In his film Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder), listed by The New York Times as one of the ‘Best 1,000 Films Ever Made’, Satyajit Ray brought alive, with great sensitivity, the misery inflicted by the horrific Bengal famine of 1943.
The film was made three decades after that harrowing experience which returned to haunt Bengalis during the mid-1960s and became the leitmotif of the Communist movement in West Bengal. Based on Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s novel of the same name, Ray’s award-winning film suggested, without recourse to crudity, how hunger stalked people amidst plentiful food stocks. Neither Bandyopadhyay nor Ray was treading new ground in making this point. After all, the famine of 1943 was a man-made disaster that claimed four million lives as the colonial British Government chose to ignore its horrendous consequences.
The Bengal famine of 1943 — there were famines earlier, too, but none so devastating — has been evocatively described as the ‘forgotten holocaust’, a crime not recognised by history and now no more than a fading memory in the Bengali conscience. Hence the need to recall the sequence of events that led to hunger, disease and death on an unimaginable scale in rural Bengal where people pleaded for a fistful of rice but were spurned by a callous administration and corrupt hoarders — both joined hands to zealously guard overflowing godowns where food was stocked to feed British troops.
The distant thunder in Ashani Sanket referred to Japanese bombers. In real life, it was the killer cyclone of October 1942 which destroyed paddy fields along the east coast stretching from Bengal to Odisha. With no autumnal harvest, farmers, most of them landless or marginal, had no other option but to dip into emergency stocks at home which ran out by the summer of 1943. Meanwhile, sensing a scarcity, traders began to hoard whatever they could lay their hands on.
But the cyclone was only one of the contributing factors and its impact could have been mitigated if the colonial administration had not acted in the most selfish manner. Huge quantities of rice were stockpiled for British soldiers by seizing paddy meant for civilian consumption. Worse, even as the stark contours of the famine were emerging, rice was being exported to Sri Lanka for British soldiers garrisoned there. The natives could die, but the Tommies had to be fed.
Later, much after vultures had feasted on the dead and the dying, Britain tried to explain the crippling shortage by citing the suspension of rice imports from Burma, then occupied by Japanese forces. But Burmese rice, at best, accounted for not more than 15 per cent of Bengal’s requirement. In any event, every effort was made to mop up all available rice from rural Bengal and either store it for soldiers or ship it out to what was then Ceylon. The little that escaped British appropriation was picked up by traders, nearly all of them collaborators of the civil administration, and sold at exorbitant prices. Wartime Kolkata, flush with money, did not experience the hunger of rural Bengal; tragically, Bengalis who could afford to buy rice at black market rates were deaf to the pitiful cries of starving fellow Bengalis who roamed the streets begging for no more than a morsel of food. The sight of emaciated children, many no more than infants, on the verge of death did not move hearts. In many ways, it was Bengal’s darkest moment. Latter day economists would say that market forces decided the price of rice. It would, therefore, be incorrect to blame the colonial Government alone for the colossal loss of lives.
Winston Churchill, who refused to acknowledge the famine till it became an embarrassment for the Empire, was to later slyly pretend it never happened by glossing over this bleak chapter of British rule in India in his six-volume History of the Second World War. Disdainful of India’s unwashed Hindoos and remorselessly untouched by their sufferings, he claimed, “No great portion of the world population was so effectively protected from the horrors and perils of the World War as were the people of Hindustan. They were carried through the struggle on the shoulders of our small island.” The lives of four million people who perished in the made-in-Britain famine of 1943 were inconsequential for the Empire’s last standard-bearer.
It is unthinkable that so many lives would be lost today even in the worst possible circumstances. In food surplus India, Government often claims, there are enough provisions to ensure that nobody dies of starvation. No matter how scary the distant thunder may be, rest assured you shall not go hungry. Indeed, despite the appalling poverty that still stalks a vast number of people in this country, rarely if ever anybody dies of starvation.
Two things have changed since 1943. The first is the attitude of the poor — they are no longer willing to go down meekly and without a fight. In 1943, the famished masses surrendered to their fate. There was no struggle for survival: Godowns were not raided by hungry masses, traders were not attacked, administration offices were not set on fire. Today, such unquestioning surrender can be ruled out. There will be food riots in the streets and villages will go up in flames if there is a famine and the poor are left to die of starvation. We may not acknowledge this reality, but deep within the elite — those who have come to substitute the colonial Government — know that nothing can save them from mob fury.
Second, and this is perhaps more important, as a people we are possibly more caring today than we were in 1943. In the shortage years of the 1960s and 1970s, when enough food never seemed to be available, my mother recalls how Punjab would take care to send rice to West Bengal. I doubt if any Indian today would turn his or her face away on spotting a starving man, woman or child. Our relative prosperity has made us more humane by affording us the opportunity to give. Yet, two questions remain: Are we giving enough? And are we willing to share our prosperity with the less fortunate?
This article was prompted by the chance discovery of a clutch of photographs of the 1943 Bengal famine that forms part of Life magazine’s awesome archive. One of them is reproduced here.
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