Between 3 and 5 million people died of starvation and famine in Bengal in India in 1943. The drought was a result of nature. The resulting famine and the millions of deaths can be attributed to the policies of the colonial power ruling India - the British, and one person is most culpable in this crime against humanity - Winston Churchill. This scandal is what the author details immaculately, punctuated by impeccable research. Human, economic, political, imperial, racist, and social angles are all brought out in vivid detail. The case against Winston Churchill turns out to be damningly severe, even to the author - "I had no idea the book would end up targeting Churchill to this extent", but the evidence is as strong as could be. As it turns out, the carefully constructed narrative and myth of the gentlemanly and benevolent nature of British rule in its colonies is shattered, devastatingly so.
The book is part history.
It tells of the riches in India and Bengal before the advent of the East India Company and then English rule. This is covered in the Prologue. The bulk of the book then deals with the famine of 1943. Since that was a tumultuous period - in India on account of the independence struggle with Mahatma Gandhi at the forefront, and in the world on account of World War II, we are provided pertinent accounts of key events that had a relevant bearing on the famine. Of Mahatma Gandhi's satyagraha, of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose and his Indian National Army, of local uprisings in Midnapore and the now mostly forgotten revolutionaries like Sushil Dhara, Ajoy Mukhopadhyaya, and others, of the Japanese conquest of Singapore, Burma, and their landing at the doorstep of India'a eastern borders, of the Denial Policy (really a scorched earth policy). If resources like grains and rice had to be shipped out of India to feed the English armies fighting the war, if grains from India had to be used to ensure that the Englishman's morale in England did not flag for want of good bread, if soldiers from the Indian army were used to win key Allied battles in the mid-east - these events are recounted with studious attention to references and footnotes.
"Starting in May (1942) Amery oversaw the effort to ship from India around 40,000 tons of grain every month, a tenth of its railway engines and carriages, and even railway tracks uprooted from less important train lines. The colony's entire commercial production of timber, woolen textiles and leather goods, and three-quarters of its steel and cement production, would be required for the war. ... Apart from the United Kingdom itself, India would become the largest contributor to the empire's war - providing goods and services worth more than 2 billion pounds." [page 5]
The book is also a part character essay.
While there are a multitude of characters who play small and big roles in this tragedy, there are three key players that stand out - Winston Churchill, prime minister of Britain during World War II, Leopold Amery, secretary of state for India, and a physicist Frederick Alexander Lindemann, who was responsible for the government's scientific decisions and who also headed a Statistics Division, or S branch. Through the author's narrative, and through the written and spoken words and actions of these characters we get to learn what drove these people to act the way they did. Whether it was partly on account of loyalty (in the case of Lindemann), wholly on account of cussedness (Winston Churchill), or the desperate efforts of Amery to alleviate a looming tragedy, there is a substantial amount of material available to the reader to form a well-informed picture of these people.
"Naturally I [Amery] lost patience and couldn't help telling him that I didn't see much difference between his outlook and Hitler's which annoyed him no little. I am by no means sure whether on the subject of India he is really quite sane. ... Amery may also have been irked by the reference to moneylenders - a hint that Churchill saw upper-class Indians, in particular Bengali babus, through the same lens as anti-Semites might perceive Jews." [pages 236, 237]
The book is part cautionary tale.
If you are an Indian, this book is a must-read because it provides a tragic and brutal reminder of the unmitigated horror that was India's fate under colonial rule. It opens a chapter of history that has rarely been taught in Indian schools - the real causes of the famine have been painted over with a strong communist brush. For others it is a reminder of what happens when a lack of accountability joins hands with callous disregard for people. Complicating matters was World War II, with the need to feed the vast armies fighting the Axis powers, for which grain and resources were sucked out from India - even as millions starved to death in Bengal. As if this wasn't enough, further complicating things was Winston Churchill, a die-hard Imperialist and dyed-in-the-wool racist who spiced this with a visceral hatred of India and Indians.
