Three Famines (8 page)

Had there been enough early political will, these problems would not necessarily have foreshadowed a disaster for Bengal’s people. In spite of all adverse conditions, everything needed to feed the army was supplied and distributed at the famine’s height in the second half of 1943 – itself an indication that a similar distribution to Bengal’s civilians could have been possible. There were suggestions on top of all else that a scarcity of food in the
mofussil
was at least welcomed by the military for recruiting purposes. It certainly spurred enlistment into the ranks of the nearly two-and-a-half-million-strong Indian army, whose members served in the British forces. The Military Labour Corps, which recruited women as well as men to work on military installations and emplacements, gave a chance of survival to a certain number of starving women, but they were often used or abused by soldiers, and some were afflicted by venereal disease.

The idea that there was an imminent food crisis continued to evade Linlithgow. On 26 January 1943 he wrote to London, to Secretary of State for India Leopold Amery, reporting that he had ordered Bengal it ‘simply
must
’ send more rice out of Bengal for Ceylon, where there was a shortage. In reality, it was not nearly as acute as that of Bengal. But the export had to take place ‘even if Bengal itself went short’. Linlithgow told Amery that he was not unsympathetic to Bengal, but that nonetheless he might be able to ‘screw a little out of [the Bengali premier]’. He thought the Bengal food situation could be treated with guarded optimism – there were recent improvements in India generally and an excellent prospect of the
rabi
(also known as the
boro
) harvest in the spring. In any case, he felt he had done everything he could by writing in June 1943 to the war cabinet asking for imports of food grain from other parts of the Empire.

By the end of his vice-regency, in June 1943, the nervously exhausted Linlithgow had at last become convinced of the urgency of the Indian situation. Yet his advice to London, after beginning bravely, was cynical. He told Leopold Amery: ‘A firm promise of 100,000 tons of barley and the possibility of a small additional quantity of wheat will go nowhere in meeting our essential demands.’ So he asked for 300,000 tons of food grain, especially wheat. He said that these shipments were needed to feed the army, but that he would declare in public that the imported wheat would be made available for the general population as well. His telegram concluded: ‘The propaganda value of this would be great indeed.’ In the meantime, he warned the cabinet: ‘I can’t be responsible for [the] continuing stability of India now, or her capacity to serve as a
base against Japan next year unless we have appropriate help in prospect’.

Later, he and other members of the British government would work out a complicated explanation of the famine, blaming it on the fact that Bengalis had eaten the ‘carry-over’ – that is, stored remnant – of the crop before the famine struck. This, he announced, was a major cause of the shortage of food in Bengal. Reserves having been consumed, people were hungering. The results of eating the carry-over would, said Linlithgow, persist for some time. The Famine Inquiry Commission reported that one cause of the famine was ‘a shortage in the stock of old rice carried forward from 1942 to 1943’, but it gave no evidence to prove its argument, and this might even have been an unconscious symptom of the tendency of authority to blame famines on their victims. The 1945 report of the Commission did not, at least, as heavily invoke Malthus’s ideas of inevitable culling as others did, nor was Malthus turned to for justification of what had happened, as he had been in the narrower geographic confines of the Irish disaster.

In Linlithgow’s place, the government of Great Britain appointed a soldier, Field Marshal Archibald Wavell, who was also to act as commander-in-chief for India. He would, arriving however late on the scene, address the family frontally.

Though Lord Linlithgow would not visit Calcutta, the acting governor of Bengal, Sir T. Rutherford, had the courage to walk its streets and then to reconnoitre some of the
mofussil
before Wavell arrived. On 19 September 1943, Rutherford wrote, ‘I have wandered around Calcutta after nightfall and scenes are pretty ghastly. I have also done a long mufti tour through 24 Parganas District … I envisage a large death toll throughout the Province from starvation following on previous malnutrition coupled with endemic malaria … Though famine is not officially declared, the conditions are those of famine.’

On 28 September, he visited the Midnapore and saw corpses being torn to pieces by dogs and vultures. He believed that the majority of the starving were the beggars and elderly until now maintained by private charity. But he thought that the large sales of metal, household vessels, ornaments and land were ominous signs. The peasants faced dizzying fluctuations in the policies of governments – price-fixing adopted and then abandoned and then adopted again. The Bengali government’s response to the Japanese advance was to call on people to keep a two-month supply of food grains in their homes. Worry about what was to happen meant that those who could manage it accumulated a six-month supply and so reduced the amount of rice in the stores. Then a US army air transport command and 6000 Chinese nationalist troops who had escaped Burma also had to be fed, which created a further drain on the local food supply in north-east Bengal and in Assam.

The question arises: was Churchill, a man of considerable compassion, nonetheless a villain in the story of Bengal? By
the time of the famine’s onset, Churchill had been British prime minister for three years and was absorbed by the European war, to which he and Roosevelt had decided to give priority. Yet Churchill knew that British survival as an empire, and much of Britain’s wealth, depended on saving India from the Japanese. He was also convinced that India owed Britain a debt for providing its civilised administration. Quit India made the Indians, in many British eyes, less worthy of help when the food crisis came. Though many thousands of Indians were serving with Indo-British forces, Churchill felt there were countervailing examples of Indian ingratitude.

In a speech at a dinner in London in October 1943 to farewell Field Marshal Archibald Wavell to India, Churchill declared, ‘I must say, I am in a state of subdued resentment about the way in which the world has failed to recognise the great achievements of Britain in India … Famines have passed away – until the horrors of war and the dislocations of war have given us a taste of them again – and pestilence has gone. Vast works of construction have enabled shortages in one part of the country to be equalised by the plenty in another, and disease has been diminished – with what results; with the incredible result … that in ten years the population of India under the blighting rule of Britain [
laughter
] has increased by 50 million – 50 million.’ Yet he was ambiguous about this population increase. As Trevelyan had with the Irish, he condemned the Indians for ‘breeding like rabbits’. India’s population was then 400 million and Bengal’s 60 million.

