Three Famines (7 page)

In the spring of 1848, following his declaration that the famine was finished – although it still had several years to run its course – Charles Trevelyan was granted a knighthood by Prime Minister Russell, a government sanction of all he had done, and a sign of the gulf between Irish and British perceptions of what was still happening. Indeed, his
ultimate reputation would be that of reformer of the British civil service, as governor of Madras at the time of the Indian Mutiny, and as minister of finance in the British government of India. He devoted his later years to charity and work on army reform, and died in 1886.

The British prime minister at the time of the famine’s birth, Sir Robert Peel, bears only a fraction of the scale of blame attached to Trevelyan’s name.

When the potato blight had first struck in the autumn of 1845, destroying a considerable and often irreplaceable part of people’s food supply, the gifted Tory prime minister (called by the Irish ‘Orange Peel’ because of his initial opposition to Catholic emancipation – the granting of full civil rights to Catholics) was moved by pragmatism rather than by belief in steely and immutable principles.

‘There is such a tendency,’ said Prime Minister Peel, ‘to exaggeration and inaccuracy in Irish reports that delay in acting on them is always desirable.’

His basis for saying so was that he had served under Prime Minister Lord Liverpool as Irish chief secretary in 1811-17, residing in Dublin, and then as home secretary of Great Britain in 1822, and in both those years there were food shortages in Ireland because of poor potato crops. An equally poor grain harvest reduced the amount of flour milled and drove up its price beyond the reach of the poor. In Mayo in 1822, discarded fish heads from the east coast, the Irish Sea, had been shipped in, and the Mayo starving ate them and the
bodies of occasional porpoises washed ashore. But Peel and his cabinet believed these conditions in the always-hungry west of Ireland were far from being a general famine.

So, during late 1845, when the blight did not strike everywhere, Peel was wary, but at least he sought daily reports from the London-appointed executive who served under Ireland’s lord lieutenant, and he set up a scientific commission consisting of a Scots chemist, Dr Lyon Playfair, and an English botanist, Dr John Lindley, and sent them to Ireland to report on the situation. They toured stricken parts of what were normally the more prosperous eastern counties – Dublin, Westmeath to the near north, Louth to the coastal north of Dublin, Meath, which was north-west of the capital, and Kildare to the south-west. In a private letter to Peel, Dr Lindley said the situation was ‘melancholy’ and argued that reports of the situation were not exaggerated but understated. Yet Peel was still locked in his earlier experience and believed what he believed. Indeed, in all three of these famines, scepticism – willed or chosen – would prove fatal.

In Ireland, the Irish political leader Daniel O’Connell had a more reliable view of what was happening. He was a Catholic landlord, member of the House of Commons in Westminster and leader of the Irish Party, whose object was the repeal of the union with Britain. He had received news of ‘the visitation’ – the blight – from repeal branches throughout the country. Hence, in late October 1845, he went with a delegation to visit Lord Lieutenant Heytesbury in Dublin Castle. (Later the following year O’Connell would say memorably that this was ‘a death-dealing famine’.) But for now, he pleaded for a suspension of the export of the annual grain
harvest, which, he claimed, was close to 1.6 million tons. He asked in particular for a prohibition on distilling and brewing using grain. While Heytesbury thought the demand about the harvest premature, he did counsel Peel to open Irish ports to the importation of foreign grain – an option that was contrary to British government protection policies. He also sought permission to stop the use of grain in distilling. His advice and requests were ignored.

However, in the bitter winter of 1845–6, when the starving had begun, Peel decided to make an urgent purchase through a London brokerage of £100,000 worth of Indian corn or maize from the United States. He intended to keep it a secret so that the grain prices in the markets of Britain and Ireland were not influenced downwards. He did dare hope, however, that once the secret was out and the corn began to be sold at cost to the Irish, it would bring down high grain prices in a reasonable way.

Indian maize was harsher than the corn grown in England and Ireland, and was unaccustomed foodstuff to the citizens of the British Isles. Thus it had the advantage that the Irish would eat it only if they needed it. The Indian maize, or ‘yellow male’ as the Irish called it, probably saved lives, even if the Irish cursed it. Improperly ground, it generated another name based on its influence on the gastric system: ‘Peel’s brimstone’.

Peel’s interference in the market did not sit so well with believers in political economy, and aggrieved many among his Tories. But it was part of a broader plan. From October 1845 onwards, Peel struggled with his party to abolish the Corn Laws. These import tariffs had been originally introduced
after the Napoleonic Wars to compensate British farmers for the post-war fall in prices, and had kept grain prices throughout Britain high. Peel argued that not only Ireland, but the condition of England as well, required the repeal of the Corn Laws. He did so as a proponent of enlightened Toryism. He told his party that he foresaw an English revolution and the shadow of the scaffold falling over the privileged if grain prices were not reduced.

