Churchill's Secret War (31 page)

“The British must have thought his offer was genuine,” opined historian Sugata Bose (and grandnephew of Subhas Bose) in an interview. “If they really thought it was a bluff they would have called it.” Had the leader failed to keep his promise, he would have been destroyed as a political force. “When it came to a question of Bengalis starving to death, Subhas Chandra Bose would not have engaged in a propaganda stunt,” Sugata Bose added. “When you look at his life, he was engaged in social work—plague relief and flood relief—since childhood.”

The War Cabinet knew of Bose’s rice offer (having received at least one of the pertinent intelligence summaries), but whether or not the issue was discussed is unclear. Although ships capable of traversing the oceans were scarce, hundreds of smaller vessels were plying along the Indian coast, most of them under government control. The proximity of Calcutta to Rangoon or other Burmese ports meant that Bose’s rice could have arrived within a week or two, had the authorities chosen to collect it. Distributed at the rate of a half-kilogram per person per day, 100,000 tons would have fed 1.6 million people for four months—after which Bengalis would be harvesting their own winter crop.

To be sure, Subhas Chandra Bose was a despised enemy of the United Kingdom; he was an Axis collaborator and a target of British assassins. But when occupied Greece underwent famine in the winter of late 1941, Germany had permitted humanitarian agencies such as the International Red Cross to bring in relief and distribute it, a remarkable
instance of Axis-Allied cooperation during the war. When it came to Bengal, His Majesty’s Government would turn down even those offers of cereals that came not from adversaries but from friends. The dominions of Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and Canada all asked how they could help. “Australia could supply all the wheat needed for the starving in India provided the United Kingdom could provide the ships,” stated a minister in Canberra, as reported by Reuters on September 28. “Wheat was practically waiting to be loaded on boats.”
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Virtually all dominion shipping was under the War Cabinet’s control, as were seventeen merchant ships registered in India, amounting to around 80,000 gross tons, that were capable of the journey to Australia. “Almost all our ships have been taken away,” Sir J. P. Srivastava later told the famine commission. (Srivastava was the member of the viceroy’s executive council who was responsible for food.) At “one time I asked whether these ships could not be released to us to carry foodgrains. But nothing came of it.” As a result, only highly compact foods could be loaded onto the ships that were already destined for India from the empire’s ports. Amery informed the New Zealand government, which had authorized £10,000 of famine relief, that “a free gift of powdered or condensed milk to this value would be the most useful form of gift as shipping could be most easily arranged for that.”
²²

Ireland sent £100,000, and Prime Minister Eamon de Valera asked his compatriots for more; meanwhile, the leader of the country’s Labour Party reminded the Irish people that when their forefathers had starved under British rule in the previous century, Indians had sent help. Private charities in the United Kingdom and the United States also began to collect money. The Red Cross started operations in Calcutta, but it could provide only milk powder, vitamins, and medicines. These were valuable, but no substitute for rice or wheat.
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DUKHAHARAN THAKUR CHAKRABARTY, a sixteen-year-old who lived near Howrah, once went with a group of communist medical students who were distributing powdered milk and medicines they had obtained from the Red Cross. In a neighboring village, the teenager saw
row after row of disintegrating huts, some missing their tin roofs, which the owners had pawned for food before abandoning them. Hearing sounds from within one hut, the students knocked. A tiny girl opened the door. Dukhaharan looked in and saw her father lying on a reed mat on the mud floor. He was sick and moaned in a continuous refrain, “Ore, ami ar banchbo na re,” meaning Oh, I won’t live any longer. The girl said her mother had gone somewhere, and started crying. “We gave them some milk and medicines, couldn’t do much else,” Chakrabarty recalled.

Another time, the teenager was about to cross a busy street near the railway station in Howrah when he saw a truck full of men come to a stop on the far side of the road. They began to grab people from the pavement and throw them onto the truck. “I didn’t know who they were, but they were merciless. They were catching hold of old men, beggars, anyone they could grab. They picked up a girl, of perhaps fifteen. Her sari fell off, and I saw that she was naked under it, nothing on her but the ring in her nose. ‘Hau mau kore kandchhe’”—she was howling desperately. “I stood rooted to the spot.”

