All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [266]
The most serious blot upon the wartime Raj, and arguably upon Britain’s entire war effort, was the 1943–44 Bengal famine. The loss of Burma deprived India of 15 per cent of its food supplies. When a series of floods and cyclones – natural catastrophes to which low-lying East Bengal is chronically vulnerable – struck the region, wrecking its 1942 harvest, the population fell prey to desperate hunger. Much transport was destroyed, further impeding movement of food supplies. A Bengali fisherman named Abani was among millions who lost their livelihoods. ‘We could not afford to buy a net … The moneylender would not give me a loan. The moneylender himself had no money. Our family possessions had been destroyed in the flood: of eight cows we only saved one.’ By December, people were dying. In the following year, their plight became catastrophic. In October 1943 a relief worker named Arangamohan Das reported from Terapekhia bazaar on the Haldi river. ‘There I saw nearly 500 destitutes of both sexes, almost naked and reduced to bare skeletons. Some of them were begging for food … from the passers by, some longing for food with piteous look, some lying by the wayside approaching death hardly with any more energy to breathe and actually I had the misfortune of seeing eight peoples breathe their last before my eyes.’
Censors intercepted a letter from an Indian soldier embittered by his experience during leave: ‘We come home to our own villages to find the food is scarce and high-priced. Our wives have been led astray and our land has been misappropriated. Why does the Sarkar [government] not do something about it now rather than talking about post-war reconstruction?’ Why not, indeed? The British government refused to divert scarce shipping to famine relief; India secretary Leo Amery at first adopted a cavalier attitude. Even when he began to exert his influence in favour of intervention, the prime minister and cabinet remained unsympathetic. In 1943, sailings to Indian Ocean destinations were cut by 60 per cent, as shipping was diverted to sustain Allied amphibious operations, aid to Russia and Atlantic convoys; the British cabinet met only 25 per cent of Delhi’s requested food deliveries. Churchill wrote in March 1943, applauding the minister of war transport’s refusal to release ships to move relief supplies: ‘A concession to one country … encourages demands from all the others. [The Indians] must learn to look after themselves as we have done … We cannot afford to send ships merely as a gesture of goodwill.’ A few months later, he said: ‘There is no reason why all parts of the British Empire should not feel the pinch in the same way as the Mother Country has done.’
But the British diet remained incomparably more lavish than that of the Indian people. Bengalis use the phrase payter jala – burning of the belly – to describe hunger, and many bellies burned in 1943 and 1944. Gourhori Majhi of Kalikakundu said long afterwards: ‘Everyone was crazed with hunger. Whatever you found, you’d tear it off and eat it right there. My family had ten people; my own stomach was wailing. Who is your brother, who is your sister – no one thought of such things then. Everyone is wondering, how will I live? … There was not a blade of grass in the fields.’ Many women resorted to prostitution, and some families sold their daughters to pimps.
Even at this extremity there were no reports of cannibalism such as took place in Russia, but there were many child murders. The newspaper Biplabi reported on 5 August 1943: ‘In Sapurapota village … a Muslim weaver was unable to support his family and, crazed with hunger, wandered away. His wife believed that he had drowned himself … Being