The resistance in Parliament was immense. As the Duke of Wellington, one of Peel’s party, said, ‘Rotten potatoes have done it all. They put Peel in his damned fright.’ The Corn Laws were in fact repealed, but Peel’s government was so divided by the process that it fell in June 1846. Yet, in reality, the reduction in the duty that supported grain-growers was abolished only gradually, which did not much help the poor of Britain in general, let alone the ordinary Irish. When – to the astonishment of the populace – the potato crop failed again in the autumn of 1846, there was still a duty of four shillings per quarter on corn.

Now the talented Lord John Russell was prime minister, and under his administration the famine would take on its full, deadly exorbitance. Trevelyan’s new master was of a pragmatic mind, rather as Peel had been. He was intelligent, sometimes strangely shy, and he had been a notable champion of the Reform Bill of 1832, without which it was believed Britain’s unrest, inequalities and ridiculous electoral system would have dragged it down into chaos. As prime minister, he was surrounded in Parliament by free-trade radicals of the kind who had been subject to the same influences, and believed the same principles, as Trevelyan. Charles Wood,
Trevelyan’s immediate superior as chancellor of the exchequer in Russell’s government, subscribed absolutely to the principles Trevelyan brought to famine relief. Yet his name – like Russell’s – is barely known to Irish nationalists and to laymen interested in the famine. It did not appear in aggrieved folksongs, nor was it repeated bitterly to the young at Irish hearthsides, nor is it nowadays tunefully denounced in pubs before Irish international rugby test matches.

Russell was ultimately responsible for subsequent government policies on Ireland, and Wood approved of them. But it was Trevelyan, as the man in charge of government’s mercy to Ireland, who became an infamous figure to Irish nationalists, who hated political economy and believed it could not be applied to their country, and who then, in turn, informed popular feeling.

T
HE VILLAINS IN
the case of the Bengal famine are far more diffuse. As Charles Trevelyan did, the Marquess of Linlithgow, Victor Alexander John Hope, viceroy of India and thus head of British administration in India, has an especially poor name. But it has not remained a byword in India, the way Trevelyan’s has in Ireland. Nor were his actions backed by as clearly perceived a set of principles as those that Trevelyan followed. Linlithgow was not the man of ideas that Trevelyan had been. His talents were described by one British official as ‘pedestrian’. His behaviour was an amalgam of incomprehension, administrative failure and a sense of racial superiority. Unlike Trevelyan, he was no scholar.

Instead, Linlithgow was a Scots banker – ‘tall, strongly-built and staunch,’ said
Time
magazine in 1936; a lean giant of a man, six feet seven inches tall. He was born of a notable Tory family and his godmother was Queen Victoria. He had
been a lord of the Admiralty and involved in government bodies dealing with the distribution and pricing of agricultural produce. He had turned down the governor-generalship of Australia. (His father had been Australia’s first and not very successful governor-general, Lord Hopetoun.) He accepted the supreme position in India in 1936. His imagination and empathy were not, however, of any great stature. He was not a friend of and had no warm feelings for Mahatma Gandhi, as his predecessor Lord Halifax had. Nor did he aspire to such intimacy. He would write, ‘If India is to be really capable of holding its own in the future without direct British control from outside, I’m not sure that it will not need an increasing infusion of stronger Nordic blood, whether by settlement or inter-marriage or otherwise.’

His personal life was as unblemished as Trevelyan’s had been and he went on to be a particularly fond grandparent. He kept a pet turtle named Jonas, to whom he fed worms. Nor was he venal or corrupt. He was perhaps an incarnation of a type about whom Gandhi had written in 1922. After defining British occupation as a criminal endeavour, Gandhi declared: ‘Englishmen and their Indian associates involved in the administration of the country do not seem to understand they are engaged in the crime I have attempted to describe. I am satisfied that many Englishmen and Indian officials honestly believe that they are administering one of the best systems devised in the world and that India is making steady but slow progress.’

Linlithgow was appointed as viceroy to make sure the new Indian constitution of 1935, by which provincial legislatures would be run by Indians under a British provincial governor,
was decreed and began functioning properly. In February 1940, when the war in Europe had already begun, even if it was rather quiescent, Gandhi wrote to Linlithgow, in answer to the viceroy’s ‘dreary, prosaic’ assurance that Britain had an ultimate ‘dominion status’ in mind for India, that, ‘The vital difference between the [Indian] Congress and the Viceroy’s offer consists in the fact that the Viceroy’s offer contemplates final determination by the British government whereas the Congress contemplates the contrary.’ Nor did the left wing of the Congress party treasure this promised ‘dominion status’, which would still leave India loyal to the crown of Great Britain.

