “Some of his happiest hours as a young subaltern were spent in India—and India was gone.” In the memoirs that Churchill had written about the war, he had tried to justify all that he had done, and managed to convince almost everyone of the rightness of his actions. “But have there been black hours when he has not been so sure?” the doctor mused. “There was the sinking of the
Prince of Wales
and the
Repulse
and the lives of the English sailors lost in that unhappy affair. And there was——. But the mind of the man of action does not work like that. When he has taken a decision on which thousands of lives depend, he puts it away from him. How otherwise could he keep sane?” The blank that Moran left in his memoir cannot be filled in until at least the 2020s, when some of his draft manuscripts will be opened to the public. Moran continued: “And yet, when all this is said, my doubts remain. Does the artist, for that is what Winston is, really escape so lightly?”
32
On January 24, 1965, Winston Spencer Churchill died at his home in London, at ninety years of age.
A MONTH BEFORE Indian independence, Sushil Dhara was released from prison and came home to a hero’s welcome. Asked to address the crowd, he broke down in tears. He cried for the youths he had led to their deaths in September 1942, who had not gotten to enjoy the liberty they craved.
Kumudini Dakua’s husband had also been released from prison. He took to traveling extensively in connection with his social work, which led Dakua to draw ever closer to Dhara. When Dhara’s sister-in-law perished in childbirth, leaving three young children, Dakua joined the household as their surrogate mother.
Dhara’s last sojourn in prison had given him time to read and reflect, and had turned him back into a Gandhian. Entrusted with all the cash
that remained after the Tamluk government’s books were balanced, he used it to build a maternity hospital—a venture aided by Chitto Samonto. Samonto also helped Dhara with other projects inspired by Gandhi’s ideas for restoring self-sufficiency to villages, such as perfecting a formula for soap made of local ingredients.
SOON AFTER INDEPENDENCE, Samonto walked to a high school owned by Mohisadal’s zamindars and, summoning up all his courage, asked to see the headmaster. The great man was seated on a chair mounted high on a platform, like a judge, and asked in a booming voice what the youth wanted. “Free schooling,” Chitto replied.
The headmaster glanced over his old grade reports, regarded the young man carefully, and agreed. Chitto would, however, have to pay 5 rupees for the first three months, after which his fees would be waived. His brother came up with the money, and Chitto was admitted. All the other boys in the school were from wealthy families and would spend their time smoking and lazing around, but Chitto did not even have the money to buy textbooks. He had an idea. “In those days you could get thin paperbacks, mostly biographies, for a quarter of a rupee. Whatever money I could collect, I would spend on buying one of these. I started a library service, would lend to the boys. With the money I earned, I bought more for my library and kept some aside to buy my own books.” Chitto also cooked and sold food at fairs. “My classmates bought snacks from me, and sometimes helped me out at the stall. I used to walk every day from here to Mohisadal and come back the same way. In winter it would be dark by the time I got back.”
Much against Chitto’s wishes, his mother had subsequently arranged his marriage. The angry young man had left home with the idea of becoming a wandering sadhu, or holy man. It was Dhara who had found him, sheltered him, and persuaded him to return to his bride. “I wronged her,” Samonto said in 2005, looking at the woman who had since been his uncomplaining partner. Throughout their long marriage, she worked from dawn to dusk, mopping the walls of the two-story mud house so that they would not crumble into dust, tending the cows
and the vegetable gardens, and, later, helping her daughter-in-law in the kitchen.
In middle age Chittobabu, as he came to be known to all, served as the
prodhan
(chief) of Kalikakundu. At the time he acquired government funding for an irrigation canal that now gave the village three crops of rice a year. More recently, he had organized villagers to rebuild a shrine for the stone image of Kali that had given the village its name. Even better, his elder sister had saved up all the money she had earned as a nurse and bought her brother a field by the family home. A local landlord gave him another as a gift. Since then, Chitto Samonto, his wife, and their children had been able to grow all the food that they needed and were even able to donate the occasional bowl of rice or an eggplant to their poorer neighbors.
Samonto’s grandchildren did not work in the fields but had the lightest chores, such as sweeping, because they were expected to study. Samonto’s eldest son, Ashok, had planted the field in front of the house with protein-rich kolai peas, just for the children to eat. “They can pick and eat all they want,” he said proudly. When the peas are gone, it is the cows who chew the stringy plants that had once helped save his father.
Acknowledgments
N
ot everyone I wanted to thank for helping me with this book lived to see it finished. I discussed the project often with Laura van Dam, who published my first book, until one day I suddenly realized I was no longer hearing from her. I miss her. The incredibly courageous and sharp-witted Ashoka Gupta, who was already in her nineties when I first met her, became a source of information and inspiration; I miss her too. I mourn the passing of the feisty Kumudini Dakua, whose eyes would light up like those of a mischievous schoolgirl when she related her past exploits; and of Phulrenu Guha, another of the remarkable women I encountered in the course of my research. And I would have dearly loved to gift the book to Bimal K. Ghose, the grandfatherly neighbor I called Dadu, who sparked my curiosity about the famine several decades ago when he became the first person to tell me about it.