Churchill's Secret War (27 page)

Churchill did say that if the situation in India got worse Amery could bring it up again. The next day, August 5, the prime minister boarded the
Queen Mary
for a conference in Quebec. The following week, a committee disbursed the shipping in the Indian Ocean for the next two months. In September, ten vessels would be required to load in Australia with wheat flour, and two with other foodstuffs, but none would be going to India. In October, ten vessels would have to load in Australia with wheat and other food, but again none would be destined for India. War-related cargo would instead fill the ships traveling to that colony. As for the Iraqi barley, at most 30,000 tons could be transported per month; negotiations on price, being the province of Lord Woolton, were incomplete when the War Cabinet again discussed the famine on September 24, 1943.
⁴¹

As long as food could be exported from India for use in the war theaters, the imperial administration had exported it. But while the colony itself suffered from famine—in no small part because of the scarcity and inflation resulting from such extractions of supplies—shiploads of Australian wheat would pass it by, to be stored for future consumption in southern Europe. “India’s need is absolutely urgent and immediate,” Amery would remonstrate in late October. “Relief for the Balkans, badly needed as it is, cannot be delivered in any quantities for many months to come for the simple reason that the enemy still control the situation. As for depleting our stocks here to danger point, that is a pretty remote consideration, especially now that we have got so effective a whiphand over the U-boats.”
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IN MARCH 1943 the Bengal government had extended over several districts the relief operations originally intended for cyclone victims. “A large famine relief organization could not however be set up without a great deal of publicity,” explained Nihar Chandra Chakravarty, a civil servant employed with the effort. “This publicity could not very well be done when propaganda was being made that there was no fear of serious shortage for keeping up the morale of the people.” The Government of India surely knew of the dire situation, he testified, because in
July a minister had written to New Delhi warning that “we were going to starve by the millions.”
⁴³

With the Department of Civil Supplies keeping all the grain it could get hold of, or distributing it to priority industries, little was left for even these circumscribed relief operations. Around July or August, Chakravarty and others “had the feeling that it might not be possible to save all people,” as he said later to the famine commission. “We simply wanted the people to keep going on, on something like half or one-fourth ration for a few weeks,” until supplies arrived. As a result, the gruel offered at the relief kitchens got thinner, so that a pound of rice a day was feeding three people. Sometime after that, the portion was further reduced, to four ounces per person per day. That came to 400 calories, at the low end of the scale on which, at much the same time, inmates at Buchenwald were being fed.
⁴⁴

“I
n Sapurapota village of the 17th Union of Panskura Thana a Muslim weaver was unable to support his family and, crazed with hunger, wandered away,” recorded
Biplabi
on August 5, 1943. “His wife believed that he had drowned himself in the flooded Kasai River. Being unable to feed her two young sons for several days, she could no longer endure their suffering. On 7/23 she dropped the smaller boy torn from her womb, the sparkle of her eye, into the Kasai’s frothing waters. She tried in the same way to send her elder son to his father, but he screamed and grabbed on to her. The maddened mother had lost all capacity for love and compassion. She discovered a new way to silence her child’s searing hunger. With feeble arms she dug a small grave and threw her son into it. As she was trying to cover him with earth a passerby heard his screams and snatched the spade from his mother’s hand. A
kagmara
(low-caste Hindu) promised to bring up the boy and the mother then went away, who knows where. Probably she found peace by joining her husband in the Kasai’s cold torrent.”
¹

Such killings were not rare. “Kironbala the Acharjo girl threw her baby into the canal,” attested Bhawbanibala Samonto of Kalikakundu. After Kironbala’s husband died, she had returned to her father’s home with her one-and-a-half-year-old girl. Dependent on her father and hungry, Kironbala had gotten angry over some careless words. She dropped her toddler into the water and came home. Her father went to look for the child but the tide had come, and he returned empty-handed.

