by Yasmin Khan
Some agriculturalists had, in their enthusiasm for the new wartime profits, also turned to the growing of cash crops instead of using the land for grains and pulses. The Americans received complaints that promised orders for jute had been overestimated and that this had had a detrimental effect on cultivators. The question was debated in the Bengal Legislative Assembly. But ultimately, it was rice that was needed. In the aftermath of the famine a ‘grow more food’ campaign addressed the problem of self-sufficiency and yields directly. It also made more attempts to get accurate statistics of crop yields, for instance, by random sampling. But this all came too late for the victims of 1943.
Administrative bungling and inadvertent stockpiling compounded the horrors. G. S. Khosla, who was managing the railway traffic at Dacca in late 1943, found that so many bags of food grains had piled up in Dacca Station that he was forced to request Calcutta to stop sending more, as the movement of the stocks onward had not been arranged. He remembered it as a ‘dismal failure’. Many years later when interviewed he was still moved by the memory of ‘stacks of gunny bags of wheat mounting up in various parts of the station’ and the place being ‘choked’ with food which had not yet reached the starving.30 The stresses on communications, administrative blockages and problems of railway freight (especially the prioritisation for military stocks) added to the difficulties of distributing food even when it was publicly and visibly available. The shortages of boats and vehicles, and the legacies of the ‘denial scheme’, also contributed to the problem of getting food out to remoter areas. The food secretary told Wavell in early 1944 that the ‘crux’ of alleviating the famine was now to ‘get stocks of food into districts in time’.31 Even getting civil telephone and telegraph messages through in Bengal was proving more difficult and slower than in the preceding years.
The debates about why the famine happened may never be fully resolved. The statistical data may be too unreliable and incomplete ever to be fully conclusive. But more significant than the practicalities was the importance of mentalities. Some people’s lives were not seen as worthy of preserving. The state was geared in every way to the war and prioritised this at all costs. Human negligence and failure to prioritise other human lives as equal was the root cause. Certain lives were not seen as worthy of mourning, or as fully valid as others, and the lives of the people of Bengal had been sacrificed towards the greater global aim of winning the war. The lives of the famine victims were a cost of the Second World War but these casualties were not counted as such. A safety net protected the general population of Britain from starvation although everywhere people suffered shortages; in Bengal these shortages were fatal and that safety net was never put in place.
Meanwhile, the War Cabinet in London blocked and delayed imports that could have prevented further deaths in late 1943 and into 1944. Linlithgow handed over power to the new Viceroy, Wavell, on 20 October 1943 and when the retiring Viceroy met his successor on his arrival in India he told him that he had never been so glad to welcome anybody in his life. On arriving back into port in England, the former Viceroy was picketed by Indian students holding placards, protesting against the famine. Returning to Britain, where he ‘referred little to Indian affairs after his return’, Linlithgow died prematurely several years later.32 The no-nonsense and taciturn Wavell injected some new vigour into the administration. He brought the famine situation in Bengal under clearer control, visiting the province immediately after he arrived and co-ordinating military assistance. But soon, the new Viceroy was raging at the desultory way in which his messages to London were being handled. Each agreement to release more British food stocks for export to India was a hard-won concession for which Wavell had to wait many weeks and fight in the strongest language. A number of requests for imports were repeatedly turned down or renegotiated. By March 1944, Wavell had requested a million tons of food grains and the government had agreed to one-quarter of the amount. Clearly shaken by what he had personally witnessed, even as a battle-hardened general, he told London that the famine was ‘one of the greatest disasters that has befallen any people under British rule and damage to our reputation both among Indians and foreigners in India is incalculable’.33 He was frequently writing in his diary of the ‘unfavourable view of my request for grain imports’. By March 1944 he was thinking he ‘might have to resign to bring the situation home’ to the Cabinet. In June 1944, he waited five or six weeks for a reply about a request for greater shipping tonnage to India. This was turned down too. Towards the end of 1944, after a year-long struggle, Wavell was still battling against the callous attitude of Churchill towards India. ‘I feel that the vital problems of India are being treated by His Majesty’s Government with neglect, even sometimes with hostility and contempt’, he told the Prime Minister directly. ‘In spite of the lesson of the Bengal famine, I had during the last nine months literally to fight with all the words I could command, sometimes almost intemperate, to secure food imports.’34 Even after this letter, and well into 1945, he was still locked in a struggle with London over imports, which consistently fell below not only the amounts requested, but also the amounts agreed, and continued to be contested right up until the end of the war.35
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In Bengal, soldiers waiting for action in Burma now found themselves on the front line of a very different kind of calamity. They witnessed deaths more shocking than the violence of war itself. Clive Branson was apoplectic with frustration and rage at the famine.
