Three Famines (21 page)

In 1848, the blight appeared again. The British Treasury secretly offered the Quakers £100 if they would resume their relief operations. They refused to accept it, on the basis that far more radical measures were needed.

Because of the British Relief Association’s close contacts with Charles Trevelyan, it was often seen as an arm of government relief. But there were a number of ideological conflicts between Strzelecki and Trevelyan, especially over the issue of feeding some 200,000 children through the schools in the west, a plan of Strzelecki’s which Trevelyan saw as too profligate. The association, subject to Trevelyan’s influence at the board level, closed its operations in the summer of 1848. In September that year, a disheartened Strzelecki left dismal Ireland, refusing to accept payment for the work he had done, though still pursuing a campaign to be recognised and compensated as the first discoverer of gold in Australia.

However, Joseph Bewley, the Dublin Quaker merchant, established a further relief committee in Dublin and the Friends in London went into action again. From English
Quakers they received an extraordinary £35,000. But the donations received from the United States far exceeded these amounts, as Jacob Harvey again organised a massive relief operation.

Joseph Bewley himself, like Harvey in New York, would be among the victims of the famine, in that they died premature deaths and, according to the opinions of contemporaries, in both cases from overwork. Many of the Friends were punished for their efforts: Jonathan Pim, a Dublin merchant, suffered acutely from exhaustion, even though he would recover to serve in the House of Commons as a Liberal. As well as Bewley and Harvey, another merchant, William Todhunter, also died – again, according to his physician, of exhaustion – while about a dozen other Quaker workers were struck down by famine epidemics.

Pope Pius IX had sent a donation of Roman $1000. Later, under pressure from British emissaries and from his own conservative conscience, he would condemn and prohibit any Catholic uprising. But in March 1847, he issued an encyclical to the Catholic community worldwide, requesting Catholics to set aside three days of prayer for Ireland and to make donations. This had an impact among the Catholics of Britain as much as it did in remote Australia, Venezuela and South Africa, and donations flowed in, though not entirely from those Irish-born or of Irish descent. In Australia, where Irish convicts, former convicts and free immigrants made up nearly a third of the population, funds were raised with some
urgency. In the more distant parts of the colonies, in what would become Queensland, there was an Irish Famine Relief Organisation. The Choctaw nation of America sent its mite as well. Privately raised aid came from Britain, from Newcastle, Gateshead, Hull, Birmingham, Leeds, Huddersfield, Wolverhampton and York.

To the chagrin of Lord John Russell, prime minister of Great Britain, the United States intervened more and more with relief. The American government’s motives were not entirely pure. The British government believed that US relief exports and their free issue to the hungry of Ireland would help drive up prices for American produce in general in Britain, and indeed even for those Irish whom the proffered American grain did not reach. The general Irish Relief Committee in New York declared that the miseries of Ireland were the direct cause of America’s increasing wealth. ‘What is death to Ireland has but augmented fortune to America.’ American merchants were fattening on the starvation of other people, it said.

In February 1847, Congress was approached to permit the Boston Relief Committee to be provided with a sloop of war, the
Jamestown
, and the frigate
Macedonian
, to transport supplies to Ireland. Congress agreed, a gesture all the more remarkable because American forces were committed to war against the Mexicans. Manned by volunteers, who slept in hammocks on deck to maximise room for supplies, the
Jamestown
left Massachusetts on 28 March. After fifteen days and three hours, it arrived in Cork. Captain Forbes of the
Jamestown
argued that if the supplies could cross the Atlantic in fifteen days, there should be no greater delay in getting them
into the hands of the poor. The ship, said a newspaper in Cork, took a shorter time to bring its supplies than it would take to get ‘an intelligible answer’ from the Board of Works or to understand one of the acts of Parliament aimed at relief. A Liverpool philanthropist, William Rathbone, had agreed to help to oversee the impartial distribution of this relief.

It seems that in Ireland, relief, with its concentration on emergency food, might have been better targeted than in some modern famines. Nonetheless, there were complaints about relief assessors travelling the country by fine coach and staying at the best inns, phenomena seen now in the gleaming vehicles and accommodation at the best hotels, which has been associated with aid workers of the International Committee of the Red Cross and other bodies.

Sometimes the aid offered to the hungry was, in the minds of the givers, ordained by God. But its intention lay in affecting drastic change in those subjected to the charity. The phenomenon of ‘souperism’ – conversion to Protestantism for the sake of food and advantage – grew in large part from the founding in 1830 of the Protestant Colonisation Society, whose objective was to create Protestant colonies in the Catholic recesses of Ireland. This society, too, would offer soup and other favours, but at a particular cost.

