Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire is no ordinary book. It takes that near-constant element of Bengal’s life, hunger, and through the lens of hunger looks at certain cataclysmic years in Bengal’s recent past -- the decade before the 1947 Partition. Through the lens of hunger, it goes through the Second World War, the End of Empire, and the riots leading up to the partition, with specific focus to the “Great” Calcutta Killings of “Direct Action” day of August 16, 1946. In this detailed account of the Bengal Famine of 1943, Calcutta riots and the war, Janam Mukherjee is simultaneously a myth-breaker, a reality-checker and a dream-maker.
This is a book that is not only about Bengal’s past. It is also a book with crucial clues about Bengal’s present and with some vision and empathy, it can also be read as a book about a just and intertwined future of the two Bengals and beyond. It is up to us and our politics, how far and with what vision we will read this book. I interviewed Janam Mukherjee exclusively for the Dhaka Tribune.
The 1943 famine, given its scale, remains quite under-discussed in both Bengals. Why do you think so?
Famine is often naturalised in one way or another; it is understood as an agricultural phenomenon, or a climatic event. Quite the contrary is true about “the Bengal famine of 1943,” which was understood to be “man-made” even at the time. But even with such “man-made” famines, the causes are often thought to be incidental -- famine is the sad outcome of larger forces aimed at. What I aim to show in my work is that famine in Bengal was not incidental, it was in fact central -- central to the constellations of power (both industrial and political) that created the conditions for famine, and central to the socio-political, and even communal, landscape of colonial India.
There were distinct policies and procedures that (it was well understood) would “make” famine, and yet in the name of war, these policies were enacted anyway -- and pursued with great vigour, despite innumerable indications that Bengal was starving as a result. This is why it is important to take a closer look at the famine -- famine is a window into the ruthless mechanics of power -- both colonial and domestic -- that defined the end of the colonial period in South Asia.
There is some valuable insight in your book about the primacy of feeding Calcutta in the context of the war-economy and its relation to the famine. Can you explain that to our readers?
Those policies that I refer to -- those that “inconvenienced” the poor of Bengal to the point of starvation -- were all enacted in the name of “defending” Calcutta. After Japan defeated European forces in Southeast Asia, Bengal was the most eastern province of empire. As such, Calcutta was officially designated as “essential” to war production and the movement of soldiers to the front.
The great hinterland of Calcutta, greater Bengal, then became merely a buffer zone to feed the city. Huge amounts of rice and paddy were seized, or frozen in place, on governmental and industrial accounts, so that Calcutta -- and Capital -- could thrive. Huge profits related to the war-time economy were being made in Calcutta at the time. In point of fact, there was also a lot of speculative buying that was done in the name of feeding Calcutta as well, and this also greatly impacted rice prices.
In what ways was the 1943 famine special, and in what ways was it “famine as usual” in Bengal?
While, of course, the specifics in Bengal during the 40s are quite unique, unfortunately the Bengal famine has many analogs. War and famine go very much in hand, and the economic violence of famine, is very often a necessary companion of militarism. There is also no question in my mind, that Churchill, in particular, saw the population of Bengal as an “enemy” in Britain’s Total War.
As I have said, economic violence is not incidental -- it is not an unfortunate “by-product of a war economy” -- it is part and parcel of a will to annihilate populations. Economic violence dismantles bodies just as surely as bombs from above.
We see war and famine across the content of Africa in the 20th century, and even today, in Yemen famine is again imminent -- a reality that is obscured, again, by the dark shadow of war.
In Yemen, currently, 20 million people are in need of immediate humanitarian assistance. And yet again we see there a hunger stricken population fleeing bombs. Hunger and hellfire. War and famine. The same is true of the famine of 1974 in Bangladesh, peel back the layers, and you find international conflict at the root of Bengal’s starvation -- yet again.
In your book, you suggest that the Calcutta riots of 1946 weren’t merely a “communal” riot. What do you mean by that? Can you illustrate with examples from the dynamics of the riot itself?
The idea advanced in most historical work to date on the riots usually blames the Muslim League for the riots in a rather uncomplicated fashion, pinning inordinate blame on HS Suhrawardy in particular. But to imagine an event as anarchic, totalising and complex as the all-points explosion known as the Calcutta riots was merely the fruit of “political intrique” is facile and, most importantly, the socio-economic context in which the riots took place cannot be so easily written out of the account.