Gandhi argued that there should be no British troops in India, nor (once the Japanese entered the war) any Americans, until India was free. The Allies should withdraw and India could make a peace with Japan and become free and neutral. It was an unlikely scenario – Japan was not disposed to stop advancing. But many Indians agreed with it. For a time, the British considered deporting Gandhi.

By May 1942, the news that disturbed Linlithgow did not concern any omen of famine in Bengal, but the disastrous loss of the city of Rangoon and all of Burma, one of India’s eastern neighbours. There was now an apparently imminent Japanese invasion of Bengal, and of Assam to the north of Bengal. A shared, though lesser, consideration of Britons and Indians was that Burma had been exporting food into India, and now would not be doing so.

By this time, a number of British warships had been destroyed off the Bay of Bengal by the ships of Admiral Nagumo, the leader of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,
and approaches to the province of Bengal were largely controlled by the enemy. The fall of Burma, in the context of the earlier losses of Singapore and Hong Kong, preoccupied Linlithgow and the cabinet of the government of India. They considered that the Indian political leaders, especially the forceful Mahatma Gandhi, the more moderate Jawaharlal Nehru and – indeed – the entire Indian National Congress party, did not seem to appreciate that there was a war in progress and that their British benefactors needed the unstinting loyalty of all Indians at this time of acute crisis. The British refused to discuss India’s future status with them until the war ended. The Indian leadership wanted to discuss it now, and in return they would promise to sanction India’s participation in the war, instead of resisting it with all their influence. Nehru at least said that the thought of fascism dominating any part of the world was repulsive to him. But, with some success, he did his best to soothe and court American opinion.

To Linlithgow, as to London, this was a form of treachery second only to the collaboration of the Japanese with the Germans. The United States disagreed radically with the British over India. President Roosevelt himself believed the British position was inherently self-contradictory – Britain was supposedly fighting for freedom and independence, while refusing to extend such benefits to the Indians. He wished it was otherwise, so that everyone in India would be galvanised to resist the Japanese. Vice-president Henry Wallace recorded in his diary that the president had ‘a very profound concern about India and a definite belief that England has not handled India properly’. Liberal American newspapers and magazines
all hoped that the problem between the British and the Indians would be resolved positively through negotiations. The
New Republic
thought that negotiations between Britain and India, even in the midst of the war, might well ‘shape the destinies of white men as well as brown, black as well as yellow, for generations to come’. Even the soft-edged
Saturday Evening Post
thought it would be better if the British had left India years before. The manager of American Express in Calcutta declared that the British had the capacity to alienate even those Indians who were loyal. Nonetheless, while Roosevelt approved of Indian independence, there was much American criticism for the apparent willingness of Indian leaders to stand in the way of the war effort, particularly after the Quit India movement began.

The war cabinet in London had sent one of its members, Sir Stafford Cripps, to try to settle the Indian question. But once more he could offer independence only as a condition of cooperation in the war, and when the war itself ended. The mission was, of course, a failure and led to serious results.

The Indian National Congress had been founded in 1885, and gradually became at least the Hindu organ of the struggle for Indian independence. As a member, Gandhi in particular had moved it away from its original character as an English-speaking, Indian middle-class body to appeal to a broader language and wider social membership base. On 8 August 1942, a ‘Quit India’ resolution – a call for a campaign of civil disobedience to make the British yield up Indian independence immediately – was being discussed by the Congress leadership at the Gowalia Tank Maidan, a park in central Bombay, when a crowd of supporters invaded the
dusty reaches of the parkland and passed the motion. Jawaharlal Nehru, future prime minister of India, and other senior members of Congress, had doubts about the wisdom of the Quit India motion, and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, considered the Congress’s approval of Quit India a great blunder, an undue forcing of the pace at a time when the Empire was at great peril and so distracted by the war.

Linlithgow viewed all this with bewilderment, and the war cabinet in London with enhanced, if not outright, fury. Linlithgow, against the wishes of a number of Indian members of his executive council, ordered the arrest of the Congress leaders, including Gandhi and Nehru. The depth of passions is demonstrated by the case of one Indian arrestee’s young daughter, who yelled at the arresting soldiers that they were rocks on the road to freedom and suckers of Indian blood. She remembered, ‘After that, we children used to go out and throw date seeds covered in dried mud at British soldiers when we saw them in the street.’

