Three Famines

by Keneally, Thomas

  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 Septembe
r 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.

  Throughout the Bengal crisis, many kept wondering why the authorities ignored the Manual of Practical Instructions Regarding Famine Relief Administration published in 1904. The manual, based on inquiries into earlier famines, declared what the emperor of Ethiopia and Mengistu would later know. ‘The first danger signal is the unusual wandering of paupers.’ Another signal, said the manual, is a contraction of credit followed by feverish activity in the grain trade, and an increase in crime. If the infirm, other than paupers, begin to take to the road in great numbers, it is almost certain that ‘gratuitous relief’ is called for.

  Once hunger and starvation struck, the provincial administration was not equipped to deal with it quickly and with effect. The ‘famine code’ laid down in the manual that supplies would be automatically attracted to where they were needed. But since it was never invoked by the viceroy, Linlithgow, no regulations existed for such a distribution. And, given events, there were not many citizens able to help with the distribution, even had it been available.

  Relief, as it developed, came mainly in the form of agricultural loans. Such aid would develop returns too slowly to save the lives of many artisans, barbers and day-labourers. In February 1944, 30 million rupees were made available for loan by government. In summary, a total of 74 million was spent on relief in Bengal, including on agricultural loans; 30 million rupees on gratuitous relief; and 14 and a half million for test works on the way to introducing a scheme of famine labour. The sum represents an expenditure of approximately 35 cents per capita over eighteen months.

  In his first address to the Indian Parliament on 17 February 1944, the new viceroy, Archibald Wavell, did not address the question of Indian independence but indicated that while India still had some problems, the food situation would improve greatly in 1944. Some thought him overly optimistic. For one thing, Bengal under Chief Minister Nazimuddin was still inefficient and slow, as much so as under his predecessor. Wavell had ordered the government of Bengal to set up and operate by 31 January 1944 at least 1000 retail outlets for the distribution of ration foodstuffs. Food rationing was introduced to the city of Calcutta on the last day of January 1944, though it would take until early May for it to spread throughout the greater Calcutta region.

  The number of starving and sick destitutes in Calcutta had been estimated to be at least 100,000 in October 1943, and now the new viceroy Wavell demanded that the government of Bengal move them out of Calcutta and into feeding camps, where they could be given medical attention. The Bengal Destitute Persons (Repatriation and Relief) Ordnance was passed by the provincial government at the end of the month. Many critics said that it would be better to truck the destitutes home instead of sending them to the food depots and camps built outside Calcutta, and even Wavell wondered if his intervention would do any good. There had now been a promising, if small, autumn crop and the winter crop to be harvested later in the year had, wherever it was planted, looked excellent and better than other years. In the meantime, Wavell ordered the army to transport food to rural areas, to give medical assistance, to provide shelters and to transport migrants back to their villages.

  General Claude Auchinleck had by now been given one of Wavell’s former duties and was commander-in-chief in India. Auchinleck made arrangements at once to carry out the viceroy’s orders. The army moved only 55,000 through their relief camps, but others left Calcutta on their own, attracted away by reports of the setting-up of relief kitchens in country areas.

  From August 1943, Air Raid Protection (ARP) doctors and emergency hospitals had been placed at the disposal of the public-health authorities for handling destitutes who collapsed in the streets of Calcutta. By the end of November, within a month of Wavell launching the army into the fight against famine, the military services had ordered sixty-eight medical officers to public-health assignments in Bengal. The Indian Medical Service also detailed several of its medical officers to the province. But up to February 1944, only 160 civilian doctors – about a quarter of the number sought – had been recruited from throughout India to serve in Bengal. There were also sixteen military hospitals in place, with a mere 2100 beds. Fifty mobile medical units were staffed with health technicians. They inaugurated programs of mass inoculations against smallpox and cholera, improved village sanitation, disinfected water supplies and treated malaria cases. The number of vaccinations against smallpox jumped 73,000 in October 1943, to 464,000 in December, to 4.3 million by April 1944. Of course, this was a mere fragment of the Bengali population, but it can be argued that it was the most Wavell and Auchinleck could do with their resources.

  While in Bengal people were being felled by cholera and malaria, from their bases in Burma the Japanese crossed the border on 22 March 1944, to try to capture the allied airfields in north-west India. There were initial reverses, but British and Indian defenders fought the Japanese troops to a standstill around the frontier towns of Imphal and Kohima. There followed weeks of intense and brutal conflict. Additional troops and supplies were rushed to the battle area, further imperilling India’s transportation system. Many doctors went back from the areas of want to their units in the front line.

  The Japanese threat rebuffed, doctors returned to the famine areas. By the following October 1944, 32 million had been inoculated against smallpox and 18 million against cholera. The military medical units were very well supplied, equipped and maintained, but t
he civilian hospitals were not. Malaria was a particular problem, because the Japanese had captured the quinine-supplying parts of the world, and there were only small stocks remaining. Still, the well-off wanted protection, so shipments of synthetic anti-malarials such as mepacrine and quinacrine, and of the remaining quinine itself, had to be transported under armed guard.

  As described, doctors encountered great peasant resistance to being inoculated against cholera and smallpox, even as polluted water continued to take its toll. There were wildfire rumours that inoculations were toxic. Before the crisis, water had come from tube wells, fed from above and then running almost horizontally before emerging from an embankment. The earlier breakdown of the pipes in the wells, and the impossibility of people outlaying money to repair them, had sent people to get their water from canals, heavily infected by bodies and waste. Inoculation, despite the popular resistance, was now saving people from the parlous condition of the water they drank.

  Wavell found that getting food for Bengal from the great farming region of Punjab was very difficult. The government in Lahore declared that it had been one of the staunchest supporters of the war effort and that one out of every two Indian soldiers was a Punjabi volunteer, which entitled them to retain their supplies for the needs of their own people. They reiterated to Wavell their strong opposition both to price controls and to rationing of food stuffs. But Wavell made it clear that both were necessary. The Punjab chief minister, Sir Khizar Hyat Khan Tiwana, and Wavell got on well together and arrived at a compromise. Maximum prices for food grains were accepted by the provincial leaders but at a higher level than Wavell’s government of India wanted. Also, the requisitioning of food grains would be less forceful and rationing adopted at a more leisurely pace than Wavell would have liked. Nonetheless, the foundations of a nationwide food-control structure were laid out in the Punjab in the final few days of November 1943.