By this time, famine had distorted and deformed certain fundamental structures that define daily existence. Meanings of concepts like “health,” “territory,” “hunger,” “home,” “community,” and “priority” (to cite just a few) had gone through many complicated and rapid layers of transformation in the tumult of war, starvation, and death. Famine and war had also transformed the geo-political importance of Calcutta.
Millions had died -- and continued to die -- of deprivation and disease, so that Calcutta, the colonial war effort, and Capital could thrive. “Belonging” to Calcutta meant “priority,” which, in turn, meant survival. That the already tortured struggle for territory and sheer existence in Calcutta should erupt into explosive violence cannot easily be understood through the lens of identity politics. Famine is everywhere in the riots.
Food shops were looted, cloth warehouses were looted, industrial interests with discriminatory labour practices were attacked. It was a free-for-all. The communal angle was just one aspect, but it was the aspect that the political establishment clung to -- it served their purposes well. Both the Muslim League and the Indian National Congress needed to shore up their bases, communal violence was a powerful tool. Historians have most often followed suit.
The violence of the poor is often dismissed as irrational, and when explanations are given, they are often cultural, rather than economic. Foolishly seized by pernicious ideology, the wretched of the Earth excoriate each other. It is as if they where possessed -- never aggrieved.
There was also the violence of the dispossessed in the fury of Calcutta, a violence that was anarchic and even random.
Growing up in a Kolkata Hindu family even in the 1980s and 1990s, one picked up various snippets of conversations from elders about the 1946 riots. The riots were still a discussed topic. In any case, there is the “Hindu” charge on Suhrawardy as the principal villain. How far is this true? Was he completely innocent, or the horrendous devil, or does the truth lie somewhere in between?
I would say it is largely untrue. Suhrawardy may have been communal-minded, but to suggest that he somehow directed the riots (as has very much been claimed in some circles) is simply absurd. The violence that engulfed Calcutta was beyond anyone’s control or design. It was the upheaval of a tortured society. The historical record also does not bear out these claims.
Suhrawardy, the then chief minister of Bengal, was calling for the military to be brought out to restore order very early on the first day of riots (by 2pm actually. The military leadership, themselves, stalled -- fearing that they would become the primary target of the rioting crowds if they descended onto the streets. This alone teaches a lot about the nature of the violence that was seething in the streets of Calcutta -- even before the rally on the Maidan at which Suhrawardy was supposed to have given the “go-ahead” to riot, looting, arson, and murder were widespread. In fact, Suhrawardy as well as the police had lost all control of the situation very early on.
How should we read your book in relationship to the state of hunger in contemporary Bengal?
You know, steeped as I was in the history of famine and riots in the colonial archives in Calcutta, I often stepped out into the streets at the end of the day and felt a dizzying sense of simultaneity between the city before me and the history of it that I was delving deeper into.
Hunger seemed still everywhere; haunting the shadows, moaning in dingy corners, undoing the faces of young children on street corners, gnawing at the spines of middle-aged sweepers, and silently ravaging the collective consciousness of society at large, an ongoing instigation to yet further violence, yet further indifference, yet further merciless competition for resources, for space, for human dignity.
At length there arose a burning question in my mind -- which still burns today -- did the Bengal famine ever really come to an end? Many of the structures of inequality and indifference that led to starvation in the 1940s are still present today.
A recent UN report finds that in Bangladesh today “more than 54% of pre-school-age children, equivalent to more than 9.5 million children, are stunted, 56% are underweight, and more than 17% are wasted.”
Famine cannot be defined as simply an episode of mass starvation. It represents, rather, a prolonged trajectory of deprivation and chronic hunger. That 17% of the population of children who are “wasting” may be said, in fact, to be starving.
All it will take is one dislocation in the economy, one natural disaster, one regional conflict, and again the poor will begin dying in larger numbers of hunger. In this light, I think we should begin talking about the intensity of famine in Bangladesh -- and elsewhere -- but admit that the problem of life-threatening and generationally debilitating malnutrition is still very much with us.
One of the main reasons that famine is so often pushed to the extent it is, is that the same structures that render the poor hungry, also render them invisible. There is something like a conspiracy of not seeing in many circles too. If we care to look, we are sure to find that hunger is not only deeply enmeshed in the history of the Bengali people, it is also deeply implicated in the present.
We have laboured under the “sign” of hunger for far too long, and it is well past time that the starvation of Bengali people -- and others -- is addressed honestly, proactively, and courageously. Let us not wait until the starved bodies of our brothers and sisters again begin stacking up on the streets of the better-off neighbourhoods before ringing the alarm.