By the early 1830s, it had already succeeded in founding its colonies of Protestants in County Donegal and Kildare. The evangelical Reverend Edward Nagle established a colony even in remote Achill Island in County Mayo, and another on
the Dingle Peninsula in Kerry – in both cases country beyond which lay the Atlantic, a fact that might have emphasised the Protestant Colonisation Society’s sense that they had created mighty fortresses there against the general barbarism of the west of Ireland. The missions were founded with the support of local landowners, who were devout members of the Church of Ireland (the Anglican church, that is). Landowners’ wives were particularly enthusiastic contributors to the projects. Those from the Catholic masses who were converted by the society were ostracised and subjected to ‘exclusive dealing’, an early form of the boycott, which involved refusing to sell goods or to give any succour to any convert to Protestantism.

When the famine began, a further conversion movement came into being, the Society for the Irish Church Mission, which worked in Connemara in western Galway. This group were also willing to offer generous support, and in trying as well to bring about conversions, they believed they were liberating the Irish not only to a pure appreciation of the deity but also to a Protestant culture associated with habits of industry, social progress and inventiveness.

At the height of the famine, a priest in Ballinakill near Clifden on the Galway coast described proselytisers going from cabin to cabin ‘proffering food and money and clothing to the naked and starving on condition of their becoming members of their conventicles’. Priests in the west inveighed against the evangelicals from the pulpit, but their words could not bear away the reality of starvation. Many of the conversions were temporary, provoked by want. Yet ‘souperism’ would come to hold a much greater place in the Irish imagination than the ultimate figures justified. Part of the
reason was the fervent, vitriolic and memorable oratory directed against the opportunistic proselytisers by the Catholic clergy. The bulk of Church of Ireland ministers themselves also mocked the work of the ‘colonisers’, and their trading of food for faith.

As for Catholic clergymen, Sir Randolph Routh, the chairman of the relief commissioners, found that during the famine the vast majority of priests were behaving ‘most liberally, and most meritoriously’, and cooperating well with their Church of Ireland colleagues. Some bishops were criticised, however, for not being demanding enough in seeking help for their people, and there were even some priests who went ahead with grand renovations or new building of churches during the most bitter years.

T
HE QUESTION MUST
be asked: why did Bengal suffer from a lack of administration and hence of mechanisms to distribute food? The centre of government in the regions was the British district officer, who was also the district magistrate and collector of revenue. His job was to keep order according to the government’s strictures. When Burma fell in 1942, the demands made on him were entirely to do with the coming Japanese invasion. His first task was to create a civil defence to prepare for the heavy air raids that were likely in the front line area. He was required to requisition supplies, land and buildings for the retreating British and Indian armies, and for military airfields. He had also to look after Indian refugees from Burma who turned up, trembling, alarmed and hungry. They had reached the town of Chittagong, far inland on the Karnaphuli River, by way of Assam and told tales of Japanese atrocities. At the level of
the British and the Indian ruling class, even as far away as the capital, Calcutta, people were panicking. The Japanese advance through Burma had been so swift that there was a sense of inevitable capture. A witness who appeared before the Famine Commission described the all-absorbing tension in Calcutta, the emptiness of streets (the starving had not yet arrived), the abandoned houses and shops. The families of government servants were ordered out of the coastal regions, and few people did not believe that by the next cold season, the Japanese would hold Calcutta.

Exposed far out on his limb, the district officer was meant to calm some of the misgivings the refugee stories evoked in the general population, while simultaneously going about the business of denying them their boats and vehicles. He also had instructions to address the local inflation of currency, and all the turmoil of a beaten army streaming through the region to take up defensive positions to the west. By June 1942, Chittagong was in front of the first line of defence, and the district officer was ready to abandon it as soon as the port and its installations were destroyed. The permanent harbour works were prepared for demolition.

In a sixty-mile line south of the town, district officers and their administration kept working in front of the positions taken up by the British armies, and were thus in no-man’s land. One wrote that he never knew whether he was going to wake up the next morning to find a Japanese soldier bringing in his morning tea.

So the efforts of the district officer were devoted to military issues and were not as exercised by the coming food crisis. Meanwhile, the only official in the Bengal village was
the
chowkidar
(watchman), who did duty as a policeman and to whom all deaths were to be reported. He was poorly paid and often illiterate, and he lacked the authority of the village officials of the
ryotwari
areas, the areas in which village taxes were raised, and in which the officials were respected, or at least eminent, members of the community.