"In 1949, a session of the Geneva Convention extended the guidelines for civilized warfare and included a prohibition against starving civilians in occupied territories.
...
If such provisions protecting civilians had been in place before the war, the Denial Policy and the failure of His Majesty's Government to relieve the famine could conceivably have been prosecuted as war crimes." [pages 274-75]
What this book reveals is that actions can sometimes produce the elaborate and self-serving construction of post-fact justifications. Especially so if the actions require justifications.
"In the end, it is not so much racism as the imbalance of power inherent in the Darwinian pyramid that explains why famine could be tolerated in India while bread rationing was regarded as an intolerable restriction in wartime Britain. ... The central evil of imperialism is the inability of subject peoples to hold their rulers accountable - and all the rest, even the racism, may flow from that essential powerlessness. ... She (Hannah Arendt) argued that racism was a direct consequence of imperialism, which 'would have necessitated the invention of racism as the only possible "explanation" and excuse for its deeds...'" [pages 276-77]
The Battle of Plassey was the decisive battle that marked the establishment of British rule in India. Robert Clive, the Englishman in charge of the English soldiers in the battle chose deceit and bribery to win the war and the approbation "Mir Jafar" entered the Indian lexicon, to refer to a traitor who betrays his land to a foreigner. The battle also marked the beginning of the transfer of wealth from India to England. The denudation of the colony's wealth continued non-stop for almost two hundred years, till there was nothing more left to be looted from India.
Clive built his victory on the sturdy and repeatedly proven foundation of bribery. And bribe he did Siraj-ud-daula's general Mir Jafar, who became the new nawab.
"As arranged, Mir Jafar paid the East India Company 2.2 million pounds and its officers and troops 1.2 million pounds, of which Clive took a lion's share. Two hundred barges carrying the first installment of the Company's booty set off from the capital city of Murshidabad on July 3 1757, accompanied down the Ganga (or Ganges) river by the trumpeting of a British military band." [page xvi]
Tales of India's wealth are scarcely exaggerations. Till the middle of the eighteenth century, India had been the richest country since the beginning of recorded history.
"In late 1665 ... Francois Bernier arrived in Bengal to find a vast, populous delta, its myriad channels lined with vibrant towns and cities interspersed with fields of rice, sugar, corn, vegetables, mustard and sesame. He declared it 'the finest and most fruitful country in the world'. Foreign merchants worked the wholesale markets, offering to buy produce in exchange for silver. They could not trade goods with the native businessman, because Bengal was in need of virtually nothing. ... Bengali merchants ... ate from gold plates and wore intricately wrought brocade clothing, and gem-studded gold jewelry." [pages xiv, xv]
Such riches and prosperity of Indians and of the Bengalis was bound to attract envy. After the plunder of Bengal had continued for decades, the land denuded of resources, and its citizenry beggared, a necessary re-writing of history began, along with the obligatory disparaging and belittling of Indians.
"... influential scholars such as James Mill argued that poverty rather than wealth was India's intrinsic and unvarying condition. Hindu legal codes contained guidelines for helping ordinary people through 'seasons of calamity,' and Mill pointed to the existence of such regulations as evidence that 'a state of poverty and wretchedness, as far as the great body of the people are concerned, must have prevailed in India' in the past, just as in the present." [pages xxiv, xxv]
"... Mills and others believed Hindus to be endowed with distinct characteristics, at the core of which lay effeminacy and its corollary, dishonesty. ... Over time, educated Indians came to internalize such distinctions between Hindus and Muslims - although the illiterate continued to worship at one another's shrines." [page xxv]
"English men and women, many of them based in Calcutta, penned furious attacks on the babu (often spelling it baboo to suggest a link with the primate). Mill had declared that 'the Hindu, like the eunuch, excels in the qualities of a slave,' and the popular historian Thomas Babington Macualay had dwelt on the emasculation of Bengalis, who'd 'found the little finger of the Company thicker than the loins' of the prince Sirasj-ud-daula." [page xxviii]
"...
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