Churchill's Secret War (18 page)

THE POLICE ESTABLISHED camps in rural Midnapore and began to hunt for fugitives and set fire to their homes. Rather than determining the innocence or guilt of certain individuals, the government imposed fines on entire Hindu communities for political subversion. Often, when they were raiding better-off Hindu households, the police encouraged poor Muslims from neighboring villages to come along with them and loot—with the apparent intent of stirring up communal hostilities. All over the country, criminals were being released from prison to make room for Quit India activists. According to Kumudini Dakua, many violent offenders returned to their former village homes and began to prey on the people and inform for the police.
¹⁶

Nature, too, began to prey on Bengal. One morning in October 1942 it started raining fiercely. Sushil Dhara, who had been lazing with friends under a flimsy open-air thatch, attempted to seek refuge at a nearby house. The wind lifted him and deposited him in a pond. He tried crawling along the path. Alternately flattened and knocked sideways by the gusts, he had ventured some ninety yards when “it was as if someone picked me up and smashed me” against a massive tamarind tree that had fallen earlier. Dhara clung to the trunk, dazed and shivering, until he gathered enough strength to sprint to safety. He could not return to fetch the others from under the thatch, who included an elderly couple who were not strong enough to brave the cyclone.

At midnight the wind abated, and Dhara emerged with a lantern to find that his earlier shelter had been pounded into the ground. His companions were safe; they had submerged themselves in a ditch to evade the wind and had waded and swum to a neighbor’s house. But the banks of the Rupnarayan River had burst and the ocean had swept in. Salt water covered the entire landscape. The cyclone had destroyed virtually every tree and house on the horizon.

 

THE DAY AFTER the Mohisadal palace guards shot up his cadre, Dhara had organized a retaliatory looting of one of the royal storehouses, five miles north of Kalikakundu. Chitto Samonto and his brother had each managed to carry off a sack of rice. From part of this stash their
mother had made
muri
, or puffed rice, for the festival of the goddess Durga. During the storm, they stored the muri in a tin, placed Chitto’s six-day-old nephew inside a trunk (so that if water overwhelmed their two-story mud house, the boy would float away), and huddled with the baby on the attic floor. Chitto and his brother tied the beams with thick rope and took turns holding the roof down against the wind. “We had a knife to cut a hole in the straw thatch if the house collapsed,” Samonto recounted. “Then we would all climb onto the roof and float to safety.”

The neighbors came over after their hut had collapsed. “So much screaming and wailing, it was awful. Someone was saying, ‘My cow was swept away’; someone else was saying, ‘Where is my mother-in-law, I couldn’t find her!’” All through the night they had tried to see how high the flood had reached. “You could tell it was sea water—it was glittering in the dark,” Samonto said. In the morning dead cows and uprooted trees floated by, as well as a wooden bridge; strangers had fought the brothers for it and taken it away. They had all eaten the muri and “caught a huge carp right there, off the porch.” After the ponds overflowed, the fish the villagers reared were enjoying a brief spell of unbounded freedom.

A few days later the water receded—revealing a layer of sand that squashed the rice plants. The new crop, due to be harvested that winter, was gone. People began to loot, Samonto said: “Forty to sixty of them would go to a landowner’s house and demand rice.” The Samontos’ own plot was small, but the family also cultivated a large field belonging to the Mohisadal rajas, receiving a share of its yield. Still, the landowner’s minions took away all that could be salvaged. “We managed to sweep up some scattered grains and keep it for seed,” Samonto remembered. The rice from the looted storehouse lasted them another month.

No more cereal was going to be available for upward of a year—until the next crop could be sown in the monsoon of 1943 and harvested at the end of that December. Everyone in Midnapore dates the famine from the day of the cyclone, October 16, 1942.