The ordinary, decent people in England must do something – this is their Empire. I have no doubts about our beating the Japanese in spite of the state of India; but what fills me with horror is the post-war payment we shall have to make. It is all very well to parade members of the 4th Indian Division around England – but the sincerity of that praise wears a bit thin if those men’s relatives are dying of hunger in the villages of Bengal and elsewhere.36
Soldiers of all nationalities felt disturbed by what they saw in Bengal in 1943 and many, deeply moved by their inability to alleviate suffering, did what they could, offering up their own rations and helping children to welfare centres. Kenneth Hulbert, of the Royal Army Medical Corps, wrote of the sound of death in his private diary:
After sunset a dull low moaning sound started up and seemed to go on all night. I asked one of the Indians what this was and he said that it was coming from the Indian village around us. He said it was the sound of people dying of hunger. What a dreadful place this is. The distressing thing is that there is nothing we can do to help them.37
In Calcutta men and women in the military encountered famine victims on a daily basis. ‘I remember speaking to the Staff Sergeant about the body of a young girl lying at the entrance to the cantonment’, Peggy Tench, a nurse with the Queen Alexandra’s Nursing Corps, recalled.38 Some GIs in Assam donated money to send a boy who had lost both his parents in the famine to school. He was called Moniruddin, ‘a bright young lad who served for many months as office boy in the civilian personnel office at this base’.39
For the soldiers, the sights were distressing and disorienting. How could they justify their presence as colonial overlords if this was the result of British rule? How could they help alleviate such a tragedy? And what was the war all about if the empire was unable to protect its own inhabitants? ‘People feel’, one intelligence official expressed it, that ‘economic conditions are so bad [in parts of Bengal] that they could not be worse under the Japanese.’40 Some soldiers – both Indian and British – were praised for sharing their rations with the starving on the street.
The sight of the generic, nameless ‘homeless man’ became so much a part of the ordinary GIs’ experience that it featured in an official guidebook for the US Army in India, alongside other Indian ‘castes’ like the Brahmin and the avaricious merchant:
The Homeless Man. At some time or other while you are here you will witness the sight of a crowd of men, women, and children who seem to move together like a herd of sheep. They huddle together, or they
rush across the street in a mob, or they gather in a group shouting and jabbering – they are new arrivals in the city. Driven here by the famine, by flood, drought, or other causes, they come from Bengal itself, from Bihar, Orissa, or Assam. Homeless, helpless, hopeless when they reach Calcutta, they fare as men have always fared, in that the able-bodied and the strong among them as usual survive and soon find their way into the immense labor corps around the city – the rest, they soon vanish – some die in the epidemics, others just disappear.41
Soldiers also came into close quarters with famine victims through the distribution of medical and food aid. Public appreciation for their work was pronounced; ‘their work has been uniformly good and efficient in whatever type of relief job they have been engaged’, wrote T. G. Narayan, who wrote an eyewitness account of the famine.42 People did not blame individual soldiers for the consequences of the famine even though they blamed the war overall. Soldiers started transporting food, maintaining free kitchens and bringing medical relief with mobile dispensaries. Those trained in jungle warfare even taught people how to find food from local grasses and leaves. Military units also circulated a pamphlet to clinics and doctors with the frank title Treatment and Management of Starving Sick Destitutes. The distribution of quinine and inoculations against typhus was one of the most significant contributions of the Indian Army, although this work did not commence until late in 1943. The military medical units provided 17 hospitals with 2,150 beds and 61 mobile centres and treated 1,135,589 cases in these centres until the end of April 1944.43
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When Gandhi was released from prison in 1944, the Bengal famine had not yet faded from memory. It was still haunting people well beyond Bengal’s provincial borders. ‘I have no shadow of doubt in my mind’, Gandhi declared, ‘that the Bengal famine, as also famines in other parts of India, were man-made and not God-made.’44 The famine added to his steely determination to ensure that swaraj (self-rule) arrived at the end of the war. It also undermined further the remnants of imperial credibility, both among South Asians and Britons. ‘I had never seen such distress in all my life and the utter callousness with which the government behaved and did not give them relief was perhaps one of the reasons that really drove the iron into our souls’, recalled the Congresswoman Sucheta Kripalani many years later.45 In Europe, however, the famine blended into other wartime horrors and knowledge of it remained strangely blunted. But in Bengal anger about the famine simmered, adding piquancy to later nationalist campaigns and cementing nationalist convictions, which would resurface with explosive force in 1945.
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In April 1943 Subhas Chandra Bose arrived in Japan, carried by submarine for many weeks through the oceans from Germany to Sumatra, and then finally flown from Singapore to Tokyo. After his public arrival back in Singapore on 2 July 1943, the Indian National Army and the Indian Independence League became his personal vehicles. These organisations, which had been formed in early 1942, struggled under factional strain in South-East Asia, with many becoming sceptical about the ability of the INA to work as an equal partner with the Japanese, who simply liked the propaganda significance of the Indian renegade soldiers. Bose gave his followers the slogan ‘Chalo Delhi!’ (Advance on Delhi) and like an alchemist was able to turn the volatile situation among Indians in South-East Asia into political gold, by welding together men and women of different religious and linguistic backgrounds and inspiring them to fight under one banner and one leadership. In bold and uncompromising language Bose spoke single-mindedly of victory against the British and of the triumph of Indian nationalism. His speeches relentlessly referred to India’s subjugation by Perfidious Albion and the machinations of a ruthless alien empire. Certainly, many of the INA men who joined him in the newly christened ‘Azad Hind Fauj’ shared this belief and were born again into the movement with a fervour that compelled them to risk everything.
