Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (26 page)

Most economic and historical examinations of the causes of the Bengal famine take the view that there was plenty of food in Bengal safely stashed away in the village stores of landlords and traders, all of whom were waiting for inflation to push prices higher.
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New research, using figures for the yields at the rice research stations in the province, which are the only hard figures of actual yields available, suggests, however, that the winter rice harvest of 1942 had in large measure failed. The unusually warm, humid and cloudy weather, together with the cyclone in October, had spread the spores of a fungal disease throughout the region. There may have been as little as half the usual amount of rice available in the Bengal food system. This would provide an alternative explanation as to why landlords and farmers with rice stores were in no hurry to release them, as they knew that there was a real and frightening shortage of rice in Bengal.
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Whether it was the product of greed or anxiety, by the end of 1942 the Bengali rice trade had frozen. There was not enough food on the market and there was no hope of receiving extra supplies of food from outside India.

The provincial government focused its attention on protecting the food supply for Calcutta. The city had been bombed by the Japanese four times and the working population were nervous. Calcutta, so close to the front line with Burma, could not be allowed to go under. The stocks of the city’s traders were seized and special shops were set up in factories which supplied the industrial workers with subsidized food. Industrialists, unable to get rice any other way, often bought their supplies on the black market, fuelling the price rises. Special ‘control shops’ sold food to the poor at low prices and government markets supplied the middle classes. In the scramble to find 20,000 tons of rice each month for the city the needs of the rural population were ignored.
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District officers watched helplessly as the rural population began to die of starvation. By 1943 famine had spread throughout the whole of Bengal. The schoolmaster Bisewar Chakrabati wrote to the Bengal Relief Committee describing the scenes he witnessed in his home village. ‘The whole population seems to be moving silently towards death. Men have neither the capacity nor the energy even to try to live. A stupor seems to have overtaken all.’
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The traditional strategy of selling children for food no longer worked as nobody wanted extra mouths
to feed. Instead, girls were sent ‘to a merchant or a Muslim
jotdar
[large tenant farmer] for a night. Thus they can procure a few annas or a few chataks of rice.’
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In a group of villages which contained 592 families in 1942, 90 families died during the famine. All of them were labouring families dependent on cash incomes, and simply did not have enough money to buy extortionately expensive food.
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The rural middle classes were also hard hit. The high-caste Bengali author H. K. Gupta wrote to a wealthy merchant in September 1943 explaining that his family had sold all their valuables and clothes. They were now naked and dying ‘by inches’, but ‘on account of my position in society’ he did not feel that he could ‘beg from door to door [or] … stand on the roads with the beggars’.
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Patronage and charity, which usually acted as a safety net, broke down. If labourers and artisans asked to be paid in rice rather than cash landlords simply stopped employing them.
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A few energetic district officers, wealthy Indians and charitable organizations in Calcutta began relief operations on their own initiative, but without a substantial influx of grain there were limits to what could be done. The Bengal government did not know what to do, as injecting cash into the economy did nothing to draw forth hidden stocks of food and they did not have access to sufficient quantities of food to enable them to distribute meaningful food aid. The other provinces, concerned by food shortages of their own, were reluctant to send rice supplies to Bengal. Their meagre contribution amounted to just 17,000 tons, under one month’s worth of food for Calcutta.
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Even the Punjab, which had plenty of food, showed no empathy with the plight of the Bengalis and concentrated on protecting the profits of Punjabi farmers. In June 1943, when the famine was at its height, the Revenue Minister of Punjab, Sir Chhotu Ram, instructed his farmers not to sell their grain to the government under a certain price.
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Frustrated by their inability to open up the market, the government of Bengal persuaded the government of India to re-introduce a free market in rice and open the borders. All this succeeded in doing was spreading the problems of Bengal into the neighbouring provinces of Bihar, Orissa and Assam.
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In August the government of India finally began to send in trainloads of food from its central stocks and the provincial government set up gruel kitchens. These were soon surrounded by men and women too
weak to walk backwards and forwards to the kitchen, who lay ‘about it on the cold ground … without any clothes … death soon relieves them of all sufferings’.
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The kitchens distributed a soup made of inferior grains such as millet, and a few vegetables, and probably did more harm than good. Doctors treating famine victims discovered that ‘a gut habituated throughout life to rice, and then enfeebled by weeks of privation, when switched to a diet of the rougher “up-country” grains simply will not take them and an uncontrollable flux ensues’. This was eventually recognized as a clinical state and ‘famine diarrhoea’, often caused by the aid kitchen gruel, caused yet more deaths.
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Famine victims began pouring into Calcutta in the summer of 1943, a ‘vast slow dispirited noiseless’ army of apathetic skeletons.
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They would sit and weep for food even when food was given to them. ‘Bewildered, finding no help, they squatted in the by-ways and grew feebler and lay down and after a while died.’
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Many died on streets within sight of shops stocked with food. It became apparent to Ian Stephens, editor of the Indian newspaper
The Statesman
, that the Indian and British governments were doing everything they could to use wartime censorship to suppress the news of the famine. Indignant, Stephens ran an eight-week campaign against the authorities, harassing them with attacks in editorials, letters and using photographs of the dead and dying on the streets of Calcutta to publicize the plight of the Bengalis. In October the Secretary of State for India finally acknowledged the famine in a speech in Birmingham.
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It was only with the appointment of Viscount Wavell as Viceroy in September 1943 that decisive action was taken. Wavell’s brief was to sort out the food situation before it threatened military strategy. The military chiefs of staff had warned the War Cabinet that ‘unless the necessary steps are taken to rectify this situation, the efficient prosecution of the war against Japan by forces based in India will be gravely jeopardised and may well prove impossible’.
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The famine was causing trouble among the troops who were destined to re-take Burma, 60 per cent of whom were Indian. Bengali soldiers were receiving distressing letters from their families and, although one British tank crewman witnessed Tommies dangling bits of bacon out of a train window in the faces of starving Bengalis, many of the soldiers, British as well as Indian, were so distressed by the horrific sight of the famine victims
that they were reported to be feeding the beggars with their own rations.
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Meanwhile the Japanese sought to capitalize on the situation by spreading rumours that they were willing to send food aid from Burma.
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In Bengal, Wavell mobilized the military to escort deliveries of rice into the rural areas, distribute clothing and to show villagers how to prepare the unfamiliar grains used for relief. The breakdown in the transport system was tackled, and boats removed under the denial scheme salvaged, bridges repaired and river ferry crossings re-established.
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That winter, to everyone’s relief, the rice harvest was good. This revived the rice market and measures were finally taken to protect the access to food of the most vulnerable. Price controls were enforced and rationing was introduced in Calcutta. The famine victims were cleared from the city’s streets and taken to camps. ‘The Famine of Bengal … as if by magic vanished into thin air.’ Many of those who were rounded up were separated from their husbands, wives or children in the process and their fate is unclear. It seems likely that the majority who were already too weak to recover simply died, out of sight.
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The Indian government at last implemented a programme to safeguard food supplies for the entire sub-continent. The Food Department developed what was known as the Basic Plan, which put an end to free-market trading and ensured that food surpluses were pooled and distributed where they were most needed. Rationing was introduced in the cities and towns, and by early 1945 covered 42 million urban Indians and even extended out into the countryside to cover the rural poor.
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Although the situation in Bengal was gradually being alleviated, Wavell was concerned that famine might spread across the sub-continent. In other areas that depended on Bengali rice there had been signs of famine in 1943. A British resident on a rubber estate in Mysore had reported that it was no longer possible to walk through the estate as the starving workers posed too great a threat to safety. Many rubber estates in Travancore had closed down as they could not feed their workers, and the bodies of famished coolies were reported to be lying by the side of the roads in Coorg.
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Wavell repeatedly telegrammed London pleading for food for India. Churchill peevishly replied that if food was so scarce in India why had Gandhi not yet died?