Thus few people except the inhabitants themselves – and those local wealthier families who often preyed on them – had any concept of what was happening on a village level, or whom to call on to set up a local machine for relieving the famine. In Bengal in particular, putting in place a system of distribution was a great challenge to any relief effort.

The Famine Commission would later stress the necessity of boat traffic and ‘the meagreness’ of the roads. Throughout the greater part of the province, roads had to be raised above flood level and a large number of bridges were needed to span the smaller rivers and canals. But the larger rivers defeated engineers, or else bridges to span them were considered too expensive. In many districts, therefore, the chief means of communications were by ‘country boats’ and the occasional river steamer.

In December 1942, when the series of Japanese attacks on Calcutta had caused panic in the city, a large number of foodgrain shops closed as their owners left for the countryside. The government of Bengal felt it was now necessary to requisition stocks from the warehouses of wholesale dealers, and from that moment, said the Famine Commission, ‘the ordinary trade machinery’ could not be relied upon to feed even Calcutta. The authorities thought there would be food riots because of dealers holding on to grain, and therefore
sent out police to seize stocks that were withheld from sale. But they could acquire only 17,000 tons over five months. Profiteering Bengali politicians started to issue grain-trading licences to their friends, so that they too could engage in hoarding until the price favoured them. The government of India itself had earlier taken off price controls of wheat throughout the country – another admission that trying to keep prices low was not working.

As in other famines, there was also the problem of more affluent people in the richer areas becoming immune to the presence of victims and blinded to their needs. There are tales from the Irish famine of people walking past the dying on the street to attend lectures on the abolition of American slavery. The Indian writer T. G. Narayan was honest enough to say that ‘in sheer self-defence’ hearts hardened towards the destitutes in Calcutta and their suffering failed to register.

John Muehl, a young American serving in the Royal Medical Corps, visited Calcutta at the time that refugees to the city were expiring on its pavements. Since he had come from the front in Burma, at first he saw Calcutta as a city of luxuries. Then he became sickened by the deaths in the streets that occurred ‘side by side with cocktail parties, hors d’oeuvres, seven-course dinners and padlocked garbage cans’. On his first evening in the city, he dined at the famous Firpo’s restaurant, and on the way back had to step among the dead and dying. The elegant food became ‘like lead’ in his stomach, and before he had reached his room at the Grand Hotel he was sick. But the longer he was in town, the more indifferent he became. He admits, too, to the callousness Narayan
mentioned, once finding himself eating a chocolate bar as he stepped by a dying woman.

After a ruinous cyclone in 1940, the
Times
of India, a Bombay English-language newspaper of record, had founded an Indian Relief fund. In 1943, the fund was revivified and, from a central office in Calcutta, began asking the readers of the
Times
, whose readership included British civil servants and business and professional people, as well as the Indian privileged classes, for donations. Contributions came in from every region – Bombay, Madras and the colony of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) – and within a few weeks amounted to £14,000.

Other charitable organisations set up relief kitchens throughout the city. The Bengal Central Relief Committee, established by the government of Bengal under the chairmanship of the governor, was responsible for some of them. The others were contributed by the Hindu Mahasabha, a communal organisation that had broken away from the Congress Party; the Marwari Relief Committee, Marwari being a cultural group from Rajasthan; the Bharat Sevashram, a self-help cultural organisation of citizens and monks; the Friends’ Ambulance Unit, a Quaker group; and Rotary. These organisations attempted to provide each destitute with a daily free meal of about 750 calories, a target they could, with sustained effort, manage to reach, but which was insufficient to ensure life.

A great deal of informal aid was given by soldiers of the British and Indian armies at military camps and along the roadsides. Sometimes the food was not entirely appropriate
to the needs of the hungry – jam, or pudding, or other foods likely to upset now-delicate digestions. Sometimes what was given flowed from simple compassion, though in other instances there might be a
quid pro quo
involving sex.

The average Bengali consumed 140 kilograms of rice in one year, but in bare subsistence rural farming families this fell to 90 kilos a head each year. The famine-relief diet, supplied in the form of gruel, or
khichri
, amounted to thirty kilos of grain per person per year. In the popular view, emergency food to make
khichri
was in many cases pilfered by officials and sold on the black market. The hungry also stole what rice they could from the stores of the relief kitchens, in part because the
khichri
was so unappetising – made out of, among other things, gourd, pumpkin, cucumber, kernel of banana trees and wild vegetables. Its smell was appalling and the colour blackish. This gruel did not contain even half the calories needed for an adult. A serving typically contained eight ounces of grain, mostly millet, a food unfamiliar to rice-eating Bengalis, to which was added these small amounts of vegetables, spices and sugar.

