Revisiting the 1943 Bengal Famine | Arup Kumar Sen

BOOK REVIEW

The Bengal famine of 1943 has found expressions in the academic discourse over the years. Amartya Sen’s Poverty and Famines (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1981) and Paul R. Greenough’s Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal: The Famine of 1943-44 (Oxford University Press, 1982) are classic books on the subject. Madhusree Mukerjee’s more recent book titled Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II (Basic Books, New York, 2010) is also a valuable contribution to the study of Bengal famine. It is estimated that about 3 million people died in the famine.

Soilen Sarkar’s recent Bengali book Durbhiksher Smriti (Prativash, Kolkata, 2024), which is basically a documentation of eyewitness accounts of the famine, has unearthed new frontiers of the 1943 Bengal famine. The book has incorporated interviews with eighty-four persons, both men and women (aged above 85), mostly belonging to subaltern social groups, who witnessed the famine. The author conducted the interviews in different districts of Bengal including Kolkata, particularly those then settled in Medinipur and later migrated to Sundarbans in the South 24 Parganas. He also interviewed a few persons who came from districts of eastern Bengal and settled in West Bengal after the Partition of Bengal in 1947.

What we have come to know from the interviews is that pre-famine natural calamities like drought and flood were combined with the British imperial policy and black marketing in foodgrains to produce the devastating famine in different parts of Bengal. While in the Medinipur district the famine was preceded by tornado and devastating floods in 1942, in the districts of east Bengal (now in Bangladesh) there were severe droughts and crop failures immediately before the famine. The testimonies of many interviewees suggest that large number of people migrated from Medinipur to different islands of Sundarbans to escape from the ravages of flood and hunger. In fact, at present many islands of Sundarbans are predominantly inhabited by people whose ancestors came from Medinipur. How the Bengal famine and agrarian distress changed the settlement patterns in different parts of Bengal may be an interesting field of research.

Pulin Samanta, a centenarian, who migrated in distress to an island in the Sundarbans, south 24 Parganas, from Kathi in Medinipur, narrated to the author the birth story of human settlements in the island – in the devastating flood of 1942 the crops on the land were completely devastated. The poor people resorted to dacoities for their survival. The local zamindars (landlords) started deserting the villages and made their journeys towards Kolkata. Many poor people migrated to tiger-infested Sundarbans. At night, they stayed on the top of trees, as the tigers were found roaming around below. Even the women responded to nature’s call from the tree top out of fear. Samanta further narrated the land settlement patterns in the islands. Latdars took lease of the land from the British and sub-leased them to the Chakdars. The Chakdars brought people from outside to cultivate land. The auction of the lands used to take place in Medinipur town. He testified that many poor people from his home village even sold their sons and daughters for their survival. Young women were sold at relatively higher prices.

Bijoykrishna Tripathi (who stated his age to be 112), then staying in the jurisdiction of Bhagabanpur thana in east Medinipur, migrated to an island village in Sundarbans. He told a variant of the same story of land settlement in the islands and distress of people. He further stated that many women fled from their families for the sake of survival, holding the hands of unknown men.

An unexpected thing happened in the Medinipur district. The 1942 Quit India movement was in full swing in the district around that time. The Congress volunteers created roadblocks and pressurized the boatmen not to float their boats in the river. So, people who were trying to escape to Kakdwip in South 24 Parganas after the floods for their survival faced great hardships, testified 89-year-old Bibhutibhushan Senapati.

Several middle-class people interviewed in the book testified that mostly the subaltern people in the villages were the victims of the famine. Jyotirmoyi Sen, aged 89, who came from a village in Dhaka in east Bengal and settled in West Bengal after the Partition, said that the Muslims and Namasudras, who were mostly landless peasants, staying in and around her village, suffered most during the drought and famine. 87-year-old Latika Chakraborty, who came to West Bengal from a village in Mymensingh district, narrated a variant of the same story. Jyotiprasad Ghosh of the Srirampur sub-division of the Hooghly district testified that the people belonging to the lower caste communities like the Malo, Dule and Bagdi were the main victims of the famine in his village. On the contrary, two members of the Malo fishing community in their nineties, settled now in the Ghoraghata village, inhabited by the fishing community in the Nadia district – Ratan Sarkar and Subalchandra Halder – said that fishing in the river with their boats ensured their survival, while the poor peasants suffered.

The most seminal dimension of the book is the documentation of testimonies of subaltern people, particularly subaltern women, about abject ‘poverty and famines’ in their villages. Kamala Maity (86) of village Chandipur in West Medinipur district narrated that her parents arranged her marriage when she was just nine to a person whose age was about 35-36. She said that her parents took this decision as they could not feed her due to abject poverty. At the time of the 1943 famine, she accompanied her mother clandestinely, who went out for begging for the sake of survival. Her sister’s condition was more precarious. She was forced to marry at the age of six to a much older person. Her husband died before she attained the age of puberty. The sister spent her whole life in such a state.

The life-story of a centenarian of the same village in West Medinipur, Kamini Bera, is more precarious. She, at the age of seven, was forced to marry a 40-year-old man as her father could not repay a 21-rupee loan taken from the husband’s father. Her husband had a sevadashi with whom he lived at that time. Kamini gave birth to a stillborn daughter in her parental house the day after the tornado, when her husband was living with the sevadashi. She testified that many girls of the village committed suicide in desperation during the famine; many married girls fled the village with parpurush (men other than husbands). Many pregnant women gave birth to stillborn children and many died during childbirth. Kamini stated that the women who fled with parpurush to escape from hunger did not commit anything wrong. She argued – survival is the first priority in the life of human beings.

At the end of his journey with the victims/survivors of the 1943 Bengal famine, the writer-interviewer, Soilen Sarkar, stated that it was a journey in the tunnel of darkness. He had a feeling that he was an organic part of that dark world full of pathos. He confessed that he would not be able to come out of this tunnel in the rest of his life. It will really be difficult for many readers of the text to come out of this Dostoyevskian dark world