ON THE NIGHT of the storm, villagers of coastal Midnapore had sheltered the wounded pilot of a small aircraft that had fallen near Sutahata, as well as soldiers whose encampments had been devastated by the cyclone. But the subdivisional officer in Tamluk, the most senior civil servant present, had refused to lift the town’s nighttime curfew so that refugees from the flood could seek shelter there, or to release government boats for rescuing people stranded on rooftops and in trees. In the following days, Midnapore’s district magistrate asserted that any cyclone relief should be “withheld from the disaffected villages until the people hand over the stolen guns and give an undertaking that they will take no further part in any subversive movement.” A British police officer protested that prompt government aid might win back an estranged populace. But the first relief workers to arrive, from a Calcutta-based private charity, were arrested and no other succor came for weeks—on orders, it seemed, from Sir John Herbert, the governor of Bengal.
¹⁷

In Calcutta, an army general summoned Ian Stephens, editor of the city’s leading newspaper,
The Statesman
, and asked him not to report on the devastation, in case the Japanese should guess that the coast was undefended. (The cyclone was scarcely a secret to the Japanese, who were repeatedly broadcasting that it had killed more than 100,000 in its first hour alone.) And the Bengal government reported to New Delhi that the calamity had left the “rebel spirit unbroken”—implying that the task remained to be finished. Two weeks after the storm, a group of ministers from Calcutta arrived in Mohisadal to survey the damage and, from the palace rooftop, saw plumes of smoke rising in the distance. The police had been hunting for fugitives in Kalikakundu; having failed to find them, the keepers of the law had set their homes on fire.
¹⁸

At the time of the storm, Nirmala Kuila of Kalikakundu and her family were better off than most and had grain stored in two golas, she recalled. The rice had escaped the flood. But on October 30, 1942, a police team led by a feared superintendent named Nolini Raha had arrived in search of Kuila’s nephew. They had not found him, and had
instead arrested her husband and brother-in-law. Wartime shortages of fuel allowed few villagers to light lanterns at night, but the police had kerosene, which they had sprayed onto the thatch and fired with flaming torches. They burned down all fourteen huts of the extended Kuila family—the entire hamlet of Kuilapara—along with all the rice.
¹⁹

At the time Kuila had an infant, less than six months old. With the men gone to prison, her sisters-in-law saved her and the baby by finding enough food to allow her to produce milk. They had continued to live in the charred remains of their hamlet, which was open to the sun and rain. “Where else will we stay?” she asked. “When there were storms, I would clasp my baby in my arms and cry.” Not until the politicians who toured Midnapore had returned to Calcutta and threatened to publicize the extent of cyclone damage did the government relent. Eighteen days after the event, on November 3, 1942,
The Statesman
briefly noted that a storm and tidal wave had killed an estimated 11,000 in Bengal. The unofficial count was 30,000. Most of the dead were from a coastal area of Midnapore known as Contai, southwest of Tamluk subdivision, which had borne the brunt of a twenty-foot storm surge.
²⁰

“Hundreds of us insurgents could easily hide in the ravaged countryside,” Dhara would write, “but when I contemplated the suffering that the people faced, I felt utterly overwhelmed.” Satish Samanta organized villagers to repair the banks of the Rupnarayan, somehow procuring
muri
and
chire
(flattened rice) to feed everyone while they worked. “We built eight miles of embankments out of mud,” recalled Radhakrishna Bari. After a month or so the government set up relief centers in the towns, but some who collected rice there complained that the police followed them home to smash pots and trample on the cooked food. A government relief worker charged that by day he was expected to provide succor, and by night he had to indicate to the police and the military the villages that had received food, so that the communities could then be punished.
²¹

In response to these actions, on December 17, 1942, the rebels set up their own government for the region. Drawing inspiration from a happier past, they called it the Tamrolipto Jatiyo Sorkar, or the Tamluk
National Government. In the future it would merge with a free government of India, a newsletter announced, but for the time being the president was Satish Samanta.
²²

The teenage Bari began to compose the government’s newsletter, called
Biplabi
(Revolutionary), using news that couriers brought from diverse corners of the district. His elders provided the editorials. Late at night, on the attic floor of a mud house, Bari would print the sheets on an old hand-operated Roneo duplicator. Most copies were distributed in the villages, but local businessmen smuggled some to Calcutta in consignments of betel leaf. The renegade government also set up civil courts that operated with the consent of all parties. More menacingly, it boasted a “national militia” headed by Sushil Dhara—who would also come to run secret tribunals that tried, convicted, and sentenced informers and other allies of the British, usually in absentia.

