The Forgotten Holocaust
{ONE}
IN THE AUTUMN OF 2018 , on a trip to Kolkata, I walked into a bookstore in the neighbourhood of College Street, out of habit, to see what interesting gem I could find. Among the books I picked up was the July 2018 quarterly issue of the Bengali little magazine Gangchil Patrika. The magazine had earlier published issues on a wide range of topics, including refugees, pornography and the Naxal movement. This issue was devoted to the topic of famines. Among the articles was a collection of 16 oral histories with full-page photographs of “Monnontorer Shakkhi,” or “Famine Witnesses,” compiled by Sailen Sarkar, the editor of the magazine. These were testimonies of ordinary people in the Bengal countryside who had witnessed, and survived, the Bengal famine of 1943, in which an estimated three million people died.
Each testimony was accompanied by a simple close-up, black-and-white portrait taken by Sarkar with a camera phone. Their names, ages and where they lived were noted at the start of each testimony. Most of the men and women were above ninety. The oldest witness claimed he was 112 years old. They had hollowed cheeks—the men with faces full of grey stubble, the women with their saris draped over their heads. Almost none of them were pictured smiling. Their eyes, unforgettable, looked straight at the camera. To me, they appeared to ask questions I did not want to ask myself.
In each interview, Sarkar wrote an introductory paragraph, sometimes explaining where the person lived, or how he had come to meet them. The witnesses spoke of a cyclone during Durga Puja in 1942 that killed thousands in a day—men, women, cattle, fish—and destroyed the paddy in the fields. They spoke of how people fled, anywhere they could, to the towns, to Calcutta, to the Sundarbans, anywhere where there was any promise of food. Many left their home and never returned, and many died in their homes, abandoned by their families, starving alone in their huts, sick with cholera or smallpox. The stories told of how women were sold into prostitution, of how families sold what little land they had for sacks of rice, of landlords who bought up the lands of those who starved and of looting in the homes of the dead.
Like most Bengalis, I knew that there had been a famine in 1943, during the Second World War. Millions had died under the watch of the colonial government. that it was the criminal neglect of the British Raj that let this disaster unfold was an open secret. But, in a way, it seemed like ancient history.
When I read those testimonies for the first time, I felt like I was communing with ghosts. Like most Bengalis, I knew that there had been a famine in 1943, during the Second World War. Millions had died under the watch of the colonial government. That it was the criminal neglect of the British Raj that let this disaster unfold was an open secret. But, in a way, it seemed like ancient history. The famine is mentioned only in passing in school history textbooks in schools, as one among the many unfortunate disasters—earthquakes, floods, droughts—that seemed to take place regularly in colonial and pre-colonial times. So, to discover that there were living eyewitnesses to something that felt like the forgotten past came as a shock to me.
I had begun my professional life as a newspaper reporter, in the early 2000s, at The Statesman in Kolkata, a city full of shuttered factories and in rapid post-industrial decline. I later returned in 2009 to conduct research for a book I wrote on the city. When I began doing interviews, sometimes the famine of 1943 would unexpectedly intrude into conversations. In one such interview, a trade-union leader, Manoj Ray Choudhury, was talking to me about factory closures and the decline of the industrial working class. By then, the ceiling-fan factory where he worked had closed and the property had been converted into South City, one of India’s largest malls and a luxury-apartment project. He started telling me about his childhood in his village along the Meghna River in the early 1940s. He had come home from school one day to see people arriving from the other side of the river. These people had walked through the forests, hungry for rice. “How they ate and ate!” he recalled. He remembered that a boy his age had been bitten on the knee by a jackal on the way, and died, after having made it all that way across.
Seeing that boy die gave shape to the choices he made in his life later. He did not join the Congress like his father and uncles. Instead, he became a communist, to fight, he told me, for another world. “I was doing a job just to do a job,” he said, about his post in the factory. “My mind was on social change.”
We had been speaking all afternoon of the decline of the union, the end of factory work, of all that he had seen fail in his lifetime, and yet the union leader’s story of the famine stayed with me. But I never sought out more such stories, as I did of the factories and the labour unions, or later of Partition and the refugee colonies that came in its aftermath. I had grown up in a refugee household, and so my concerns were with the ghosts of Partition. Janam Mukherjee, who wrote Hungry Bengal, a new history of the 1943 famine, argues that to understand Partition and the riots in Calcutta in 1946, which had made Partition inevitable, one had to understand the famine of 1943—or, more precisely, 1942–46. Mukherjee has argued that “far from being a side story for special study, the Bengal famine should be understood as central to the history of twentieth-century India and even global history.”
But I never delved into it. Our family had lost their home and their land in East Bengal, moved to Calcutta and survived in difficult circumstances because of Partition. Many of my parents’ friends or my friends’ parents in Kolkata had the same family history—of loss, trauma and rebuilding. We came from families that were mostly upper caste, and had been middle or upper class, before Partition. They had either owned land in the east or had held salaried jobs, and were then pauperised. Land, education, class and caste could not protect them from the displacement of Partition.
But the famine of 1943 was another story. I had heard my grandmother’s stories of beggars asking for fan—the gruel water in which rice was boiled. But no one in my family died in the Bengal famine. Nor did I know anyone whose relatives had. That perhaps is a clue as to why certain stories are told and others sidelined.
At the time that I discovered famine issue, I was living in Delhi. I had recently moved back from Kerala, where I had lived for over a year, traveling and doing interviews, working on a new book on the social transformation that had taken place in the state in the twentieth century. The questions I was thinking of propelled me to reconsider the history of West Bengal in a similar light. I began translating the