Responding to the demands of the European war, Churchill and his cabinet directed inadequate shipping in
India’s direction. Frederick Lindemann, Viscount Cherwell, the son of an Alsatian businessman and – like Churchill – an Anglo-American mother, was often his adviser on such matters as shipping priorities and India. During World War I, Lindemann’s loyalty was to Britain, and he took part in the scientific testing of aircraft, defining the physics of an aircraft’s spin and the method to get out of it. In the mid 1930s, while a professor of physics at Oxford, he became close to Churchill on the basis that both men were passionately opposed to any appeasement of Hitler. Churchill called him ‘the scientific lobe of my brain’.

Like Churchill (and, again, like Trevelyan in the case of Ireland), Lindemann believed the Bengal situation was exaggerated, a statistical invention, a creation of the Bengali imagination. He also believed he had the figures to prove wrong those who were proclaiming a Bengali emergency. In fact, he claimed that the Bengal famine could be managed by reforming the food distribution system.

Later, in London to meet the cabinet Food Committee, Archibald Wavell would write in his journal that Churchill’s secretary of war, his minister for war and Viscount Cherwell spent all their time saying that the Indians should not be as they were and suggesting that a number of wealthy and famous Indians should be hung. Wavell described Viscount Cherwell as having been introduced into discussions to present ‘fatuous calculations’ about harvests and yields. Wavell could make no impression on ‘Dr Berlin’, as Lindemann’s associates had nicknamed him.

Not all Britons accepted the British government’s view of the Bengali food emergency. Many thought that the
government had failed. Leading British churchmen, headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, called for daily prayers for India’s starving. A thousand delegates of British women’s organisations passed a resolution calling for the removal of Leopold Amery as secretary of state for India. Labour member Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, who succeeded Amery in 1945, would call the British government’s handling of the Bengal food crisis ‘a dishonourable failure’.

Churchill and Lindemann had further and more notable reasons than Quit India to accuse the Indians of ingratitude, and so to be unimpressed by their cries for help. There was the issue of the extraordinary Indian Subhas Chandra Bose. Born in 1897, Bose was a charismatic Bengali of Hindu stock. He was one of the Indian elite who had passed examinations to qualify for entry into the Indian civil service. He had twice been elected president of Congress. Today he is considered a great Indian hero, celebrated as Kalki, the final manifestation or avatar of the god Vishnu, and of Shivaji. Calcutta’s airport and Bombay’s Bose Marine Drive have been named after him. Any follies of the man have been forgotten in modern India, and he is seen as a prophet of Indian independence.

In his lifetime he was given the honorific title of ‘Netaji’ by Indians, which means ‘great leader’. And such was his aura by the early 1940s that when the Japanese bombed Calcutta in December 1942, many enthusiastic Indians attributed it to Bose.

Bose attempted to collaborate with the Nazis, a fact that
was appalling to the British and to a great number of Indians, but obviously did not outrage all Indian opinion. Bose had gone to Germany in 1941 and tried, without much success, to create a ‘free Indian government’ in Berlin and to raise an ‘Indian legion’ under the aegis of the Nazis. It was Bose’s hope that the Germans would get beyond the Volga and Stalingrad to reach Tajikistan and Uzbekistan and, through Afghanistan, would enter north-west India. There, it was assumed, the local population would join them in fighting the British. Bose’s fantastic expectations were not approved of by Gandhi, despite his earlier statements about the British and Americans leaving, nor by the other great Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru. The leader of the Muslim League, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, thought that it was crazy to swap one imperial master for yet another and worse one.

By 1942, the Japanese were hammering on the door. After a private meeting with Hitler, Bose left the German port of Kiel for Japan by u-boat. In Napoleonic style, he left his 3500 Indian soldiers to the German army, in which they became the 950th Regiment. In July 1943, he travelled through Japanese-captured Asia to recruit an Indian National Army from prisoners of war.

Asia proved far richer pickings for Bose than Germany had been. Many Indian POWs, and some Indian nationals throughout the Japanese-conquered areas, were willing to join his army and fight with the Japanese in the invasion of Bengal and Assam from bases in Japanese-conquered Burma. Some of the POWs in Japanese prisons in Singapore were motivated by the general incompetence of the British leadership in the face of Japanese military competence throughout south-east
Asia. The Indian POWs of the Japanese in Burma, thousands having been caught on the wrong side of the Sittang River, did not have the fondest memories of the battles they had lost under British command. Of the British army’s Indian regiments who had been surrounded and captured by Japanese, 35,000 remained loyal, but more than a third of the Indian POWs from Burma agreed to go over to the Japanese under Bose’s command.

Under the Japanese, Bose was Indian head of state and prime minister and war minister of a government in exile, as well as supreme commander of the Indian National Army. Members of his army fought on with the Japanese until the end of the war, despite the Japanese tendency to use the Indians for coolie work. Bose had offered Burmese rice to victims of the famine in Bengal by way of a broadcast through German radio on 14 August 1943. In return, he required British acceptance of his Indian Independence League, and for Britons to give an undertaking that any food he sent would not be used to feed the military or be exported from India. Naturally enough, the cabinet found the first of these demands unacceptable and no deal was done. Bose himself would be killed in a plane crash in Taiwan – on the way to Japan – in the last days of the war in 1945.