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As in the ravaged cities of Southeast Asia in 1942, the problems did not cease when the fighting died down. Cholera, ever present in Calcutta, took over from human killers as sanitation collapsed and rubbish built up in the streets. Arthur Dash wrote in his diary that corpses ‘were dotted about even in the streets of the European areas. In Indian areas they were piled up and blocked them.’23 British authorities noted that Indians tended not to remove the bodies even if they lay outside their own houses for fear of pollution.24 This job had to be carried out by the troops. The city was sprayed with DDT, which helped a little, but food supplies broke down and both grain and cloth had to be rationed again. As late as 28 August there were still 307 government and private relief centres feeding 190,000 people cut off in the most seriously affected parts of the city. Worse was the lingering psychological damage. Many people never again trusted their Hindu or Muslim neighbours. It was this that lay at the heart of the massive refugee problems that were to overwhelm India and Pakistan as they attained their freedom. Indirectly, it was to propel the two dominions towards three pointless and destructive wars over the next generation.

Dacca in eastern Bengal was soon to be the capital East Pakistan, but in 1946 the city still had a large Hindu minority and it quickly fell prey to Calcutta’s infectious violence. The trouble was sporadic but vicious. Murderous gangs killed a handful of people every day with weapons of varying sophistication. The district magistrate recorded that: ‘Occasionally acid bombs (acid contained in an electric light bulb) were used, but killing was done by knives and property was attacked with crowbars, or torches made of rags and oil helped by dry wood and straw.’25 In September the frenzy spread to the rural areas of east Bengal, especially to villages where large numbers of Muslim immigrants had moved into India from Arakan during and after the war in Burma. Prime locations were the districts of Noakhali and Tippera in the Chittagong division which had already experienced appalling suffering in 1942. A local political boss and Muslim League member, Ghulam Sarwar, stirred up the trouble by demanding revenge for the thousands of Muslims killed in Calcutta. In this part of the countryside Muslim peasants were beginning to assert themselves, resentful at what they saw as generations of exploitation by Hindu shopkeepers, moneylenders and landlords. Once again, though, it was religious difference and not economic distress that determined the course of the disturbances, which left hundreds dead and 20,000 people homeless. Here, however, the terror hardly deserves categorization as rioting; it took the form of a highly organized programme of forced conversions of Hindus to Islam. A Muslim gang would come to a Hindu house and give its occupants twenty-four hours to convert to Islam or die. Returning at the appointed time, the gang members would force the ‘converts’ to eat beef, recite the Muslim confession of faith and quit their homes. These were then burnt out because, the Muslims explained, the end of the world was imminent and shelter would be unnecessary in paradise. These events were meticulously organized by local politicians and their supporters; the British district magistrate observed that ‘large stocks of Muslim prayer caps had been made ready for the converts’.26 But there is no question that many ordinary people were living in daily expectation of the apocalypse. This was a common perception up and down the crescent in Burma and Malaya where similar millenarian movements were giving legitimacy to intercommunal clashes and anti-colonial upsurges.

Help was a long time in coming; the government machine was virtually shut down for a time. Muslim clerks in the local telegraph office intercepted and destroyed messages from Hindu inhabitants of Noakhali and Tippera begging for help. When the security forces arrived, as one British subaltern remembered, it was often too late.27 Whole villages