Ajoy Mukhopadhyay, the finance minister of the rebel government, instructed Dhara to serve notices on selected landowners, demanding cash in amounts commensurate with the extent to which they were deemed to collaborate with the authorities. Most paid right away, and Mukhopadhyay ordered the “arrest” of those who did not. (Among the leaders of the Tamluk government, he was probably the least committed to Gandhian values.) Dhara also forced landowners to share any excess rice with the villagers.
²³

The Tamluk government’s officials got no pay, but they did get food. “We went on strict rations, only a little rice and lentils, and as much vegetable as we liked,” related Bari. “Our leaders gave away most of the rice we could get. They also thought of other kinds of food, encouraged people to grow pumpkins. The silt that the flood had brought was very fertile—I never saw such a crop of pumpkins in my life. Only the runners who brought the mail were allowed all the rice they could eat, for they had to go far. It was very hard work.”

Sushil Dhara could eat staggering quantities of food—on one occasion he downed 150
pithe
, or filled crepes. Having to trek tens of miles each day, he found the ration very painful and debilitating, and would sometimes be discovered by his soldiers leaning on his stick in
the middle of a path, fast asleep. If there was a benefit to their deprivation, it was that the rebels became as skinny as everyone else, the easier to blend in.

 

“YOU KNOW THAT Calcutta is being bombed,” Clive Branson wrote to his wife in early January 1943. “But do you know that an acute food crisis is raging throughout Bengal?” Branson was on leave in Bombay, where his hotel served ample food: “breakfast, lunch and dinner are all
five course
meals.” But reading the newspapers made him melancholy. “I fear that we may again be called out to maintain law and order—don’t misunderstand me—not to shoot the speculators, landlords, government officials, but to deal with the angry people” who were rioting for food.
²⁴

The price of rice in Bengal had jumped after the cyclone, and in February 1943 official policy gave it a further, lethal boost. Leonard G. Pinnell headed the Bengal government’s Department of Civil Supplies, which was charged with acquiring rice for Calcutta’s “priority classes”—employees of the government and of firms deemed essential to the war effort. His task, supported by requisition from northern Bengal, had begun well enough. But at Christmas of 1942, Japanese aircraft bombed Calcutta, causing suppliers to down their shutters and laborers to pile their bundles on their heads and stream out. Pinnell had to do something drastic. “It had become a fight for survival, for collapse in Calcutta—not only the headquarters of Government, but with its port, its railways, and its industrial area—would have been a disaster for the Province as a whole, and for the successful prosecution of the war,” he wrote in an unpublished memoir. He forcibly acquired stocks of rice in the city—inadvertently driving all remaining supplies underground.
²⁵

What happened next is best told in the words of another civil servant, Binay Ranjan Sen, who was entrusted with overseeing cyclone relief in Midnapore. (A decade later, Sen would head the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.) Pinnell was supposed to provide Sen’s operation with grain, but cyclone relief was getting only a quarter of its requirements, Sen told the famine commission: “I could not possibly
carry on with such meager supplies.” On February 13, 1943, however, he was instructed to no longer rely on Pinnell but instead to buy what rice he could on the market. The Civil Supplies Department could not fulfill even its primary task of feeding the war effort, Sen explained. When that department’s officials found their reserves to be critically short, “they instructed their agents to go to any place and purchase at any price” and store the rice on behalf of the government. The alternative to such desperate acquisitions was to use the police to seize grain from rural areas, which would “probably lead to much violence,” Pinnell confirmed in his memoir.
²⁶

Because there were no limits to what the administration would pay, rice prices immediately escalated. Worse, several other bodies—the Bengal Chamber of Commerce, the railways, the Government of India, and the army—were also told to fend for themselves. (The Bengal Chamber of Commerce comprised mainly British-owned firms, dealing in ordnance manufacture, jute, coal, banking, tea, tobacco, and other industries, all of which were deemed essential for the war effort.) Armed with vast quantities of paper money, these entities began to vie with one another to buy up the winter crop. Sen joined the competition.