Some British and Indian army officers and men responded brutally to Quit India advocates, especially to Indian women taking part in demonstrations. One activist claims that a woman demonstrator in Delhi was raped ‘not by one officer but by officer after officer, including the British officers’. The authorities in some regions had advocates of Quit India publicly whipped. If missionaries, especially American missionaries, supported Quit India, they faced expulsion from the country.

American attitudes may well have bolstered what in this case would prove to be the fatal stubbornness of Churchill
over Bengal. Another result, however, would be that as the Bengali famine began in 1943, the council of the Congress Party were in prison, and could not react to the disaster as they might have, had they been free. So the famine ran the risk of being overshadowed not only by a great crisis for the British at the war front on the borders of Bengal, but by Indian politics. Because of their arrests, the Indian leadership was not available to protest at, or visit the sites of, the famine. The Bengal famine, rich in destruction as it was, never held a position in Indian history that the Irish famine did in Irish history, or the Ethiopian famines have come to occupy for the Ethiopians.

Linlithgow himself, subject to the advice of his experts, permitted provincial governments to retain all the food they produced within their boundaries and refuse to export it to other parts of India. The ruling of November 1941 by Linlithgow’s executive council, over which he sat as chairman and chief executive, meant that no food came from other provinces into Bengal, even though troops were consuming a great amount of that province’s food. In December, Linlithgow and his council introduced maximum prices of wheat, but this simply made grain dealers retain their wheat in their warehouses, waiting for a better price. In May 1942, a Foodgrains Control Order fixed prices at a level that ensured, without meaning to, further hoarding and ultimate profiteering.

Neither was Linlithgow solely responsible for other
decisions and events, such as the British government and army’s 1942 Rice Denial Scheme – their buying-up of Bengali rice to ensure that any advancing Japanese would not be able to use it. In its policy of rice denial, the government forcibly purchased 40,000 tons of grain and trucked it away to feed the army. Though not as much rice was acquired as the authorities hoped, or people in Bengal feared, the psychological impact was far larger than the amount taken away. Its effect on the Bengali imagination was the equivalent of the Irish sense of grain being transported by road and canal for shipping out of the country to England. Since people believed the government and army would take more still, it led to the sometimes panicked, sometimes deliberate, hoarding of rice for future sale, and thus to a huge ramping-up of the price of rice for the labourers and craftsmen who tried to buy it at their village shops.

It is likely that such policies as these derived from London instead of New Delhi, from the war cabinet itself. And the governor of Bengal, Sir Jack Herbert, agreed to the denial policies without briefing the Bengali provincial cabinet. He assured the Bengal provincial legislature that the government did not intend to burn houses or remove household grain. The Bengal chief minister wrote to Herbert, ‘In a matter of such vital importance, affecting the question of the foodstuffs of the people, you should have called an emergency meeting of the Cabinet … but you did nothing of the kind.’ Herbert had not done so because he knew the removal of surplus grain would, in itself, drive up prices of food in the
mofussil
– the countryside. He did not want to face any political opposition to the policies until he had to.

Like Trevelyan, as the famine developed, Linlithgow was not open to the proposition that things were as bad as people on the ground in Bengal said. So he refused to invoke the ‘famine codes’, provisions published in a manual early in the century, designed to bring special systems of relief into play. He had persuaded himself that the problem was in part a matter of inefficiency of distribution by the Bengali provincial government, a new and inexperienced government, and not a concern of the British government of India. He also consoled the secretary for India in Whitehall that the situation in Bengal ‘does not constitute a grave menace to the peace and tranquillity of Bengal … for sufferers are entirely submissive’.

Under him, in 1942 the government of India sent out the order for the confiscation of thousands of Bengal’s boats, so essential to trade and fishing, along the region’s numberless waterways, lest the Japanese get the use of them. On 1 May 1942, the process of the removal of boats began in southern coastal districts, in which the transport of goods and people was almost entirely by water. The ‘denial line’ ran from Barakpur above Calcutta in the west across to Chandpur in present-day Bangladesh, close to the Burmese border. By the end of November, 60,000 boats were gone and only about one third of the normal number were left on the area’s waterways. From November onwards, when military and civic nerves had become less tremulous, many boats were returned to their owners. But they had been stored at ‘reception stations’ and had often been damaged. Their absence had made it harder to move grain, driving up its price.

The government also ordered the moving of 350,000
families, to clear the ground for military operations. They were trucked out of East Bengal by an administration they hated, and found temporary homes with family members and in barracks further to the west. In military terms, the edicts were quite understandable. In their effect, they would further ensure the coming misery in Bengal. The roads and railways were unable to do the work the country boats had done. In many cases, once a truck reached rivers such as the Padma (of which the Ganges is a tributary), the Mahanadi, Godavari and Krishna, it had to be unloaded and somehow got across the water for reloading on a further truck.