Shah Nawaz Khan was a tall, gentlemanly officer from a long line of military professionals, and was bitterly disappointed by the surrender of 1942 and by his status as a prisoner of war in Singapore. He was already a member of the INA but held many reservations about it, and remembered his own conversion from scepticism to becoming a fully fledged leader of the Indian National Army:
When Netaji [as Bose was known] arrived in Singapore, I watched him very keenly. I had never seen or met him before, and did not know very much about his activities in India. I heard a number of his public speeches, which had a profound effect on me. It will not be wrong to say that I was hypnotized by his personality and his speeches. He placed the true picture of India before us, and for the first time in my life I saw India, through the eyes of an Indian.46
Shah Nawaz Khan was tried during the Red Fort trial of 1946 and became one of the national heroes of the INA. Women, too, found Bose quite irresistible. In South-East Asia, many women who had been fearful about the future prospects of their community now turned to Bose. The INA’s recruitment of women into the famed Rani of Jhansi Regiment was consistent with the transformative changes that were taking place for women across South Asia. Among the local population in South-East Asia, the support of women was vocal and one fervent, anonymous supporter of Bose recorded in her diary:
The women’s section of the IIL [Indian Independence League] convened a mass meeting of Indian women. It was addressed by Netaji. The audience hung on each syllable as it dropped from the powerful jaws of our beloved leader. Women had walked ten and twelve miles to the meeting place … A Gujarati lady gave away all her jewellery: bangles, rings, necklace that she was wearing, as gift to Netaji for work by women.47
At a distance and from across the Indian Ocean, the subcontinent could be simplified and idealised as Mother India, and Bose was able to bring co-ordination and security to the shattered South-East Asian community of Indians. ‘What is most note-worthy is the way all petty intrigues have been abandoned, all quarrels forgotten’, wrote the same woman in her diary. ‘Netaji has certainly transformed all of us. We feel different.’48 She went on to join the Rani of Jhansi Regiment. This was a bracing modern form of nationalism with potentially fascist overtones. But unlike German fascism, it also played heavily on an inclusive vision of Indian identity, wiping aside differences of caste, class, religion and even gender. It inspired visions of revolutionary transformation, though one which Bose grounded on ideas about the will of the people. His rallies, funding drives and public orations during whirlwind tours to Rangoon, Shanghai, Bangkok, Nanking and the Andamans brought out crowds of thousands.
In reality, though, in South-East Asia there were far more complex undercurrents and complicated negotiations needed to sustain the INA movement on a daily basis. Doubts over Japanese intentions persisted and could not be easily ignored. There was also the need to co-ordinate with the Japanese and to organise everything from food and medical supplies to military tactics, military discipline and regulations. Bose persisted in trying to make his movement a genuinely independent and serious fighting machine – despite the fact that many of his recruits had no experience of military life – and to imbue the provisional government with autonomy, but ultimately relied on Japanese authority. For instance, in the Andaman Islands, where Bose hoped to formally acquire some control of Indian soil for his provisional government, he was able to rename the islands Shahid and Swaraj Islands and acquired nominal control, but failed to get the Japanese to relinquish any real sovereignty or military power.49 Despite Bose’s lobbying to have his troops integrated into the military assault on India, ultimately only 8,000 of the INA would see action when the Subhas Brigade took part in the Imphal campaign of 1944, leading to death, desertion, capture and appalling struggles for survival for these men and women. Within South-East Asia, many workers from the rubber estates continued to be caught in these cross-currents of imperialism and nationalism, with little choice but to join the INA or be used as forced labourers.
But for those on the other side of the Indian Ocean, within India’s actual borders, listen
ing to Bose and simply the knowledge of the existence of the Indian National Army (and the establishment of the Provisional Government of Azad Hind (Free India) from October 1943) gave a focal point for nationalism. From the time of his arrival in South-East Asia, Bose’s broadcasts intensified in frequency and popularity back in India and were heard by many. The Japanese radio stations in Singapore and Burma directed propaganda towards India from 11 p.m. until 3.30 a.m. and used Hindi, English, Bengali, Marathi, Urdu, Tamil and Punjabi. At least two hours a day were allotted to Bose and his programme and Rash Behari Bose also broadcast directly from Tokyo. People huddled around clandestinely to listen to these addresses, although their ability to sway opinion – rather than simply to bolster those already committed to nationalism – remains unknown. Broadcasts were well informed by conditions in India and dwelt on themes such as the futility of the Cripps Mission, the impact of air raids on South Asia and, from 1943, the famine.50 Significantly, Bose continued to refer to the Mahatma and to pay deference to Congress symbols and history, despite his differences with Gandhi, melding the Indian National Congress with the aims of the INA in the minds of some. Ultimately, the INA lost their military battles but they won the propaganda war, and the myth of Netaji became indefatigable. This would become even more important at the cessation of war when the celebration of the INA heroes would become a national cause célèbre and propel forward the collapse of the Raj.