Often, the murderer—or mercy killer—was the father. A “man with a female child requested everybody he met to buy the baby. As nobody
agreed to his proposal, the man threw the baby into the well and fled away,” reported the
Hindustan Standard
on November 28, 1943. Another newspaper mentioned that Bhogurdi Mandal of central Bengal was tried in September and sentenced to deportation for life (presumably to a penal colony on the Andaman Islands) for killing his three-year-old son Mozaffar, whom he could not feed.
Biplabi
wrote that on September 15, Gyanendranath Panda of Chongra village, having become crazed with hunger, slew his father, mother, grandmother, grandfather, wife, son, and daughter—everyone in the house. Suicides were so common that the newsletter took to listing these by name, place, and rough date, providing no further details. Another press report related that on October 22, in a suburb of Dacca, a fisherman, his wife, and their small daughter threw themselves in front of a train. The child miraculously survived, but what then became of her was not stated.
²

The effect on the psyche of prolonged hunger is profound. An American experiment that enrolled conscientious objectors to World War II in a study of starvation revealed that it leads to an obsession with food, intolerance for loud sounds, and sudden bursts of irrational rage. A parent in such straits may well be impelled to do violence to an importuning child. An anthropologist in Calcutta at the time described a mother and son who had received some morsels from a relief kitchen. After eating his portion the boy took a piece of potato from hers, and she began to beat him so mercilessly that the onlooker had to intervene.
³

Stories of abandonment during the Bengal famine—of a small child found wandering alone in a field, or of a woman who continued to eat at a relief camp while her baby died untended in her lap—are also common. An actress in Calcutta reported that once when her cook poured onto the pavement some
phyan
, the starchy water in which rice had been boiled, a shriveled-up woman who nevertheless seemed young caught it in her clay pot. Her four children ran up, but the mother ferociously slapped them away and drank up most of the phyan in quick gulps. Then she stopped and looked into the pot, which she must nearly have emptied, peered up at her crying children, and, horrified at what she had done, burst into sobs. At Faridpur in eastern Bengal, some workers
were removing a corpse when a woman huddled nearby threw a bundle in their direction, saying, “Take that also.” It was the body of her child.
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FAMILIAL BONDS DID, however, persist even amid calamity. The husband of Fatema Bibi had plied a ferryboat on a river not far from Kalikakundu, but died of vomiting and diarrhea sometime after the 1942 cyclone. She was then perhaps sixteen and had a baby, Sopi. Her mother had died long before, but Fatema brought Sopi home to the Muslim hamlet of Kalikakundu. The famine then took her father and elder brother, leaving her with a younger brother to bring up alongside her son. Asked sixty-two years later how she and her son had survived, she replied simply, “I lived by looking at his face.” She made it through for her son’s sake, by working as a servant and begging to bring home what food she could. “It was a very hard time,” she said and stopped, too overcome with emotion to elucidate.

Abdul Rahman was thirteen or fourteen at the time of the famine. Telling his story six decades afterward, he recounted how he had trailed along with an elder brother the day everyone converged on the Mohisadal police station and was lucky to escape the bullets. Later he ate at a nearby soup kitchen, along with perhaps a thousand others, many of whom came from far away. But no one could get more than a ladleful. “It was a thin gruel. How could it be enough?” he asked. “Even that some people would divide up and eat. Lots of people died. Sheikh Khurshed, Intiaz, Latul . . . and many children. We couldn’t bury them or anything. No one had the strength to perform rites. People would tie a rope around the necks and drag them over to a ditch.”

Gunodhar Samonto, who was living by a canal in Kalikakundu at the time of the cyclone, named the men he knew who died during the famine: Behari Das, Gobindo Das, Bhuson Jit, Hori Jit, Pawnchom Jit, Haradhon Khan, Madhob Khetua, Nityanando Pramanik, Pawnchom Pramanik, and Madhob Rai. Among the female fatalities he recalled Poribala Acharjo, Saroda Acharjo, Surobala Acharjo, and Sagori Giri. Almost all the able-bodied of Kalikakundu had left their homes and
trekked to Calcutta to look for employment, he said. Saroda Acharjo’s three sons found jobs in the city’s wartime factories, and Moni Giri’s sisters Gyanoda and Kulobala also got work, in the brothels.