Given Churchill’s determination to prevent the Americans from
taking all the credit in the battle against the Japanese it seems strange that he was so cavalier about the food situation in India. On 17 February 1944, India Secretary Leo Amery warned him: ‘once it becomes known that no supplies are coming from outside the machinery of the Governments of India will be quite incapable of preventing food going underground everywhere and famine conditions spreading with disastrous rapidity all over India. The result may well be fatal for the whole prosecution of the war, and that not only from the point of view of India as a base for further operations. I don’t think you have any idea of how deeply public feeling in this country has already been stirred against the Government over the Bengal Famine.’
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Prejudice and dislike seem to have made Churchill determined that India should not be helped. He is said to have thought the Indians were ‘the beastliest population in the world next to the Germans’.
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But Churchill was not alone in his refusal to prioritize India’s food needs. A committee to look into the question of food supplies for India decided that the risk of civilian hunger in India was a lesser evil than jeopardizing British civilian food supplies or military supplies for the Indian army. In November 1943 the committee even turned down a Canadian offer of 100,000 tons of wheat for India for lack of shipping and the British government prevented the Indian legislative assembly from applying to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) for food aid.
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‘If UNRRA operated in India in the sphere of supply and public health,’ Amery pointed out, ‘they would no doubt wish to send supervisors or inspectors whose operations would presumably be concentrated on Bengal and you must expect undesirable attention to be directed, e.g. on the breakdown of administration there.’
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He was painfully aware that the spotlight of world attention would not show the British government in a good light if it were focused on India and Bengal.

In desperation Wavell transferred his attentions to Claude Auchinleck and Louis Mountbatten, respectively Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army and Supreme Commander of the Allies in South-East Asia. They conceded that they could afford a 10 per cent cut in military supplies, which persuaded the chiefs of staff in London to divert twenty-five ships from military transports and forced the cabinet to agree to a shipment of 200,000 tons of grain. Depressed by the dreadful predictions for the
1944 harvest, Wavell continued to campaign for food for India and asked Churchill to make a personal appeal to Roosevelt for shipping. Churchill’s weakly worded request meant that Roosevelt simply passed the issue on to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who, of course, replied that no ships could be spared in the light of the forthcoming invasion of France. Wavell pronounced the British cabinet ‘short-sighted and callous’.
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His disgust left the British command unmoved and it was not until there were real fears of demoralization in the Indian army at the end of 1944 that military reinforcements were replaced by a shipment of 20,000 tons of Australian wheat.
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When Wavell heard of the wealth of supplies airlifted in to Holland in March 1945 he remarked with bitterness, ‘A very different attitude [exists] towards feeding a starving population when the starvation is in Europe.’
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