Nonetheless, the free meals were so sought-after that it was necessary for all kitchens in an area to issue the daily meal at the same hour, to prevent recipients moving from one to another. In November 1943, the kitchens fed an average of 2.1 million people a day. Doles of uncooked food were distributed to another quarter million. In the meantime, grain began to be sold at subsidised rates to about half a million. Obviously, millions starved beyond the reach of this mercy.

During April and May 1943, when corpses were beginning to appear in the villages of Bengal, the provincial Bengal government began a propaganda campaign to convince the people there was no serious shortage of rice. Their intentions were good – to stop local hoarding and to temper the purchases of grain by better-off families. Even now, had the total amount of rice in Bengal been equally distributed throughout the population, though everyone would have endured some hunger, no one would have starved to death. The acting governor of Bengal, Sir Thomas Rutherford, declared, ‘It is this price racket based on scarcity that has been killing people as much as scarcity itself.’

By May 1943, in Midnapore and Parganas in West Bengal, babies and nursing mothers were scraping by on the milk powder distributed under the cyclone-relief program the year before. Voluntary groups were setting up soup kitchens in the towns of Chittagong and Noakhali in East Bengal, but they could not buy enough food to operate properly.

Many had died of starvation before the third all-India Food Conference assembled in New Delhi on 5 July 1943 and established a new Basic Plan. The free-trade idea was abandoned, a Foodgrains Policy Committee was set up and the export of rice from India was prohibited. Only small amounts of rice had been exported, in any case. Though an original Basic Plan adopted at the beginning of the year had allocated 217,000 tons of rice to Bengal, the revised plan now allotted a mere 15,000 tons, but along with 340,000 tons of wheat, 46,000 tons of chickpeas and 40,000 tons of millet. At the beginning of August, in an attempt to make hoarders sell, Bengal set maximum rice prices at six to eight times
the pre-war rate and offered to buy at these rates all the rice that was offered. But again they could purchase very little, for hoarders were still holding rice in warehouses in the hope of even greater profit.

Now, from the very evidence of the dead on Calcutta’s streets, the government of Bengal told their district administrative offices to sell food grain (if they had a chance of getting it) at a subsidised price, to begin public work for wages, to hand out free gruel, to give small gifts of cash in emergencies, to make loans so people could buy cattle and to devote themselves to relief as their primary work. An overall famine commissioner was appointed in September 1943. Engineers supervised the Bengali-government-initiated public works, in return for which a small wage was paid. Many on the works showed mercy to pregnant women, to whom they paid a digger’s wage without requiring them to work.

In America in late November 1943, a group of influential people formed the Emergency Committee for Indian Famine Relief. Members included Pearl S. Buck, the American Nobel Prize-winning novelist; Clare Boothe Luce, writer and wife of the founder of
Time
magazine; and Henry F. Grady, who was to be the first ambassador to independent India. The main objectives of the organisation were not only to raise funds for famine relief but also to pressure government authorities to allocate ships and transport planes to the task of moving food to Bengal. The committee was unsuccessful in its attempts to persuade the US government to divert shipping, however.

In early December, the Quaker organisation the American Friends Service Committee despatched the first American
relief supplies to Bengal – 20,000 cases of evaporated milk. The American Red Cross sent the same, with two million multivitamin tablets. James G. Vail, an official from the American Friends Service Committee, was appointed to go to India on behalf of all the American agencies and supervise the distribution. At first he had a budget of $100,000, but donations quickly fell away. Vail faced the usual problem of finding trucks to transport the American aid, or negotiating with other agencies to distribute it.

Still, concerned Americans saw hope in a new international organisation. Forty-four nations, including India, gathered at the White House on 9 November 1943 to sign an agreement that created the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). Roosevelt raised the hopes of those concerned with India when he said that it was the task of UNRRA to operate in areas of food shortage. It was to be UNRRA who would assure a fair distribution of available supplies among all liberated people in the world, and address death by starvation or exposure. The India League of America, the combined relief committees, and the Post-war World Council, set up to be in place when peace came, made appeals to UNRRA for the starving in Bengal. These pleas ran up against bureaucrats, who interpreted the meaning of the UNRRA charter along the lines that only areas liberated from the enemy were eligible for aid. Dean Acheson, at the time undersecretary of state, stood by this interpretation. The British delegate to UNRRA, Minister for Food John J. Llewellin, supported Mr Acheson’s position and called a press conference to prove that nothing needed to be done in India and that the UNRRA agreement did not apply to it. Sir Girja
Bajpai, agent general for India in Washington, quietly supported Acheson and Llewellin. And so Bengal received no UNRRA aid.