It was the first time Chakrabarty had seen a naked female, and the vision never left him. “I still wonder, where did they take her, what happened to her? I wish I had run forward, protested, done something to help her,” he said sixty years later. “But I just stood there.”

 

THE TRUCK WAS from a government program to cleanse Calcutta’s streets. Near the end of August, Governor Herbert had come down with an inflamed ulcer and appendix. Shortly afterward, Chief Minister Nazimuddin summoned civil servant Olaf Martin to Calcutta and asked him to take charge of the relief operation. Martin had run such programs in 1936—but that year he’d “started work in January, and had found that this was not a day too soon,” Martin commented in his memoir. “Here was a much bigger calamity.” Eventually it dawned on the civil servant that his job was not so much to begin gruel kitchens or work-for-food programs in the countryside, for which there was not enough grain, as to rid the city of unsightly beggars “as quietly as possible. The Army was demanding this, and had the support of the Viceroy.” It was
a matter of morale—Calcutta being the place where soldiers billeted in the east went for recreation.
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With the help of politician Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, Martin rented space for relief centers just outside the city. But the refugees took to hiding when they spied the trucks that went around to collect them, because most of them were waiting for relatives who had gone in search of food. They had to be chased, grabbed, and thrown onto the trucks. The cleansing of Calcutta broke up many families, and although Martin would eventually set up a camp where those with missing relatives could go and search for lost family members, the problem of involuntary separation was never solved.

Years later, the writer Mahasweta Devi would employ a maid named Hiron who spent much of her time crying, because during the famine she had left her daughter on the pavement to go search for food and never saw her again. It was also routine to see “dead people being picked up in government trucks, tossed in like logs,” Devi recalled. “
Thok thok
they would land, as if made of wood. I heard they were burned in furnaces of factories,” serving the war as fuel.

 

MANOS BANERJEE, A seventeen-year-old student, had been jailed for participating in the Quit India movement. After his release in the summer of 1943 he arrived in Calcutta to find beggars and corpses everywhere. Dumped in a crater excavated for the construction of a movie theater were dozens of corpses that filled the environs with a horrific stench. Some months later, as he marched in a protest to the governor’s palace, shouting slogans against the famine, communist thugs armed with lathis fell upon them from both sides. “A ‘comrade’ got my friend by the throat and was choking him,” said Banerjee. “I gave him a blow, then we ran.” A few of the demonstrators managed to break through the palace gate but came under police fire or were arrested.

Communists initially supported the Axis but had switched sides after Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941. (“Because Stalin and Churchill combined, that is fundamental,” one Bolshevik would explain to the famine commission. “Churchill as a comrade in arms is
completely different from Churchill in opposition.”) Thereafter the Communist Party of India declared that it was fighting a People’s War against fascism and began to actively support the authorities. Communists were prominent among the intellectuals who chronicled the famine in art and literature, but they placed all blame for it on speculators and the Japanese. Consequently they stayed out of jail, prevented food stocks from being looted, suppressed protests, helped distribute whatever relief was available, and acquired political leverage in Bengal.
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THE POLICE WERE fully engaged in hunting down political subversives. At one point, the teenage courier Kanu Mahapatro realized that either the police or the Intelligence Bureau had posted men to watch the building in north Calcutta where he had stashed copies of
Biplabi
. The printed sheets were secreted in a room rented by Congress volunteers from Burdwan district (north of Midnapore). Fearing that a search was in the offing, Kanu decided to stage a move. Along with a friend, he approached two streetwalkers and asked them to pose with him as family.