Gourhori Majhi of Kalikakundu was eight at the time of the cyclone and living in another village. The family’s hut had fallen, but they had forded the floodwaters to reach a higher house. The starvation started right away, for there was no rice to be had. “Everyone was crazed with hunger,” he said in 2005. Whatever you found, you’d tear it off and eat it right there. My family had ten people; my own stomach was wailing. Who is your brother, who is your sister—no one thought of such things then. Everyone is wondering, how will I live?” For months the boy fed on boiled
patalawta
(leaves and vines),
kochudata
(yam stems), and seeds of
durbo ghas
(lawn grass). “There was not a blade of grass in the field,” he said, because everyone was searching them out for their tiny grains. While Gourhori’s body grew skeletal his stomach had ballooned, a marker of approaching death.

He would eat at the gruel kitchen, where “the food was like water.” The family had sold its utensils and would accept the soup in cupped leaves, but others would snatch even these out of their hands. The child was fortunate, though, in that his swollen belly caught the eye of a gentleman with the relief operation, who called him aside. “He gave me a few grains of rice and watched me eat them.” Day after day for months the man had fed him, in secret and a little at a time, so that the boy slowly recovered. Tears coursed down the cheeks of the seventy-one-year-old Majhi as he remembered this unknown savior.

Mani Bhaumik lived in a village near Tamluk. His father, Bhaumik would write in an autobiography, was a former schoolteacher who had become a nationalist and therefore rarely dared to come home. Sometimes the police would show up instead, to search for the fugitive and to ransack the house. Once an officer smelling of sweat and cologne called Mani a “wog” and hit him in the face. But the eleven-year-old was fortified by the love of two remarkable old women.

One of them was Matongini Hazra, who lived alone in a nearby village. Married at twelve to an old man and widowed at eighteen, she
used to eke out a precarious living by husking rice. Many years earlier, when Mani was only a year old, his father had led a procession that had wound by Hazra’s hut, and she had run out to join it. Since that day she had been a freedom fighter and a friend of the family, and would sometimes bring the boy some pithe, or crepes with sweet fillings, that she had made.

One evening in September 1942 Hazra arrived with a plateful of pithe and, seating the boy on the doorstep, fed them to him by her own hand. Her eyes had a strange fire in them. She told him not to worry about his father, to trust in God, and to always do what he most fervently believed in. When he grew up he would live in a land that was free, even if there would still be a lot of struggle, because “nothing comes just because you want it . . . you have to fight for it. And you have to stay on the right path.” She blessed him and walked into the night. The next day, September 29, she died in a hail of bullets.

The other woman who profoundly affected Mani was his grandmother, Saroda Devi. After the famine began, the family started receiving mysterious bundles of food—millets, yas,
kolai
lentils. His father must be sending these, Mani presumed. Still the provisions were not enough for him, so his grandmother began to give him her portions. Each evening she would lie down, enervated, and stare “listlessly at the light coming through the cracks in the door,” wrote Bhaumik. “I knelt by her side and clasped her bony hand, sharing in her secret plot to make one life from two.” Someone must have told Mani’s father that the old woman was doing badly, for he managed to visit just before she died. Bhaumik went on to finish school and college, get a doctorate in physics, migrate to the United States, co-invent a laser used for corrective eye surgery, and live as a millionaire in Malibu, California.
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“AFTER THE FLOOD we started a vegetable garden,” said Chitto Samonto. His family owned less than a half-acre of land, but because many of the local people had died or wandered away, fields all around now lay fallow. There the brothers sowed pumpkins, squash, and watermelons. In three months they started to get fruit, which they boiled and ate,
long before it could ripen. “Otherwise we had coconuts and some boiled kolai,” he said. These lentils, which when freshly picked resemble tiny green peas, are a valuable source of protein but contain few calories. “We would gulp everything down with water,” Samonto remembered. They also boiled and ate stems of yam, fleshy stems of vine, leaves and seeds of tamarind and other trees, seeds of grass, and stringy whole kolai plants, which were normally fed to cows. Occasionally they drank palm sugar mixed with water. Finding and processing food often took more energy than one could get out of eating it.