The rebels from Burdwan provided pots, pans, brooms, pillows, and other household items. These Kanu piled onto a cart, with the newsletters hidden in a bedroll at the bottom. Acting the roles of a householder, his wife, and his younger brother and sister, he and the others talked and cursed volubly about water supply and other domestic matters as they pushed the cart past the watchmen. When far enough away, Kanu decided to stop and let the women go, and they asked what it had all been about. “When we explained who we were, they were in tears, so thrilled were they at having been able to help,” Mahapatro said. “They would have fallen at our feet if we’d let them. They wouldn’t take any money.”

The police had been overwhelmed by duties related to war and insurgency for more than a year, as Deputy Inspector General C. J. Minister of the Criminal Investigation Department would tell the famine commission. To begin with, he said, from early 1942 onward the police had had to help implement the rice denial policy, which required grain
to be forcibly requisitioned from landowners and cultivators. Eventually criminals had come to realize that “they had a much greater opportunity than they had had before.” Armed robbery had skyrocketed, he continued, the reason being “the steady relaxation of police surveillance over known criminals.” After that, the Quit India movement had “inevitably absorbed the whole attention of the police who had no time left to take notice of anything else.” The Tamluk insurgency had proved particularly onerous.
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On top of that, many convicts had reportedly been released from prison. The authorities remained absorbed in curbing the activities of their political adversaries, while marauders, war profiteers, child traffickers, and hucksters of all kinds roamed free. Bengali society had descended into
matsyayana
, defined as a time when big fish ate little fish.

 

A MADAM NAMED Durga made her fortune at the famine time. A ravishing beauty, tall and very fair of skin, she used to live with a
seth
, a powerful businessman from western India. He did not allow Durga to sell her own body; instead, she used his money to buy girls who could not get enough to eat. Famine had brought into the market females of diverse classes and castes, some of whom would normally have been cherished as daughters or wives, and who could earn large profits for brothel owners. (In the previous century, historian William Hunter had noted that famine boosted the slave trade: “Infamous women went about buying up beautiful girls.”)
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In the old days an upper-class prostitute, as Durga had once been, would hide her face behind a fold of her sari when first encountering a potential customer. Instead she would display the heel of her foot, bordered with red paint and adorned with an anklet, so that a customer could judge her youth and class. As a madam, though, Durga dispensed with such niceties. “If you didn’t get undressed right away she’d threaten to put a broken bottle up your insides,” reported Kohinoor Begum, one of her former slaves. The madam would live into the twenty-first century, dying at the age of 103 and bequeathing cars, jewelry, and five brothels to her sons.

Women also sold sex of their own accord, in order to provide for themselves and their families. Historians Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper have written that, unlike the Japanese and their comfort women, the British did not need to use overt coercion to provide entertainment for their soldiers: “Free enterprise did it all for them.” Officially sanctioned brothels enabled at least one enterprising military officer to put away a stash for retirement.
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DURING THE 1943 famine, ten-year-old Monju Patro lived with her parents and three siblings in a two-story mud house in a Midnapore village. She would line up her mug at a gruel kitchen, but sometimes it would remain empty. Her mother husked rice for a better-off family, bringing home for the children the broken rice she got in return, as well as the puffed rice they gave her for breakfast. “I never saw her eat,” Patro said.

A neighbor had been working on the girl for days, telling her that he would get her a job in a babu’s home. “I didn’t listen,” Patro related. But one day, while she was play-cooking with other children—using utensils, rice, and vegetables they had fashioned out of mud—the man drew her aside and said, “Come along, I’ll buy you sweets at the train station.” The girl had eagerly assented. She was wearing her only dress, “a pretty frock made of flannel—my father had given it to me for Durga Pujo,” and her drawstring underpants.

When they reached the railway station, after a long trek, the man had bought her two or three
rosogolla
, cheese balls in syrup. “I was so absorbed in eating that I never realized he was putting me on the train,” Patro recounted. Calcutta, which she had never seen before, had dumbfounded the young girl. The neighbor left her with a woman, who gave the girl a ruti (flat bread): “I was thrilled to get to eat.” Then she cried, wondering why the man was not coming back to take her home, but to no avail. She would spend the next years drawing water, sweeping, and mopping for the madam.